Archeology and the False Self

The following is from an excellent little book called Daily Office by Peter Scazzero:

"Thomas Keating compares God's work in us to a Middle Eastern 'tell', or archeological site, where one civilization is built on another in the same place. Archeologists excavate, level by level, culture by culture, down through history. The Holy Spirit is like a Divine Archeologist digging through the layers of our lives.

     'The Spirit intends to investigate our whole life history, layer by layer,
      throwing out the junk and preserving the values that were appropriate to 
      each stage of our human development...Eventually the Spirit begins to 
      dig into the bedrock of our earliest emotional life...Hence, as we progress 
      toward the center where God is actually waiting for us, we are naturally
      going to feel that we are getting worse. This warns us that the spiritual 
      journey is not a success story or a career move. It is rather a series of 
      humiliations of the false self.'   (Thomas Keating)"