One needs an ego to live. Sometimes I read some guru or cult leader who claims to be "beyond all ego," or to not have had a single thought in many years (that Byron Katie I wrote about yesterday actually claims so), I feel it is hogwash.
What we can be is not so attached to our ego, to the push and pull of our desires and drives, excesses and runaway destructive thoughts and emotions, so that our thoughts are moderate, balanced, like an ox well tamed. Or, a hamster well tamed.
We can also learn to see through our ego, and experience a reality free of an individual ego, a separate sense of self, and all the frictions and fears which a separate self creates between its ears when it bumps into the other seeming separate selves of the world, or fears for its own non-existence. The result is not nihilistic nothing, but a wholeness, fullness and flowing that sweeps in and through all separate things.
In fact, we can do all this at once, as one, as if encountering the world through two eyes which, both open, give perspective and clarity: A moderated self AND no self at once, each infusing and perfuming the other.
However, we need a self so long as we are human beings, and not trees or rocks.
Sorry to run long in my words.
Gassho, Jundo
STLah
PS - The Buddha and Dogen both got a lot done in their lives, building organizations, creating teachings, moving and shaking. They did a heck of a lot for folks without "thoughts and egos"