The waking state is play of attention and volition responding to the world, you can feel this knitting together as you wake each morning, and then the sense that it is you, the self, the 'I' that you give to things, acting out desires and stories, fragmentary and then again returning to certain themes over and over. But if self has any meaning it is the context or space or clearing in which all of this takes place, the unity of experience without an 'I' and that from which all phenomena draw their life.