Ego stands in direct opposition with Saint and God. It fills intellect with feeling of self-pride and thus makes it more closed to accepting dictates of saint, while it is only through following sayings of a saint that one can achieve the goal of divine happiness. One who has experience and reached the destination can only guide about the correct path and ego is in direct opposition to accept any guidelines from the saint.
Ego develops faith in wrong channel – intellect thinks that it can decide on each and every mater in the universe and it is superior to everyone including God and goes on defying Saint and his preaching. Ego tries to keep feeling of self-importance intact and the only way to show this is by not obeying saints terming them to be the persons of a blind belief!
At some point of time, when a lot of sufferings come in your way, one does take recourse to God and Saint. Once the troubling situation is over, again mind goes back to the square one.
To some extent, mind does accept Saint to be genuine but does not surrender to him completely. Not only that, ego in its efforts of gaining importance adopts the tactic of seeing faults even in Saint and God. Mind is fully aware that it does not have access to infinite happiness but tries to circumvent the situation by proving Saint to be problematic. The result is, it takes recourse to other material persons who are in search of same divine happiness but are not yet successful. It is something like ‘blind leading blind and both fall in a ditch.’ Problem of impurity of mind gets multiplied! Thus, the damage is complete.
Ego also makes you to commit many sins by not remaining open to pleas of others. Haughty behavior is insensitive to others’ problems and viewpoints. You will find history is full of atrocities made by rulers! It is but natural that any possession of power, wealth will assist ego to flourish. Therefore, it is necessary that ego is not allowed to rule the mind and decisions are be made by rational reasoning and by directives of saint.
The other side is – Tulsidas says ‘I have a pride (ego) that Ram is my Master and I am his slave’ That is, ego has enforced a correct decision in the mind. It is taking pride from the fact that it is related to Lord Ram. It is a pride arising out of Love. In a way the pride is for Ram.