There are constantly arising points of reference in consciousness; a sense of looking from, at.
This from, at gives rise to "self", e.g. reflexive thought about you. "I am so and so," for example.
The sense of looking out at the world from your eyes is another.
Pretty gross.
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But there are far subtler manifestations of this where the point of reference thing is more implicit than explicit.
You only realize you're "selfing" because whatever experience arises implies this self somewhere in the system.
Emotional suffering (vs. just pain), for example.
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People usually mix emotional suffering with abusive self-talk, mental imagery or w/e, so that there is a more gross level of "WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME?"
But you can have this sense of something happening to a "you" without these additional layers.
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There are also things like orientation in space, balance etc. that require a sort of constructed, instrumental sense of self in order to make sense.
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Point is you might not feel the need to name these things you, in the same way people do with their thoughts, feelings etc.
But experientially, there is the same component of reflexivity.
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So even if you suspend explicitly reflexive thought (i.e. talking about yourself inside your mind) and imagery, there are still these constant exercises of perspective-taking that you carry out in order to function (quite literally) in the world.
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But when mind is quiet and this is the main, sometimes only way in which such feelings arise, they have a very flexible, flighty quality to them.
You may just as easily experience self *inside your perception of someone else's feelings* as in your thoughts, for example.
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But a lot of the time there are these extremely localized feelings of consciousness rippling out from some point in space or abstract mind-geometry.
You step on a nail, and there's a whole lot of self going on in your foot. You adjust your balance, it moves around... etc.
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For a while I was regularly experiencing this sense of self as arising from a point in space somewhere up and to the left of my head.
From this vantage, I was pretty close to totally insensate to body-internal feelings, but still sensitive to the wider environment.
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right so the thing with the alexander technique is it made the regular from,at (thinking???) self-referential self point disappear *while* wider environment sensitivity stayed (heightened???) - this was very new and freaky it felt like being there + not being """me"""
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Never really perceived the Alexander Technique as some form of enlightenment tradition, but uh, those are for sure some common points.
I should stress that not all (few?) Alexander Technique teachers operate in this domain. I'm very lucky that I've fallen in with the right crowd, so to speak. A lot of them have confused the finger for the moon and seem to focus on posture. Completely misses the point IMO.
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F..M. Alexander himself called this out in advance...
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Alexander Technique is not about posture. Alexander Technique is not about posture.
Call it wu-wei. Call it non-doing. Call it cultivating spontaneity.
It's about learning how to unlearn and then to explore the space you discover beyond that unlearning. twitter.com/nibrasibn/stat…
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