"I think, therefore I am" — René Descartes' cogito — is, in 📝The Ascent of Humanity, a founding statement of the 📝separate self. By locating the certainty of existence in private thought, Descartes drew the modern boundary of the self at the edge of the thinking mind.
📝Charles Eisenstein reads the cogito as a hinge in the long history of 📝separation: a self defined by reason alone is, by definition, cut off — from the body, from other beings, from a world reduced to mere object of thought. The discrete and separate self the book diagnoses is, in large part, the Cartesian self.
There is, however, a quieter reading hidden in the same sentence. If a self can observe its own thinking, then the self is not the thoughts but the awareness in which thoughts arise — a self with no edge, and so no separation to defend.