Losing Oneself

Tag: selfing

  • 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 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.