Quotes about Ego

Without an inner life, our outer prayer will soon become superficial, ego-centered, and even counterproductive on the spiritual path.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and

Contemplation is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers. It never rushes to judgment, and in fact avoids making quick judgments because judgments have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.

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.

The lone individual is far too small and insecure to carry either the "weight of glory" or the "burden of sin" on his or her own. Yet that is the impossible task we gave the individual. It will never work. It creates well-disguised religious egocentricity, because we are forced to take our single and isolated selves far too seriously—both our wonderfulness and our terribleness—which are both their own kinds of ego trips, I am afraid.

All we can do is keep our egos out of the way, note and weep over our defensive behaviors, keep our various centers from closing down—and the Presence that is surely the Highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing, and immediately effective. The immediate embrace is from God's side.

The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.

Whenever we get defensive or go emotionally up and down, this is a sign that we are attached to a self-image.

Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.

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.

When you put the Gospels in someone's life who hasn't walked any journeys yet, who hasn't lost, suffered, longed, and thirsted for anything, they will use it for power - I promise you. For personal power, reputational power, economic power, because that's where the ego always goes. We will use God for our own purposes which is the ultimate idolatry. But if you have made the journey into powerless somehow, I will be happy to put the gospel in your hands.

he just tells him to "descend" from his power position, "go away and get rid of all your possessions." Money is only the metaphor here; the real possession he has to get rid of is his ego.