What self realization is on a practical level is the cessation of emotional relationship to self-imagination and thought. This occurs because there is a realization there is no experience of past or future and that there is actually no self-identity or "Me" that exists at all, despite us acting and thinking there is one previously.
He is completely correct: self-realization is an instantaneous and permanent event that is realized now and happens now and then persists for every now that is experienced. What he means and what I mean is that there is absolutely no other time that things occur. This is tremendously hard to reconcile because we view our lives as an 80+ year monolith of information. You have years and years of childhood and years and years of future life you will experience. I am saying, and he is saying, that you don't. You have exactly present perception. This includes present memory, which is those other things. You have present perception, which includes present memory. Present memory is your past and your projected imagination of the future.
The phrase itself makes perfect sense and is a great 'meditation', but at the time I didn't understand it conceptually at all as it was completely new, I was just talking to myself and thinking and it came out, but it triggered the physical event, and afterwards it made complete sense in hindsight. It felt more like someone saying "look, there's the moon" and consciously I was like "ooooh...moon" but your brain is like "ok that's it we're becoming an astronaut but he'll learn that info later". Not like there is secret info, but it felt like your own conscious knowledge is extremely low level, but that small insight was enough to trigger a much deeper and more intelligent brain structure to click and become aware of something.
There isn't an emotional relationship to an idea of presenting or what anyone is saying, but there is a focus/tension in relationship to the actual event as it's happening. Like there is a "stress" that I experience in the same way that asking someone out I'd probably be nervous. This isn't accompanied by anxiety or an emotion, but is a tense physical event containing uncertainty that you have to pay a lot of attention to because you perceive it as consequential/important. While in this particular case there isn't any emotional characteristic, it's not like you never experience emotions, it's that emotions occur when they are necessary in response to events that are currently happening, not towards imagined outcomes or events.
I think that what you are looking at is really insightful and very accurate. The only thing I'd add on afterwards is saying "is there even that 'Me' at the end of the search?" Is there definitively anything at all at the end of the road you call yourself?
Straightforwardly, loneliness is the desire for meaningful companionship, it is - importantly - not the lack of relationship. You are lonely when you want something, not when you hypothetically lack something.
In my experience, nearly all of feelings of "I wanted to express something but I couldn't" is usually related to thinking. It is, in my experience, basically impossible to have any sensory experience that can't be communicated in basic thought other than other thought.
The point to be made is that there is no first principle, which originates itself in thought, where does that thought come from? From where does that symbol or identification originate other than thought, and what is that?
I mean I think it's just a continual progression of the same thing. While it's true that self-realization itself is phenomenological, the explanation of experience to other people afterwards and your own ideas about life are intellectual, so it's been difficult to evolve those concepts to share. An example is that I originally communicated the idea like one week after it happened as "cutting the umbilical cord between thought and emotion" and a lot of people thought it was like a mental break "are you ok?" type of thing. After a while I communicated the same thing as something like "the cessation of emotional relationship to self-imagination" which is pretty accurate, but I feel like maybe only around now I'd be comfortable being like "ok, these expressions have settled with me long enough to write them into a book to share without wanting to change them significantly later".
The reason you don't need a self-image is because you don't need to imagine who you are. You are experiencing what you are every single moment of your life right now.
You will feel whatever you feel as you figure it out. They are both the same, but to be more practical, yes you need to engage. The only reason I'm saying they're the same is because your whole life is in service of self-realization and self-actualization. If you use the metaphor of a sunflower, if I plant the seed, it grows into the flower. This is inevitable. If I give it a consciousness, perhaps it has some greater freedom, volatility, energy efficiency, etc, but it becomes a sunflower no matter what it does, that tape runs its course. You are the same way and whether you get it or not, you will act yourself out as a human being.
It's analogous in my own experience to how I used to and presumably most people would experience a dream. In a dream something really bad might happen, you get really scared, then you wake up and in 5 seconds you're completely fine. Why don't you have lingering trauma? Because you intuit "that wasn't real, it was a dream" and your brain automatically discounts it. If you say "I am going through a breakup, and the image of this person in my mind hurts" it is different for me (now) because there is not the "added on" part of hurt. Without an imagined personal identity that was hurt by another person's death, there is no change in your identity or imagination of your life, just an immediate change to what is happening in front of you. You can love someone in their last moments, then they are gone, and there is no sadness, just an absence of love.
The ultra-nutshell version is that your natural mode of operation is wanting to love. This is the complete fulfilment of intelligent function in relationship to your life as it plays out in front of you. Self-image or our ego is a secondary carbon copy of this literal brain function that is the belief we are an actual "other" person in thought. This causes a secondary version of the previous emotion set that demands we create conditions under which other people love us. This is an introduction to self-inquiry, which is the question: "if you can see this, then how do you know other people love you other than your own invented standard?"
It's a relationship with your past, present and future. You feel discontent in the present because there is a previous "wrong" or "insufficiency" you want to correct, improve or achieve. This creates a present demand in the brain to acquire, achieve, or overcome something.
The beliefs an individual has don't make everything make sense, they try to make sense of things through forcing a relationship of "I am not sufficient" ----> "my current experience" -----> "rectifying insufficiency with perfect solution". An example with your mention of the need to be successful is not that there's anything wrong with being an athlete, or being a movie star, or being a successful business person, the only problem is the ongoing algorithmic brain function that operates constantly demanding it, which is ambition, anxiety, restlessness, and anger at your own failure to live up to your "imagined" solution to the problem. The problem in this case being not that you couldn't make more money or be in better shape and that would be cool, it is the artificial demand that has been invented by the brain that believes it is "fixing" something in time when it isn't.
I think the best analogy is that I don't ever experience anger related to ideas, but you do still experience frustration, which is a strong energetic demand from your brain to try to communicate an important idea you don't think another person is understanding. In the sense that if you are angry it is because you think another person is saying/doing something harmful, whereas if you are frustrated there is no emotion, but a forceful effort of communication to express the other person is not understanding you. Being angry feels like anger obviously, but being frustrated exclusively is just heightened energy towards a particular focus, like a dog who wants to get out of the car so it can run around.
My understanding, and to whatever extent experience, is that in a strange and very unintuitive way everything feeds into now. The point of the phrase and what it represents conceptually is there is nothing else to feed into now. Ten years ago it was experienced by you as "Now". Right now you are experiencing "Now". In ten years you will experience that moment in time as "Now". You cannot experience "everything feeds into now" there is no other thing than now. The one and only thing in existence to you is present experience.
Most people struggle with self-realization because they want something that is not natural, but generated by their culture or conditioning. Self-realization is automatic and you don't do this consciously, but to relate to my past self or others, it is like saying 'I let go of everything, I want nothing, I don't need to be saved, I don't need to achieve... I just want to know what the fuck is me and my experience.' Self-realization results first and foremost in a change in emotional state. A self-realized person is not insecure. At its core, that's all that it is. A person who has a self-image/ego is able to have their mood altered by other people's opinions and ideas like a leaf in the wind, and a self-realized person does not experience that. Self-realization is a bit like exploring a cave looking for treasure, and then finally realizing there has never been any treasure at all, why did you believe there was? For me personally it was about 5 or 6 months after really looking into self-inquiry and this stuff specifically, but some people it's really quick if the circumstances are right and some people never figure it out their whole lives. At the end of the day, the realization causes you to have no separation between any form of categorization of thought or activity, and so, believe it or not, you are doing self-enquiry every moment you are alive. Don't ever worry that you are misspending your time, your time is being spent correctly at all times, it is only your self-image/ego saying 'no, I should be doing this instead.'
Self-enquiry is essentially the examination of what 'I' refers to when you use it, but the problem is the instinct of nearly everyone is to intellectualize it and try to philosophize or look for 'the right answer' to agree with, which isn't the right direction. The mention of 'stepping back' is meant to try to help people understand that unlike analysis where you 'zoom in' on the details, you instead are trying to 'zoom out' and see the entirety of what you are analyzing or experiencing in the first place. What you are trying to resolve with self-inquiry is the false relationship you have with time. You have invented an identity called 'Me' that specifically has characteristic and duration that affects your relationships, friends, past, future, and self-identity. Self-realization is about resolving and permanently dissolving the incorrect relationship you have emotionally invented with your past and future. Like talking to a therapist, the most important thing when you are trying to figure out and resolve your beliefs is being absolutely honest with yourself. If you are talking about someone you are envious of for example, don't say to yourself 'I dislike how they act arrogantly in front of others' because that's not actually what you believe. Instead directly say 'I am angry at them because they are more successful than me but I don't think they deserve it as much as I do.' You aren't trying to get an outcome, you are trying to see exactly what you think, then automatically you will notice errors in what you believe and change it. An analogy would be if someone said 'I want to be a better podcaster, any tips?' and the only important tip is talk for ten minutes on any subject uninterrupted into a microphone, then listen to it back and you will automatically notice a dozen things you don't like, which will cause you to automatically fix it. The purpose of the question 'What am I?' or 'Who am I?' or 'What is Me?' is as an introductory question like 'Economics 101' that is meant to plant a seed. It is the 'once upon a time' and the rest is what you're doing and inquiring into, and there's no wrong way to do it. The resolution is also in the same question, and I understand everyone's frustration that there isn't a 'method' but it functionally can't work that way unfortunately.
The end result of self-inquiry or formal meditation is the realization that your natural and permanent state is one of fully integrated and constant meditation. You can do self-inquiry with your legs crossed and eyes closed or while you're sitting on the bus, it doesn't really matter as it's just directed thought, analysis, observation, and/or attention. A lot of formal meditation currently is not towards self-realization but more the belief that through practicing the skill of observing our own thoughts and processes that attachment to negative thoughts or harmful patterns of thought can be diminished or eliminated. This will not lead to self-realization as it's an effort to avoid negative experience and pursue preferred experience or indifference, which is itself a preferred experience. The underlying effort of genuine meditation or self-inquiry is to identify the fundamental 'Me' that we believe is affected by all of our imagined problems and experiences in order to realize not that our problems or thoughts aren't real, but that the 'Me' affected by them was not what we always believed it was. When I say something like 'you realize you're always meditating' it's not because you just permanently toggled it on, it's more like realizing that when you're 'meditating' you actually aren't really doing anything. True meditation is more akin to the realization that for every second of your entire life you thought you were 'doing something' when you fundamentally weren't. I've personally not really ever done much formal meditation but no reason not to have multiple angles of attack. I don't recommend any combination, I found it's usually intuitive what you need more or less of and to approach that naturally.