In, I believe, 2006, I attended a
retreat co-led by one of my teachers at the time, Dorothy Hunt.
Dorothy said something that I wanted to have been the one to have
said. What did it matter who said it, as long as the wisdom was
imparted? Nonetheless, I wanted
to be the one who got credit – because I'd been thinking it as well
but no one called on me.
After
the retreat was over, we were all enjoying lunch, and I was telling
someone sitting across from me about how I wanted to get credit for
being wise and enlightened – how my ego craved that. Dorothy, to my
surprise, responded from the other end of the long table, “You did
say it.” I looked over at her, puzzled. “You did
say it,” she repeated.
And
suddenly, I was bowled over with the truth of what she said. It took
a year or so before I understood in words what I had realized in my
body: I am everything,
so of course I am also what comes out of Dorothy's mouth.
I was
recently re-telling this story to someone who hadn't heard it, and
this caused me to consider it from another vantage point. For one
thing, it was a miracle that Dorothy was so attuned to me that she
knew exactly what was the right thing to say to me at that moment.
But I also see now that her statement undercut my assumptions about
ego. I've always thought ego – the wanting to make the personal
self bigger and more important – was to be admonished and kept
under control, if not eliminated. But now I see that ego is a
pointer: we really are
bigger than our apparent
separate selves make us think we are. The ego is striving to realize
that largeness. So Dorothy, rather than cut down the poor ego that
was only trying to help, said, essentially, “Dear ego, you don't
have to try so hard because what you want to make happen already is
true. The apparent separate self
is already as big as
it can possibly get. It is infinite.”
