Losing Oneself

Category: blog-post

  • same old body

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    William James – the nineteenth centure pioneer of Psychology – wrote the following: Contrary to the perception of an object, which can be perceived from different perspectives or even cease to be perceived, we experience “the feeling of the same old body always there” – William James There’s something about the way in which we take…

  • shimmer

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    Simon Ellis
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    I’ve mentioned before in data data data and in low fidelity documentation just how complex the ways in which some of the practical work in the studio might be documented and shared. A while back I happened across a simple post-production technique called motion extraction by the YouTuber Posy. It made me think that it…

  • the ordinary self and nonduality

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    To the ordinary self, NDA appears as an object of sorts, something one might want to experience or as a capacity one might want to have. To NDA, however, the ordinary self and its constituting processes, to the extent that they can be phenomenally accessed, appear as contents within its space.[1] – Josipovic and Miskovi In…

  • simple gif

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    These images are of Katye Coe dancing on 13 March 2024. I looked at the first one (slightly out of shot) and then grabbed the next 50.

  • data data data

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Just as a strange kind of wtf there are approximately 36000 photos from 10 days of studio practice, and a rude quantity of video footage. All photographs were taken as part of timelapses so the framing is effectively arbitrary and designed to cover the space. I’ve mostly resisted thinking too much about what I might…

  • next phase

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Yesterday (Wednesday 13 March 2024) Katye Coe and I finished the studio-based phase of the project. If you’ve been looking around this blog you will have noticed that most of the posts are really background information: philosophical and theoretical things that have in some way been important to the research. This is what is next:…

  • awareness as modulation of organism and environment

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Here’s Jay Garfield (again) writing about the embedded, embodied, enactive and extended 4E) approach to cognition: we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of as the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in…

  • consciousness

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    I’ve been mentioning consciousness quite a lot on this blog. But what is it? Annaka Harris is a editor and consultant for science writers and the author of a lucid introduction to the nature of consciousness research called Conscious: a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind (2019). She writes: And even though,…

  • nonduality

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Nonduality “encompasses a unified experience in which the boundaries between self and environment dissolve”.[1] It is when subject and object are unified. It is also known as consciousness-as-such [2] and in Asian contemplative traditions it is variously known as pure consciousness, pure awareness, nondual awareness (NDA), rigpa, timeless or choiceless awareness, being-awareness-bliss, the Self, the…

  • the paradox of choice

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    In the middle of a guided Waking Up meditation I hear the following words: Observe that you don’t actually choose the next thing you notice; whatever it is. Everything is simply appearing, including acts of attention. You don’t know what you will pay attention to next. See if you can drop back into that position…