This is a really interesting way to compare what's really our "true" self vs. what's not. It's basically splitting things to in to attention and expectations/thoughts.

Our brains are basically pattern matching machines, and they're going to create all kinds of thoughts or expectations automatically. And that's completely out of control, at least in the short term. But consciously we can choose what we party attention to, and how we act based on that. That's what really reveals our character, it's what we have deliberate control over.

A lot of people assume that anything that's happening in their brains is "them". But there's a huge amount of stuff going on in our brains that we're not conscious of and have no control over. And evolutionarily there's stuff in there that's left over from when we were still lizards.