part of the experience

Here’s Roger Linden from his website The Elusive Obvious on the nature of experience and the self:

What is assumed to be at the heart of all experience, namely that I have to be there experiencing it, it’s not what’s happening. It’s not you who is experiencing reading these words, the experience is of you reading. The sense of self is part of the experience, part of what is happening.

– Roger Linden

This small excerpt underlines what I see as the value of embracing nonduality as a lens to understand movement improvisation. Actually, nonduality isn’t a lens, and nor can it ever be a lens. Nonduality is not an object to be applied anywhere. It is experience itself, and it defies subject-object dualism in which there would be a ‘me’ dancing that contains the contents of experience.

As a small aside I am not at all comfortable or familiar with attempting to articulate these very complex ideas that are abstract and concrete at the same time. A blog post like this is pretty much just having a go. Rupert Spira’s 2008 book The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience is an extraordinary example of writing the ineffable solidity of nonduality.