Don't Eat the Ego
The need for ego is built into the very architecture of human being.
Many spiritual teachings imply that suffering would disappear if the self disappeared. But evolution suggests something different. The self-model did not evolve because it creates suffering. It evolved because organisms without one could not survive. Immediately after birth, the process of creating a self begins and this is inevitable for every child unless they are ill. Suffering is not produced by the mere existence of the self. It is produced because a finite self-maintaining organism inevitably encounters threats, uncertainty, loss, and ultimately death.
In fact, we could invert the usual spiritual narrative.The self is not the cause of suffering. The self is evolution's solution to the problem of surviving long enough to reproduce. Suffering is one of the mechanisms and costs if you lkie of that solution. Therefore the self cannot and should not be destroyed. It should be understood. It should become educated and then more accurate, more flexible, less dominated by rigid narratives and unrealistic predictions. Not because the self is false but because the self is an adaptive model that can model itself. Metaphorically, it's evolutionary AI modeling itself.
That is a much more naturalistic and biologically coherent picture than speaking about "killing the ego." The deepest insight is not that there is no self. It is that the self is an ongoing process of biological self-maintenance, continually revised through interaction with the world. Recognizing its processual nature can reduce identification with any one passing story about ourselves, but it does not abolish the need for a self-model. That need is built into the very architecture of living systems.
