What is Sovereignty?

What is Sovereignty?



(Written into an article on Sott.net)


https://www.sott.net/article/322133-What-is-Sovereignty#comment161045

What is Sovereignty?



The idea of sovereignty or free will, like any other idea, can be corrupted. Something else is being passed off as if it is freedom - and by that is true freedom lost - or rather covered over from a conscious recognition, appreciation and sharing in.

Identity defined 'in a body' or even equating self with body, and mind with brain, is a defined sense of self arising from conditioning - like a mask or spacesuit or interface by which engage in the human experience of the world as we tend to give 'Reality' to - in forgetfulness of the underlying focus in desire, meaning, image and idea, by which we 'make sense' of existence - of Fact of our Existence - AS a world - from which we then make or infer a self.

The freedom to desire and imagine - focusing within and through the ideas that resonate with recognition of the meaning we both have and are - and being moved as that consciousness of appreciation - rises from a depth of which the consciousness is an extension and vehicle of - and yet one with.

Nothing can limit imagination and desire excepting the meanings accepted and invested in as true of You - that are no longer your true desire or held true service for you in the past but are not serving who you feel and know yourself to be - now.

Self-concept - or a the association of concepts that comprise self-image - is a model. An inner creation drawn and woven out from a Whole Cloth through which to uniquely experience facets of a Totality that can only be experienced through some degree of differentiation within it - but never really apart from it.

Confusion of self, identity and expression, with the framework of self image, then operates as if from an exclusive sense of segregated self and experiences the reflected denials inherent in defending and maintaining its 'self' as experience of being denied, threatened and attacked - and ascribes the sense of disconnection and loss that is inherent to an exclusive identification - with this sense of denying, limiting, threatening or opposing 'otherness'.

In place of freedom to accept and live the truly felt movement of being - is now an imperative for survival in set terms that struggle and further reinforce the terms - so as to solidify a rigidity with all the emotional force of survival need believed - and lived out within a local or exclusive assertion of self and reality - as if this is free will - upon a deeper movement of being of which it is not only unaware of - but redefines as threat or asset to exploit.

The idea of sovereignty is rightly belonging not to power that 'lords it over' - but to the power that holds all things aligned in true balance. And as may be implicitly recognized in this reading by now - the sense and fear of losing balance leads to a coercive attempt to impose it - with sets action and reaction upon a false foundation of control against and over perceived threat - fragmenting under the worship of power unto itself as Meaning.

Nothing in this world can convince you, the truth of which you are unwilling to learn, though pain of meaninglessness may call to re-evaluate what is held true. This is your free will - for only from you comes your own acceptance of the true of you. In articulating this I have to acknowledge two parts - because the belief in the split operates the mind that thinks in discrete linear concept. The parental aspect of you needs to listen to and feelingly accept that which has been denied - for only in revisiting the feeling will a fresh take heal a mis-take. And the child fragment needs to embody, or give movement and expression to the denied feeling and thought - within a willingness FOR acceptance and healing - instead of reacting as the trigger finger to the baiting of heartbreak, rage or terror, of an ongoing oppression that disallows or demonizes and fears, the movement of being that is being pushed down or subverted and neutered within conformed dictate.

Because of the nature of pain, fear, hate and reaction, these can and do simply feed the same that operates the role of coercion - unless there is a deeper recognition and acceptance of the call that is within the behaviour and willingness to genuinely respond. Or - the negative or unacceptable expression has found acceptance and transformation in conditions away from triggering harm - so as to grow the capacity to bring communication of the denied self in a form more open to recognition and less liable to trigger being attacked or denied. Of course both these aspects work together - for you are not split by belief apart from believing it so. But the sketch I invite considering here is necessarily a tiny  facet of a much richer communication of being than our physically conformed mind allows - for the nature of Existence may project or embody through the prism of time and space but is not defined or limited thereby - excepting again through the proviso of the freedom to define and accept core ground-rules by which to explore freedom to experience within structures that enable and bring forth.

Just as with natural environments, there are cycles of change within the underlying matrix of meanings - that meanings can no longer 'survive' in without being renewed from Source so as to embody a current expression of being - freely accepted.

While in principle one is free to persist in the meaningless if one gives it the power of acceptance and belief - such freedom operates against the core purpose of extending and sharing meaning, worth or value recognized - as a freedom to refuse the current and use it as a means to support a static and unyielding concept of self.

Perhaps there is a mixed harvest of those who come to freely yield a false sense of control to an inner recognition of true balance within wholeness - and those whose self sense asserts freedom in defiance, opposition and revenge - righteously but blindly asserting as rage and terror both - for attack without a body cannot be but a relational breakdown of communication - translating and embodying into fixity of form. As conditioning generates conditions that then reinforce and complexify and mask 'mapped out denials'.

The forms of denial are so fragmented and multi-layered and imprinted as part of our identity - that there is no way to mind-map it all out and re-find our way - for the urge to map, define and control is already largely operating from and for self-concept  - particularly when invested in as an identity over and against false.

The quantum idea of collapsing the Infinite to a specific comes to mind. Do we feel out the pathways that truly align a truly felt desire - or allow a layer of subconscious and seemingly 'autonomous' thinking to condition and effectively control our unfolding of perspective?

Allow that any form and any thing can be used for self-deceit - or for the honest and open appreciation of who you are - which of course includes an honesty relative to all kinds of psychological defences that were inherited or needed as part of your personality and character development. Only feeling our way - in the currency of the moment and movement of being - will reveal and discern what we need to know or do in its right timing. The idea of manually living is absurd - no matter how complex the robot or system that rises to substitute for communication and relationship. The true nature of feeling, is richer in living and creative information than any conceptual overlay. Nothing within us need be invalidated or demonised when finding its right place. Priority is not coercive upon us - but when what is first is accepted first - all else finds its place relative to true.

Until an acceptance of unconditional love releases us of self-hatred and self-denial - we cannot but go forth and multiply the hate in the name of love - as self-righteous attempt to survive in our own terms - at cost of out-sourcing un-recognized and un-owned pain and hate onto others - and our world.

The idea of self has to become open to a greater communication - and the idea of group or nation or corporation has to embody such alignment. The history of nations and the modern history of corporations is an extension of the structure of coercive power that operates war beneath a masking narrative for unity, diplomacy and representation.

The true nature of globalisation is global awakening - and not a corporately enacted dominion by an elitism that owns and pulls all the strings whereby to control the narrative and enforce or en-trance conformity to its agenda and image.

At least - such is the willingness of acceptance from which I meet the world and through which I am met. But unlike the measure of power in the world - all power is in shared witness to the true - no matter how seemingly insignificant the form it takes. And of course we cant get our heads around that but that is why it is called Under standing.

The self is a construct of the collective!

An evolution article:
Why Richard Dawkins is no scientist, the survival of the least selfish, and what ants can tell us about humans


The 'self' idea is a construct of definitions,and beliefs that generate feelings, thoughts and perceptions, from which proceed actions and behaviours and conditionings.
Clearly, and observably, foundational self-definitions are imagined and accepted or created in consciousness - but this is not equivalent to the 'definition' of a personal or private 'consciousness' which in our current human template operates AS IF it is a thinker that thinks alone and apart from all else.
In antiquity there were mythic models of a world on the back of a tortoise. In modernity the world seems so much more 'realistic' yet the framework within which which it is perceived and manipulated is no more substantial than an imagined tortoise.
There is no self but Self (for want of a word for the All in All). There is no self as is presumed and asserted and supported with emotional force and intentional identification. But there IS a belief/definition 'self' that has all the currency of its mutual acceptance but only the value of what it fulfils as consciousness experience.
The mechanism of the delivery of experience within consciousness can be explored AS experience, but to do so is to differentiate from the indivisible in order to experience a point of view. But there is NEVER a separation in FACT from the experience observed. It is provided to the desire because it is part of the desire. The desire that has dominated and driven scientific exploration in the main is an expression of a 'disconnected urge to define, control and prevail over Life Itself. And as such is clearly insane to anything but its own self-conditioned blindness.
The cutting off of consciousness from its true nature is a device of dissociation and denial well known to those who would use psychology for the manipulation of other minds rather than heal their own and others. But it operates a splitting off of dissociated 'conscious' personae within a negatively or fearfully determined and segregated self-sense.
The nature of a deception operates defensively against its own exposure by invalidating all else in such wise as to seem associated with the power of it god - from which it derives authority. The god of the separating self sense is the idea of asserting coercive power upon life - but beneath this 'power' is a self that defines itself in victim-hood and thus in hurt, fear and anger. The halt lead the blind. Nothing will come of a fearful foundation but fuel for fear.
The idea of self can be reintegrated to its true nature and consciousness. This is not determined and controlled but yielded to and accepted INSTEAD of yielding to the god of fear. AND in a true willingness for Life, our Arts and Sciences will uncover a wealth of INTEGRATED inspiration in all that it explores to experience in shared reality instead of seeking to manipulate as dictated by private agenda.
WE ARE all already cooperating to maintain a culture of lovelessness, because we are not actually separate from Consciousness and must TEACH what we define and accept ourselves to be. WHAT we teach depends on what we choose to learn. Definitions operate invisibly until you want to check in with what is really going on right here and now where 'reality' is presumed to be. Now are you opening to a truth that you do not make - because that which observes definitions is not defined by them. Just because one can follow thinking, doesn't mean one has to. Aligning with true joy and passion is not a fear-based compulsion. Fear OF consciousness is scientism's shadow. True Science seeks to know the truth - not just the filtered truths that can fuel a fearfully derived agenda.

One commenter offerred this to the article:

Use of the word "selfless" here undermines the argument. Selfless suggests a conscious choice (and therefore ability) to go against ones needs or instinct. In the case of the ants, they have no such ability, so it is not selfless.

- - -
They don't demonstrate it on our timeframe - nor in ways that our human 'self' template can recognize. Species-ality focuses in its own explorations yet they reflect something to us that we take as 'collective' consciousness and that is something we tend to disregard in focussing in what we call individual consciousness. All facets operate consciousness - but we do not stand alone and apart to judge excepting we presume our independent ego to be god and believe our own spin.

Is not what we call 'conscious choice' but a virtual layer over what is actually happening anyway?Have you met any truly 'conscious' self that can choose to go against its needs or instinct - or is it a distorting layer of mind that redefines needs and the 'self' that it is, so as to then automatically 'choose' according to the defined template. In this sense our 'self' is a persona or mask upon what we actually ARE - that makes a model of the world in which to play out its illusory power. Putting such 'self' aside - that is - noticing it is not YOU, allows the undistorted integrity of a true existence to shine through. While the 'power' to be what you are not (against yourself) is your choice, all choice is but a mechanism of conditioned reaction.
But the first choice remains yours to change, regardless the layers of experience and definition that constitute the human conditioning.

Mistaken identity and cold hard struggle

Said Dave to one of my posts:

one can look at it through rose colored glasses but it doesn't change the cold hard truth, which is found by stripping the self down to the naked core facts grounded in reality and supported even mathematically. Only then can the conscious decide how one 'feels' about it and decide how one will operate as a best course. By doing this work, one then discovers the how and why of integration with others for mutual benefit as viable. The "me" can not be crushed or separated from "self", or fly only on "feelings" and exist for very long.

My Reply:

One can look through a glass darkly and see only cold hard truth. I invite you to consider that when you have looked upon the feared or the terror or the guilt and refused it, it no longer has power to direct your mind and so you can now follow the movement of your true desire. Nothing else is truly conscious.

Nothing else but is an imposter taken as one's 'self'.

Mindcontrol practitioners know well that applying trauma splits the self and enables access to substitute coercive commands into the mind - and so do the 'war on terror' brigade.

I don't demean whatever awareness you have gained or your perspective therefrom. Everyone entering the human conditioning unfolds their experience through their own choices. While the world is seen as cause - one's own self-definition in relation to that world is hidden. Now I am not saying that negative experience cannot or does not occur - but I am saying that can have a positive outcome if you decide it will.

The 'self' is fundamental to all else. A phishing scam at this level renders all above it captive to a false basis. The 'i thought', or 'me', is not Self.

I am completely at one with that mathematical structure is innate to the structure of our manifest experience of reality.

The higher mind is not emotions. Discernment and insight and inspiration are not 'feelings'.

Feelings are that which arise as a result of a self definition. Discernment most clearly shines through the neglecting to define oneself.

That you are is Fact. What you define yourself to be is fiction - or rather the imaginative exploration of experience in reflection.

There is no separate 'self' anywhere to be found. It is a kind of currency of shorthand that has drifted and divorced from what it originally signified.

Operating in the 'zone' is an expression sometimes used for the spontaneity that simply knows how to be in any given situation. There is no way to bring the "me" into this quality of Life - and yet in such transparency, one is not absent - so much as a pure awareness that is one with and not apart from.

The "me" wants to regain this true power, but is the only thing getting in the way. But it sees everyone and everything else as getting in the way.

That which Is Awake is not the personality. One does not have to be awake to be willing to open to the prompts and guidances of that which is. But one does have to wake enough to recognize one is in a sense dreaming. This is often when one's personality construct has been in some sense broken or deconstructed by whatever life-experience brought the gift. It may not have seemed a gift. It may seem cold and hard indeed. But have you unwrapped it yet?

The larger thread of comments can be viewed here:

http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/35456/Is-the-Level-of-Economic-Illiteracy-Among-the-Wests-Top-Thinkers-Deliberate/#comment-1474317796

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.

The I experience

I use the term 'I' or else cant say much! - but if pushed to show or uncover what the 'I' is - I have to tell you I cant find it! Nor define or measure it. It is a virtual self - that is - it is not really here at all despite serving as a context for a world-life experience.

So what is being known directly - exists as shifting thoughts of I or other thought-experience rising and falling to an otherwise formless and limitless quality of awareness.

Our perception-experience is a selective reflection. That it is actually a harmony of parts is a reflection of a unified process of being.

But an exclusive identification with the self concepts - or self-image  - makes a distortion experience of apparently independent yet conflicted separate thing-ness amidst a world of things.

And the release of this idea of separate self will allows recognizing the power that actually moves all things one. Absent of all coercion.

The experiential embrace of - and abiding in - presence... without interference, invites true foundation to restore true perspective.

Our words don't have to determine the truth of anything - but that communication occurs at all is witness to shared purpose.

This is the unified and unifying foundation of All That Is: shared purpose.

In attempting private agendas the identification with an apparently independent 'I', sets up a drama and that can be addictive at the level of its engagement. But without the definitions and roles that we mutually ascribe the simple presence of all that is - is a truly unifies awareness revealed to have always been all that is.

Trying to fit perspective of One into a mind in division (a mind in a body in a world) cannot and will never be possible, for such thinking is not itself discerning or feeling/intuiting existence.

My willingness to sketch the unspeakable is of the desire to share the glimpse and open curiosity from a mesmerised attention that thinks it knows and so neglects to look.

That which gave rise to all manifest being is not absent, but in our virtual orphanhood (thinking) we absent ourselves from a direct participance. The symptoms of a our human planet are a call to wake - not to react in fear - but to see fear with new eyes. To see the false foundations from which a parasitic intent usurped the extending and sharing of true relational being.

The fear of love makes the body dense. One's individuality is tangibly and visibly identified by body-mind - but this is abused as a hideout for self concept and dumping ground for guilt and anger.

Who does not know what love is to the body... enlightening, joyous, free and opening in gratitude. Only the blocks to awareness of love cover this over.

So a curiosity to notice allows re-evaluation of such blocks and a shift occurs.

Love is natural to true presence - not as a social or personal manipulation. Love is not a personal or social manipulation. The Now is a point of timelessness when releasing the 'story of me'.

There is always so much more to existence-being than thought or belief could imagine - hence recognizing the blocks or limits and letting more in, such as we are freely willing. There is no coercion in the unified existence.

Always by invitation to willingness. Never coercive upon us -but without persistence and consistency of focus, our vacillations cancel each other out and we prevaricate in a confusion of no real fulfilment at all.

The virtual 'I' is a sort of placeholder concept for the I Am of existence - and yet there IS no substitution for the I Am of existence. This IS our true life and our true world, and the surrogate experiences of a virtual reality in which we seek the 'more' but find the less - and the loss - is as if we had put reality on hold whilst playing very seriously in an imagination.

A wish has all the power that is given it, but the power of shared willingness allows what is already moving to rise to a true awareness in which all is appreciated as it is - free of a personal bias or wish it be different. Here is sanity. Here is peace - and all that can only be fully or truly known, appreciated, loved and shared.