EGO

When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head….This is the ego, a mind-made “me.” That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces. When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking…. Who you are is not the voice – the thinker – but the one who is aware of it.

–Eckhart Tolle