U01:20 - Meaning of Life-6 Ego & IdentificationBicameral Mind and the legislation of Eckhart Tolle,

6. EGO & IDENTIFICATION
Therefore the Human Being has developed a false self called the ego (and the super-ego), and because of the essence of that ego's own falsehood and its ultimate void, it is required to acquire its identity in the world of matter, in both external forms and internals forms such as thought and belief.

There's a theory concerning the Bicameral Mind which posits that at an earlier point of the human being's evolution, the two hemispheres of the brain were separate. There was the god-half and the self-half. And the god spoke to the self in hallucinatory myths. And thus was born the world of the gods.

But in time, because of stressful experience, or maybe because of knowledge and written communication, which can be stressful in and of itself, the two minds converged, and the gods left, leaving the human being alone in its world of thought. And thus was born the self as it is in thought, unconscious identification with the mind, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, or what we now call the ego. Alone and alienated from all the gods and the essence of life.

Not knowing that it was connected to the godhead itself, that it was one with universal spirit of consciousness, it turned to the world of matter. So theory or not, the ego is the self created in thought, disconnected from the life source, believing in the world of matter as its new source, connecting to forms, be they external things or internal thoughts, for identification, meaning, and what it mistakenly thinks of as its life.