This is a work in progress and an excerpt from a recent email…
Could you keep your mind a little open to what I have to say about self-curiosity and self-actualization being the highest moral goals achievable?
Moral in the sense that the honest pursuit and actualization of one’s true self leads to personal AND world happiness. Love is at the core of my philosophy. Everybody wants it and everybody needs it. (For anyone to deny this seems ludicrous.) But before you can love another person, you must first love yourself. And in order to love yourself, you must know yourself, which means investigate, analyze and actualize who you are. It’s a full circle:
1. To love another, you must first love yourself.
2. To love yourself, you must know yourself.
3. To know yourself, you must be self-curious – investigate and manifest who you really are. Part of this involves simply spending time alone and doing things you enjoy for no other reason but that you enjoy them.
4. To investigate and manifest who you really are, you must first discern the difference between the ideas and attitudes you’ve adopted from other people and those that are truly your own. Then you must foster awareness of falling into old conditioning or behavior habits that reflect these other people’s or societal ideas. Once you become aware, you can begin to change your actions and attitudes to reflect what’s really important to you.
5. To discern attitudes that are a result of conditioning and don’t reflect your honest priorities, you must learn to say no to people. These are people who would, intentionally or no, enforce that conditioning. You might need to spend time completely removed from your friends, family, and romantic partner, in order to be surrounded solely by your own energy. Their energy, influence, and any conditioning will wear off the longer you stay away. Regular breaks are usually beneficial to any partnership as these allow us to remember who we are on our own, outside of the relationship. And this balance between two different individuals is what makes any relationship fulfilling and successful. It’s when two people forget their individuality and compromise it for the “benefit” of the relationship that people ache to get away – back to themselves. If this isn’t recognized and addressed, heartache typically ensues in the form of affairs, distance, or some other type of “separate life” from the partner.
In the beginning, as you take more time for yourself and pursue your own interests, you might make mistakes and perhaps emulate the more negative characteristics of the term ”selfish,” or be accused of doing so. Mistakes are tolerable. Getting back to yourself is of the utmost importance to true fulfillment and relationship satisfaction.
6. Only through experiencing what hurts and what works can you understand your honest motivations and priorities. Sometimes when we find ourselves saddled with a way of life that is simply unsatisfying, it can be hard to know how to change. Just try new things – or things you remembered enjoying when you were younger. At this stage taking small risks is fine, but until you know yourself better, it may not be best to take bigger risks you might regret.
7. Self-honesty is essential as emotions are key indicators of what is working (is true for you) and what is not (is somebody else’s idea of what works). Emotional intelligence comes easier to some people than others, but can be improved upon by all of us.
8. Compassion and faith in the “everyone deserves love” attitude must be on board if you’re to love what you see when you uncover your true self. People often live in denial because they don’t want to face their own demons. And guess what, we all have them. Demons are ok. Part of the reason why we’re here is to deal with them. Oddly, loving ourselves in spite of the darkness and having compassion no matter how “ill” our deeds have been is the only way to really let the evil inside us go. Evil basically comes down to one simple thing – fear. Once fear is gone, only love remains.
9. As you distill down the layers of what you are – which intimately involves your motivations – you’ll find that love is at the center of it all. Everything you’ve ever done, somewhere was motivated by love. It could’ve been a reaction to not getting love, or a way to feel loved yourself. Even some of the most heinous acts are done to distract people and fuel their denial of the very real and universal need for love.
10. When you can see that even your ugliest traits are motivated by love – a desire to love and be loved and the anger at not getting it or fear of rejection – you can forgive yourself your ugliness and give yourself the love you so richly deserve. (It takes extreme courage, practice and patience to look full on at and accept your worst traits – which is required to see what is underneath them.)
11. Once you learn to put this loving relationship with yourself above all else, you can be the ultimate and most honest expression of who you are. Being who we are, perfectly, is the most anyone can aspire to be.
12. This expression of yourself greatly benefits the collective – we all have gifts and talents to share – and feeds your soul as well, thereby allowing you to feed the souls of others.
13. Last, through the recognition of and compassion for your own worst faults, you can better recognize and have compassion for the faults of others. You’ll recognize their burning desire for love and perhaps their lack of self-awareness – both of which may create or fuel their faults and bad attitudes. In this way, you can also love even the “worst” of the people around you. Even your enemies. “Loving your enemies” can seem like a very selfless ideal to aspire to. Whereas in truth, to be able to love your enemies, you must hold self-love as the highest commandment.
I just found this article on the 
