My. Self.

A reviewer (David Voron) summed up the thrust of Thomas Metzinger's "Being No One" thus:

"You cannot be convinced that your 'self' is a fiction, because in doing so you would have to dissolve the very self that is being convinced."

Which is about as succinct an explanation as any I've heard, of why it's so hard to abandon my notion of 'myself'. It takes just a moment of introspection to agree with what 99.9% of consciousness researchers say, that my sense of acting from a center, from an essential 'me', is a fictional metaphor. (Does my 'inner me' have a yet deeper essence? ...ad infinitum) The delusion is so complete that even with thousands of hours of meditating under my belt, a zillion discussions, books read, websites surfed--that my sense of 'barryness' survives unscathed. There's a feeling of being 'me' that no arguments to the contrary can dispel. That's the way my brain's built.

(Researcher Sue Blackmore says that the cleverest 'memes'--ideas which spread through the culture--are those that persuade us that our 'selves' really exist "…because giving us the illusion of 'self' helps them to survive and spread.")

Metaphor or not, 'myself' endures, barely touched by logic.