How to escape from ego?

Your thoughts are so chained to your ego that it is difficult for them to escape for long.

But are you ever melancholy when creating imaginatively a scene in a book? 

Could you be melancholy when figuring out the polar elevation of a planet―or computing one of those converse primary directions?  

I see you smile. 

When you are engaged with figures you forget yourself. 

Now take my advice. 

When auto-suggestion is powerless to conquer melancholy, draw up an astrological figure at a low altitude with that table of oblique ascensions that I saw you using yesterday, and work out the converse primaries and the longitude of Vulcan. 

―The Judge [Last Letters from a Living Dead Man]