Losing Oneself

Tag: nonduality

  • 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.

  • 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 ordinary self and nonduality

    To the ordinary self, NDA appears as an object of sorts, something one might want to experience or as a capacity one might want to have. To NDA, however, the ordinary self and its constituting processes, to the extent that they can be phenomenally accessed, appear as contents within its space.[1]

    – Josipovic and Miskovi

    In the above quote Josipovic and Miskovic describe a vital aspect of nonduality. That is, the self (or what we think of as a self) is simply yet another thing (or object) in consciousness. Furthermore, there is no “I” aware of itself as an object in consciousness, because where would that “I” exist or be located? Rather there is simply no “I”. This is what is meant by the unification of subject and object.

    The proposition here is that we human beings are already nondual; nonduality is not a ‘state’ to be reached (like we might say ‘flow states’ are). Rather we create and recreate the self as part of the process of grasping or reaching for sense. Sam Harris refers to this as selfing:

    … your mental experience of the world is a process. It is not a static something. So the experience of being a self, an ego, in the middle of all of these changing neurophysiological states, it too must be a process. It’s a verb, it’s not a noun. You are selfing your experience. You are not a self standing in the middle of experience. Self is a kind of action. It’s the act of identifying. It’s the act of grasping.[2]

    – Sam Harris

    [1] Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087

    [2] Harris, S. (nodate) Ego and Illusion. [online] available from https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CE2E59 [30 January 2024] (from 01:29min).

  • nonduality

    Nonduality “encompasses a unified experience in which the boundaries between self and environment dissolve”.[1] It is when subject and object are unified.

    It is also known as consciousness-as-such [2] and in Asian contemplative traditions it is variously known as pure consciousness, pure awareness, nondual awareness (NDA), rigpa, timeless or choiceless awareness, being-awareness-bliss, the Self, the fourth, Atman-Brahman, Buddha-nature, clear light, Shiva-Shakti, etc .[3]

    Aside from the idea that non dual awareness can co-occur with any content Josipovic and Miskovic write:

    we advance the perspective that consciousness-as-such is first and foremost a type of awareness, that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual, in other words, non-representational. This awareness is a unique kind, and cannot be reduced to a level of arousal and phenomenal content, or to their mental representations and representational models.[3]

    Nonduality’s relationship to flow states is not at all clear to me. There are certainly degrees of overlap but at this stage my hunch is that they are different in kind, or perhaps that experiences of flow are a subset of nonduality, or provide insight into this open awareness that is equivalent to consciousness.

    References

    [1] Lynch, J.M. and Troy, A.S. (2021) ‘The Role of Nonduality in the Relationship Between Flow States and Well-Being’. Mindfulness 12 (7), 1639–1652

    [2] Metzinger, T. (2019). Minimal phenomenal experience: the ARAS-model theory: steps toward a minimal model of conscious experience as such. MindRxiv, https://www.philosophie.fb05.uni-mainz.de/files/2019/04/MPE_discussion_paper_March_2019.pdf

    [3] Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087

  • non dual awareness can co-occur with any content

    Zoran Josipovic is a cognitive and affective neuroscientist who founded the Nonduality Institute with Judith Blackstone. Here’s Josipovic with Vladimir Miskovic:

    NDA [non dual awareness] can co-occur with any content, whether perceptual, affective, or cognitive, which appears in it, so to speak, like an image in a mirror.

    – Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087, p.6

    This was an important idea in my initial curiosity about the potential to work through and with nonduality as a lens to understand experiences in dance improvisation. Nonduality does not presuppose particular types of content and therefore it seemed to make sense (as a matter of direct experience) that a busy, emotionally rich (even difficult) experience during a movement improvisation could be non dual in much the same way that more contemplative, slow and still meditation or sitting practices could be.

    I’ll return to nonduality as a framework for thinking through improvisation in future posts including whether the phenomenological method is capable of ‘getting at’ nonduality, and how nonduality is distinct from typical flow experiences.

  • 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.