I. War with the Wrong Enemy
Spiritual traditions make the same mistake century after century: they declare war on the ego.
The ego has been turned into a scapegoat. All suffering comes from it. All alienation is its doing. Dissolve it — and peace will come. This narrative has penetrated spiritual discourse so deeply that few stop to consider: the ego was given to us for a reason.
The ego is the psychological architecture that consciousness builds in order to exist in the world of forms. It remembers your name, recognizes your face in the mirror, takes responsibility for yesterday's decisions, and makes plans for tomorrow. Without it, there is no continuity — only a stream of sensations without a subject to experience them.
Freud saw the ego primarily as a mediator: it balances between the impulses of the Id and the demands of the Superego, between instinct and social reality (Das Ich und das Es, 1923). Jung saw something different — the center of consciousness, a small island of light in an ocean of the unconscious. He contrasted the ego with the Self as the center of the entire psyche, including the unconscious. But Jung never claimed that the island needed to be submerged. He said we need to become aware of the ocean.
The problem arises when the ego decides that it is everything. That nothing exists beyond its walls. That it is the only reality. That is when a structure built for navigation becomes a prison. But it is a specific configuration of the ego that becomes the prison — not the principle of its existence itself.
II. Spirit as Context
Spirit is the context in which the ego exists. An awareness that observes thoughts without merging with them.
In Indian philosophy, this distinction is described through several conceptual pairs depending on the school. In Samkhya — one of the six classical schools — it is purusha and prakriti: pure witness-consciousness and material nature. In Vedanta, the philosophical system based on the Upanishads, it is atman and jiva: the true Self and the individual soul, bound to body and mind.
A crucial detail: in dualistic Samkhya, both poles were considered real and necessary. Prakriti is the arena in which purusha gains experience. In Advaita Vedanta the picture is different: the material world is viewed as maya. But even here, the point is to recognize the illusory nature of the ego from within — not to mechanically destroy it.
Spirit without ego is an infinite diffuse light, unable to focus. Ego without spirit is a precise optical system, dark on the inside. One sets direction. The other is the source. Both are needed.
III. The Great Confusion
Philosopher Ken Wilber described one of the key errors of the spiritual search: the pre/trans fallacy — the confusion between pre-egoic and trans-egoic states (Wilber, 1980). Both look similar from the outside — blurred boundaries of "I," dissolution into something larger, absence of rigid identity. But they are fundamentally different phenomena.
The pre-egoic state is a starting point. An infant has no clear sense of a boundary between itself and the world. This is simply the absence of differentiation.
The trans-egoic is the result of years of conscious work. An awareness that transcends the ego by including it as a tool. Here the boundaries of "I" become permeable not because they were never formed, but because the person sees through them.
Psychotherapist Jack Engler, who worked at the intersection of Buddhist practice and Western psychology, put it with perfect precision: "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" (Engler, 1984). Without a formed ego, trans-egoic practices become regression.
And this is exactly what often happens. Spiritual traditions — especially in their popularized, simplified versions — frequently offer regression disguised as evolution. They call people back into pre-egoic merger and call it liberation. A person dissolves, loses boundaries, becomes incapable of functioning in a world of obligations, relationships, and responsibility — and thinks they have reached the goal.
Psychotherapist John Welwood, who worked at the intersection of Buddhism and psychology, gave this a name: spiritual bypassing — using spiritual practices as anesthesia from life rather than a tool for deepening it (Welwood, 2000).
Empirical confirmation came from Willoughby Britton's research. Her "Dark Night" project and the subsequent publication in PLOS ONE (Lindahl et al., 2017) documented cases in which intensive meditation without psychological preparation led to dissociation, depersonalization, and prolonged crises. Ego dissolution without integration is trauma, not liberation.
IV. The Shadow: The Real Source of the Problem
A "bad" ego is an ego that does not know its own shadow.
Suppressed envy, hidden aggression, unacknowledged fear — all of this is material locked in the basement, which forces the ego to defend itself, grasp, and build walls. It is precisely this defensive configuration that spiritual traditions mistakenly take for the very nature of the ego. They see the walls and conclude that the walls are the structure. But the structure is the whole building — the walls are merely a protective shell grown from fear.
Jung described the process of individuation as a gradual expansion of the ego: as the shadow, the anima, and the archetypes are integrated, the ego does not disappear — it becomes more spacious. It learns to say: "I am more than I thought" (Jung, 1951).
Jungian shadow work is not a preliminary stage before "real" spirituality. It is spirituality in its most honest form. Encountering what you have been turning away from for decades requires more courage than any Vipassana retreat.
Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, already distinguished in the mid-twentieth century between the "personal I" (ego) and the "Higher Self" (the spiritual dimension) — and built his therapy on their integration. Psychosynthesis proposed expansion: including spiritual experience within the structure of the personality, rather than dismantling the personality for the sake of spiritual experience (Assagioli, 1965).
V. What Must Die and What Must Be Kept
When mystical traditions speak of the "death of the ego," they err in their formulation — not in their intuition.
The ego as a tool — the capacity to remember, to plan, to take responsibility, to build relationships — does not need to be killed. The ego as a prison — the set of frozen defense mechanisms, fears, and masks mistaken for one's own face — truly must die. The difference is enormous. In the first case, you lose the ability to function. In the second, you stop confusing your walls with yourself.
The goal is transparency. An ego that fulfills its functions (memory, planning, responsibility, relationships) while remaining permeable to an awareness that is wider than it. You use the ego as a tool, without forgetting that you are more than the tool.
The mature spiritual path begins with a dialogue between two levels. The ego says: "I am here, I feel pain, I want, I am afraid." Spirit replies: "I see this, I am with you, none of these waves is entirely me." Conscious coexistence.
VI. What This Looks Like in Life
A person with an integrated spirit and a healthy ego looks surprisingly ordinary. They pay taxes and notice the sunset. They feel anger and observe their anger without drama. They make plans without clinging to them as a condition of their happiness. They can be fully here — in conversation, in work, in the body — while never losing the sense of something larger through which all of this occurs.
Integration is a technical skill. It requires working on both levels simultaneously.
Ego work: Keep a self-observation journal — living, honest, recording what you avoided, where you lied to yourself, what you suppressed. This is shadow work. Undergo psychotherapy before flying off to a Vipassana retreat or a monastery. Without a worked-through ego, deep practices easily become spiritual bypassing. Notice the moments when you explain your reactions through "energies" and "karma" instead of simply saying "I am angry" or "I am afraid."
Spirit work: Practice observation meditation — to train the witness position, not to destroy what is being observed. At any moment, ask: who is experiencing this right now? Not for the sake of an answer — but for the sake of the gap between experience and experiencer. Return to the body. Breath, movement, sensation. Spirit is lived through the body.
Honesty check: If your practice is making you less capable of relationships, work, and conflict — it is regression. The "and/and" principle: notice the sunset and pay your taxes; meditate and get angry at traffic. Once a month, ask yourself: am I using spirituality to escape something?
Only by refusing the false dichotomy does this path open. Form permeated by emptiness. Ego transparent to spirit. Life lived with open eyes on both levels at once.
Ayobowan.
References
Freud, S. (1923). Das Ich und das Es. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Jung, C.G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9ii.
Wilber, K. (1980). The Pre/Trans Fallacy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 20(4), 5–43.
Engler, J. (1984). Therapeutic Aims in Psychotherapy and Meditation. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16(1), 25–61.
Welwood, J. (2000). Toward a Psychology of Awakening. Shambhala Publications.
Assagioli, R. (1965). Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques. Hobbs, Dorman & Co.
Lindahl, J.R., Fisher, N.E., Cooper, D.J., Rosen, R.K., & Britton, W.B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience. PLOS ONE, 12(5), e0176239.