When masters speak of killing the ego, they are not speaking of the archetypal ego, which is the centre of your conscious mind. Your ego keeps you alive and driven – to kill it would be silly. To do such a thing would result in you going backwards in consciousness and receding into an animal mind. What they are referring to “killing the ego” is not holding a fixed perception in order to enter into the flow state. The ego is likened to a rough diamond, that through pressure is compressed and refined into a glorious diamond able to reflect the highest light without being crushed by it.
Killing the ego is the biggest ego trip yet, and it causes you to hate yourself. Anything that we reject and repress in ourselves is projected outwardly as the Shadow. People who tell you “your Ego needs to be put aside” or that “you’re so full of ego, whatta head!” are projecting their shadow onto you. That which isn’t a part of us doesn’t affect us. The idea is to transmute the Shadow, not kill the conscious mind, and inevitably become nothing more than Shadow. Your shadow is how you are controlled. This is why this philopshy about killing the ego has become centre stage in fictitious spiritual ideologies.
Your ego is special and is the lens of your consciousness. It assimilates shadow and becomes humble. It doesn’t try to kill itself. That is absolutely ridiculous and a sure way to create a pure shadow being. The true self is a universal centre. A bridge between the collective unconscious and the conscious, it acts as a feed loop between the collective field and the individual awareness. In no way does it seek to destroy either the ego nor shadow, but mediates through pure awareness free of fixed perception/projection and is only fully realised in the flow state.
