Review: The Power of Now (2)

The Power of Now

As we saw in the first part “You are not your mind” it is important to disidentify from your mind. To be able to fully accept the present moment you have to forget about the past and the future. That is not easy because the mind always tries to escape into the past or the future. The mind tries to deny the Now because it can only exist in time.

Think about thoughts like “I don’t want to be here. I don’t like this moment, this moment is not good enough. I want to be there. I want to be then,…not now. I will be happy when I have this or that…I will be happy when I’ve achieved this…”. These are escapes from the Now. The Now has no time and because the mind can only exist in time it tries to deny the Now. This is why so many are identified with the mind (egoic mind as Tolle names it). We are so used to it (and used by it ) that everyone thinks there is no alternative.

This doesn’t mean that you should forget about the past and the future:

Have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.

Egoic mind means that you identify yourself with your mind. Despite several defense mechanisms of the egoic mind it is very vulnerable and insecure. It needs lots of external things to feed it’s lack of incompleteness. Some people search for this wholeness in possessions, money, success, power, recognition etc. but this search is never ending. It is not possible to complete yourself with external things.

As long as your egoic mind is running your life you cannot truly be at ease. The egoic mind (your false self) doesn’t want to die – because if you are identified with it – this would also be the death of your identity. So your false self is very engaged in creating and maintaining the whole illusion and this makes it even more difficult to break out of this thought patterns.

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Apr200906

Daniel

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