To Self Or Not To Self, that is a question.

by Ambo Suno

Aug 11, 2016

Since my favorite topic seems to have to do with my self, and with my selving, and it turns out even selving process more generally, I explicitly create a blog for related musings, immersions, obsessings, and curiosities. By placing it as a Blog, I sort of give my self permission to hang a lot out there without obvious identification for integral, post-metaphysical, or spirituality. Hah. Other people, you, may respond or place your own musings that may be stimulated in your self. May I have the courage for honest revelation of the extent of my self-concern and involvement that waxes and perhaps graciously wanes, goes all gross and perhaps subtle, turgid and lightish through my sense of, well, self, and world. May I, dear All, not embarrass or shame myself to the point of feeling and experiencing intense degrees of what self's very structure may have been largely designed to avoid and mitigate. Hah, indeed.
Load Previous Comments

  • Ambo Suno

    (These blog comments do not have a feature for editing and I like to edit after I post rather Han break my flow-and-release. I see now that it will be easy to have the auto-editing function on iPad or computer to slip some silly and even contradictory words into the mix. Not entirely unlike my mind and self. Self as flawed structure/self as quirky process.)

    Aug 12, 2016

  • Ambo Suno

    Hi again Edwyrd and others - I just listened to another presentation by Evan Thompson that was succinct and very resonant with the more vague way that I have been coming to understand how we function and how we are.
    https://youtu.be/OJHCae1liAI

    Though the particular topic of focused interest was "mindfulness", he expanded large and well on why *context* matters so much. To do that he laid out in a little over 20 minutes how acknowledging the reality and usefulness of addressing conceptions of mindfulness through the science [and I'll add, growing 'common sense' around understanding ourselves and our situations and conditions] of embodied cognition.

    One term and developed concept that was new to me was "looping effect" that relates to how far and quickly afield we can become, how lost in images, figures, representations, metaphors, framings, and increasingly complex reifications of such, we can become. The image of a looping effect comes especially close to my self-characterization of 'convoluted' and certainly complex or complicated.

    CONTEXT. Of course this is big and he looked at it through four researched qualities. Embodiment, embeddedness, extendedness, enactiveness. I got more extravagant and said 'All' was context.

    The "self", and my personal idiosyncratic selving, and my layers and angles on moments of meta-selving for apparent efforts at orienting and stabilizing my variously uncomfortable and agitated self, notices my loop d loops and almost-futility.

    One of my favorite cultureal self-criticisms and apologies to use the modern psychological term, neurotic. I feel almost ok about being neurotic said since Woody Allen has made it almost fashionable :) Or, I'm a mess. And so on, with various styles and emotional valences.

    Okay, okay, I'm pretty fucked up. But that's a story I might have to let go of as more of this global story of homo fucksapiens is unpacked by good smart people like Thompson. Hah :)

    And so on.

    Aug 15, 2016

  • Ambo Suno

    It could be said that "self" is performance art.

    Some of self, that might also be labeled 'persona', is adornment, vestment, costume, mask, visual flourish.

    The value of the self is often judged by its performance by one's own self and by others. It's an art to play within that inevitable game and cultural circumstance while still retaining some sense of individual value and the many other required psycho-social navigations.

    Some small thing like that.

    Aug 23, 2016