The "ego" - in the negative sense- is that ossified sense of a stable, unchanging 'self' which people use as a defense against the Fear of Change and Death. It's SELF as a suit of armor; protective or comforting at times SELF doesn't allow much room to maneuver, make effective contact or adapt to new situations. Otherwise, the Ego, with a big 'E' can be a useful tool like everything else lying around here. Ego creates the heroic drive towards the Transcendence which CONSUMES AND RESOLVES that drive into a higher context.

It must be remembered that you can't go beyond ego until you've developed on to go beyond. The ego, as Individual Self, is scaffolding for what we can call superself or the memeplex (to use Susan Blackmore's revolutionary theory). Scaffolding is a necessary part of many construction project but for the last couple of hundred yeras we've been encouraged to mistake the scaffolding for the building. The individual sovereign self once seemed such a developmental prize that it's now very difficult to let go of it without incurring amusing existential extinction traumas, but like all other stages of growth it IS just a stage and must be surpassed.

Demoting the concept of the 'individual' by deliberately engineering multiple, conferring 'egos', personae, memeplexes or selves is intended, at least by me, as a method if breaking up the existential, calcified, individual 'Self' into more fluid Multiple Personality constellations, by exposing 'the personality' as just one behavioral option from a menu of many.