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 to the abstract concept of a self connected to a body that is mine.
Goldstein says:
When we’re not looking deeply into our experience, into the nature of our experience, and simply live in the world of surface appearances, what happens is, we create a reference point for all experience, a someone to whom all experience is happening. We’re creating this notion of a self behind experience to whom it’s happening. How much of our sense of self comes from a superficial perception of the body? No, it seems so solid. And it’s the first, you know, who are you? This is me, it was so easy to identify with the body as being self.
– Joseph Goldstein
For dancers (and other practitioners) honing the body as the primary lens to filter experience I imagine it is difficult to reconcile the concreteness of direct experience with the creation and reinforcement of a ‘self behind experience’.
Two things occur to me: i) would anything be different if we (as dancers) no longer clung to that which we call a self? ii) is the body as perceived by dancers simply a bias through which we enter the adventure of consciousness?
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