Losing Oneself

Tag: Jay Garfield

  • the conviction that we are selves

    Here’s a bit more from Jay Garfield’s Losing Ourselves:

    The ninth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva argues in How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicāryāvatāra) that our conviction that we are selves arises from a primal fear of death, and that we construct the idea of a self as a bulwark against that fear. Śāntideva also argues that the idea that we are selves arises primarily in emotionally charged situations, as when we perceive that we have been harmed, or when pride is aroused. It is then that we think not of our minds or bodies, but of we who possess those minds and bodies. David Hume adopts a similar view. He argues that the thought that we are selves is a product of the passions – that we posit the self as the object of pride and humility, and then reify it in thought. If anything like these analyses is right, the idea of self is grounded not in reason or perception, but in affect.

    I’m not quite sure how these ideas fit in and around this work and research but I am struck by the feeling of a being a self only arising in particular circumstances: when threatened, anxious, proud, etc. That in moments other than these we are simply experience itself (and without a self that is experiencing).

    References:

    Garfield, Jay L. Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

  • 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.

  • self vs person

    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 of the subject that stands behind mind and body as their possessor, that to which we seem to be so atavistically attached. That is the self, not the person. It should convince us that something has gone terribly wrong because, when we reflect carefully, it does not seem at all plausible that we really exist outside of space and time and distinct from our psychophysical embodiment.

    – Garfield, Losing Ourselves, Chapter 4

    It is not that this self isn’t useful to we humans, but more that it is an illusion (or “apparent integration” — also in Garfield) that reifies agency and control.

  • immersed, embodied awareness that is entirely fluid

    Here’s Jay Garfield from his book Losing Ourselves:

    … the focused attention of the expert is entirely on the task at hand and on the goals to be accomplished through that task. It is immersed, embodied awareness, and awareness that is entirely fluid, adjusting to the ever-changing demands of the task at hand. Nothing resembling a self is ever present in this kind of consciousness.

    – Jay Garfield (2022) Losing ourselves: learning to live without a self.

    Compare this with meditation teacher and psychotherapist Loch Kelly‘s effort to describe the difference between flow states and selflessness (nonduality):

    I divided [flow] into two […] what I call absorbed flow and panoramic flow. And they’re always talked about as if they’re one thing, but they’re actually two. [In] absorbed flow, you literally are in almost a Jhana absorbed concentration where you are so involved in a task that everything else is gone and you look up and two hours have gone by. And a panoramic is more like an athletic or being in the wood walking in the woods, you feel everything … your time slows down, you’re in the now, you know, you’re not in your ego, your ego is dropped away, you feel connected to everyone and everything around you.

    – Loch Kelly in Kelly, L. and Harris, S. (nodate) Meditation vs. Flow States. [online] available from https://app.wakingup.com/theory/questions-answers/loch-kelly-and-sam-harris#crC81CE1 [10 January 2024]

    Kelly gets a bit bogged down (because he’s talking live as opposed to presenting an edited text), but goes on to make the point that in panoramic flow people do not use metacognition to look back to recognise that this experience is your “natural condition” and that “what you discover is that which you already are that’s here”. In panoramic flow there is the illusion of chasing something — perhaps a ‘state’ — when in reality it is the natural condition of consciousness.

    There’s much more to consider here about the differences and overlap between nonduality and flow but I’m intrigued by Kelly’s effort here to disambiguate two types of flow as if nonduality is one form of flow.