Losing Oneself

Tag: Sam Harris

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • selfing your experience

    This is from Sam Harris’s app called Waking Up and is a brief commentary about ego and illusion:

    … 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.

    – Sam Harris (no date) Ego and Illusion. [online] available from https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CE2E59 [30 January 2024], from 01:29min.

    Makes me think that it takes a lot of effort to maintain this process of selfing.