Ego means I.
In ego-death (what would really be called ego-immersion, zen is the best though) you are the only thing that exists in that moment. People use it to describe many various states of mind, be it a flow or a breakthrough. The one state I consider authentic is total isolation from your surroundings. The reason there seems to be no 'I' in total isolation is that there is nothing else to compare the 'I' to. When it is the only thing around it seems like you went away and now the experience is everything, infinite energy, ultimate truth. But it only needs to be your consciousness, it does not require the universe revealing its own consciousness. Obviously, if that happened other people would have been involved.
The term ego-death comes out of the confusion over what you were experiencing. It is dumbfounding, for sure, so confusion is very justified, but ego-immersion would make more sense as a term. "Ego-death" is just additional noise to an already perplexing mythos.
When you boil down the term ego-death, it should mean that you are not experiencing a state. How to describe the experience you experience when you do not exist? How about, idiotic? Hold on, I am not disenfranchising you from your experience, but stop and think about it for two full minutes. The universe did not open up and become you, you just had a personal experience and the universe went right on being a bunch of rocks, with speed limit signs (3x10^?), while you laid comatose on whatever rock you happened to lay on.
From that state: enlightenment, satori, religious experience, a mental hole-in-one; whatever term you use, if you were to lose the "I" at that time then you would be "not" experiencing. You would be the void, dead, sleeping, not experiencing a thing.
The "awakening" is what happens afterward. You wake back up from this ego-immersion/zen-understanding/strike-on-the-head and then you feel like a being reborn; your past affiliations, memory of who you are and what you own disappear, previous judgements (not necessarily wrong judgements) about the world die, a part of you wilts like a flower, everything is anew with first impressions; instead of trusting your established concrete reality, everything is now a discovery, your previous conceptions of things go out the window. To sum it all up, being "open-minded".
Personally, I think people can be open-minded many ways, furthermore achieving the state is more to do with deliriously thinking you achieved it more than anything.
There are different levels of this ego-immersion but no upper or lower limit, it just loops in an unbroken continuum, so you see there is no hard-set definition for any term. Your ego-immersion is happening right now; you are default set near the useful ("seeing" why "things" happen) end of the spectrum. You have a white out on the opposite end of the spectrum from where we normally are.
Ultimately, you want to achieve that state of mind, but you need to "work" also.
I understand the compulsion to experience it, but the "release from desire" is just what this means. I saw "enlightenment" and, understanding it, I have no desire to see it again. No desire to be "reborn" I have "transcended" from the "cycle" and now see the "ultimate truth", that is that, we must remain open-minded and grounded in reality. The whole thing gets blown way out of proportion.
That is pretty much it, the rest is just confusion over the matter and metaphysical (make-believe) thinking: saw God, the universe spoke to me, saw the light at the end of the tunnel, got a new soul, the wizard teleported me to a nearly identical reality, etc.
There is no problem with any of that, it all falls under the guise of reality. I just want to ease your burden and vexation. The text on your screen is reality. Hello. The complete, internal vs external, alpha and omega, what is this reality thing? Ding! The answer is in all combinations of all that is around you/inside you (us); you have made it ((confetti)) ((trumpets)). It is not like there are different answers to life. There is one. Reality is not knowledge. Your imagination and reality are not synonymous, your imagination is extremely powerful, to you. Being a part of reality.
There is NO NEED for expensive terms. You can describe things using common words everyone understands. Andy Warhol put a toilet on the wall. The simplicity of understanding sometimes eludes the mind.
(read: toa te ching)
Sorry for the smothering!
The problem is like this: You can see a shadow on the side of the crescent moon. This shadow is an imperfection. It cannot be avoided unless the moon and sun are perfectly aligned.
When you do this, then you have a lunar eclipse and you do not see the moon at all!
This is the problem of the enlightened mind seeing reality. The moon is perfect, but as you approach seeing it, you do not actually get closer to seeing it!
i like to think that's what happens when our physical bodies stop interpreting sensory data and we no longer form our reality through perception.