If you have to have it, it's ego. If you have to not have it, it's ego. Hold life lightly and it will deliver what you need and release what you don't.
"Understand the process of the ego. How does the ego live? The ego lives in the tension between what you are and what you want to be. A wants to be B - the ego is created out of this very tension. How does the ego die? The ego dies by you accepting what you are. That you say, "I am fine as I am, where I am is good. I will remain just as existence keeps me. Its will is my will."
This one life has no form and is empty by nature. If you become attached by any form, you should reject it. If you see an ego, a soul, a birth, or a death, reject them all.
We become forgetful of the ego when we think of the body as dedicated to the service of others - the body with which most complacently we identify the ego.
Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.
The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.