The Most Fascinating Problem In The World Is "Who Am I?" [Alan Watts Notes]

 "What do you mean... what do you feel when you say the word 'I'. 

• You can't look into your own eyes without using a mirror.
• You can't bite your own teeth.
• You can't taste your own tongue.
• You can't touch the tip of this finger with the trip of this finger. 

What do you mean by the word 'I'?

In the Western world, people feel 'I' (ego, myself, my source of consciousness) to be a center of awareness, a source of action, that resides in the middle of a bag of skin. 

This is the conception of ourselves as a 'skin encapsulated ego'. 

How We Use The Word "I"?

We aren't accustomed to say, "I am a body."

We say, "I have a body."

We don't say, "I beat my heart."

We say, "I walk. I think. I talk."

We feel our heart beats itself, and that has nothing very much to do with "I".

In other words, we don't regard "I"/Myself as identical with our physical organism.
We regard it as something inside of it.

Most Western people locate their ego inside their heads. You are somewhere between your eyes, and between your ears, and the rest of you dangles.

It is not so in other cultures. When a Chinese or Japanese person, he points (kokoro Japanese) (shin Chinese) the heart-mind. Some locate themselves at the solar plexus.

But we are in our heads. As if within the dome of the skull, we have really the idea of ourselves, as a little man inside our heads with earphones on which brings messages from the ears, and televisions in front which brings messages from the eyes. Involuntary actions 'happen to me'. I'm pushed around by them, but by some extent I can push my body around. 

This is the ordinary, average conception of what is oneself.

"Who would I have been if my father had been someone else?"
The child gets the idea that the mother and father gave him/her a body in to which he was popped. In our whole way of thinking, is the idea that we are a soul or an essence, imprisoned in a body, and we look out onto a world that is foreign to us.

We speak of coming into this world. And this whole sensation we are brought up to have - of being an island of consciousness locked up in a skin - facing outside us a world that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside me is not me. 

This sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility. And estrangement. Between ourselves and the so-called external world. 

Therefor we go onto talk about the 'conquest of nature' 'the conquest of space', and view ourselves in a kind of battle towards the world outside of us. 

Examining the Strange Feeling of Being an Isolated Self