Your body is made up of millions of cells. Each of those cells can be considered a unique living organism. We can take a skin cell and put it in a petri dish and under the right conditions it will exhibit a sense of self a begin to move around in response to stimulus. White cells live only for days. blood cells live for weeks and liver cells live for months. The majority of cells in our body die and are replaced on a regular basis. Our sense of ourselves as a unified and continuous whole is an illusion. We cannot see individual cells without the aid of a magnifying instrument. Our perception of our body/self as one thing is an illusion perpetrated by the limits of our visual resolution. We also know that animals are capable of perceiving a much wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum than we are. Our conceptual awareness/mind is permanently restricted by the limitations of our sensory modalities. This is why study of any kind can only take us so far. Words can only express what we have experienced, or what we can name. If you want to experience things in a completely new way, then at some point you must abandon the efficacy of words, and thus the process by which our mind creates words. There is no self to study. That doesn't mean there is nothing. It means that what is really there is so much more amazing and wonderful that to call it a self is laughable. The truth of things can only be found in a direct experience of the present moment. Many cultures have found that certain herbs, mushrooms can aid creating this experience. If you do choose to use them, use the minimum dose and only increase dose slowly. The body is capable of this experience without aids but it can be very difficult and require a great deal of patience and equanimity.