The sense of self is itself a thought — perhaps the most fundamental thought. “There’s an I. I am this. I think this.” When you begin questioning assumptions and seeing through your thoughts, you eventually arrive at this deepest assumption: that there is a separate “I” having the thoughts at all.
“The sense of self is a thought. The most basic thought is there’s an I. Prove it. It’s an incredibly hard thing to prove.”
Joe invites the inquiry: Did you choose to have a thought, or did it just appear? Was it you who had the thought, or were you receiving it? What was noticing? Was awareness the thing, and you just claimed awareness as “me”?
The question “What am I?” — which Joe wrestled with for seven years — doesn’t have a conceptual answer. You sit in the question until the question dissolves. At that point, identity flips from personal to universal. Joe describes this as happening without discipline — the question asked itself 10-15 times a day because it was alive in him, not because he forced it.
When the question finally dissolved, he realized “it wasn’t even me asking the question — it felt more like the question was asking me.”
Related Concepts
- Identity creates rigidity and limitation
- Identity stress comes from defending a fixed self
- Question the assumption is self-inquiry, not skepticism