• by Eckhart Tolle (excerpted from “The Power of Now”) • Your mind [thinking] is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. Most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction—you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
Why should we be addicted to thinking? Because you are identified with it. You derive your sense of self from the content and activity of your mind. You believe that you would cease to be if you stopped thinking.
As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego used here means a false self created by unconscious identification with the mind.
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive because without it—who are you?
It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release of fulfillment there. It says: “One day when this, that or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace.”
Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees. It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, and end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you’ll see that this is how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.