"WHAT is the self? One answer is that it is the diamond in the rough that is you, the unique, immutable and indestructible jewel that makes each person who they are, the being amidst the becoming, the unfluxable within the flux.Kant called it the Transcendental Ego, which stands behind experience as the condition of its possibility. An alternative view endorsed by Buddha, Heraclitus, John Locke, David Hume and William James is that the self does not exist."

Our sense of self is a virtual simulation within a larger simulation of an external reality which is larger still

Diamond in the rough