Losing Oneself

Category: blog-post

  • low fidelity documentation

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    I’ve written and presented in another context about documenting complex, rich, high fidelity human experiences with low fidelity (or resolution) forms of documentation. When we point any kind of camera at a human being improvising there is vast difference between the internal experience of the improviser and what is visible. In Losing Oneself Katye Coe…

  • non dual awareness can co-occur with any content

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Zoran Josipovic is a cognitive and affective neuroscientist who founded the Nonduality Institute with Judith Blackstone. Here’s Josipovic with Vladimir Miskovic: NDA [non dual awareness] can co-occur with any content, whether perceptual, affective, or cognitive, which appears in it, so to speak, like an image in a mirror. – Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020)…

  • me doing into it doing itself

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    One of the things that Katye Coe and I have been focused on in the studio is the remarkably subtle shift that happens between a very expansive and open awareness that is the consequence of attention, and the feeling that a similarly open awareness is happening of its own accord. Katye beautifully captures this distinction…

  • self vs person

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    One of the key themes in Jay Garfield’s book Losing Ourselves is the distinction he makes between a self and a person (built on the thinking of Candrakīrti and Hume). Garfield describes how the idea of a transcendent self: should convince us that we are talking about the self because it perfectly captures that idea…

  • interpretations of sensory signals

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Anil Seth is a cognitive neuroscientist who thinks and writes about consciousness. He is known for describing perception as a form of controlled hallucination. The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is…

  • experience and consciousness

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness. – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber

  • the body and related signals

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Because mindfulness interventions are concerned with the idea of being present in the moment, focusing on the body and related signals in a non-judgmental way, such methods are of high interest in research on interoception. – Fischer, D., Messner, M., and Pollatos, O. (2017) ‘Improvement of Interoceptive Processes after an 8-Week Body Scan Intervention’. Frontiers…

  • the body tends to efface itself

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Normally, the body tends to efface itself in our world-directed activity. However, it appears as an object of conscious attention, particularly when it is inadequate for a task to be performed, be it by a lack of capacity, fatigue, illness or numbness, and whenever it becomes an object for others to whom I feel exposed.…

  • selfing your experience

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    This is from Sam Harris’s app called Waking Up and is a brief commentary about ego and illusion: … your mental experience of the world is a process. It is not a static something. So the experience of being a self, an ego, in the middle of all of these changing neurophysiological states, it too…

  • embodiment is not apposite

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Here’s Tim Ingold from his 2013 book Making citing Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (who has long been critical of how we in dance use the term embodiment): … animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, argues…