Was that my ego squawking?

I'm deep into Eckhart Tolle's New Earth -- again -- and loving what it has to say about the ego.  Yesterday's quote was particularly powerful, I thought:

"If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations.  You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it.  Then out of your alertness would come a response.  Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small me), would be responding.  It would be powerful and effective and would make no situation or person into an enemy."

... which is all well and good.  But, you know, I'm human.  I'm able to stay on an even keel most of the time, but every once in a while someone will say or do something that sets me off.  I know enough now to understand that the intensity of those feelings comes from some place other than "true me," but that doesn't necessarily make it easier to deal with in the moment. 

So reading this ... well, it feels like a should; I end up feeling ashamed of the fact that I can still get set off like that -- which I don't think was his intent.  I think Tolle just wants us to wake up, to notice that we can get triggered that way, and not get too caught up in it.

But because I'm thinking about these things, I have to wonder: was yesterday's post all about ego?  Some part of me -- the part that's still feeling a bit shamed by this reading -- says yes; that was ego talking.  But some other, kinder part of me, is smiling, I think: it understands that each of us is much bigger than any of the roles we play, and that somehow putting all that together is just another way of saying, "Don't put me in a box... in fact, don't put any of us in a box."

Each of us is so much more complex than what can be seen in any given situation.  We need to recognize and celebrate that, both in ourselves and in each other.  It's a bit like the six degrees of separation: the more deeply we communicate, the more connected we discover ourselves to be.  It's a way of exploring and discovering the amazing web of being that holds us all together...