YOU! LOVE! YOURSELF!

[Chorus]
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other

Now when you go deeply into the nature of selfishness
What do you discover?
You say I love myself, I seek my own advantage
Now what is the self that I love?
What do I want?
And that becomes an increasingly ever deepening puzzle
Now I've often referred to this when you say to somebody else
I love you, it's always rather disconcerting to the person to whom you say that
If you imply that you love them with a pure disinterested and holy love
They automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony
But if you say “I love you so much I could eat you”
That's an expression, it’s a way of saying to a person you attract me so much that I can't help it
I'm absolutely bowled over by you
I'm gone
And people like that
Then they feel they're really being loved
That it's absolutely genuine
But now, I love you so much I could eat you
Now what the devil do I want?
I certainly don't want to eat the girl in the sense of literally devouring her
Because then she'd disappear
Hmmmm
But I love myself
And what is me, in what way do I know me?
When it suddenly occurs to me that I know me only in terms of you
See when I think of anything that I know and I like
Then it's always something that can be viewed as other than me
I can never get to look at me, real me
It's always behind, it's always hidden
And I really don't know it well enough to know whether I love it or not
Maybe I don't, maybe it's an appalling mess
But certainly the things I do love, and that I want from a selfish point of view
When I really think about them they're all something else
That's in a way outside me

[Chorus]
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other

Now, we saw that there is a reciprocity
A total mutual interdependence between what we call the self and what we call the other
That's the warp and the woof
And so if you're perfectly honest about loving yourself
And you don't pull any punches, you don't pretend that you're anything other than exactly what you are
You suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really go into it
Is the universe
You suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really go into it
Is the universe
You don't like all of it
You're selective about it as we saw in the beginning
Perception is selection
But on the whole

[Chorus]
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other
You! Love! Yourself!
In terms of what is other
In terms of what is other

Because it's only in terms of what is other that you have a self at all