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I had responded to this earlier, but a little boy erased it! Yer dead meat son! 
OK. Ummm...let me say it like this. First, I can't get on board with this idea of separating the self like you have done here. Your "self-relating to itself" may be similar to my person possessing a "toward otherness. It seems to me you need to take it more wholistically. Regardless, every real being exists FIRST as a present in itself. In the company of but not as a part of other existents. True dat. But this "presence-in-itself" (the substantiality) at the level of personal being exists in two ways: in the order of knowledge as self-consciousness and in the order of action as self-determination. I deal mostly with the first one.
Now, self-consciousness as self awareness enables a personal being to be aware of itself as subject immediately present to itself from within and conscious of itself as the source of its own actions such that the person can MEANINGFULLY say, "I." This ability to be "self-present" or self-conscious is considered primarily the function of the spirit and not the body such that we could say that in the higher form of spiritual being i.e. God and the angels, this self-presence is immediate and complete. HOWEVER, in human beings it is less immediate. Instead, it remains incomplete and must be activated from without, relying on the stimulation of the senses by the outside world of objects and existents. That is, the explicit awakening to self-awareness as an "I" is therefore DEPENDENT on an "other" encountering us, to providing us with the "wake-up call" so to speak, by reaching out to us and calling us into an "I-Thou" relationship.
So all of this is to say that it seems that in order for the human self-presence to emerge, human beings cannot exist on their own; we need the outside world and particularly other persons before we even become self-conscious. There is something misleading about the "self" in the "self-consciousness" (YOUR self relating to itself-"empathy") for we become conscious of others before we become conscious of ourselves.
And here's another thing. This "self-consciousness?" in a human person continues on throughout one's whole life. Which is to say that there is a progressive and incremental character to one's self-awareness as one journeys through life. In a sense, because of the seemingly infinite and inexhaustible depth of the self, it can be said that not only are we naturally open to the Infinite Spirit of God, but we never really see ourselves as we really are.
As for participating in the divine life collectively? This seems to me to be a eschatological question of "becoming." That is, it seems to me that the church fathers describe a process of human development or actualization of human potentionals as "deifcation." That is, humanity has a dynamic nature--an ongoing process. A pilgrimage with a history beginning in immaturity and imperfection, and progressing throught various stages to greater and greater manifestations of the "image", until it is ultimately consummated in total "likeness" with God. In communion John Zizioulas has some really cool things to say. He says:
"the ontological question [of human personhood] is not answered by pointing to the "self-existent," to a being determined by its own boundaries, but to a being which in its ekstasis breaks through these boundaries in a movement of communion...It is not in its "self-existence." but in communion that this being is "itself" and thus is at all. This communion does not threat personal particularity; it is constitutive of it."
Brandon
It is the purpose that makes strong the vow, but vows to every purpose must not hold.--A friend.
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