Losing Oneself

Tag: self

  • the starlings and the sun

    Maria Popova has been blogging a long long time. Her site is called The Marginalian and it’s quite the treasure trove of ideas and connections. In her post on the work of Richard Jeffries she writes:

    This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars, is made meaningful entirely inside the self, but the self is a mirage of the mind, a figment of cohesion that makes the chaos and transience bearable.

    I know I’ve mostly been posting quotes here for a while and for that I apologise. There will be more reflective writing soon enough but I also want to keep sharing things publicly that seem to resonate with many of the themes of the research. This site can then be a kind of container for the ideas and work.

  • 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?

  • the poetics of presence

    Maria Popova’s blog called The Marginalian is widely known and harks back to what the internet promised before advertising, social media and enshittification took over (another is Jason Kottke’s site).

    This is Popova’s post on time and self-transcendence and the work of Richard Jeffries, but as is her style, it covers a lot of ground with links to overlapping ideas previously posted:

    The Ecstasy of Eternity: Richard Jefferies on Time and Self-Transcendence

    The entire post is worth a read but here are some parts that resonate with this work in Losing Oneself.

    A few times a lifetime, if you are lucky, something — an encounter with nature, a work of art, a great love — sparks what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” dismantling the cathedral of illusion and rendering you one with everything that ever was and ever will be.

    Crowning his magnificent account of the experience is the revelation that presence — this prayerful attention to the here and now — is the supreme portal to eternity. A generation after Kierkegaard insisted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity” and a century before Mary Oliver drew on Blake and Whitman to observe that “all eternity is in the moment,” …

    And yet it is only through the body — this perishable reliquary of life — that the mind can grasp the abstraction of timelessness; it is only through absolute presence with the aliveness of the moment that the soul can sing with the ecstasy of eternity.

  • 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).

  • 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.