Losing Oneself

Tag: experience

  • 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).

  • 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?

  • part of the experience

    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 reading. The sense of self is part of the experience, part of what is happening.

    – Roger Linden

    This small excerpt underlines what I see as the value of embracing nonduality as a lens to understand movement improvisation. Actually, nonduality isn’t a lens, and nor can it ever be a lens. Nonduality is not an object to be applied anywhere. It is experience itself, and it defies subject-object dualism in which there would be a ‘me’ dancing that contains the contents of experience.

    As a small aside I am not at all comfortable or familiar with attempting to articulate these very complex ideas that are abstract and concrete at the same time. A blog post like this is pretty much just having a go. Rupert Spira’s 2008 book The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience is an extraordinary example of writing the ineffable solidity of nonduality.

  • 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 …

  • experience and consciousness

    Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.

    – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber

  • the body tends to efface itself

    Normally, the body tends to efface itself in our world-directed activity. However, it appears as an object of conscious attention, particularly when it is inadequate for a task to be performed, be it by a lack of capacity, fatigue, illness or numbness, and whenever it becomes an object for others to whom I feel exposed. In these cases, the body’s performance is made explicit and may often be disturbed. Thus, the body has a double or ambiguous experiential status: both as a ‘lived body’, implicit in one’s ongoing experience, and as an explicit, physical or objective body. An ongoing oscillation between these two bodily modes constitutes a fluid and hardly noticed foundation of all experiencing.

    –Thomas Fuchs and Jann E. Schlimme (2009) ‘Embodiment and Psychopathology: A Phenomenological Perspective’: Current Opinion in Psychiatry 22 (6), 570–575.

    I find the language of the body effacing itself to be fascinating. How it is that the body can do this to itself? Is the body in this case both subject and object?

    The work in the practice component of this research is to foreground the body in consciousness such that it tends not to efface itself, if at all — to patiently allow, enable or afford the body to resonate through consciousness. What are the strategies for such affordance? What does this feel like?