The concept of time was created for our minds to measure spatial distance. And what power our ego minds give to timeas if we are helpless creatures being propelled forward on a conveyor belt controlled by the "Great Wizard." Along the way we are cast in vignettes that, when completed, will be labeled as past experiences or memories, and assigned one or more emotions that will later trigger our minds to replay those experiences. Opportunities ahead of us are referred to as future experiences and these are assigned a preliminary emotion to prepare us for that experience. Our egos minds need us to stay in our past and future to survive. As for present experiences, it desperately avoids the now because it has no control over the now; and truthfully, the now is all we really have.

Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now writes, "To be identified with your [ego] mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory [past] and anticipation [future]. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever for."

To accept that there is only the now, that there is no spatial separation, is to diminish the power of the ego over our consciousness and allow us to be in the momentthat space between thoughts where the truthfulness of our being resides.

Learn more about this author, Laura Emerson.
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