What is Consciousness vs Ego

Question

I am trying to understand it, here is my take on the matter:

The consciousness is individual, and each of us has a consciousness and an ego. Our ego is what we rely on to guide our consciousness in this world, ego is our wants and needs, and the ego is a side product of everything that makes us happy, food water, sugar, and addiction, everything we showed it. The ego doesn't demonstrate who we are, the ego can be wrong, we have the power to control and change the ego, to make it aligned with our consciousness, to make it what we want it to be, not what it wants us to be. But people are a slave to the ego, it controls them and only wants pleasure, joy, addiction. While the consciousness only wants love.

Answer 1

Wehn you say each of us has an ego and a consciousness you are positing what many philosphers call 'the heart' that uniqueness of each of us that is 'behind' mind and will.

You say ego controls but it is your ego, you have access to truth and conscience and that is higher than all egos. And you say consciousness wants love but it is your consciousness.

The best I can make of what you think is that you are talking about what spiritual writers call the True Self and the False Self.

MErton says 2 things that might help clarify

1) All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface

2) But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.

Answer 2

Wehn you say each of us has an ego and a consciousness you are positing what many philosphers call 'the heart' that uniqueness of each of us that is 'behind' mind and will.

You say ego controls but it is your ego, you have access to truth and conscience and that is higher than all egos. And you say consciousness wants love but it is your consciousness.

The best I can make of what you think is that you are talking about what spiritual writers call the True Self and the False Self.

MErton says 2 things that might help clarify

1) All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface

2) But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.