Magic is about transforming the Self into a Divine Being and that can only go as far as the imagination of the practitioner.
There's an inherent contradiction in your statement: you can't be and change something at the same time.
Eventually when you realize that you can never experience yourself, you come to the point of "infinite" self-esteem, or no self-esteem at all. In other words, the self cannot ever have a condition or value, especially to measure up against anything else. Self-esteem issues crumble away.
You can't "transform the Self" (
who is transforming this "Self?"). You can change experience -- the mind (which is an umbrella term describing many processes including the personality, memories, cognitive abilities, etc), body, or anything else that exists. Anything you can know about cannot be "you" by definition. You can never know about yourself directly. To put it abstractly, the Self is safely anchored outside all possible experience. To use different words, it doesn't exist in the sense that it is the one that does the experiencing of all that exists and isn't an aspect of existence.
You gain an emense freedom from this perspective, realizing you are not trapped within the transient nature and conditions of experience. You are in the world but not of it.
In a lucid dream, you know you are not any of the experiences in that dream and hence have perfect control over the dream elements. In a normal dream you tend to identify with the dream elements hence the lack of lucidity. This waking existence is little different.
If we do take the idea of the Self that you presented above as a given (and most everyone does anyway), I agree with your points.
