No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and - as a special class within the whole - mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment... by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.

The self requires a story.

Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.

Take away your father and your mother, take away all the ancestral influences you have inherited, take away all the culture, language, and perceptions you have acquired: then what will be left of you? In this big picture, you carry within you the entire history of evolution as well as millions of years of the future to come, the entire network of relationships, the continuous dance of life; you are much much more than this small individual soul imprisoned in this flesh and blood personality. You are infinitely flowing energy, you are indivisible; and that is what makes you individual.

Every self is an argument trying to prove its identity

Like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.

When a cultured and sensitive soul retraces its efforts to lay down the great lineaments of reason according to its own intellectual destiny,
when it retraces the history of its own culture through memory, it becomes aware that the vestige of an essential ignorance lies forever at the core of its intimate certainties. Within the realm of knowledge itself, there is indeed an original fault-that of having an origin; that of falling short of the glory of atemporal being; that of not awakening oneself to remain oneself, but of awaiting the lesson of light from the dark world.

When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into acount. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of apurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everythng tht belongs to us - and then flows back again. (...) One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive.

What is the self?
A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love <i>her</i>? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory, do they love me? <i>me</i>, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing my self. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person's soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore we never love anyone, but only qualities.
Let us then stop scoffing at those who win honour through their appointments and offices, for we never love anyone except for borrowed qualities.

The autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000) incorporates the reflective self and some of the emotional self, and it provides the sense of “I” having a unique past and future. The core self involves an underlying and largely nonverbal feeling of “I” that has little sense of the past or the future. If the PFC — which provides most of the neural substrate of the autobiographical self — were to be damaged, the core self would remain, though with little sense of continuity with the past or future. On the other hand, if the subcortical and brain stem structures which the core self relies upon were damaged, then both the core and autobiographical selves would disappear, which suggests that the core self is the neural and mental foundation of the autobiographical self (D’Amasio 2000). When your mind is very quiet, the autobiographical self seems largely absent, which presumably corresponds to a relative deactivation of its neural substrate. Meditations that still the mind, such as the concentration practices we explored in the previous chapter, improve conscious control over that deactivation process.

Life batters and shapes us in all sorts of ways before it's done, but those original selves which we were born with, and which I believe we continue in some measure to be no matter what, are selves which still echo with the holiness of their origin. I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self – painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit and enriches the understanding. I think that our truest prayers come from there too, the often unspoken, unbidden prayers that can rise out of the lives of unbelievers as well as believers whether they recognize them as prayers or not. And I think that from there also come our best dreams and our times of gladdest playing and taking it easy and all those moments when we find ourselves being better or stronger or braver or wiser than we are.

When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things...