Spiritual people love to bash the ego. Kill the ego. Transcend the ego. Dissolve the ego. As if it’s an enemy that has to be defeated before you can wake up.
I see it differently. There’s nothing wrong with the ego. The ego is a vehicle.
Think of it this way: if you lived in a world where you could fly, you wouldn’t need a car. But if you’re in a world where you can’t fly, a car helps a lot. The ego is that car. We live in a world full of trauma, where we’re not yet totally spiritually free, and the ego is the vehicle that lets us navigate it. It gives you a personality, a functioning sense of self, a way to operate effectively in a lower vibrational state.
The ego runs on limits
But a car only works because it has edges. It has a body, a frame, a defined shape. And the ego works the same way. Its whole ability to exist depends on confines and limitations.
That’s why the ego loves labels. I’m a mother. I’m this old. I’m this young. I’m this gender, this sexuality, this income bracket. In a spiritual context we might call these archetypes. In a business context, we call them advertising demographics. Either way, they’re the boxes the ego uses to identify itself within an egoic, traumatized society.
Here’s the tension. In a more evolved spiritual understanding, you’re living in a sea of infinite potential at every moment. Your higher self has expansive desires. But the ego, built on limits, will keep reverberating on those limits and keep you stuck, unless you learn to work with it. The ego pretends it wants more. Really, it thrives on less.
The famous artist trap
Say you want to be a famous artist. Your ego says: I want to be a famous artist. Then I’ll have meaning. Then I’ll have purpose. Then I’ll be happy.
But listen to what’s underneath. Every time the ego says “I want to be a famous artist,” it’s also saying “I’m not a famous artist.” It’s comparing, measuring, acknowledging the limitations around it, and every acknowledgment builds the prison a little higher.
Now imagine you succeed. You become a genuinely famous artist, and the ego can’t deny it anymore. What happens? The ego panics. My whole identity was wrapped up in wanting to become this. Now I am this. So who am I? What do I want? This is the desire-acquire cycle, and it’s why so many people reach the top of the mountain and feel strangely empty.
It can get uglier, too. People who achieve success but don’t feel they deserve it, don’t feel confident in it, or don’t trust it, sometimes try to egoically keep other people down. That’s not strength. It’s a projection of their own shame and their inability to hold the manifestation they have. Some even crave more conflict, because conflict is what they identify with.
What the traditions say
Different traditions have drawn the ego in different ways, and each one adds something.
In Freud’s model, the ego is the mediator: the part of the mind that negotiates between our raw desires and the demands of reality and conscience. (The word “ego” itself is the Latin his English translators chose for his German das Ich, simply “the I.”) Carl Jung went further, describing the ego as the center of conscious awareness, but only a small part of the larger Self, the totality of the psyche that the ego can serve but never fully contain.
Buddhism offers anatta, the teaching of non-self: the sense of a solid, permanent “me” is a construction, a bundle of changing experiences that we cling to as if it were fixed. And in Advaita Vedanta, the individual ego is the self mistaking itself for something separate from the infinite, Brahman.
What these views share with the car metaphor is that the ego isn’t the whole of you. It’s a useful structure, a smaller “I” operating inside something much vaster. Problems start when the vehicle believes it’s the driver.
Let your higher self drive
So the goal isn’t to destroy the car. It’s to put the right driver in the seat. You have to take ownership of your life, tap into the higher, coherent aspect of yourself, and let it lead, while gathering up all the subconscious parts of you and understanding them with compassionate love.
When I first started this work, my ego would not listen. My ego was a brat. It thought it knew everything, even though it was doing a bad job running my life. So my higher self had to take charge, firmly. Honestly, it was a bit of a dom/sub dynamic: you don’t know everything, you want the same things I want, so sit down and let me drive. And my ego loved it. Sometimes it has to be that extreme at first.
Over time, it softens into partnership. The ego raises a concern, and instead of overriding it or obeying it, your higher self listens. Oh, I want to succeed, but I’m afraid I’ll have to mask. The old answer was: shut up, everyone masks, put on a suit and climb the ladder. The integrated answer is: you’re right, masking sucks. How can we succeed without it? And suddenly a whole new reality opens up.
From black and white to rainbow
The ego lives in duality: me and them, success and failure, wanting and having. That’s what keeps it oriented. But you don’t have to choose between your ego and your higher self. You have to marry them. Let them be friends.
When you can hold your higher self and your subconscious, egoic mind at the same time, the black and white starts to bleed into rainbow, into nuance and infinite potential. In UNICULT, we call that rainbow reality Unitopia.
So keep your car. Take care of it. Thank it for getting you through a world where you couldn’t fly. Just remember who’s driving, and where you’re actually trying to go.
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