Losing Oneself

Tag: Jay Garfield

  • the conviction that we are selves

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    Here’s a bit more from Jay Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: The ninth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva argues in How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicāryāvatāra) that our conviction that we are selves arises from a primal fear of death, and that we construct the idea of a self as a bulwark against that fear. Śāntideva also argues…

  • awareness as modulation of organism and environment

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    by

    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…

  • self vs person

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    by

    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…

  • immersed, embodied awareness that is entirely fluid

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    by

    Simon Ellis
    in

    Here’s Jay Garfield from his book Losing Ourselves: … the focused attention of the expert is entirely on the task at hand and on the goals to be accomplished through that task. It is immersed, embodied awareness, and awareness that is entirely fluid, adjusting to the ever-changing demands of the task at hand. Nothing resembling…