The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

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.

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.