Ego trip

It's very common in spiritual writings to find the nostrum that the ego must be destroyed. This is a corrective to the social norms that preserve people's limited sense of self and keep them locked in patterns based on fear that they will lose that equilibrium of knowing who they are. But I find the idea of getting rid of this thing called the ego a bit questionable. What is the I, after all, but a very thin, single letter. Maybe we all tend to inflate it up a bit more than we should, but is it really necessary to destroy it? Oh, we'll die and be reborn all right, several times while in this body if we're living right, but it will be found that despite all that, this slim little letter endures. Why can't we get rid of it, even in our more exalted spiritual states (which unaccountably seem to inflate it in their own subtle way)? Because the I is inseparable from our consciousness and our experiencing apparatus as human beings. It is the point of reference from which it all starts here on this earth. So I think I'll keep that ego for a bit longer, thank you. After all, if it's so bad that everyone wants to destroy it, it must have something going for it.