“Whenever you feel a judgment arise in your awareness, you are feeling the ego’s energetic pull,” the Zen teacher said to a group of us in the meditation hall.
It was late in the afternoon and I was tired, worried that I might fall asleep during this lady’s talk. I wasn’t bored with what she was saying, I just wanted a little sleep.
“Any preference,” she went on, “can show us where our attachments are.”
I began to perk up at this comment. Could my judgments help me recognize, and better understand my ego’s pull? Could my preferences do the same thing?
The fog of sleepiness began to fade a bit as I considered her comments. I was judging all the time, and I had all sorts of preferences. But something about what she was saying made sense at a level that was new to me.
My hand shot up after the talk concluded. I asked, “Are preferences the same as judgments?”
“I think it’s helpful to see the ego as the sun in a psychological solar system. Preferences are like small planets that have an observable gravitational pull. Judgments are planets as well; they’re just bigger, and therefore have more pull.”
This seemed so elegant. So simple. I bowed to her in gratitude.
“Then how do we free ourselves from all the pull?” came another question from across the hall.
“We’re free from any and all forms of judgmental or preferential pull, when we can integrate the recognition that we are at once the unlimited entirety of the Universe and a limited egoic solar system.”
She paused and let this sink in.
“All things that orbit around you,” she went on, “start to shrink when seen from the enormity of what you really are. You’ll sense this the more you sit. And then it is my hope that you’ll let your enormity express itself through your life.”
She started to giggle, and then bowed, leaving us each to make friends with our enormity without any preferences.
