Best Friend and Worst Enemy

The ego, or individuated self-sense, is both your best friend and your worst enemy. It is your best friend because, in the most positive sense, it represents your capacity to individuate—to see yourself as a unique, autonomous entity and to bear witness to your own experience with some measure of objectivity. Individuation is what makes it possible for you to be a conscious agent of evolution, a vessel for Spirit in action. The more profound our individuation, the more powerfully Spirit can shine through us. However, ego is also our worst enemy. And this is because, for too many of us, over-identification with our separate individuality obscures the deeper and higher spiritual dimensions of our being. It is very important to understand this paradoxical nature of ego if you, as an individual, want to take responsibility for creating the future, as yourself.

~ Andrew Cohen