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Originally Posted by HealerW
First let's talk about thoughts. For simplicity, let's define thoughts as strings of words from your native tongue spoken silently in your head.
The Ego is a specific thought: "I", "me". Whenever you use the word I, you're introducing your ego.
I like pizza. The Ego likes pizza. Your Ego is separate and individual from everything else. BUT, it identifies with your body and thoughts. The Ego calls the body and thoughts "I".
The Ego is in a war with the Self, which is the real substance of who you are.
The Self resides in the background of awareness. This background of awareness is seamless and continual through your life. He reason you think the Self ends when you sleep and begins when you wake up, is because you look at the world from the outside. So then of course the background of awareness seems to stop and start.
Try this: when you wake up, ask yourself who is there first. The awakened presence is the Self. But the moment thoughts start going through your head, the Ego is at his dirty business.
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I read a lot about ego here without people realising that it is
part of their spirit, the part that guides its owner's survival and public presentation and since one presents oneself differently in different situations and is always reliant on experience, it's dynamic (unless the owner refuses to interact with the ecology inc people at all).
Without it, someone has no identity and cannot distinguish themselves from anyone else. The moment they speak, glance, gesture, ego emerges.
It reaches to the (real) Self as well. One still has to differentiate themselves. Only when going beyond (deeper) than Self is the ego abandoned.
As others have said here, ego is the equivalent of Self
and self-on-the-mundane. The difference between them is one of refinement. The Self lies behind delusion and illusion that are figments of the mundane in varying degrees through which Self percolates to become the persona, the thing that the public sees in situ.
Ego harks back to Freud's model of the mind. (I use his terms here sometimes as they're recognised even if I don't like them). But they are a bit outdated.
From glancing here and there in this forum it looks like populist authors are promoting not just this model but bad press about what it is. If you don't like what someone's doing; if they're acting selfishly; it's their ego at work sort of thing. But does anyone imagine someone working in AI would use this model to construct intelligent behaviour?
Just my views.
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