The Ego is a concept which is used by many different teachers and systems and can sometimes have some obscurity to its meaning as a consequence.
I would like to propose two separate terms and meanings to help delineate what we are discussing and the multiple ways of looking at it, as I notice these two definitions find themselves at odds with each other when discussing the ego.
Psychological Ego
Firstly, we have the “psychological ego”.
I describe this as a functionary and integral part of our psychology and ability to interact with the world.
The psychological ego, could be compared to the body or “the persona/personality”. It is our self image which holds our self concept as an individual in this life, and facilitates our ability to interact and relate with the world.
This psychological ego is with us until our body dies and is not something to be transcended itself, but utilized and integrated as the tool that it is.
To demonstrate the necessity for this psychological ego, we can introspect that if we had no sense of self in the world, and no desire at all relative to it, we would take no action, and do nothing. We would have no desire to live, love, eat or drink, not even an awareness of a “need” to do so.
This psychological ego, is actually the vehicle through which we grow up and develop from children to adults. All these initiations of the mind are done for the purpose of training and developing the psychological ego into awareness and harmony with its environment/self.
In this sense, we never lose this psychological ego until we pass on from this body. We never fully lose the contextual sense of self as an Individual in a body which contains the self-image, until the body passes.
Paradoxically, we know this self-image to be merely a time-bound illusion and a tool to the true self which originally generated the self-image and sense of individuality. We know that we are at all times, the true self expressing through various garments and mediums, all of which are made possible through the individualized self-image or “psychological ego”.
Spiritual Ego:
The spiritual ego is more of a description of inner attitudes/beliefs. The spiritual ego develops within the individual’s sense of self, or the psychological ego, but is actually a structure of beliefs contained within the self-image. Not the self-image itself.
Unlike the psychological ego, which mandates a self-image for experience of individuality and cannot be “transcended” in the body.
The spiritual ego is merely a collection of beliefs about the self projected onto the self-image and CAN be transcended in the body.
In this way, it is, the spiritual ego, which describes the forms/beliefs we project onto the self-image.
The spiritual ego can be transcended in that we can transcend previous “limiting beliefs” up to the point of liberation (or self transcendence) and “forgive the world”.
In this way, the spiritual ego (or the beliefs which are projected onto the psychological ego “self-image”) is the ego we consider when we talk about transcending the PERCEPTION of a separation from God.
It is a simply a transcending of prior beliefs(or identification with them) actually, as the True self/God is never destroyed.
