Rule by deception : playing all sides of every conflict

I suggest this perception  (see bottom of post or  Here) serves as an awakening mirror to the current structure of human consciousness. It 'rules' by deceit.
It would be surprising indeed if our world did NOT reflect our consciousness - for any experience of it is a direct result of the mutual definitions that are in effect filters and template to the Primary or Source current of Communication.

The conflict between the original and the usurping possessor is not a communication - because the original is indivisible and beyond 'sides'.

Within the framework of 'sides', self interest plays out along the line of its own creation - that is along the line of its self definitions in relationship.

Within the identification of an investment, the persona suffers and exults with every rise and fall; mesmerised within its own reflection.

So yes - arguing definitions is simply a disruption device - an expression of an unwillingness to truly communicate, truly relate or actually meet. Only equals can meet, communicate or truly relate - regardless of the forms of their appearance.

But coded or psuedo communication occurs within its various levels from dealing in actual violence of physical, or psycho-emotional intent, to bargaining and transactions, to the growing and valuing of trust.

Consciousness can focus wherever your desire is and where it is focussing reveals your actual desire - regardless of the spin doctors of self justified stories.

The idea that the world is wrong arises from not listening deeply and truly. Likewise the idea our brother or sister is wrong. The deception that puts 'wrong' out there is the mechanism your post identifies. By setting up and scripting the focus of 'wrongness' or guilt to fall on the ones who do not serve or who obstruct your purpose is to let other people do your work and fight your wars. But this the self-elect do not know; that the guilt they have outsourced to their world and their unrecognized brother and sister - comes home to them in their 'victory'. Because it never really left their mind, and depended on hating and invalidating the 'enemy' to remain hidden.

Service in its true sense is not servile, but enlightened self interest. Not a bargain or insurance for the future - but the way of abiding in the current true value of an intimate appreciation of Life shared. Your world and your brother and sister are the opportunity to share and thus know what you are. Without them are you lost. Yet you cannot be without the tangibility and relational feedback to your existence - though you can define them such as not to recognize your self in them.

I write from beneath the virtual self and its world - but of course operate as an instrument within it and use its terms.
The idea of recognizing one's foundation is false and that all which comes forth from it is likewise deceiving is the opening of the willingness to seek true foundation. This is what unsubscribes energy and investment from a sham and releases it to a reintegrating relation within a wholeness. There is nothing new in such an idea or such process. It is a transformative shift of consciousness that one yields to rather than controls - yet insofar as the private sense of control is meaningful, it is brought into the new purpose - which comes not from past conditioning but out of a current living sense of worth and appreciation - extended.

Attacking the enemy is the reinforcement of the very mentality that one is supposed to be denying, and that is an example of how the deceiver plays all sides of every conflict. This does not mean forcefulness of expression is not an appropriate vocabulary. But the motivating force springs forth as an expression of one's being and not as baited reaction.

Without an energetic or experiential sense of the meanings here - they are just more war - because a conflicted mentality ONLY sees war - and thus believes war is expressing love of self and embraces death as its salvation.

Spiritual death is simply disconnection from Source. This belief is the false foundation; the father of the lie from which all deception must arise and likewise divide all things from their true Nature. It is a chosen mentality and not original to your Creation; a timelessness forgot amidst distraction.

The idea is that beneath the mental coverings and their reinforcing experience, is the natural movement of you, innocent as ever, but denied within the framework of the mind of confusion. To recognize confusion as confusion is to have the basis to pause and put it down. This allows the tangible presence of life to move you as your own intimate joy.
The forms arise appropriate to our true desire. This 'guidance and support' operates within  the world we know as intuition, gut instinct, timely wisdom for thought word or deed, insight and understanding that releases the sense of being hostage or victim to circumstance. But the only way to have it is in the willingness to trust it - and although one can and some do confuse themselves with its power and think they have the gift, it is only given in service of a greater reintegration of consciousness - and the segregating mentality will find the denial it gifts its world. Until it is put aside for a gift worthy of sharing. Honesty being foundational - for all else carries hidden agenda.


In response to the point raised within this post:

Feb 11, 2014 Corporatocracy: How the Corporate Welfare State Divides and Conquers
A small, readily-identifiable ruling oligarchy that no serious political observer denies the existence of is able to keep the public from attacking it by dividing them along ideological grounds so that the public spends all their time arguing over definitions and splitting doctrinal hairs instead of attacking the commonly acknowledged enemy. You couldn't ask for a more perfect system of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Divide and rule operates within our minds, as our choice

'Divide and rule' operates in our minds, under our noses such that we choose to limit ourselves, become hostage or victim to circumstance and then express powerlessness in destructive ways. This point was brought out when

vardarac said:

Everyone, innocent and guilty, rich and poor, everyman and politician, is lumped together under the tribe of "West" or "East", "Right" or "Left." Hate and violence will come to those who never had any real control over the circumstances.

I see this, at present, as the biggest problem with humanity - We like to simplify our enemies into groups that include wide swaths of people that have nothing whatever to do with our grievances.

My comment:

Personalizing an issue invokes a primitive reaction that shuts down communication in fight or flight modes on one level or another. So to become free of this 'love to hate' mentality, we have to be willing to take a step back from opinion, identity and reaction and identify the mentality at work in ourselves.

It could be said that the most cunning, work behind the scenes to set up and work both sides of every conflict. The personalized reactions merely programmed thereby. If one can see it in others - then one can start recognizing it in one's self.

This of course is not the direction that self-righteousness wants to take.

The conceptual control mentality is so normal to most of our living that we do not recognize we are enslaved - nor that beneath the such a mentality, we are making choices that 'give our power away' and identify with victimhood and limitation as a means to get something we believe we want.

The breakdown of such consciousness is part of waking up - because it becomes intolerable and impossible to maintain such 'unconsciousness' of one's actual consciousness. So realignment is inevitable. The way in which we experience life in all its changes, is fundamentally determined by our self-definition. Using the 'evil' out there to define a relative 'good' in here, is a primitive denial and displacement mechanism. This has to yield or give way to a self-honesty.

If one plays mind-games without integrity and believes them, there is no foundation, and sanity is at cost of truth instead of its embodiment in your unique presence.

Poisoning the food supply - guard your own Well Being!

The comment that inspired this article is at the bottom of this post


If the concept of 'food supply' expands to include everything that you are receptive to and take in by using it to act out from, then this puts your responsibility to your consciousness at the centre.
Our core beliefs and self-definitions work beneath our normal surface mentality as distortion filters. To a negatively polarised consciousness, all things can be defined awry, such as to make war and conflict and struggle, pain and loss desirable, meaningful and defended against healing - or against change in which such identity made out of conflict, feels threatened.
So there are collective insanities that are embodying as various symptomologies in society, as they can also be seen in the body.
No one is doing anything to you without your permission - Ultimately... but to make sense of that fully requires waking up to Who You Are - and not limiting yourself to the surface waking mentality of the personality structure. But in general terms one can awaken to consciousness responsibility - that is awaken from victimhood, and reconnect with the Living Now in place of a control mentality of conceptual substitution.

The appearance of doing unto others and being done to by others is based on complex interactions of mutual definitions and agreements, BUT the truth is that the situation has all the meaning YOU give it. So you CAN unsubscribe from loveless definitions and play a different game - a self-honouring game that naturally extends that same value to others - whether they play loveless games of not!. For there is only One in All, and we are All in One. That is what we forget when we play disconnect from CAPITAL C Consciousness.

We all grew a self and world view in which we felt some adaptation and security within the flux of life experience and at some time we go through fandamental shifts that are deeply disturbing and yet part of a process of deeper (consciousness) integration. So one can only use the language that one has, and others can only read through their current filters - YET the capacity to discern is of a self-honesty that feels something true or resonant with one's being - even if one does not understand it.

I've been playing God's Advocate with you - I thankyou for your perspective because it opens the mind rather than feeds reaction.
If we relate with what is genuine in ourselves it HAS to reveal that same in others - if if there is also confusion in the forms and vocabularies through which it expresses. This is the Holy Spirit - if you will. We can force or effort or manipulate genuiity - because we are already genuous to our Source. We just have to stop getting in the way of our own natural communication.

Common sense is wise to persist in until something better comes along. The disturbance of the article here is not in its claims but in the revealing of man's hatred upon himself. We all have a share in this - mostly suppressed to unconsciousness. It is if your will a core component of the 'Great deceiver'.

If you are One self - can you BE at war with yourself? Only if first you divide the indivisible and agree to turn away from your Knowing in order to experience yourself differently than you ARE.

Of course though I share this with you it extends to whoever alights upon it and finds there own resonance of heart and mind... as one.

Below is the comment that invited my response above:

PDX_listener posted:

Wow, a lot in that article. Thanks for the research. As usual, though, there is a lot of mixing of facts with theory and conjecture. So let me play a little devil's advocate

1) You can't link all of our social problems to our food supply.
2) The causal link between chemicals in our food and adverse effects to our bodies is very difficult to prove, especially if it happens over long periods of time
3) Just exactly who is it that is doing this to us? (and what do they eat?)
4) is it intentional or is it out of greed and short-sightedness?

Not to say that you are wrong but when you exaggerate or get on your soapbox ("mass insanity", "escalations of criminality", "near total loss of rational thinking among the voting masses") you lose some of your credibility.

Insanity : War on Life

An alarming title "Battle for humanity nearly lost: global food supply deliberately engineered to end life, not nourish it" at www.naturalnews.com

Comment to the article:

The 'battle for humanity' is perhaps a negatively framed phrase for the desire to overcome or be free from negative and destructive elements to our well being. Apart from choosing to eat things that are unhealthy, it is becoming clear that toxins are added to food production and supply without any justification along with other attempts to own and control our 'biology' as well as our mind.

I have been arriving at the same conclusions - which I did not see before because I could not have believed it.
There are levels of psychology or self reinforcing mentalities that operate in this. Becoming aware of this within ourselves is key.
The 'zealotry' of the mentality that embodies as such self-hate and destruction is inherent to egoic materialism; to a sense of fearful disconnection within a hostile world that is experienced as unlike and 'other' to you. This is NOT You! Accepting it as your self is destructive unto your awareness of your wholeness. The rest is - as they say - history.
Though there may be examples of this mentality in the world, the temptation to hide our own fear by hating and opposing them can leave the false root in our consciousness so as to sabotage and deceive us in what we believe is right.
It should be noted that everyone has a justifiction for their acts - and others tend to reinforce and validate our judgements.
The answer to a false or deceptive and destructive experience of self and world is to pause or STOP! - and Go To The Source at once. This has meaning at all levels - including our diet - but not excluding our honesty of being.
The runaway mind is off the rails. It has ever been so - but its divorce from the heart can no longer be hidden and the raw insanity leaks out.
It is deeply disturbing - but the answer is NOT to go to the mind to answer the problem of a disconnecting or segregating mind! But to breath and trust and feel through the layer of apparent compulsion to connect or indeed be picked up - by the Movement of one's Being. This is the context of your Health. But it is the context and guide and not the acceptance of the guide. You have to be willing to let your Life back in - even though you have become stranger unto yourself.
For sure there are various spiritual and metaphysical teachings that may serve - but they often accommodate to the guilt-separation of their day. Today, now, let there be no guilt-separation between you and the Source of Life. It is destructive to your peace, to your relationships, to your experience of sharing in All That Is.
If we made a faulty choice before, then we are still in it! - So to own it, is the way to come back into the power and freedom of choosing anew.
Honour your belief structures while they serve you, incremental real steps are solid gains. Grand gestures evaporate when based in egoic confidence.
What we cant immediately change, give over to a greater trust rather than let fear use it against you. Anything that undermines your sense of value within yourself, reflects that world back. Consciousness responsibility is a steep learning curve, but it only applies to your living Now. Choosing Life does not focus on what it does NOT want!
Recognizing insanity for what it is - IS a real awakening, for that which sees, is at least partially Sane. True Sanity is not defended against Life - but at rest in the fullness of its Movement. War on Life is the inevitable outcome of a disconnected self-survival, because you can not BE disconnected from Source. But that you make a mind unlike your Source Consciousness - and believe it - will be your experience because you choose it.
What we are not perhaps aware of, is the power of the re-integrative movement for healing. So long a slave... There is a joining in light that the fearful cannot mimic - nor be aware of. What is the light but our original awareness prior to being masked with the thinking of a loveless world? It is and has always been you - and always with you. Use fear wisely, or it will hide you from yourself.

Reply to another comment: (Referring to references that took Zionist propaganda at face value)

Yes. Check out. The gassing was a delousing procedure not an extermination. False food supply also has a correlation in false 'history'. 'Victimhood' is one of the most powerful devices for deception. A parasitical mentality uses whatever host it can take over and operates a deceit which believes reality is death and so temporal power is its god - and all else is its subject in death's name. It is a kind of thinking that is exemplified in much of the Talmud, which is not religious but "the lie and the Father of the lie". Note that 'Jew' is not a racial term - for Eastern 'Jews' are not Semitic in origin, and adopted Talmudic Judaeism many centuries back. Allowing for disinfo - this can be easily uncovered. Specialness segregates and divides. To be a 'Chosen People' ought to mean - Choosing to serve all. Not chose to 'lord it' over all.

Who seeks power but the powerless who feel they have been unjustly deprived or denied?
(Worldly) Power corrupts - and once corrupted will work through the whole as a 'wolf in sheep's clothing' - or 'trojan'.


The war against Life (in the name of the god of death) is firstly upon the mind. Who controls the mind seems therefore to be 'lord'. To control the minds of others while they believe they are exercising freedom is to be able to cause your 'enemy' to turn upon himself and war brother with brother, while seeming but to offer protection and support...

Another commenter says: "May the Lord save us"

May a transcendent Unity reveal and restore true relation in all things. May we therefore release our own blinkered vision in willingness to more honestly see.
The obstacle in mine own mind shows me a world where the fault seen in my brother distracts and seems to relieve me of the responsibility to accept my own healing. It justifies my hatred and powerlessness. My victimhood becomes my 'self' and attests to my power to withdraw and withhold from Life.
Healing is like walking and waking out from a nightmare. Once we accept negative and limiting definitions of our self in place of what we actually are, we become ever more complexly entangled in our own struggle to be what we are NOT!
The presence of love and life is known through extension, sharing, radiance, giving. Whatever the forms we are presenting, the real communication is either of an open presence or a withholding in judgement. Love or fear. It is always a choice, but our minds have become confused one with the other. So yes - reach out to the connection of a higher or awakened Consciousness that is not absent - but forever unwilling to violate your choice - even when you choose self-hurt and suffering. Love waits on welcome, not on time.

So hungry for life, it would suck out the lives of others in exchange for granting magic powers?

Or perhaps so afraid of death that it feels compelled to 'eat' or kill any rival?

Facebook spends US $16 Billion on WhatsApp
$16,000,000,000 (based on the US definition of Billion rather than a million millions).


Clearly the perception of future monetized rewards coming from this acquisition justify the price - in the minds of Zuckerberg & co. They see money everywhere as some kind of tax on communication, that is paid and collected and perhaps directed.

As someone outside the social networking scene it reeks to me of the drug-dealer scam - or the banking scam; free access to goodies as the initial phase and then milking the dependency by whatever mens available.

The thing about social networking is it grows history of investment and identification, that follows the same patterns of development as all else that lives and dies. And the attempt to possess or control it only serves to shift from a relative innocence and freedom to a managed existence.
The politic generally in the world has retreated from the embrace of freedom to a substitution of virtual freedom - as a compensation for self disillusionment or sense of inadequacy.
Distraction and dissociation is the mechanism of denial. If the mind is kept busy enough, the fears, blames and angers are kept at bay,
From another perspective, if you can nurture and encourage such disconnections within the consciousness of others, you can effectively asset strip their energy while they believe they are exercising freedom.
The principle of sharing life is perhaps its most fundamental motive, yet the basis upon which that occurs can be usurped by a 'middleman'.
Or a cartel of interests that work behind the scenes of the front end.
What is true about life is that our individual experience of it is what we each make of it - and that we can change our minds about our minds.
History repeats itself in one set of clothes or another. But we can observe consciousness and wake up to the living now - and of course any technology can extend the life that you are. No less than it can extend and reinforce the life that you are not!

I believe in Father Christmas

Binra, you have to pay less attention to all that psycho-babble. The preachers of the cult of "self-esteem" are the same ones who go on the network news every Christmas and tell all the parents it's okay to outright lie to their kids and tell them Santa Claus is real.

 This in the continuing consideration of self interest on the Daily Bell page (my handle is Binra)


There is in many the attempt to coerce or manipulate self esteem - which fuels a lot of the 'self-help' market... and there is what I am talking about. The only way I recommend uncovering your integrity is to first notice the lack of it. Of course most of us do not feel this would apply to us - and certainly not in our presentation to the world. That's why I use the word consciousness a lot - because the so called 'waking consciousness' is a compartmentalized surface mentality that has an underside and a deep underside.
Even though all aspects of consciousness are fully present and active at all times - the 'waking' attention is a sort of continuity made up of a very specific focus within a vastness that few on the 'surface' have any notion of - and whose idea of sanity is to absolutely protect them from opening the awareness of the More of what is actually present. This surface awareness is mostly identified with the personality structure, and its conditioning is its dictate.

There are many devices or strategies that serve as psychological defences - you can look them up. Our minds use all of them, in all sorts of complex ways, so that our personality experience has a functional continuity of identity. But in a sense it is a virtual self with which we are identified - and which we largely experience as isolated consciousness within a world of fleshed out tangibility. As if it came from the past, arose from energy and matter - as a sort of anonymous amnesiac in a strange world that it's interactions and explorations model internally in order to experience it.

The construction of our world has a level of archetypes running at a template level and this language is deeply symbolic as a sort of primitive parameters of structure through which and within which are all the levels above (I could just as well say below - but the principle is of nested inclusion rather than spatial direction).

Father Christmas is a symbolic fiction - no less than your self image. It may or may not serve a function in any member of society and the nature of that function is determined by the active purpose or desire that it is used within. For the Crassmass industry it means $$$. Personally I feel that when our cultural vocabularies have been hollowed out to coercive intent, I prefer to reclain the Spirit from which all of them come. Presence rather than presents. Sharing the gift of life rather than hype. But I can choose without pushing anything on anyone else and trust that each can find there own way because - actually no one is really forced to believe anything. And what we choose is for our own reasons at the time and they can change because we are not so stuck unless we want to be.

I just watched a bit of a program on the placebo effect. Ordinary skin lotion as an effective painkiller, fake drugs enabling parkinsons persona to move freely, fake oxygen enabling a skier to ascend without sickness at high altitude. There is more to the mind than meets the thinking.

As for where I give my attention - it is to a point of relaxation in simple trust and willingness - and this psychobabble is created fresh - just for you. The official orthodox babble seems solid because you want and need it solid - and I don't want to deconstruct what works, but what is not working is reflected more vividly in our world as a breakdown of communication, as fear and attempt to control or indeed tell outright lies about the economy and the political and social situation. This deconstruction is already underway, and the perspectives that are beneath our presumptions of self and world are where true cultural renewal rises from. Of course it makes no sense to the old way of thinking - or it would BE the old way of thinking!

The genuine presence of you, that you extend to you kids - or your fellow man is real. But the stories you tell are whatever you choose. The idea of giving, to the disconnected, is the idea of losing.  But the experience of giving without measure - that is as one is inspired and moved without inhibition or censor, is an intimacy in which everyone involved is blessed. yes people try to fake it. No that doesn't work. Consumerism is the appetite of getting. If we only teach our kids they are getters in a world of getters we have addicted them to the same lie as we protect against exposure.

I don't think what we each believe on surface amounts to very much - but what we hold and share and act from in our heart, which is a symbol and a seat of a unified consciousness.

Consciousness is not really IN the body. The body is IN Consciousness. But the intent to withhold (hide) thought that is too fearful, demands walls, disrupts communication, and then requires an alibi.

Now we're back to a defence mechanism that works to deny anything to awareness that would expose its lack of substance. But associate the form of its expression with its own intent and also with terms of derision, ridicule or invalidation. A large part of this is running subconsciously to the mentality that presumes its opinions are fact and self-evident to anyone of any credible intelligence - for which it presumes itself an example.

Negative cooperations of disconnecting minds

For the context to which I respond here's the article and comment page in the Daily Bell

On the cooperations that reinforce a negatively defined self:

Likewise ideas of "moral codes" can be subverted to social definitions of accepted behaviours, and guilt employed to coerce deviation to get into line or suffer penalty.

I feel this as a 'reverse engineering' of Life, that usurps or subverts the pure spontaneity of life with self-consciousness, self-doubt, as the development of the divided self that seems to be able to pause life or step outside it in order to experience all kinds of facets within what is actually instant forever - or timeless Infinitude that embraces both specific AND universal polarity within itself.

This self we humanly identify is not both, and... but tends to focus exclusively in the specific and be unconscious of the communion with the Infinite.

Insofar as that quality of connection/communication is held culturally and individually, it has tended to create rules to check and limit and correct the mentality that actively disconnects and yet keep it as it were hidden in the background, because it is associated with power.

This love/hate alloy is the nature of the human consciousness in its separation beliefs and definitions. The structures that we create in consciousness - that model our reality, express this 'house divided' against itself, so much so that the 'human condition' is accepted reality instead of recognizing it as the human conditioning!

The principle aspect of disconnection is a loss - and subsequent fear, of intimacy of being. For disconnection is the seeming power to have private thoughts and hidden mind, and from this seeming power a world arises that is no longer Recognizable in Consciousness - but chaotically conflicted through the filters and distortions of a split mind.

What arises from this is the joining in tacit mutual agreement NOT to join as an intimate connectedness, but to develop the FORMS of joining WITHOUT the actual meeting. The mind is thus structured to keep out that which threatens the order that it dictates and asserts via any available workable strategy that works to defend it. The cooperation of such minds can achieve all kinds of control over the forms and behaviours but none over the underlying reality. Eventually it runs out of ways to present and package itself - and so disintegrates. In the microcycles, this occurs all the time but in the larger periodic cycle of an epoch, it comes to an 'end' that reveals what Is beneath the beginning and Is after the end. This might be seen as a repeat class in the responsibility for self creation or a shift to a new perspective from which to share and appreciate life.

If we are not already invested in being the shift, we will not even see the bus... let alone catch it. However, what you want will determine your outcome, so there is no coercion involved - although it may seem so to the mentality that values coercion as hidden or private leverage over life and self and others.

The impermanence of all things can be used to justify asset stripping as much as you can before you die, as it can be used for an ever new opportunity to extend and share the core value that is our joy to be living. The 'selfishness' of fear rises from a false investment. If that is owned, one can use fear as the messenger that reveals it as something out of true - which can then be seen and undone, rather than blindly suffered.
Because we have such investments we fear to lose, yet no one really lives their joy in the shadow or undercurrent of fear. It is wise to honour our existing belief systems, for while they operate as our support  it is foolish to abandon them. But a process of curiosity and discovery uncovers alternate pathways and experiences, and of course this is already going on, naturally.


On condemning selfishness or doing for others:

To reveal selfishness as a deceptive reaction that acts against ones true interests is to join with the sanity hiding beneath the limited presentation. Sometimes a pause invites a greater perspective and we choose from a more connected place.

On the other hand, in the conspiracy of selfishness, anyone who stands in their natural authority will tend to be perceived as 'selfish' because the society redefines its own version of reality and enforces it.

Natural authority doesn't 'lord it' over anyone, nor does it give power to deceits and dead concepts, or stone gods.

I sort of agree with your last sentence - but I express value to hold and have that value by expressing it. So in that sense it is selfish of me and simply offered with no strings for others to resonate with... or not.

if everyone were to grow a culture of being who they enjoy being - and doing and allowing relationships to align and reflect that, then no organising and controlling externality is called upon or required.  In practice we cannot stray from our true desire without feeling the loss of joy - and forcing through doesn't force it back. Pretending there is no such thing only covers a hollow place. When we've tried everything that doesn't work... we have got ourselves in place for what does.

Disconnected thinking, loss of perspective, false self interest

(This is written in response to the following - which itself replied to *5 in the previous post, in which suicide is mentioned as an example that does not fit with the comment "No one hates his own flesh") :

Life the Journey: Philippines 2:4. Let each of you look not only to his own interest, but also to the interest of others.
Unfortunately, people today view "loving others" and "loving self" as a zero sum game. They win then I lose.
Human society is built on a balance of personnel interest. People are so used to seeing everyone serving his own ends that no other kind of conduct is expected. One thing is certain, we cannot turn back the clock to quieter times, neither can we hide from the persistent noise of this time. We must learn to live in such a world as this and be victorious over it. The truth is in nature, this being the wisdom of God incarnate.
May your daughter and your neighbor's son be in that happy home of saints and angels.

It is all a matter of perspective. The sense "my" life and "my" daughter is a shortcut term for a rich relationship - that then gets traded as if it was itself real - (disconnected from its living context) and then asserted/defended as a seemingly separate polarity within a greater wholeness. When we think to take (or assert) the "my" as an exclusive independence then we have stepped out of a wholeness perspective into a "defence (and attack) mechanism - that knows not love excepting what serves "my" interest. Appreciate the gifts of your life and uncover the deeper gift in the shock of such exposures of self knowledge, one step at a time as willingness allows. For of course they at first feel like violations.

Traditionally the 'selfishness' that cuts off from a living inheritance and which 'goes it alone' in a drunken and misguided sense of its own power, has been moralized against - such as to induce social controls in place of living communication. Fearful rules and hateful scapegoats set up a society in which personal control (power over) is worshipped (given allegiance) over trust and communication (love honouring).

Such personal control is the very thing that sets off and maintains the loss of clarity and relational wholeness - and so we have set up a self-replicating system of fear and hate, that works to deplete us of our living inheritance and our commonwealth - and which works under the name of love and freedom and fairness and so forth - but only up to a point  - and only when it serves such defensive self interest to do so. True order operates within life and not coercively upon it. Action and reaction is contagious to an ungrounded consciousness, but the tangible harmony of inspired alignment holds a unity freely shared, and truly attractive as a self interest that is at once the movement of a wholeness.

So in a sense, on the level of a divisive self interest, the devil rules the world - as a deception within our minds that we buy into and believe gives us power and freedom - or is the promise of regaining such. It plays all sides of every conflict and will make a 'side' of any rising communication or movement. That is it's 'fuel'; our investment in

Within such a mentality as - has you say - become normalised conditioning - the teaching of a common interest works to limit the 'freedom' to blindly disregard all that lives in a deluded selfishness, and so 'do as you would yourself be done by' is a Golden Rule that transcends any one cultural path or teaching. This reflects a greater perspective of which the disconnecting mentality is unaware of. For as you do, confirms you in the belief that gives rise to your action and this sets the value of your self in experience. It is literally like a control lever where you can let light in or shut it out. If you give (express yourself) in a clear honesty - then that is the value and measure of your receiving - and can grow in self-awareness.

Though the thinking of the world tacitly conspires to block, subvert or distract from any such 'interference' from reality, to its self-asserted version of reality, it is more desperately clinging to a disintegrating structure of control. So as the original fears and hates that programmed or conditioned our attempts at control by our own power, rise again in our awareness despite our ingenuity or determined unconsciousness, so does it the 'noise' (as you put it) increase.

The fearful deception that 'works' as subtler suggestion does not work as forceful assertion and obvious coercion excepting in a very short term - as terror. But within the original darkness - so to speak - is also a capacity to question ALL of it - and to choose NOT to invest in hate and evil as foundations of self.

Whilst there is a global shift going on - all of us are in one way or another - within a process of either segregating from life or reintegrating ourselves. It's a moment by moment context of which most are unaware as their primary self-loving responsibility to themselves - and which aligns them with Source and with 'brother' - with the living sharing reflections and communication that is our life in experience, no less than what we have tended to fence off as 'mine'. This is a totally different perspective that is entirely natural to an uncoercive consciousness.

What then works to exchange a participation in the Living for a lead role in a cage but our thoughts? - and beneath these the self definitions that we 'believe' by acting as if they are true. And so our thought creates personal density and polarised perception in which we can become so conflicted and worthless and failed in our deeply held wish that life be as 'my' will determines it, that we would rather 'die' than submit to humiliation and loss of 'freedom'. This is in a sense repeating the original choice to give all allegiance to the idea of self-will and actively deny a Universal Will in which our true will extends joy, tangible value, creative imagination, passionate embrace of life in its movement within us.

In the attempt to coerce others instead of owning and healing the coercive intent in one's own mind, the idea of guilt and pain as a god was woven into the story of our Source Nature and Condition. far from bringing the apparently immoral back into the 'fold' it instils terror at the very threshold of perfect Innocence. And so the fear of love is beneath all other fears. yet there IS no fear in love - and the world's idea of love is fearful - that is a fearfully distorted crumb that becomes a prison food - and thus a currency of exchange and leverage within the prison mentality.

There is nothing I can do to make another's choice, but in making my own, I can know that this choice is available to others and can at least not seek to confirm them in their choosing against their joy.
As far as I am concerned, Everyone comes Home - but as a waking up from knowing NOT what they do - to being restored to true sight. No one can maintain self-hatred in the light of love - and without the density of the body, the mental is revealed as a picturing that can be reinterpreted.
So thankyou for your blessing, I feel that when we are in a blessing mode, we are releasing others and ourselves, from a past made in judgement, confusion and fear.

Quietness is what can see the noise as noise. What we resist, persists! What we appreciate, appreciates! Peace is the most encompassing embrace of the dynamic vibrancy of life and not a mausoleum. Disinfo rises from the attempt to hide and be hidden from. The choices we make tune us into the realities we experience - all of which are passing. And yet an aligned choosing welcomes the recognition of our existence reflected in transparency, that Is, Knowing One in All and All in One - thus giving and receiving freely in an ever new act of extending Creation. I don't sketch this crude pointer as a future, but as our true presence. One can only re-integrate with what one has first disassociated.

The difficulty in communicating in the mind that does not know or has 'forgotten' its own act, is that it has you defending it's definitions and thoughts as if they were You. An open mind is able to pause of what it thinks it knows and listen or feel more deeply. Here, the 'still small voice' of a stirring recognition. And here also the 'temptations' that re-frame and subvert the natural being back into terms of guilts and disconnected derivatives!

The virtue of self interest?

A few article/comments into this article/page at the Daily Bell: The Virtue of self interest:

*1

If the ONLY motivation in all circumstances without exception is towards pleasure and away from pain - as we define the situation in relation to us, then we set up our own curriculum by what we accept and therefore share, teach or demonstrate.
When we seem to choose against our will or happiness it is because we have belief in greater loss by choosing other than as we do.
The sense of disconnection that comes with a negatively defined self leads to the urge to dominate and possess. The fear of the negative leads to the attempt to coerce and moralize.
Whatever Reality is - we only experience it through the filters and distortions of our beliefs and definitions, but the reality of our joy is of a recognition that transcends experience to the sense of knowing or being that cannot be in any way divided. This is the Singularity of the Indivisible and the true root of individuation.
Consciousness responsibility is inescapable because one can believe and experience accordingly - but never actually become something other than Consciousness. While any structure of self-construct holds meaning or value, it persists. What is without value or meaning is inherently disregarded.
Part of the implication of the above is that humans tend to use 100% of their Consciousness to experience themselves limited to perhaps to a few % or their capacity.
By far the most of Consciousness is unconscious to our 'waking mind' in a not dissimilar way to the front end of this computing medium being only an interactive experience on top of a complex multi-leveled structure of software code and hardware configuration.
The scientifically oriented mentality seeks to perceive and understand Life in material terms with material or external reality being primary and consciousness being somehow within this (presumed to be) singular Universe of energy stuff. It sees transactions in place of real relationships. This reduction of Consciousness to linear forms and processes in time is the result of disconnection from Source Consciousness - awareness of which has been effectively neutered or disregarded so as to maintain a specific focus in the personality structure.
Religious approaches have tended to believe separation from Source as being inherent or absolute - and sought to maintain the segregated self sense upon the sin, guilt and fear of the 'separation' of 'fall'.
As Physics expands, it will be seen that the God Idea is not external as a separate agency from All That Is - nor a special personage or power within it acting coercively upon 'stuff'. Everything is recognisable in Consciousness, but the freedom to experience it in terms of tangible light, energy, physicality extends the structure in which to experience itself through a personality complex - with all the facets of experience that that opens.
The fundamental Spiritual Recognition is of our oneness with Life, with others who share and are of the same Life, and with the world that reflects our unique multifaceted interplay in perception, action and experience.
The two commandments quoted by Jesus speak of an Already Truth that our consciousness covers over. As we do unto others, we DO unto our Self. What we give DOES set the measure of our receiving. Our experience does reflect this as faithful feedback but we are not receptive while engaging victimiser and victim-hood roles.
Without a guiltless - (read truly scientific desire for truth) - appreciation of consciousness, the game of guilt and fear and dissociation persists - no matter what kind of package or scheme it is presented in.
So yes to self-interest but YES to a true understanding and realisation of Self - for to take anything out of its living context is in a sense to kill it and engage in fantasy associations with the dead.
The Golden Rule presupposes loving yourself. If you actually believe you are worthless you will treat others in like manner - again regardless of the masks or presentations used. A self that hates or fears itself is not a true self and not a basis for the ideas of social, economic or political and personal harmony.
Be true to thyself and it follows as sure as night follows day, thou canst be false to no man. But if one invokes ingenuity, one can act in order to get or take by deceit, and use all one gets to bolster and develop one's 'power'. It's a choice.

PS: Sympathy can mean one of the most destructive devices in our capacity, or (the term) can be used for a true resonant recognition of the 'other' as one's self - for which 'compassion' is better suited. To confirm another in their weakness or error, undermines their own innate capacities and masquerades a 'loving kindness' when it is a mask for those qualities or facets in the other that we cannot tolerate in our self. To be powerless or helpless is considered invalidating, yet it is an apparent humiliation that through willingness, honesty and trust, becomes a truly humbling receptivity - and capacity for compassion.
No one feels another's pain or pleasure. These usage shortcuts came to usurp an intimacy each unto our Self. (Used to be called 'our God' and for some still is and might still carry that core meaning). The joining is a core aspect of what power is - but to join in hate or weakness is to strengthen that which undermines our true Spirit - and of course seduces us into giving away our true power for 'external' validations and protections'.
Trying to marry our experience with the truth of our being, intellectually, is impossible, but we can come to a clearer knowing of our being, which then fruits in a less coercively filtered and distorted experience of ourselves in our relations in our world. Its always a choice as to whether to fit Life into our mentality, or cooperate and fit in our relation with Life - with that which is aware through you, sustaining and giving existence. Life is what we make of it. But we do not make Life, because it is infinitely more Intimate than any self-construct in its particular focus - though not absent - or you would not be.

*2

Because we separate from Spirit - from intimate living presence - in order to think alone, we then separate all things from it and make it seem as if a goal at the top of the Pyramid. The filter of our thinking is not much appreciated because we generally are engaging it and suffering its reflections as our reflection. Every belief generates a corresponding reinforcement. The belief and the believer are of course two facets of one thing - neither being you, nor separate for each other. These tools for experience can get the better of us if we use them unwisely.
Our true social expressions arise from our connect-ness within ourselves - hence the divide and rule maxim, for once you can divide someone from their own consciousness, you can substitute or interject coercive will. This deceit is endemic because it is the foundation of a false sense of self that has as much real wealth as the financial shenanigans that are traded in today. It is a lure or illusion whose only power is in its acceptance as valid currency.
So as has been observed - though without much transformation as a result perhaps, is that social transaction is generally a substitute for real relationship; a receptivity of consciousness in some direct communication or interaction. The masculine without the receptive merely projects a show of force or farce, and yet has a protective sense of surviving as if it alone is holding the fort.
The observation of consciousness in action is itself an act or movement of focus and awareness within Consciousness itself - and the primary basis for truth in such observation is trust and self honesty.
It is well known that living with such integrity can cost one's job, and perhaps one's social relations - simply because one's current society is embodying a different sense of value. But sometimes existing relations open to the new level - and in time, new connections and relations occur that are in resonance with the uncovered 'you' in a true self-value.
When we can be ourselves - truly ourselves, with another, we feel loved and naturally loving. It doesn't oblige the other to 'supply' nor obligate us to them - excepting gratitude for sharing the gift of simply being alive - in whatever movements of interest, need and desire move us.
What does it profit to gain the world and lose our Soul? In this sense, economics reveals the truth - but who in their attempt to grasp the ephemeral pauses long enough to notice the hollow emptiness or restless dissonance that drives us to persistent distraction - for when is now to be the true expression that we are?
It only seems a spark to the mentality that redefined darkness as the conditions in which to see. The all pervading light of Consciousness is too close to see - except in reflection. But the veil of disconnected thinking runs a different economical model: divide and rule.
Coercive intent is the unmistakeable sign of a fearful non-acceptance of current reality. Reacting in like kind confirms its shadow perceptions to it. There is a 'social' dimension in refusing to pass the buck of one's discontent onto others, and instead being willing to work to the integration of the situation - as willingness allows.
If we try to force the good it no longer is good and we are operating the disconnected coercive will. But we can hold and demonstrate a true willingness for honesty in our relations - so as not to join in hate or false witness, nor to seek to use others for our own private agendas.
God is in a sense quite indifferent to what you choose to magnify. If you hate, abundant hate is given you. But of course we are both teacher and learner to ourselves - although the guidance that is implicit in our connectedness is absent and unbelievable to the disconnected sense, and so is often an idea in a special Other that saves us - simply because our self-definitions are ruling our experience.
If anything in what I write has any significance to anyone, it is because they recognize something of themselves. This is your Intimacy that I would serve simply because the nature of joy is to shine. There is not a special 'knower' in my person - quite the reverse!
But consider... if we have it upside down and back to front, the reintegration of our consciousness is going to have to accept some radical shifts. As willingness allows. But the persistence in what does not work and is no longer supported generates increasing intolerable conditions, and so the unthinkable has to become thinkable and bargaining for self has to make way for a deep and urgent need for self honesty and the sanity and peace that only comes with it.

*3

In the work of Adam Curtis's documentary "All watched over by machines of love and grace', are some ironic references to Ayn Rand's 'rational decision' to take one of her already married inner circle as a lover, and of that one's rational decision to dilute or adulterate his marriage, and that one's wife to rationally justify altruism.
So I don't use rational as a basis for living - but simply integral - integrity - which is a congruency of being that includes rational or logic. Words and concepts can become gods - and then one rationalizes or logically extends such assertions.
The attempt to rationalize human experience is trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again. What I mean is that there is always already a pre existing harmony or law at work that seems to work against us in our split off mentality. And so we attempt to make it work for us from a split off compartment that is not really split off at all - but we each have extremely compelling experience of being isolated, threatened and in need of protection and control - that we are then biased to seek alone due to the withdrawal and defensive separation from each other - and from the greater dimensions of our conscious existence.
The capacity of humans to assert concept over relationship, is that if growing and creating a model of the self and its world that substitutes for living participance. It seduces as if a frontier of discovery, possession and control for the explorer and it runs on top of Life like a mass hallucination.
The harmony reveals itself in that the very things that 'go wrong' or are dissonant to us - offer custom feedback to the resonance and relevance of our own conscious unfoldment of our being - which is integrally joyful when not invalidating itself. But we don't want to listen - for the most part, but would rather assert our power - perhaps through victim-hood, or in some reaction to something we are sure is 'wrong' so that we feel more alright.
I'm not suggesting humans are wrong in a blameworthy sense but that we have the map the wrong way round - as if to confirm and validate a manual control over life - when it can be used to open the conscious embrace and relationship in which alignment occurs without coercive force. There is every call to use force as an expression of truly caring. retraint and limitation are appropriate results for self harming or violence against others.
But note the personal element of revenge, hatred and self-righteousness are not called on when standing in and expressing from one's integrity. Forms of idea, form of action, can be ascribed meanings by othersto suit their own agenda, but each of us is the living context of our idea and act, and so the way we do it - is embodied energetically in what we do. Not because we 'say so' like the manipulator who tells you how to feel, but because we are essentially unselfconscious about what others - or ourself - thinks about us - because we are wholly embracing and extending our integrity such as unfolds. One can only work with the material in hand.
Of course we evolve complex cooperative strategies of 'getting what we want' and avoiding what we hate, but I feel that these tend to extend the idea of separateness rather than integral-ness.
As you can tell (and no doubt already knew) I can run on and on about this. I trust you can feel, (in what we call between the lines), that I am entering this in a willingness for communication and not to use the energy and sharing of your article to make cheap points - though that very dynamic - of using the creativity of others - or Life Itself - to raise a facade of a self and then assert it as if to then become real, valid, respected and loved as a specialness of some achievement or ascendency over others, is also a theme within the human consciousness that is played over and over in as many ways as can be imagined. But is it simply a simple but 'prodigal' error?

*4
Moral coercion is one aspect of 'self-interest' when self interest embodies or expresses self-concept. Who does not find themselves trying to 'guilt' another into either doing or not doing something that seems to be one's interest. The term 'self' can mean any of a range of identifications - so we can see that we 'make a self' by accepting and rejecting aspects of our thought and experience. But the consciousness in which (and as which) this occurs, pre-exists any rational or irrational act. So we are not identical to our self image or concept and yet tend to act from the distorted and biased perception, that such image filters - somewhat like a lens.

I am with you that self interest is the only game in town, but feel to add that we are entirely and demonstrably capable of doing what we don't want as if we do - or indeed doing what we want and then suffering our own assertion that it is forced upon us - because made me do it!

Turning a blind eye enables fantasies to be lived out as real, but brought into the light of an honesty of awareness, they dissolve to reveal a self-definition that was chosen - and can thus be re-chosen or choose differently.
Then if I own what is and always was my own part, I can redefine the situation from a clearer and more conscious appreciation of what really resonates with me - with the truth of what enlivens and moves me in life.
"Follow your bliss" said Joe Campbell - but this is a stirring within that may or may not conform to concepts of society or even one's own conceptual capacity to define.
I feel that self interest is the capacity to live from a sense of value, whereas conceptual approaches tend to put fulfilment in some future moment - which brings in the carrot and the stick - coercive mentality.

I did manage to keep this one shorter. I obviously an using concepts here - but always toward the recognition of the conceptual as a tool rather than as a box in which to be buried.
 
*5 (reply to the phrase "No one hates his own flesh"). 

It's all a matter of definition. My next door neighbour but one has just experienced her only son's suicide.
Self hatred in one form or another is a perversion of self love. That is to say a love given to that which usurps and denies the loving.

The 'flesh' has in many ways been defined negatively and hated - and a source of inadequacy, shame or ungovernable will.
So what exactly might your phrase mean? There are innumerable examples of infanticide or fratricide - not to mention irritation! I feel that all hatred begins with self and projects out - for what we hate in others we cannot abide in our self - so we are obliged to put it out there until we change our mind about our mind.

No man ever hated his own reflection - excepting he wake from the dream he makes by looking there for himself.
One might SAY they hate it and act out the hate - but yet keep looking there.
The narcissus myth serves well for the love we have of our own thoughts,
which are like a first born son to us - and which we generally are loath
to release - even if they wound us so.

We join in making illusions of hate or judgement - and so it is no surprise that the undoing of such negative self definition uncovers a cooperative will. But it is not the result of the ingenuity of the desire for exercising power over. It's more like when I abandon my attempt to be who I am not, I start to meet and discover others for who they really are - in a living way that does not seek to bind another to my will as if thereby it would make me safer amidst the uncontrollability of a world in flux.

Older and wiser? No sex please, we're making love!

An 'article' in the Telegraph (I wanted a comment on the EU coercions upon the Scottish Referendum - but they are also biased or told what to allow comment and what not to).
But this was a click bait on "Sex, older women love having it. Shock Horror (sic)" - oh I missed out 4 exclamation marks!!!!

If some want to use talking about sex as an attention grab, I can use the occasion to share something that you are of course entirely free to disregard and which makes no claim on your attention beyond you ongoing willingness.