Self. Center.

I'll never get over you, dear. You who I love.

As Björk put it, "I am no fucking Buddhist. But this is enlightenment." I can't very well be a Buddhist, and tell you I'll never get over you. If I am a Buddhist, I can't even tell you that I love you, in anything but the most flawed (meaning: acknowledgment that this perception and attachment to a self is a flaw) or abstract (meaning: to love not you, not a thing about you, but rather to love the crude voltage of impersonal "life force" that lights you up now, deserts you later) sort of love.

Buddhism is inimical to self, and so to love. This doesn't stop many Buddhists I've known from being deeply compassionate actors, with genuine love flowing for all those around them. Buddhists are only human, after all! It's as hard for a human not to love as it is for a human to truly let go self. Most Buddhists I've known love their fellow humans deeply, with a keen sense of humor about the prisons of self we all inhabit.

For to a Buddhist, a prison it is. Buddhism seeks to break the illusion of self, to leave self behind, and to achieve nirvana: the state of blissful oblivion. Buddhism abhors the self, and not one's own, only - every self there is, every self there has been or shall be. The distinctive humor of a well-enlightened Buddhist is of a fine kind, a funny kind too: at its root is the belief that all we selves are deluded to think that we matter. Those enlightened bodhisattvas even take a vow to forgo their well-earned oblivion, and instead keep on returning to self, over and over again. For as long as they can! To help others reach oblivion, is the claimed motive. If so, I call that quite admirably selfless. But I wonder whether more than a few of those bodhisattvas haven't got an ulterior motive? To want to keep coming back? Self is pretty seductive, after all. Seductive for good reason.

I wish to affirm the worth of the self. Yours in particular. I put it to you: self matters. You matter. There is within you - very particularly, you - a unique thing of worth that is no illusion, but that is rather a treasure far greater than whatever elan vital happens to be animating your limbs. Life force is not the valuable component of life. Life force, however you want to conceptualize or formulate it, is a cheap and renewable fuel that is worth only what comes of it: in a word, you.

I set forth the purpose of our reality thus: reality is the place where selves are self-made, where we each create who we will be by our choices and actions, within the confines of the raw materials of our bodies and worlds. We, our selves, are greater than those confines. We are making something infinitely more valuable than those materials, something infinitely more powerful than just the rude spark that sets us in motion, something limitless far beyond the mere confines of place and circumstance through which we pick our way. The self is our life's work. Each day, we are making it. Each day, we have made it. There is within you a world that is worth the world.

Some say (Christians, for instance) that afterwards, that precious thing we have each made of our self will get collected, whisked up high and set upon some shining and heartbreakingly beautiful shelf, for some eternally blissful ongoing purpose: a thing worth having been made, a thing not to be cast aside, a thing loved and worth being loved, for as many reasons as...as the reasons I love you. And so, some say that self will be gathered up, to bask in the light of the creator who created us: creators. But whether or not that's the case, know that the self you have created is worth all of that. Worth far more than the base matter and energy that went into you, that you created your self out of. Your self; who you are.

Shall I get over myself?

Dear me, no. I never shall. Perhaps someone other than I will get over myself. I know I won't. But as a happy consequence, though: hey. You. Know now and know forever, that I will never get over you, either.

You who I love.