March 23, 2013: Eckhart Tolle, Part 2

Tolle continues in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Penguin, 2005): "Giving yourself more time is precisely this: giving your 'self' more time. Time, that is to say, past and future, is what the false mind-made self, the ego, lives on, and time is in your mind. It isn't something that has an objective existence 'out there.' It is a mind-structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself. Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible to you only through the portal of the present moment. 

"So instead of adding time to yourself, remove time. The elimination of time from your consciousness is the elimination of ego. It is the only true spiritual practice" (pp. 206-207). 

I guess if we are in doubt about eliminating time from our consciousness, all we need to do is ask a cat.