Losing Oneself

Category: blog-post

  • the starlings and the sun

    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, is made meaningful entirely inside the self, but the self is a mirage of the mind, a figment of cohesion that makes the chaos and transience bearable.

    I know I’ve mostly been posting quotes here for a while and for that I apologise. There will be more reflective writing soon enough but I also want to keep sharing things publicly that seem to resonate with many of the themes of the research. This site can then be a kind of container for the ideas and work.

  • embodiment isn’t a match with experience

    Here’s a quote from Tim Ingold’s Making that describes how Maxine Sheets-Johnstone questions the synergies between embodiment and experience:

    Comparison of the two pieces vividly demonstrates how 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 dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the term ‘embodiment’ is simply not experientially apposite. We do not, she insists, experience ourselves and one another as ‘packaged’ but as moving and moved, in ongoing response – that is in correspondence – with the things around us (Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 359; Ingold 2011b: 10).

  • nonduality meditation

    I thought I’d post this transcription of a meditation by Sam Harris (from his Waking Up app called The feeling of awareness. It quite clearly diambiguates awareness/consciousness from the feeling of a self or a ‘you’.

    The original meditation is at https://dynamic.wakingup.com/daily/DA07B1E and I post the transcript below without permission.

    Okay just sit comfortably and close your eyes and become aware of the sense of paying attention. Just notice the feeling associated with awareness itself. What is this like to hear and feel and see? To notice thoughts and emotions? There’s a clarity and an openness. Notice if it feels located anywhere. Does it really feel like it’s inside your head? Notice that every sign that you have a head – feelings of pressure, temperature, tension whatever is there – is simply appearing in the same open condition. Is awareness inside of anything? And if it feels to you like you’re still located as a source of attention behind your face, inside your head, feel a sensation associated with your face as clearly as you can. Feel your jaw. Are you above your jaw? Are you behind your face? Feel the top of your head. Are you beneath the top of your head? Feel the back of your head. Are you in front of the back of your head? Aren’t all these sensations simply appearing in consciousness? And where is that? Again feel your face as an appearance in this open space and feel the top of your head as an appearance. Feel your jaw. Feel the back of your head. Are you as the witness of experience in the middle of all that? Or are all those sensations simply appearing in consciousness? And now just let awareness rest wide open and notice whatever appears: sensations, sounds, thoughts.

  • becoming the passenger

    Yesterday I blogged about Jon Kabat-Zinn’s term awareness-ing and how awareness is inseparable from experience.

    Going through the transcripts of my post-dancing conversations with Katye Coe, I note that I was starting to use this term. In this extract below I am trying to describe two things. First is the shift from the feeling of awareness-ing to the feeling of becoming a passenger in the improvisation. Second is the question (while ‘awareness-ing’) of why some kinds of movements and not others.

    I haven’t edited the text just to keep the sense of how messy it is talking about these things. The text is from 14 February 2024.

    I think I’d probably say two things. One is the shift from the feeling as if I’m tuning into my body … surfing or allowing awarenesses or things that are happening in my body: friction, temperature, tension, tone, tingling etc … which is like a wash of yeah very open sense of awarenesses like I’m awareness-ing. The shift from that to what you’ve described Charlie Morrissey as describing it as being the passenger. That … it’s such a stark starkly different sensation.

    And I should be clear that the sort of awareness-ing … it doesn’t feel like I’m reaching or wanting this other thing. So yeah that shift which is so stark and so clear … and so surprising and and weirdly, it’s not as if I’m aware that I’ve gone into it or gone from one to the other.

    And I think I can see it [the transition] in you and it’s shockingly different. But if you were to ask me what is it that I’m seeing that’s different it’s not even about the quantity of movement that’s … sometimes but not necessarily. So that … and then the other thing is yeah, this thing that we talked about last week, I think which was why some movement and not others, why some movements and not others. As part of that awareness-ing, that process of, of being in awareness.

    – Simon Ellis (in conversation with Katye Coe, 14 February 2024.

  • selfing and awareness-ing

    Back in February on this blog I quoted Sam Harris re selfing one’s experience. Now here’s Jon Kabat-Zinn on awareness-ing:

    The real practice is life itself. And coming to all of those senses in hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and also we could say minding. Which is another way of saying awareness-ing.

    Selfing. Awareness-ing.

    Here’s Harris again on awareness:

    We tend to imagine that awareness is inside of us, and the world is outside. But just look with your open eyes. Everything you see is a modification of awareness. As a matter of experience, there is no inside and outside. Everything is in the same place. What you take to be a world, and your body in it, and thoughts, emotions, your mood … the amazing truth and it’s the truth of your very being, is that you have never noticed, even for an instance, anything outside of awareness.

    Although Harris doesn’t use Kabat-Zinn’s term awareness-ing his short text captures the active nature of awareness. That it is the only lens of experience; that there is nothing outside of awareness-ing.

  • the paradox of the body

    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?

  • the poetics of presence

    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 with links to overlapping ideas previously posted:

    The Ecstasy of Eternity: Richard Jefferies on Time and Self-Transcendence

    The entire post is worth a read but here are some parts that resonate with this work in Losing Oneself.

    A few times a lifetime, if you are lucky, something — an encounter with nature, a work of art, a great love — sparks what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” dismantling the cathedral of illusion and rendering you one with everything that ever was and ever will be.

    Crowning his magnificent account of the experience is the revelation that presence — this prayerful attention to the here and now — is the supreme portal to eternity. A generation after Kierkegaard insisted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity” and a century before Mary Oliver drew on Blake and Whitman to observe that “all eternity is in the moment,” …

    And yet it is only through the body — this perishable reliquary of life — that the mind can grasp the abstraction of timelessness; it is only through absolute presence with the aliveness of the moment that the soul can sing with the ecstasy of eternity.

  • default mode network

    If you start reading about consciousness, the brain and mindfulness practices you will come across the term Default Mode Network or DMN. It refers to network of brain structures responsible for the “inattentive wandering of our minds” (Williams, 2014) that was first described by Marcus Raichle in 2001.

    The term is relevant in Losing Oneself because of how experiences of movement improvisation seem to intersect with mindfulness practices.

    Matthew Williams describes the mental state of inattention that is synonymous with the DMN:

    By “inattention” I mean times when you are not attending to physical activity, engaging with the external environment, or carrying on a conversation. Inattention, in the way I am using it, describes states of daydreaming, contemplating the future, reliving the past, or general rumination. The DMN is the set of neurologic structures responsible for this ruminative mental activity.

    In Williams’ excellent overview of the neurscience of mindfulness he compares the DMN with the task positive network (TPN). Who doesn’t love a three letter acronym (TLA)?

    Compare this description of inattention with how paying attention is ceasing to do something.

  • paying attention is ceasing to do something

    It seems generally hard to get a handle on words like perception, attention and sensation, and especially so in nonduality: When paying attention who is the subject doing the attending, and what is the object that is being attended to?

    Here’s Sam Harris from his Waking Up app on how choice happens:

    When we focus our attention on consciousness, who is it that is being attentive? In other words, which faculty of mind can set the focus to the experience of consciousness? Well, like many of these kinds of questions, much of this seems backwards from the experience of just noticing how consciousness is. It’s not that you are focusing your attention on consciousness, you are simply ceasing to be distracted, […] you’re ceasing to be identified with thought and with attention itself.

    The feeling that you can direct your attention is part of this undercurrent of thinking that you’re not noticing […] there’s simply consciousness … already. Everything is appearing on its own, including acts of attention. And the truth is you don’t even have to be attentive, you simply have to no longer be distracted, you’re ceasing to do something, you’re not doing something, the sense that you’re doing something is more distraction.

    – Sam Harris

    I find this very useful indeed. That paying attention is a recognition of distraction and that if I have the thought (one of many) “pay attention to the weight of my arm” the flow of distracted thought ceases and there is simply arm’s weight being sensed.

  • shimmer duet (video)

    Some more video but this time two separate video streams (one of Katye Coe, one of me (Simon Ellis)) placed side by side on the canvas. Two notes: i) I made no effort to match them or shift them in time; ii) the video is not slowed down at all.