Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them. This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first. Source: started meditating a few months ago.
If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?
It, too is a creation of the unconscious mind. It tends to stay conscious for a period of a few minutes, then fade for a few seconds while we scan the environment, then it recreates.
You can track this in an MRI scanner with the "default network", or by meditation, or by psychedelic drugs (careful with that last one).
Then realize that the "death/rebirth" of the self occurs multiple times per day, not once per life, and re-think how you understand religion.
And each re-creation of self can be a new entity, a chance to drop an old thought/habit and pick up a new.
You should have some attachment to earlier "yous", love is real and powerful and you should love yourself, but those prior selfs are not the totality of you and you can also love without attachment, mark some of that prior self as past and gone never to return.
My wife threw out some cut tulips this morning. They still had their petals, but they were cut a week ago and she thought they were fading. She really loves tulips.