It should be clear from many of the pages here that finding God/Self is by no means straightforward. People have sought across ages and cultures with many methodologies, from formal religions to more esoteric systems.
What I would say simply is this. It is called the Self because It is something within you. Although you might see reflections of Divinity everywhere in nature, or in the love that people show one another, that Source is within you, not outside. It is as Jesus says: “The Kingdom of God is within you (1)”.
Simply explained (should that be possible) you might see it as a well in your centre. Across the course of our lives, this well gradually fills up with the detritus of our lives in the way that urban wells do: supermarket trolleys, old rusty bikes, garbage of every variety, even the occasional body.
The process of finding the Self means turning within and beginning the long process of clearing this well. That, essentially, is the work of Yoga. That is why I counsel that people use life as a mirror to themselves, because everything you feel or experience, every fear or desire, tells you something about yourself.
I have followed the Bhakti path of devotion which is the path of Love. As Krishna says:
“Not by the Vedas, or an austere life, or gifts to the poor, or ritual offerings can I be seen as thou hast seen me. Only by love can men see me, and know me, and come unto me (2).”
The esoteric Eastern Theologies are impressive in their conceptualisation of Divinity. But, in the end, my own personal experience is as Krishna counsels, or in the experiences of mystics such as Julian of Norwich (3), or the Anonymous author of the 14th century text ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ (4). That it is only through Love that we will ever ‘know’ the Self.
(1) New Testament. Luke 17. 21 Standard Christian interpretations of this statement hold that Jesus was in fact referring to himself, as with “the Kingdom of God is among you”, not to the concept of God/Self within one, which is how Eastern theology understands it.
(2)Bhagavad Gita Ch.11. 53-54 Translated by Juan Mascaró. 1962. Penguin, Random House, India.
The Bhagavad Gita Comes Alive:
Ch. 11 v. 53 But it is not through dana, yajna, tapasya, or the study of vedic knowledge that I can be seen in My universal form as you have seen Me.
v. 54 Only by pure and unwavering bhakti yoga can I be seen, known, and understood in My most essential, true, and ultimate nature. O Arjuna, only in that way can you reach, attain, and fully enter into the mysteries of My many divine forms.
(3) Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love:
“From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord’s meaning. It was more than fifteen years after [the revelations she had experienced] that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else — ever.’ “
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich
(4) Cloud of Unknowing:
“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.”