Been working with my ego for about 1 year now.
My mental coach told me to ask people I know what ego means to them. Because it’s such a vague term. What does it actually mean? I asked some people that I know, but then I realized this is an excellent question for the forum.
So I was wondering, what does ego mean to you and how do you work with it?
Identity
Great question.
Recently I heard a very good answer to this which I find practical. Which is that Ego is the part of your mind that keeps you safe.
When we want to get out the comfort zone, ego will tell us “nah. It’s comfortable over here. It’s safe”. Whether it be doing something dangerous to improve ourselves (like taking up boxing) or challenging a faulty belief (like rich people are evil), our ego feels offended when our conscious mind offers it such options.
To get over our ego and do things to be successful, sometimes we can do it by brute forcing (like stopping smoking cold turkey, Thanksgiving pun intended) or by sneaking in things into our subconcious (like subliminals). When we are able to do this, our ego is more pacified and thinks “Oh that wasn’t so hard. It didn’t kill me. We can do this”. And hence grows smaller.
Which is why people who self-improve have smaller egos since they have allowed themselves to change their minds and know they can be wrong.
This sounds like the definition of the “subconscious mind”. What is, then, the difference between the subconscious mind and the “Ego”?
Subconcious mind is pure power. It does whatever it is programmed to do. It doesn’t care whether it is dangerous or safe to do something, it will execute the orders it has. It isn’t discerning of the instructions and doesn’t evaluate them. Which is why we have to be careful what we feed it.
To further differentiate:
Subconcious mind:
Concious mind:
Ego:
So far I reckon Ego is the flesh/body, Intuition the soul/spirit.
When I’m sober/neutral I hear them both fighting for control and superiority. For instance when I’m drunk my ego tells my intuition to get lost, when I smoke weed my intuition tells my ego to calm the F down.
I’m still digging and searching
Edit: A Lil Wayne quote “The devil on my shoulder, the Lord is my witness”
To me ego used to be the part of me that made it hard to progress, it was the confort, the identity that refused to nudge or made me think that I was being harmed somehow
Now to me ego is the identity that I’m perfecting at this precise moment, it’s what I’m shaping to my will, neither bad or good
I am working in tandem with it
With me
Also how to define something that has no edge no angle, no shape
Never the same things twice
It is what you make of it
Unless your unaware of yourself
Ego is bascically the thought “Me” as opposed to “not me”
Gradually through the years it becomes crystalized into the body.
So that even if you have glipses of insight into “no self/no ego” seldom you are completely free from it.
It keeps running for a while (days, months, years…) like a car running at high speed and suddenly for a few moments the engine is switched off.
In truth, there’s no indipendent entity, ego, it’s just an illusion, a thought that keeps reinforcing itself.
BTW. Ego in asian cultures is quite different than wester ones, the above it’s more toward east
Related to the above:
Is it even possible to completely eliminate the Ego from your psyche?
No, cause it’s an illusion. You can’t eliminate an illusion, you simply recognize (completely, crystal clear, 24/7… lol) it is
My ego can sometimes be ‘gangster’ lol, guess I’m stuck with it for now. 
The one saying “my ego” is the ego 
Lol I hear you, I have to stop thinking this way thx 
Recognition is enough, but it has to be clear, without any doubt (because again there’s no independent self that starts/stops thinking 
)
I’ll be that guy this time, since no one else has said it yet.
Ego is an actual term with a history. It’s not just about what it means to me.
The word actually objectively has a set of usages and contexts associated with it.
Etymologically, the term literally means ‘the I’.
One of those who most popularized the term in modern times was Sigmund Freud, creator of psychoanalysis and forefather of modern psychotherapy. In Freud’s theory of mental structure, the mind had three parts (or more precisely, it had three ‘functional domains’): Id, Ego, and Superego. The Id was that repository of primal drives and unregulated root instincts that fuels our passion for life and living. The Superego was the moral and societal function; the internalizations of the rules, ethics, and standards of the larger group. The Ego was that mental principle of conscious perceiving and decision-making that had the desperate task of reconciling the tension between those two extremes. Pleasure or Propriety??!!! Which do I choose?!!!
In Buddhism, Ego refers to the object and focus of the Buddhist’s main project. It is a falsely-concretized sense of permanent, separate subject-position. According to Buddha dharma (or Buddhist phenomenological principles), our sense of the permanence and separateness of this point-of-view that we call ‘I’ is what causes the greatest amount of suffering in life. If we can learn to accept the dynamic and ultimately transitory nature of this seemingly permanent "I’, we relate to the flow of life in a much more skillful manner. Hard to do though, because our instincts and programming tell us to pretend its permanent as if our lives depended on it. So they come up with all kinds of ways to loosen up that Programmed Desperation of the Permanent Ego.
So, in that regard, Ego is basically ‘the self’ and ‘the sense of self’.
In common, colloquial usage, the way most people use the word ‘ego’ would be better expressed as ‘self-importance’ or ‘aggrandized ego’. But usually people drop the ‘aggrandized’ and just say ‘ego’ for short.
In my opinion, ‘ego’ is actually not a vague term. It’s just that people tend to use it vaguely.
It’s the people who are vague, not the term.
This little joint is called a Theodolite.
It’s a piece of surveying equipment used to measure the horizontal and vertical angles between points (thanks, Google).
If you give me that tool and tell me to use it, I’m going to use it extremely vaguely. Because I don’t know how the hell it works. Barely knew the name until I looked it up just now.
A surveyor, on the other hand, is going to be quite precise and straight-forward in how she uses it.
It’s not the tool that’s vague here; it’s me. 
Everything is interdependent (Interdependent Origination), including thoughts, emotions, body sensations that are usually assumed to be I, the self, separate from the world and others.
“That’s what S/He said.”
