“Self-conscious” or Self Conscious?

“Self-consciousness” is an emotional state that implies separateness, and some amount of discomfort. I am self-conscious when I am standing out from my fellows, or my surroundings, like a man in a top hat among miners. We love the person who can wear the top hat in the mine and neither feel nor exhibit any sense of separateness: the truly charismatic are not self-conscious in this way.

But Self-consciousness, in another sense, is the blessed state of awareness or consciousness that the spiritual student seeks. When one is conscious of the Self that is the Universal One-ness; when one feels part of this Self, united with God, with nature and with all others, all apartness, all alienation, and all worldly “self-consciousness” disappears.