The summary definition of the word 'self', derived from the Oxford English Dictionary, the highest authority on the English language, is as follows:
Self is all that we are.
The word ‘all’ means all, everything, without exception.
This is why the word self must include all we are consciously aware of about our self - and everything we are not.
We are consciously aware of body and our conscious mind - but there is so much more about us that is beyond our perception or 'out of sight' of our conscious awareness, hidden from our conscious mind - in our unconscious.
It is for this reason that when we use the word ‘I’, we mean the totality of our self, but all we are ever pointing to is the surface of our self.
If we ask 'who am I?' we must use our mind to search for our self, but we cannot access the unconscious mind, so all we can ever find is our ‘sense of self’ - which is far from all that self is.
To begin to grasp what the self is, we must first understand what mind is...