Quotes About Self

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change. It will think up a thousand other things to be concerned about or be moralistic about—anything rather than giving up "who I think I am" and "who I need to be to look good.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of "common sense," of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful "Beatrice.

Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you. Your image of God creates you.

It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them.

The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until 'no one' is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.

Those who are too carefully engineering their own superiority systems will usually not allow it at all. It is much more done to you than anything you do yourself, and sometimes nonreligious people are more open to this change in strategy than are religious folks who have their private salvation project all worked out.

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

Home is another word for the Spirit that we are, our True Self in God. The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God, and this is the full homecoming, according to Teresa of Avila.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God

You are who you are in the eyes of God, nothing more and nothing less," he often said.12

It is often when the ego is most deconstructed that we can hear things anew and begin some honest reconstruction, even if it is only half heard and halfhearted.

There is nothing wrong with or bad about your False Self; it's simply "the identity you created for yourself

Self-worth is not created; it is discovered.

Jung believed that humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation.

The shadow self invariably presents itself as prudence, common sense, justice, or "I'm doing this for your own good," when it is really manifesting fear, control, manipulation, or even vengeance…. Invariably, when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction, out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed, so watch for any over-reactions or over-denials.

He did not come to change God's mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.