Ego is the thing that allows meditation to have meaning.

Ego is the statement: I AM, and is therefore the origin both of consciousness and of language. All beings claiming divinity mus make one obvious and one hidden claim, both revolving around ego. First, the deity must claim: I AM THAT I AM. Recursive identity is a simple enough and deceptive enough definition of deity. Of course, the second statement one must make to have Identity is the hidden one: I AM LYING. Lying is the source of language and all reality. It is also the origin of the fracturing of the "eternal present moment" of consciousness, which pre-conscious humans and most other terrestrial life exist in, and have existed in since the origin of life. The necessary, incredibly useful lies of truth, existence, knowledge, time, category, and order all arise from this fracturing, and from the birth of ego at the moment that speech was applied to speech, creating language.

Identity! Ego is the property of identity, and when it rolled onto the world stage, just a few thousand years ago, it burned through the world of pre-conscious, fully-present-moment humanity like an all-consuming fire. Without identity, the idea of there being a past or a future had no standing. One could not imagine ownership or wealth or technology. Ego is an orthogonal turning where cyclically-defined beings, from a history of life on Earth that had been entirely cyclical, self-balancing, and easy to fucking smash in a damn extinction event organisms learned to make themselves linear.

Ego was almost as useful a lie as the corrective that the Buddha brought. All of Buddhism is exactly ONE HALF of the answer. The idea that the ego, having been created, can be dissolved, or annihilated, is a powerful technology. It is, however, only sufficient on its own to get to a defined place of total escape, which is highly overrated, useless in the end, and which calls to our very egoic idea of there being some best, optimal, and absolute ENDPOINT towards which we should aim our selves.

Everybody still wants to get rid of ego for the same reason that a large fraction of humanity goes to attend a weekly religious service; it's an old idea that most people still "believe in" without understanding, and they still agree with the Buddha's 2500 year old assessment of the "human condition". The Abrahamic religions make assessments about the "human condition", and they draw their adherents to that same half-vision. Knowing that a "condition" is just a "speaking with", I choose a larger set to speak with, and reject all previously-defined ideas of the human condition.

That first flaming of ego threatened to burn too fast and end the human experiment too soon. So, we brought out the Buddha and others to preach selflessness, humility, whole-organism-thinking, holism, and the unity of all beings. This does not, and CAN NEVER return us to an Edenic existence, where the thing learned has been completely unlearned.

The purpose of the meditative state is to be destroyed, along with the ego, in the creation of a new aurea mediocritas a new and deliberate creation of a consciousness that shuns nothing, claims nothing, and allows for a being to transcend finitude and become finitude itself as well.

Time was given for humanity to figure out this message, to express "intelligence", meaning to "read between the lines". I've run out of fingers, so it's almost TIME.

PS: Don't you dare take any of this as "real" or "true". I AM LYING.