The categories by which your self is apprehended are empty in the sense of the emptiness of a net drawn out empty from a plunge in dark waters. They are either subtle inner feelings such as were they to suddenly disappear you would be jolted by the strangeness of their absence into a fine and sharp awareness, and so they have little more value than that of a useful habit - it is restful to 'dial them up' and drown in them, in other words to sleep -; or else they are formal unities, like the unity of apperception: everything experienced is experienced by you, but such unity is empty because there cannot actually be anything, any diversity, to unify, there being no outside; or else it is an introjection of a social phenomenon: you are what exactly others are mistaken about when they address themselves to you, but for this to work you need to first imagine others on the model of yourself, etc. Could it then be what you are mistaken about when you think 'I'? No, you can't pick yourself up by the bootstraps. When there is talk of eliminating the ego it can only mean a vivid apprehension of the failure of all such strategies which does away with both self and non-self in the same gesture.