“A genuine spiritual path does not avoid difficulties or mistakes but leads us to the art of making mistakes wakefully, bringing them to the transformative power of our heart.” –Jack Kornfield
Your ego is an instrument, a tool, the primitive leveraging mechanism of the self. Some would even say it is the self. It is there to balance (master) or dissociate (disaster) our unique energy with the primordial energy of the cosmos. It is forever in the throes of connection and disconnection, of attachment and detachment, torn between finitude and infinity. When the ego is being used to dissociate, its energy is codependent and it is torn between bemoaning the past and being anxious about the future.