The office and the servant

After reading Ram Dass' exuberant set of lectures, The Only Dance There Is, I decided to check out his guide to meditation, Journey of Awakening, before jumping into his classic Be Here Now. Within the first few pages, I was struck by the following passage:

We may ask how we could survive without our ego. Don't worry--it doesn't disappear. We can learn to venture beyond it, though. The ego is there, as our servant. Our room is there. We can always go in and use it like an office when we need to be efficient. But the door can be left open so that we can always walk out.

The ego is something that I (as an ego) think about a lot, and there are many different ways to describe it and interpret it. But this one in particular really illuminated something for me--the possibility of developing to a point where I could use my rationally reflecting, problem-solving, chattering ego, to step into the office to do some work, when I wanted to, and to leave it aside when I didn't want to be chattering away in my own head. It reminds me of what you sometimes hear Zen masters say: when you are eating, eat, when you are walking, walk. When I first encountered this image, I thought it impossible. How I could just stop thinking? But the point seems to be not that I stop thinking, but that I can use this particular kind of thinking as a tool or servant, rather than as my given way of experiencing the world.

I practice this now in different situations. Today while riding the subway, I told my ego-thinking that we could resume taking care of the issues that were pressing at my head when we got to work, but for now, we are meditating and those thoughts are going to pass just as the stations are through the windows of the train. It was fascinating watching myself try to keep restarting different trains of thought, only to be shuffled along. I enjoy this practice very much, so perhaps I will be able to step aside from the "office" with greater ease as the practice deepens.