The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgment, discontent, and mental projection away from the Now.
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, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you’ll see that this is how it works.
The ego 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 or fulfillment there.
You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.
The amazing and incomprehensible fact is not that you can become conscious of God but that you are not conscious of God.
Most humans alternate not between consciousness and unconsciousness but only between different levels of unconsciousness.
Don’t let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it.
Anything “bad” that happens in your life – use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness – and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.
Because every form is highly unstable, they live in fear. This fear causes a deep misperception of themselves and of other humans, a distortion in their vision of the world.
Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, “What a pretty flower,” but that’s just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel its essence, its holiness – just as they don’t know themselves, don’t feel their own essence, their own holiness.
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: “I wonder what my next thought is going to be.” Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now. Well?
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become free or enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future.
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now (Extras – Mind, Ego, Thinking)