It's good to be honest about the ego.

I've found that approximately 100% of those who work in 'spiritual enterprises' and try to instruct about the virtues of ego-less living are themselves constructing really entrenched ego-identities which rest on 'being the person who instructs others about being ego-less' - it's a very sad thing.

One friend of mine told me about a yoga retreat he went on abroad (you know the type of thing, woman in her 40s with a bit of cash that sets up in Greece) - the introduce yourself dinner consisted of everyone introducing themselves with the host spending apparently 40 minutes outlining her 'spiritual credentials'.

With that kind of introduction you're guaranteed to have several days of your host 'acting out a spiritual role' and all you can do with that is grit your teeth and practice your patience, in which case you may as well go and spend a long weekend hanging out with a bunch of white racists or some other classically detestable group and really challenge yourself. You'd learn more.

If I exclude a lot of people I've met through Zen then I've only met a handful of people in my life who I think are on the path to egolessness - two tai chi teachers, one monk, another a cleaner. The later was a better teacher (in the sense of being a 'model') than the monk, not that she'd realise it or accept it if you told her.

The two Tai Chi teachers were really just ordinary blokes, until you got to know them. They didn't advertise their classes as 'anything special' - they were just open and made everyone practice the basics over and over and over again.

I don't claim to be ego-less, I'm a long way off moving beyond it, maybe one day!