Quotes from Edward F. Edinger

the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.

And if it is true that we acquired our knowledge before our birth, and lost it at the moment of birth, but afterward, by the exercise of our senses upon sensible objects, recover the knowledge which we had once before, I suppose that what we call learning will be the recovery of our own knowledge . . . PLATO*

Through his researches, we now know that the individual psyche is not just a product of personal experience. It also has a pre-personal or transpersonal dimension which is manifested in universal patterns and images such as are found in all the world's religions and mythologies.

Eris, the Goddess of Discord and sister of Ares, presides over separatio. It was she who came uninvited to a marriage on Olympus and flung into the midst of the gathering an apple inscribed "to the fairest." Thus she brought about the judgment of Paris. Comparisons are odious and comparison is what the golden apple provoked. To determine what is "more" and what is "most" requires and leads to judgments.

He must give up his identification with original unconscious wholeness and voluntarily accept being a real fragment instead of an unreal whole.

The Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality. Or, put in other words, the ego is the seat of subjective identity while the Self is the seat of objective identity. The Self is thus the supreme psychic authority and subordinates the ego to it. The Self is most simply described as the inner empirical deity and is identical with the imago Dei.