The Power of Now

The human mind/ego

Quotes from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Hodder & Stoughton, London, U.K., 1999.

“You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.” (Page 53).

“Such knowledge is vital, for unless you learn to recognise the false as false – as not you – there can be no lasting transformation, and you would always end up being drawn back into illusion and into some form of pain. On this level, I also show you how not to make that which is false in you into a self and into a personal problem, for that is how the false perpetuates itself.” (Introduction, page 5).

“The word ‘enlightenment’ conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but t is simply your natural state of felt oneness with being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation, from yourself and from the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.” (Page 10).

“Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the true liberation.” (Page 15).

“One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.” (Page 17).

“You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware...while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so it primarily felt in the body.” (Page 22).

“An emotion usually represents an amplified and energised thought pattern and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you lover, and it usually succeeds – unless there is enough presence in you. If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes ‘you.’ Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the situation, event or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion which, in turn, energises the thought pattern, and so on.” (Page 22-23).

“The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor’s edge of Now – to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now. The great Zen master Rinzai, in order to take his students’ attention away from time, would often raise his finger and slowly ask, ‘What, at this moment, is lacking? A powerful question that does not require an answer on the level of the mind. It is designed to take your attention deeply into the Now. A similar question in the Zen transition is this: ‘If not now, when?’” (Page 43).

“Usually, the future is a replica of the past. Superficial changes are possible, but real transformation is rare and depends upon whether you can become resent enough to dissolve the past by accessing the power of the Now...The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future – which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now. You may win $10 million, but that kind of change is no more than skin deep. You would simply continue to act out the same conditioned patterns in more luxurious surroundings. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change?” (Page 49).

“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.” (Page 50).

Further quotes from a web page I came across...

”So once you recognise the root of unconsciousness as identification with the mind, which of course includes the emotions, you step out of it. You become present. When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is not dysfunctional. It is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are. It then becomes the egoic mind and takes over your whole life...The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be...the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.”

“As long as the egoic mind is running your life,” “you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”

When we identify with the body and with emotional and subconscious patterns, we think we are in the now but we are actually caught up in the past or the future. We are obscuring the purity of the present moment with hopes, fears and expectations. When we are fully conscious and realise, as Tolle says, that thinking is only a small portion of consciousness, we are afforded an objective relationship with life, time, consciousness and the world. We can act objectively as our true Selves. We are no longer obscuring our essential Being with finite identity or habitual subconscious patterns of thought and behaviour. The egoic mind, says Tolle, “is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole...people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within.” “The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it” “Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.”

“Feel,” “a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.” “That intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.” “To stay present in everyday life,” “it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river.” “To inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now.”

Related

Now, Now ( a series of five articles by Antraeus Voltage)