Best books on this feeling of "I"-ness. What is this

>>9620091
Books by Ouspensky (after he met Gurdjieff, not before, unless you happen to be interested in semi-turgid mysticism) & Gurdjieff

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>>9620091

Read this OP. It's perfect for what you're trying to understand.

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This is what I'm reading atm at least.

>But what then is the identity of the self? It seems to depend on the irreversible history of the body, a linkage of causes and effects. But this linkage is pure appearance. The body is constantly being modified so as to form one and the same physiognomy; and it is only when the resources for the body's rejuvenation are impoverished that the person becomes fixed, and its 'character' hardens.

>But the different ages of the body are all so many different states, each giving birth to the next. The body is the same body only insofar as a single self is able to and wills to be merged with it, with all its vicissitudes. The cohesion of the body is that of the self; the body produces this self, and hence its own cohesion. But for itself, this body dies and is reborn numerous times - deaths and rebirths that the self pretends to survive in its illusory cohesion. In reality, the ages of the body are simply the impulsive movements that form and deform it, and finally tend to abandon it. But just as these impulses are resources for the body, they are also threats to its cohesion. The purely functional cohesion of the body, in the service of the self s identity, is in this sense irreversible. The ages of the self are those of the body's cohesion, which means that the more this self begns to age in and with the body, and the more it aspires to cohesion, the more it also seeks to return to
its starting-point - and thus to recapitulate itself.

>The dread of physical dissolution requires a retrospective vision of its own cohesion. Thus, because the self, as a product of the body, attributes this body to itself as its own, and is unable to create another, the self too has its own irreversible history.

Merleau-Ponty

>>9620100
Seconding this book. Not a bad intro to eastern conception of the self, it's super short and readable, and at the very least it's something to get your noggin joggin.

>>9620095
interesting to see Gurdjieff recommended here.

am reading Pessoa's book of disquiet, its way up this alley

>>9620091
Carl Jung's conception of the "ego" throughout his Collected Works.

>>9620107
which books?

>>9620100
>>9620258

These two go great together. Alan Watts loves some Jung.