Losing Oneself

Tag: self

  • the starlings and the sun

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Maria Popova has been blogging a long long time. Her site is called The Marginalian and it’s quite the treasure trove of ideas and connections. In her post on the work of Richard Jeffries she writes: This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars,…

  • the paradox of the body

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    In What are we calling the self? Joseph Goldstein maps out just how easy it is to identify with our body. The paradox of the body is experienced as the lucid concreteness of direct experiences in the body (temperature, movement, tingling, pressure, etc), set against how we concatenate and identify these direct experiences as belonging…

  • the poetics of presence

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    Maria Popova’s blog called The Marginalian is widely known and harks back to what the internet promised before advertising, social media and enshittification took over (another is Jason Kottke’s site). This is Popova’s post on time and self-transcendence and the work of Richard Jeffries, but as is her style, it covers a lot of ground…

  • part of the experience

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    Simon Ellis
    in

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…