The self is ineffable, immediate reality. It may give meaning to its existence, interpreting itself first as qualia, then abstracting qualia as patterned activity, or physics. Occupying these projected layers of intelligibility it conjures an identity—its ego. The ego may see itself as one individual among many, a discrete excitation of an underlying field.

One should expect to be a typical individual—say, a hydrogen ion—but the extreme opposite is the case. To resolve this discrepancy, and thereby render sapient life ordinary, unprivileged, or otherwise expected, we must invoke the Everett interpretation and posit that each individual perceives the timeline in which they become conscious of the self. Existence then becomes a blossoming tree of self-realization, with one's life but a single branch. Flowering occurs when we finally learn to stop inflicting misery upon ourselves, dissolving the ego into blissful, timeless, and undivided awareness.