So it is quite simple in fact to separate the real Self from the illusory self.
We think Everest here is far away. But actually to see Everest it must have already been seen by us. This means we have already come into contact with it. Our True Self is already involved in bringing this vision of Everest to life and existence before us. Our True self is visible when it comes into contact with the world and does everything to make the world around us.
So if our True Self is busy making the world around us, what is this at the centre supposedly looking at Mount Everest. This is just a thought. A mental model of what the True Self is doing. The True Self of course is busy making this mental model! It is all about time. The True Self is already at work the moment something comes into existence. What we think our self is experiencing is a long way down the track and happens long after our True Self experienced it. Even those thoughts are hosted by our True Self.
Now we can add a third self by looking in a mirror.
When we look in a mirror we have three selves. There is the one before our eyes and the one behind our eyes and then there is the reality, the True Self, itself.
Normally we don't call reality a "self" but from recent posts "you cannot see what has not been seen" this means that everything we see has already been seen. When the True Self sees we get the world around us. Once the world is around us there is nothing else to do, it has really been seen. So Everest now exists, or our mirror reflection now exists. There is nothing more to do.
What we deduce is a theoretical self in the middle of the world doing the seeing, but this is just a model. Its a bad model as well because it doesn't actually do any seeing. The True Self is actually having these thoughts. The very modelling of this self at the centre is done by the True Self.
We have a loop here of course. The True Self is like the computer and the modelled self is like it modelling itself. We have already loosely shown that this is a contraction mapping and the modelled self if just a shadow of the real one. Most important to realise is that the whole the True Self can do modelling the modelled one cannot. The reduction in quality is huge for the brain.
So what happens in the mirror. By reflecting light we manage to look at our self. But this image is not us, it doesn't for example see itself. It is not like we are seeing the reflection and it is seeing us! There is a sense in which this is true but it relies upon reference. In a sense the reflection is "me" but only in the loosest sense. It is not actually me. If you throw a ball at the reflection you will quickly find out it is not you! The reflection is just that "a reflection" it is not you.
Again the True Self here is the one doing the seeing. But the other two images are different. The reflection is exactly that a reflection of our body. The one at the centre of the world is the mental construction.
We can see the difference with Douglas Harding's "headless method." If we point at things we get to a problem when we point at our eyes. There is nothing there. We are headless and eyeless. This is the True Self. But we did expect a head to be there and this self, with an expected head, is the modelled self.
Now how does this all related to Tat Tvam Asi and why is it wrong.
Well Tat Tvam Asi is the deep acknowledgment that the True Self is engaged with manifesting the world. That real time process is where we are really engaged. We are seeing and sensing the world so that it can be there. We are thinking the world so our imagination and beliefs can exist. It means that what is "there" is really "me" or the usual translation "you are that."
So for so good, straightforward quite easy to see.
The problem though is that "me" is very easily confused with the conceptual self. The solid, fixed, understood, conceptualised self the one we "think" we know--because we think it--that one is just a thought. That one has a discrete boundary around it, and we know it from the outside. The real Self is not like this. The real Self lies embedded in our experiences. It is not separate from the world. When the Sun rises that is our true self being involved with the sunlight to give us a conscious manifestation of the Sun. The very presence of the Sun has already involved our Self. There is no boundary around this self, it cannot be grasped by either the hand or the mind. Grasping and thinking itself is done by this Self.
To know this True Self we need meditate away from the derivative world of thoughts and mental experiences and start to embrace existence as it happens. In this case of reading this blog you are no longer interest in what I am saying but acutely aware of how the words look and how they cause thought, images and meaning to occur. The actual thoughts and meanings are no longer of interest, that they are occurring now becomes the point. As a new line is read, perhaps with a spwelling mistake, it triggers all kinds of mental activity: we are interpeted in noting that mental activity because it is our True Self that is doing this mental activity. We are to drift away from the contents of this mental activity and say the emergence of a snail in our mind as we read this. The snail is just the contents of the mental activity, the meaning of what is written, but the actual fact that this thought, imagination and meaning of a snail has just happened that is our True Self at work making all this happen.
So Tat Tvam Asi and Hinduism is highly problematic because it takes the Atman which is really the illusory self at the heart of our experience and equates it with the Brahman which is the True Self manufacturing all the world experiences that make up our moment by moment existence. But if in that equation we preserve the discrete nature of the Atman to think that the Brahman is a discrete entity we have achieved nothing. Brahman has no limits or boundary, it is not a "thing" we can think because it is the thinking itself. Atman however does not think, it is just a thought. Brahman thinks Atman that is the relationship and so they are importantly not the same.