Losing Oneself

Tag: awareness

  • 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 sensing of a sensation

    In one of our conversations post movement (on 2 February 2024) I ask Katye:

    Are we expressing sensation? Can you talk more about sensation and movement? You say “sensation then movement”. What is this thing called “sensation”?

    I then wonder out loud if sensation is different from sensing.

    Once Katye and I have worked through the transcripts more carefully I’ll get to that conversation. But as I’m reflecting now what I suspect (or perhaps propose) is that there is no separation between sensation, sensing, experience, awareness and consciousness. That is, when perceiving (or feeling) a sensation (say pressure or tension on the outside of the left calcaneus) that is the experience one is aware of and that is in the open flow of consciousness. This is not to say that all sensations enter consciousness (far from it), but rather that the feeling or perception of a sensation (or the sensing of a sensation!) is indistinct from experience, awareness and consciousness.

    I’ll write more about the enfolding of perception, feeling, sensation, experience, awareness, consciousness, perception and action another time. It seems important to be able to disambiguate them as well as recognise when they are being used interchangeably. I should say also that I don’t think the above is quite right …

  • awareness as modulation of organism and environment

    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 introspection. To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don’t stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.

    – Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

    Garfield’s explanation is more complicated when we think about our bodies; that the body easily becomes another object (but this time an interior object) looked at by some other interior subject. This is the linguistic trope (at least in English) that we have a body. But who is the ‘we’ in that phrase that is other to the body?

    In this project, in the movement practice conceived as non dual awareness there is no ‘we’ or ‘I’ as subject. Rather, perhaps we can re-think the nature of the environment as described by Garfield. That is, the environment does not start at the boundary of the skin and that the separation between human as (dancing) organism and the environment is more or less arbitrary. Certainly, the extended part of 4E cognition aligns with such a conceptualisation.

    Perhaps though I’ve missed a vital part of Garfield’s thinking here; that “awareness is more an attunement to our environment”. But attunement by what or who? In the English language (and certainly in the romantic langauges) it’s nigh impossible to avoid subject-object splits.