The Power of Now

🌱 Sprout |

Here are some tidbits I learned from the book The Power of Now:

Ego

Isn't thinking essential in order to survive in this world?

Your mind 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. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of 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. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: 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, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.

Why should we be addicted to 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 means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind.

Fear

The ego has a fear of death

To the ego, fear is always around the corner. For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong - defending the mental position with which you have identified.

If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die.

Problems

When you create a problem, you create pain

You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind the insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing you can do now.

When you create a problem, you create pain. All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: No matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems.

Pain

To become free from pain

As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.

Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.

Time

Letting go of time

If you want to remove pain and the pain for others we must not create any more time.

But how do we stop time? Deeply realising that the now and present moment is all we have. Only give brief time to the past and future when practical for aspect in life. Always say 'yes' to the present moment.

When we live in time, we identify too much and become trapped in time; the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation of the past and future and an unwillingness to accept the present. This compulsion gives you the past identity whereas the future holds the promise of salvation. Both are illusions!.

Time is the most precious thing

Firstly, because that's all we have Now. It's all there is. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will ever be.

Secondly, the Now is the only thing that can take your from the confines of of the mind. The Now is the only point in which we can take action. Not in the past, not in the future but the actions we do now only have impact.