The ego is the illusion that everything else is in the image of the self —Nature
A famous philosopher once defined the the fundamental drive in life: not merely crude domination, but the force toward growth, overcoming, creativity, and the expansion or enhancement of one’s strength or influence. This philosopher, on another occasion, destroyed an Occident (western) tradition that lasted 2600 years, that is the belief in metaphysics.
Those erroneous articles of faith which were successively transmitted by inheritance, and have finally become almost the property and stock of the human species, are, for example, the following:—that there are enduring things, that there are equal things, that there are things, substances, and bodies, that a thing is what it appears, that our will is free, that what is good for me is also good absolutely. —Nietzsche
The Gay Science (1887)
For Schopenhauer the Will is the blind, metaphysical thing-in-itself whose ceaseless striving is the source of suffering and so must be denied or quieted; (Schopenhauer draws heavily on Indian thought, especially the Upanishads and Buddhism) for Nietzsche the will (recast as the will to power) is an immanent, creative drive toward growth, self-overcoming, and value-creation.
Anima Naturae
We can relate the will to the ego – that thing that can only see everything else in its form, for the sake of its own survival. We can try to think about an alternative for the human-centered / ego centered upper principle, (will to) power. We can think about an ultimate principle that is paramount of life, growth, symbiosis, exchange of intelligence in nature, we can call this Biocentric Principle, Anima Naturae, the animated life.
An extension of our will to express power would be to be able to open up to receive power, instead of seeing the world as our extension, we can see ourselves as the extension of the world. At the same time, the power of intelligence should not be underestimated and what we can do with our capabilities as humans in the universe should not be underestimated. The next phase would be to stop about consciousness and intelligence as target/object-oriented-devices and more of something the makes us part of the world that has a side effect. The side effect is programmed for survival : intelligence and the ego, when we learn to temporary tune down that very active part of our consciousness we open up and are exposed to the oceanic stream of the universe.
The self is the repetitive act of tacitly presuming otherness
Identity emerges in repeated, often unconscious practices that require and rely on some form of alterity. You become an “I” only in relation to what is not-I — in mirrored responses, social recognition, language, and habitual behavior.
What, then, is truth? — A movable host of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people. —
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 1873.