Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

The journey never happens alone.

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.

Religion has in fact outdone culture in dualistic thinking - we've become as violent, as hateful toward our enemies, damning them to hell and whatever else, that the world doesn't look to us for wisdom, because we're trapped in the dualistic mind, instead of the mind of Christ that we were supposed to have.