As a student of the Buddhadharma, you should devote all your time and energy trying to find your right self. You cannot ever find the nirvanic light of absolute reality in the wrong self.
Whether you walk, you breath, you talk, sleep, or meditate in a position of motionlessness, or perform a few or many rigid rituals of self-purification, all these conditioned permutations are nothing but actions of your imagining mind, which carries an awesome animative power where primarily thought is its directional magic wand of becoming and should as such therefore stand aside for the true and most sublime light of your right self.
This transition, when occurring, from illusion and ignorance to the first clear light of your right self, is instantaneous and highly intuitive. Once standing on the light-filled and deathless land of countless Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the great work begins to shed the residual illusions, memories and useless longings of the false self. This is called the great cultivation and continues until the end of your last existence in samsara.
You can deny the false self in so many ways and believe this illusion of this, or that self or no-self, is permanent once your mind induces itself to buy the aforementioned spiritual misdirection, but you can never deny the presence of the right self, the time it finally reveals itself – hence its prime allusions, the Absolute Reality, the Unconditioned, the Unborn Mind, Buddha Mind, etc.
The dependence on a false core carries the stigma of a false self – which never dies as long as it is watered by the consciousness of ignorance.
The singular reliance on the true core brings out the liberating power of the absolute.
What is absolute, is impervious to any delusions, radiating its perfect light in all ten directions, freely and abundantly, by the power (noble wisdom) of its sheer omnipotence under the grace of its own omniscience.
Tozen