The self is a necessary fiction. I need a name and a birth date to function on planet earth. I have particular characteristics, both in a bodily sense and in terms of personality, both of which distinguish me from every other being on this planet. I have a self. But am I self?

The more I focus on this self, the more unhappy I become. The more time and effort I spend on its wants and needs, its traumas and littler hurts, the more energy I expend burnishing its reputation and its pride, prettying up its housing and focusing on its future economic prospects, then the more fearful I become. I’m afraid of losing these very attributes which seem so necessary to protect the self and enhance the image the self has of itself.

The more I focus on the self’s security in its various forms, the more afraid I become. The more fearful I become, the angrier I get, since anger, a secondary emotion often derived from fear, is protective and less threatening for the self to experience. Fear makes the self feel threatened and vulnerable. Anger can make it feel energized and powerful. The angrier I grow, the more I justify my grievances, nurse them, compose stories around them which become a part of ‘me.’ These stories become an armor so that you can’t see in.

In all this, it’s not so much the self that’s the problem. It’s the accessories I build around my self. It’s my attempts to enlarge myself, which I often do at the expense of other selves. For the self doesn’t see win/win. It views life as a zero sum, winner-take-all game in a world of limited resources.

No, it’s not having a self that’s problematic. It’s the focus on self. It’s my inordinate concentration of my awareness on myself. It’s all the time and energy I spend burnishing my self-image. And that’s all it is; an image. My awareness can only be trained on one thing at any one moment. More often than not, this awareness is either focused inwardly on myself, or on objects, persons, conditions  or processes in my exterior environment which I believe have a direct or indirect impact on this self. This preoccupation with self is the problem. It leads to a life out of balance. These imbalances, introduced into the world and multiplied by the many, many selves running around trying to be somebody important, lead to various kinds of suffering, to ills like poverty and crime and war.

When the focus on self becomes excessive, illness of one kind or another results. Often, the illness is emotional or psychological, but it can lead to physical disorders as well. When the focus on self grows into an obsession, the problems of addiction and other forms of mental illness can result.

What can the solution be? We might try to solve the problem of this preoccupation by shifting focus. What might call this shift in attention away from self? We might call it love.

Love is beyond definition. It’s past all understanding. Yet we must have analogies to what love is if ever we are to practice it. And perhaps that’s the best we can do: practice love, act out our love through these little selves we think we are while we walk along the surface of the earth.

As a verb, as an action, love might be considered the turning of each of our awarenesses from our selves onto others, without trying to get our own needs met. That last part’s an important qualification. To love is to focus on someone or something else to the exclusion of ourselves. Human understanding of love is rather transactional, aren’t they? We love a woman because she’s beautiful. Well, what happens when she grows older? We love our cat until it pisses on the bed, then we get rid of it. We know only love with conditions. The proof in that is that we talk about unconditional love. All love must be given without conditions, or it’s not a love at all. It’s just another bargain. Another this-for-that.

Reflect back on your life. The times you’ve been most happy are precisely those times you’d lost awareness of your self. It was during those times when you lost yourself in someone or something else: a lover, the happiness of a child, a puppy, a cause. It didn’t matter whether it was a sunset on the rim of the Grand Canyon or the bliss of a drug you poured down your throat. This loss of self, really the loss of self-consciousness – the loss of awareness of self –relieved you of the burden of having to think about you and all of your problems for a while. It took your mind off all the things you don’t have, and everything you’re afraid of losing.

It also brought you into the moment of now, injected you into the present tense. This action we call love was something you were doing or being now: eating, reproducing, painting, flying, caring, singing, running, petting. The act of love is always present participle. Love, in its various forms, is an -ing word.

When you’re unhappy, by contrast, you’re usually reviewing some past misfortune, an injustice done to you, or maybe your own mistakes. When you’re into self, you’re in the past. Or you’re in the future, worrying about what you might get that you don’t want or might not get that you do want. You fret about some possible cataclysm that may occur to you, which affects you. You’re worried about what might happen to your health, or your money, or about when your self might die. Even when you’re worried about someone else, it’s often because if something happens to them, if affects you. It’s not because you love them. It’s because you’re afraid for them. When you’re in fear, you’re not in love. You can always tell when your focus is on love because it’s in the present moment, and because you’re not afraid.

It’s when I turn the focus of my lens outward and concentrate on what I can do for someone or something else, without thinking about the consequences to me, that I’m truly loving. People who are really happy are those who’ve learned how best to use their talents to help others.

There is a catch-22 to all this. If I know that I can only be truly happy by shifting my focus from my self to others, then aren’t I being selfish by being selfless?  It’s said that perfect kindness acts without thinking of kindness. This lack of self-awareness in performing deeds imbued with love is the truest happiness, the most authentic of all acts. True love loves without any thought of what it will receive. This may be difficult, may even be impossible; to not think about ourselves. It may be an ideal. The most we may hope for is to try to love without thinking of ourselves.

And so, there’s an intermediate step out of self which begins with self-interest. We begin teaching ourselves and others what love is by helping others with the ulterior motive of finding joy in the process. Some call this acting in enlightened self-interest. We do it because it makes us happy. It’s the only ‘drug’ that really works. But then love gets hard. Our children are no longer cute. In fact, they’re down right brats who return our love with disdain. Our significant other is no longer beautiful. They’ve stopped giving us what we need and seem to us as strangers. We’re no longer in love. Why have they changed? We volunteer at the homeless shelter and some of those people don’t seem very grateful. Love can be painful.

This is when we learn that love isn’t an emotion. It’s a decision. It’s a commitment. Love is a verb. We love those who can’t or won’t love us back. We do things for our partner even when we don’t feel like it. This teaches us that love doesn’t act out of self-interest, but out of thought for the interests of others. Why else would a mother give up her life for her child? Or a soldier give his up for his country? Oh, there are evolutionary biologists who’ll tell you that altruism is driven by our genes and evolution. That even the feeling of love is just a bunch of hormones like oxytocin. Bullshit.

Eventually, performing ‘thankless’ acts of love where we can’t expect to be loved in return reminds us of what we really are; not just little individual selves running around eating and drinking and screwing, but love itself. Then, as with all practice, we don’t even think about ourselves. That’s when kindness acts without thinking of kindness. That’s true love. It gives without any thought of return. The giving self is absent from the equation, not because it’s not there, but because it doesn’t regard itself as even being in the exchange. There’s nothing there to wonder: What’s in this for me?

We merge into the object of our desire. For some of us, this objective is God. Mystics go through a dark night of the soul, a spiritual aridity in which they report that the feeling of love is withdrawn by God. Bodhisattvas stay on the plane of earthly existence for the benefit of all sentient beings. Yet not all of us believe in a God, yet alone strive to be Buddhist masters. So a belief in God or even in spiritual practice isn’t necessary to remind us that we are love.

In shifting our focus from our selves to something else, some of us encounter resistance. The self usually balks at merging into anything or anyone unless the self absorbs the entity with which it merges. The self, above all, is terrified at the idea of its own annihilation. So it tries to acquire rather than to love. The self believes that this unconditional turning outward toward others and giving to them is a sacrifice which will eventually lead to its own end. So it focuses on consuming, believing that in a winner-take-all world, it must eat or be eaten.

Yet think of it this way: all love represents is a shift in focus. We don’t lose ourselves in an act of assimilation by another when we love. If we love someone or something, they don’t absorb us. And if they do, then it really wasn’t love to begin with. It may have just been codependency. The self may have deluded itself into believing that it turned outward in an act of love, when really, it just tried to get its needs met by holding someone hostage or allowing someone else to hold it hostage.

When we love someone, we don’t lose ourselves. We’re not absorbed. We don’t eat others, and we’re not consumed by them when we really care about them.  Instead, in a true act of love, we don’t add to ourselves the same way one cell gets bigger when it devours another. When we love, we don’t divide what we are in act of diminishment the way a cell does when it splits in two. Instead, we multiply, with neither giver nor receiver divided or subtracted from, absorbing or being absorbed.

Love multiplies. It never divides. In every act of love, nothing is taken away, but both giver and receiver are added to. Our self doesn’t disappear. We simply cease paying attention to it. We finally stop focusing on the little self, and in the act of forgetting about it, we’re released from its cares and worries, its slights and pains. The act is both a surrender and a conquest at the same time. Love liberates the lover and the beloved. We’re finally free.

Not having to worry about the self, it seems as though it’s not there. A pristine light pours into the darkness and chase the shadows away, and you forget that the shadows were ever there.

Love can only be pure. It can only be true in its complete giving, which never holds onto a reserve, which is never partial. Any true act of love on this earth is a suspension of the awareness of the self in favor of the object of its desire. It’s an act of forgetting. Being so in love with, so embracing of what it loves, the lover simply forgets to see the differences between itself and what it loves. The lover overlooks the boundary between itself and its beloved, between subject and object. It doesn’t matter whether that loved thing is a song or a sunset, a cat or a child. The membrane between the heart and the organ into which it pours its blood dissolves in the radiance of true desire, which never attaches, never possesses. Is it not so with the body?

All you need do to begin is shift your focus. Shine your light onto someone or something else today.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just