At the same time, balance is a dynamic concept. There are types of balances, and the EXACT way you need to balance will always vary moment to moment, and people that are clumsy will fail to do it.
We all need an ego. We need healthy self respect. We need to have some sense of who we are, what we are capable of. We need to have a history and at least a plan for the future. We need to be located in time and space in some respect, even if not ROOTED in time and space.
I see so much silliness going on in the name of egolessness. Most often, it seems to be used to avoid personal responsibility, to avoid hard decisions, as a support for the basic idea that we are all just happy brothers and sisters on this pastoral and peaceful Earth, and that only people who feel the need to defend themselves from the predations of others cause actual violence. For example: such people gladly suffer the comforting lie that Communism was something other than a creed advanced by violence and subterfuge which appealed to and attracted the most mentally ill and power mongering wherever it went, and that it had and has as a goal the complete enslavement of the human race in a permanent regime of terror, despair, loneliness, cultural destruction, and impoverishment.
Look at history. You don’t need to go more than 50 years back. 1965 Cuban terrorists were shooting in the head or locking in little cages for months people who refused to cooperate. Vietnamese Communists were strapping explosives to the backs of 10 year old girls and sending them as suicide bombs on bicycles to kill other children on the playground. They were mortaring nightly civilian areas, and assassinating every person in a position of any influence. In 1968 the Soviets invaded Czechoslavakia. In the mid-1970’s millions of Cambodian children, many under the age of 18, were strapping people who had been caught with a book or wearing glasses to tables, and torturing them to death with electrodes, and doing this multiple times a day. Perhaps a third of the overall population was killed, all for nothing. That was 40 years ago.
To THIS VERY DAY you can be locked in one of those soft torture cells in Cuba for dissidence, or killed. TO THIS VERY DAY Islamists are decapitating Christians simply for being Christians, raping and enslaving their women and children, and continuing a path of conquest perfectly congruent with the original military conquests of the “great” Muhammad, who, too, loved treasure, sex slaves, the murder of innocents, and the destruction of entire civilizations.
What seems to be my task, and it is a difficult and unpleasant, but necessary task, is to square being open hearted and relaxed, with a very deep awareness of the human capacity for evil. I need to both be clear eyed and forgetful. Every moment I am not molested or hurt, or anyone I care about, I should relish and be grateful and enjoy myself. But I need to recall without fear what sort of world this is.