Blog Post #14: Compassion and Self

You may remember when I started this blog months ago I mentioned that compassion is not resourced from our ego but our true self/core self, one with God.  I have worked with these concepts for many years, first exposed to it in the work of Thomas Merton[1].  Later in Merton’s Palace of Nowhere[2] Jim Finley provides more insights into this seeming dichotomy.  For years I’ve sought a language that does not include the concepts of true and false because of the pejorative connotations of “false” self.  Then we throw ego into the mix and where does that fit in the conceptual schema?

I thought I had settled into a type of at least linguistic comfort when I changed true self to core self as the self created in the image and likeness of God and one with God. Then changing false self to constructed self, defined as…