The problem is that experiencing the “now”—and through it, true happiness—is impossible when you are under the control of the ego, and almost all of us are, almost all of the time. The word “ego” here refers not to “confidence” or “thinking you are better than others” but what Eckhart Tolle defines in The Power of Now as “a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning” or “a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind”. He goes on to describe the workings of this tricky little SOB:
“To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. The 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 or 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, an 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.”
Nick Nolte’s Socrates character explains this well in The Peaceful Warrior:
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