Listener question: what and where is the self?

Listener question: I listened to your podcast this morning. This concept of freeing ourselves from the illusion of the self to 'be what we really are' is something I find difficult to understand. Is it even possible to know 'what we really are' without some underpinning of what we mean by 'we'? If my concept of my 'self' - complete with all its baggage and cultural conditioning and prejudices etc - is an illusion of some kind, behind which lurks a more real, authentic entity, do we not risk falling into some kind of Cartesian duality whereby the 'who I really am' has somehow been occluded, or forgotten by the 'persona' of my conditioning? The conclusion seems to be that 'who I really am' is not my 'self' in the way that I ordinarily understand that term but something else, the proverbial 'ghost in the machine', a concept which I thought had been abandoned long ago. 

Can you help to clarify this a bit more?