What the ego is is not ownership or identification but responsibility, culpability. Isn't this clear even in the Biblical story of the Fall? That it was the tree of Knowledge, of a certain kind of knowledge, is not as material as the fact that it was a forbidden tree and the act of eating from it a disobedience. Eating of it was a breaking of faith with their Maker, and if the result was a feeling of shame this was not about their nakedness, but shame at their act which caused them to see themselves in a new way, as guilty of a trespass. So that this guilt became attached to themselves and to their sense of being together. It is only in retrospect that the knowledge is called of good and evil - it was the trespass that brought those concepts into being. What each of them saw in the other was a reflection of the act. That their own experience belonged to them and was private, that there was an I, me, mine, was simply a fact of nature and no cause for shame. The true mystery, in so far as the Fall can be taken to be a symbol of the involution of consciousness, is the origin of shame, guilt and responsibility, and more than this of the peculiar fashion in which they proliferate within the psyche. How could that phenomenon arise out of primal innocence and be the seed of humanisation? As if God is brought in ex machina to try to explain this strange fact.