You could say that there would be no enemies at all without ego.
First, a clarification: Ego isn’t only an over-inflated opinion of oneself. It’s the story that everyone carries around about who they are, what they stand for, what they like and dislike, their aspirations, how they relate to everyone else…like a private Facebook page for your own personal consumption.
People tend to invest a lot in this story. It gives a sense of how you fit into the world, what’s important, and where you’re heading. People come to rely on their story as a kind of map or guidebook. It has some limited usefulness in this way.
But the universe really doesn’t care about your story. Reality unfolds in its own way, unconcerned with how you’ve mapped things out. We constantly find that our story is at odds with reality. When that happens, we’re more likely to find fault with reality than with our story, because we have so much riding on the accuracy of our story. So we overlook or discount evidence that conflicts with the story, or struggle to bring reality in line with the story.
That makes life harder than it needs to be. This over-investment in the story creates enemies: aspects of reality that threaten the precious coherence of the story. Change—an inevitable aspect of reality—becomes an enemy, because it constantly erodes the accuracy of your story. Your story often comes into conflict with the stories of others, and that too creates enemies.
You can’t really live a life of active engagement in the world without an ego. The story has some use. But things become a lot easier when you remember that your story is just a story, not reality itself. When conflicts between the story and reality arise, as they must, you can then more easily let go of the story, or update it, without so much agonizing. You may even ind that you can occasionally set the story aside entirely, if only for a moment. “Enemies” stop feeling like enemies.