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It not uncommon to work against ones ‘good’.

I disagree, biologically we are meant to seek our good and what benefits us, most of healthy minded people do, unless you really hate yourself or were programmed to please people instead of your own.

Perhaps that might be true if man was only a biological creature that was mostly unconscious and functioned from the position of the Id.

In what I call beginning stories like Genesis the birth of consciousness comes at the price of being ejected from paradise. (I’m using the story as metaphor not literal historic fact so don’t outright disagree with me or tune out based on that).

The eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is not the same ‘knowing’ what is good and evil. It is this confrontation with ‘knowing of’ but not ‘knowing what is’ that consciousness arises. – Consciousness and the problem of opposites, duality, are connected. No confrontation or tension, no consciousness.  Consciousness and the garden can’t exist together.

A baby slowly becomes aware of its being as separate from mother (garden), though the tensions of opposites. A baby relieves itself which experienced as good notices unconsciously mother face of disgust reacting to the smell. Something that feels good is reflected (mirrored) back as not ‘good’, not smiling, a something becomes conscious… ‘knowledge of’ but not ‘knowledge of what is’, just a ‘something’, a feeling…

The reaction to a wakening consciousness of the knowledge of but not what is good and bad, is shame. That something about our being, our naked authentic selves is wrong, does not smell ‘right’.. and must be hidden from others and even ourselves.

We put on clothes, personas, that clothes don’t fit. “Relieving” ourselves a biological good experienced as something that smells and wrong so we “constipate” ourselves, working against our good (and the flow of life) working against ourselves. (I know you don’t like the word ‘self ‘ but what ever part of you that experiences you)

I have never met anyone who was so mentally healthy that they do not struggle with the problem of opposites and its implications.

That said you may be correct that the process which involves suffering and getting things wrong is of the greater ‘Good’. That what seems to me as working against my good, even biological good, can be views as being the GOOD as it results in consciousness – Life desires to be conscious of Life which cannot happen in the garden. Thus, Life is never at war with Life, everything is as it must be (like it or not)… I can never work against my own ‘good’ as even my experience with suffering is Life and so  ‘Good’…

Which is not how I experience myself nor is it a tension I can hold for long (sometimes in meditation)… Which is why We work against ourselves – I do the things I do not wish to do and do not do the things I wish to do.  I am a contradiction.

That was fun 😊