Ken Wilber on the Unique Self
Suppose everyone in this room woke up fully to the same single spirit. We would still each see it from a different angle, and nothing can change that. The perspective you hold is yours alone. No other conscious being can occupy it, because no other being stands where you stand in this manifest universe. Call it your cosmic address if you like, your particular AQAL configuration, a vantage point on the world that belongs to you and to no one else.
That is the reason spirit needs each of us to complete itself. What you carry to spirit is a fresh, individual slant on the cosmos, a view that spirit on its own, as pure spirit, cannot produce. The self that opens at this level is more than personal, not less. It is a personal plus. This is the thing you give to God, the thing that completes God, the reason God needs you at all. It makes spirit a genuine unity that is also a diversity rather than a blank, featureless sameness. One in many, not a single undifferentiated lump.
The older traditions leaned hard on the oneness of this true self, and they were right about that. What they tended to skip over was how distinct the view becomes the instant that self shows up in any particular creature anywhere. When the saints and sages of a given lineage realized the supreme identity, they did it as themselves, through their own self. The one true self was showing up in and through a specific perspective.
Doing it that way joins the infinite to the finite, the eternal to the temporal, the formless to the formed. You get a real nondual unity that still has diversity in it, not a uniform oneness scrubbed of every feature. Emptying out all features is not absolute spirit at all; it is absolute erasing. The oneness worth having is seamless rather than featureless.
Each of the world's major traditions started the same way. A founder, or a handful of founders, lived through the stages directly, a profound waking up, a direct experience of the individual in unity with ultimate spirit. The supreme identity realized through the unique self.
Many religions later drifted, especially in the West. They came to identify less with that path of waking up and more with a path of growing up, and the trouble was which part of growing up: the lower rungs, the magic and mythic stages, frankly the more childish ones. Over time those religions let the direct experiences of waking up quietly fall away.