The Self
The Self can be thought of as the being in a human. Yourself is your awareness. There is a very subtle difference between consciousness and the self. Awareness is not enough. You can't just be aware of things - you need an ego, an identification machine to have an interface with reality in order to survive.
Your "self" is awareness, but in order to have an interface with your body you need to identify with your body parts. This is where the ego comes into play. You can actually see the ego in work when meditating. As you breath, you can focus on identifying with each individual body part starting with the feet working all the way up to your head. When you identify with one of them it's like you can feel it more than the others - it's a very strange experience. But you may realized that there are two types of identifications: conscious and unconscious. Like even though you focus on one body part and can feel it more than the others, your brain still unconsciously identifies with other body parts your just not as aware of it. The ability for your brain to identify with things unconsciously in order to function is neuroplasticity. Your ability to consciously choose what you identify regardless of anything is the ego. But the ego and neuroplasticity make up all your identifications consciously or unconsciously. So none of the parts in your body are technically yourself, but the self takes up your body. Think of yourself like water - it takes up the shape of things, but isn't any of them. The main car model of your interface is neuroplasticity. The wheel and the pedals can be thought of as the ego since your consciously choosing them. But the actual driver of it is yourself.
So this begs the question: What if you lose a body part? You're not less of yourself, since your body isn't the self. Well there is a very strange phenomeon that happens where people who have lost body parts still feel them. It's called phantom limb sensation. There are many theories regarding it, but the overall thinking is that the brain remembered identifying with a body part so much, that there is still some identification code left in there even when the body part isn't there.
You can actually try this experiment yourself through the Rubber Hand illusion. Essentially what will happen is the brain will unconsciously start identifying with a rubberhand by giving it the illusion that its your actual hand. This is done through messing with your physical and visual sensors. Basically by hiding one of your hands and only showing the rubberhand infront of you while giving both the rubberhand and your hand that you can't see the same sensation your brain will use those physical and visual sensors to start identifying with the rubberhand. Now if you take a hammer and hammer the rubberhand your brain will actually create a sensation to jump or get away or feel pain due to some of it being identified with the rubberhand.
Death
So where is the self, what is the self, and what happens to yourself when you die?
Let's entertain the idea that all of ourselves come from a space and all return to that space when we die. If this is true then it could be stated that the self simply moves into one body and then at death moves out of that body.
Some people will call this creation center God. Where the self is actually created. Once the self moves in, the ego is created and is put into this body to interact with this reality and have an interface with this existence. The ego's function makes sense since you need to survive and reproduce. The function of the self, however, is much more mysterious and unclear.
It does make sense people think there is a God beyond ourselves because how else would ourselves be created? I mean what the hell is even past this boundary? And when you die your ego disappears, but yourself doesn't? Are you just getting closer to creation, where you were you actually were created, to the creation entity? Those out of body experiences and "Seeing the light" are all referring to what I am talking about. Maybe it's all delusions of the brain. But maybe the self is returning to the entity that created it into existence, whatever that is. Since science has no answers to this, it's fun to speculate. I'm sure dark matter and anti-matter are hiding some secrets to how ourselves actually work. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that our perception systems can not pick up on.
It can be a depressing experience to know we lose our masks, our identities, and our ego. We can try to hold onto them through a photo or a video to try to experience those identities again. Whether our personas, our ego, our masks, are real or not, to know that experience occured at all is enough for me. Before we die in this short reality lets experience them to the best of our ability and see how they are controlling us.
The Self Ego Shadow Identity Model
We are finally bringing it all together. There is yourself which is just aware of everything, there is the ego which is the identifer, there are the identities your ego puts on which is the persona, and then there is the shadow which is what the ego represses. Using this model we can start talking about other more complex identifications/behaviors in humans. This little model will be used to explain all the little complex social identifications we put on: Race, Religion, Gender, Sexuality, Jobs, Income, Status, Education, Politics, and Entertainment. But I want to ask you this, is it ever a wonder why we have so much trouble with them? I mean I feel like we waste so much emotional energy on them that can be put to other healthier uses. I feel like for each of them, if we had better ways to integrate them and accept them then we would be at a much better place.