Hi Edwyrd - I haven't read the book by Thompson, but did see video(s) of his presentation that you probably linked. I like his material a lot.

Because of that appreciation, the last photo I placed here was of his slide on two views of self, a neuro-reductive paradigm and a process/co-enactive one. I keep that image foreground for me because it is a good concise rather objective reminder.

http://api.ning.com/files/L6yK1d-njaZaEXd2AD4E7usAvEQZRcfQ*qVBTGsi45LVKz0rlymDDhaBHiSlPgyhgeS-37NDUVTmTcELbVV91jwODTrskyg*/EvanThompson2selfstories.png

Here, I hope, is the photo link:
http://integralpostmetaphysics.ning.com/photo/image-3/prev?context=...

The motivation for the blog thread on my self, and thereby, selfless and selving, seems mainly to be personal, subjective, phenomenological, and introspective.

As someone who has been moved, much of the movement cognitive, by integral theory of Ken Wilber and others, I of course often feel and understand that the contexts for self content and orienting-process is much larger. Apparently the contexts comprise All of life and kosmic conditions.

The immediate impetus for writing here probably will usually come from strong feeling-imbued, inner experiences that are state-of-mind-&-being imbued. Often the feelings, ideas, images, scripts arise in the early morning during my personal inner-care and self-attention time before beginning my overt daily activities.

I become aware of how constrained and influenced by memory, conditioning, recurring patterns of mind/body/plus self I am.

What I write may be memoir-like (as *memory* imbues impressions, interpretations and conclusions) though maybe very introspective and interior-detailed, less daily-scaled social activity-based reporting.

Apparently I feel I want now to purposefully re-orient myself towards the initial intentionality of this thread that is the revealing of these very personal-feeling subjective phenomena. It is very easy to go in different directions, and Hugh I can and may, I want to keep this space primarily for airing my idiosyncratic interiority. (I am likely not totally alone in all of this.)

I'll continue at this moment by saying I have studied some of the academic and psychological attention given to "self". Though I haven't stayed with great discipline and comprehensivity in studying "self", I think I have gotten some larger sense of much that has been studied and written about self. One of my self-critiques and self-criticisms is that I tend to be a bit of a dabbler - a positive way of describing this facet of self is that I am usually more interested in breadth, flow, and proportion of an experience or topic as it unfolds for me than great articulate detail. This is a big topic of interest for me about my self, as well. Because self criticism and feared outer criticism touches on the embarrassment, guilt, and shame that I alluded to in my introductory post is frequently associated with these stories I tell about myself, this is a powerful topic. I suspect that to varying degrees and qualities the powerful emotional moldings of self and personality and personae are, or werein early formative years, a part of many of us.

We may be unconscious of very much of this. Part of how we have been molded around criticism and greater threat and risk has come to be formed as mental strategies and patterns known as "psychological defenses." I can often see how constrained and tweaked and convoluted I have become within the complexity of inner defenses and self-formation consequences to how I and greater life came and come, co-exist and flow together.

See what I mean? This may be some of how I speak about, how I see and think I know my self and life.

When I get started I can be relatively lost in the details of my self-experience and thinking.

Enough for now. Sheesh. Fingers crossed. Ta daa.