This idea may be harder to grasp for those unfamiliar with the concept of "emptiness."
But I think about it more and more often. I found it in Robert Burbea's book Seeing that frees.
Here it is: what we call the ego is not a fixed property of a person.
Throughout a lifetime, a week, a day, the ego moves along a spectrum: it manifests more strongly or almost completely disappears depending on the situation.
What governs these variations?
As always: attachment.
When I want or refuse something, when I harbor desire or aversion for an object, that object and my ego appear at the same time. Buddhists call this "dependent arising."
The moment before, I might be in the flow of the present, moving freely from sensation to sensation with complete lightness: no center, no subject, no ego. I'm floating.
Then I attach to a thought. Suddenly, I want, I refuse, I ruminate. The ego is nothing other than this relationship that has just been created between this idea of myself (which was nowhere to be found the second before) and the idea of this object (which doesn't really exist).
Far from being a flaw, the ego is therefore a relationship.
A relationship between two objects that we choose to create ourselves.
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