The self, with a capital T and a lowercase s, is to mean oneself; the 📝Skin Encapsulated Ego that is a disguise of the 📝true nature of self, the royal 📝Self.
The distinction the lowercase letter carries is old and recurs across traditions that otherwise share little. The phrase skin-encapsulated ego comes from 📝Alan Watts, who used it for the conviction that a person is a separate center of awareness bounded by their own skin — an identity defined by everything it is not. 📝Carl Jung reserved the capital-S Self for something else entirely: not the ego but the archetype of wholeness, the totality of the psyche that the conscious ego is only a fragment of. The two spellings are not two words. They are two answers to the question of where a person ends.
What follows from the distinction is an argument about selfishness. If the self is the skin-encapsulated one, then acting in its interest necessarily comes at the expense of everything outside the boundary, and self-interest and generosity are opposed. If the boundary is the disguise, the opposition dissolves — serving what is beyond the skin is not a sacrifice of self but an expression of it. The charge in the word selfish depends entirely on which self is doing the work.
"It's not that we shouldn't be selfish, it's that we misperceive the self. [...] When the other is not an other, then to be good to an other is to be good to yourself." ~ 📝Charles Eisenstein
"Selfish is not a curse word." ~ 📝Leah Orleans