Ken Wilber on Waking Up and the Unique Self
I'll skip the full map of this path and just point to what it belongs to: the meditative and contemplative traditions, the ones concerned with liberation, with waking up. And here's a parallel worth sitting with. Just as cultures around the globe show a recognizable likeness in the major stages of growing up, the research turns up a similar convergence on the four or five main stages of waking up.
Evelyn Underhill laid out the sequence she believed every Western mystic travels through: gross purification, then subtle elimination, then the infinite abyss (the dark night), and finally a non-dual unity consciousness. That last one is sometimes called the supreme identity. You can locate much the same progression in nearly all the major Eastern traditions, which is something many researchers have documented. Daniel P. Brown comes to mind, and some of my own work points the same direction.
There's one feature of this realization I want to flag. People tend to describe the supreme identity as leaving the separate self behind completely, dissolving into a pure unity. The finite, narrow, skin-encapsulated ego drops away, and what gets uncovered is one's true self, said to be identical with spirit and with everything that appears. One mind, one self, one spirit.
Erwin Schrödinger, who helped found quantum mechanics, said it plainly: consciousness is a singular whose plural is unknown. But coming upon this universal one mind doesn't erase your individuality. It finishes it.
Think about how that works. A person wakes up to the single true self and spirit of the whole cosmos, and yet each person who does so is looking from a different place, a different angle. That angle gives every realization and every expression of the true self a radically distinct flavor. A perspective you won't find duplicated anywhere else in existence. So when the true self shows up in any given being, what actually arrives is that being's wholly particular self. Capital U, capital S.
This Unique Self is the source of whatever irreplaceable meaning your life carries, as your life and no one else's. The final reality of the universe, seen and lived and realized through you, as your being. What sets you apart from the countless other sentient beings all voicing the same one-self and the same one-spirit is small and total at once: you, and each of them, are seeing and speaking this one-self through eyes that belong to no one but you.