Is the ego all bad?

A lot of people on the spiritual path experience a certain level of confusion when it comes to our egos. Can we keep any part of our ego if we embark on our path? Or does it all have to be sacrificed? Here is one answer I gave in response to a related question. Posted with thanks to the student for the question:

Question: Toby, I’d like to ask if you can please help me clarify two things: - Is the ego all bad? We talk about negative ego, is there a positive ego?

Answer: No, the ego is not all bad. When we talk of the ego, what we are referring to is the sum total of our thoughts (mental body), feelings (emotional body), sub-conscious mind, conscious mind and physical body. The ego is the sum total of ourselves that functions in daily life, that thinks, feels, talks, acts and so on...

From this definition we can see that the term 'ego' is a neutral term that is used to refer to ourselves as a personality in daily life. On the path of integrated mastery we are not trying to destroy our ego, we are simply trying to;
1) Recognize the aspects of our ego that are good and positive, and to strengthen and preserve them.
2) Recognize the aspects of our ego that are negative or unwholesome and destroy, reprogram, heal and re-work these parts of our ego into positive or spiritualized habits and energies.
By engaging in this process over time we build a 'positive ego'. By this I mean a personality within self that is deeply happy and harmonious and that thinks, feels, speaks and acts in an altogether positive way that is in harmony with our true spiritual being.

The 'negative ego' is a term that is used to describe all of the negative or dysfunctional aspects of our ego. In the category of the negative ego is placed all of our fear-based thinking and feeling, all delusion, all separation consciousness, all selfish egotism, all imbalanced thinking. The negative ego is 'all bad' in the sense that it is all the energy, habits, feelings and perceptions presently in our consciousness that definitely needs to be overcome, re-worked, healed, re-programmed and spiritualized in order to find our inner peace and to make progress on the path of integrated mastery.
The negative ego in the I AM University teachings is set up in 'opposition' to 'Christ consciousness', which is basically the process of learning to think, feel and act from our positive spiritual or Christed mind (the Christ here referring to the original pattern or blueprint for our consciousness that was conceived during its creation in the spiritual realms) . You can read more about the negative ego and Christ consciousness here:

So, in conclusion, the ego is not all bad, it simply refers to the sum total of our self as a personality on earth. On the spiritual path / the path of Integrated Mastery we are not trying to destroy our ego, we are trying to re-work it into a positive, harmonious, balanced organism. In order to do this we do have to overcome our 'negative ego' which is our fear based and separative thinking.

This is an important point to be clear about because there are many spiritual practitioners who labor under the misconception that all ego is bad, and that anything to do with our ego we should avoid at all costs. This attitude in itself leads to a host of imbalances and fragmentation!