Psychologically, there is a respectable case made that our "self" is a cognitive construct by which we integrate diverse quite separate processes and patterns.
When I was deep into Zen, one day I was looking out of the window of a college building at the students across the street. I saw one young man crossing the street. As an approaching car came close to him, I noticed that he picked up the pace a little to assure that he got off the street and out of the way of the car.
I mused upon what I saw. And I decided that there was no illusion about the self. We do not practically live day to day as if the self is an illusion.
If he had lived as if he was an illusion he would not have sought to get out of the way of the approaching vehicle.
Having said that, there is something or Someone more eternal and more real than the self centered ego. And rather than destroy the soul, He wants to dispense Himself into the soul, unite with that soul, mingle with that soul and live again on the earth "wearing" as it were that soul quite comfortably.
So Paul, one of our Christian pioneers in the Christian life showed us how to get into this enjoyment of living in oneness with the available resurrected Son of God.
" I [ego] and crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I [ego] who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
... I now live in faith, the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me."
What attracted me away from Zen to Jesus was that I came to understand that the Truth was not a Force or a Vibration but a living Person.
You see any mere Force is something lower than me. But a living Person such as Jesus, in addition to being powerful, is a Person
"who LOVED me, and gave Himself up for me." .
A Person is a bit harder to give in to than a force.
Your ego remains forever transcendent to any force.
But a living Lord and Savior, God in Christ, rises above ego.
Yet this is no tyrannical transcendence.
This is no despotic transcendence.
"... Son of God who LOVED me and gave Himself up for me."
When I touched Christ I touched an eternal and enduring divine Love.
No force loves.
No mere energy or transcendent plane free from self,
Loves .
A Person loves. And to touch Christ within is to touch the Lord of Love.
There is no doubt whatever that many of these processes and patterns take place without engaging our "self" at all, because they happen outside of awareness. Nor can we doubt that we often observe in ourselves and others behaviours that are at odds with what we would expect of a rational or purposeful "self."
All in all, there are many perfectly serious and respected threads to the idea that we are not ourselves - that self is an illusion. Probably a helpful one of course: it works well most of the time. To phrase that differently, we are usually happy with this illusion.
So yes - you are overlooking a huge amount.
It is nothing "new" introduced by Buddhism that there is something illusionary about the self.
The entire Old Testament book of
Ecclesiastes has Solomon speaking again and again that there is a
vanity of vanities to a human life
"under the sun" .
IF you read
Ecclesiastes you should see that the Bible gives an entire book devoted to declaring that there is something futile, something vain ...
"vanity or vanities" and chasing the wind in emptiness about the fallen human life.
[quote]
"He has made everything beautiful in its own time; also He has put eternity in their heart, yet so that man does not find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." (Ecc. 3:11)
We come into the world with a God shaped vacuum in our hearts. And this sense is a sense of vanity or that there must be something more than the self. I think some Eastern philosophies also recognize the vanity and react with a belief in the illusion of the ego.
There is something like a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every created man. Fortunately, Christ as God incarnate, has come to terminate that
"vanity" and end gradually deliver His lover from that illusion and vanity that did truly accompany the fall of Adam.