Tom: Yes, ego-mind-thought must die for realisation to occur. Those who are still attached to the body-mind-world and still take themselves to be the body say otherwise.
Ego is ignorance. Ego is duality. It is the ego that creates/projects the body-mind and world, like in a dream. When ego goes, everything goes, and all that remains is the Self. It cannot be put into words or understood by the mind. In truth ego never existed at all.
Objections to this such as ‘how does the sage function without ego’ only occur in ignorance of taking the sage to be the body and in the presense of ego-ignorance seeing body-mind-world.
The paradox of this cannot be explained in words, but when the mind becomes so completely and utterly still so that time and space and personhood all cease to exist, this ‘Self’ is somehow ‘known without knowing’.
Tom Das 
Nissargadata mentioned a “rudimentary” ego i.e. a basic notion of answering/filling in tax returns under a particular name and this and perhaps other refs. have given rise to notions such as “the ego has been given a bad rap”. It seems more like a defect in out vocabulary where there isn’t a distinct name for this rudimentary “ego”. Eckhart Tolle seems to have addressed this with his definition (like yours) of the ego as a “mind made fictional self”.
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