According to Eckhart Tolle, the human mind craves not only food for thought, but clues to its identity, or sense of self. Life is like an onion where you peel away the layers of skin to discover what you've been hiding from yourself.  Your ego emerges and continuously re-creates itself. Your mind interprets the world to make sense of who you are. To do so, you're often conditioned by the past and seek to find fulfillment in future. Tolle urges us to recognize The Power of Now :

1) Explore your fear. When thoughts capture your full attention, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought guides your sense of self. This is the ego. That mentally-constructed self that ells you it feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fear and want are predominant emotions and motivating forces. Why do you really allow yourself to experience dissatisfaction?

2) Inner voices aren't the whole truth. As you recognize a voice in your head pretends to be you and speaks constantly, you move away from unconscious acceptance of this mindset. When you notice that voice, you realize who you are is not the voice (the thinker) but the listener, the one who is aware. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is the key to your freedom.

3) Stop seeking. Your ego pursuades you to seek, aspire for more things to make itself feel more complete.  Why does it seem insatiable? This explains the ego’s compulsive preoccupation with future. If you slowly become aware of yourself "living for the next moment," you learn to step out of that pattern.  You choose to devote your full attention to this moment.

4) Recognize there's more to it. When you live through the ego, you always view the present moment to a means to an end. You live for the future, and when you achieve your goals, they, like pleasure, end quickly and don’t satisfy you.   As you give more attention to the doing than to the future result you aim to achieve through it, you redefine your old conditioning. Your efforts exerted become not only more effective, but infinitely more fulfilling and joyful without end.

5) Step outside your prison.  Even if your grievances seem "justified," you have created an identity for yourself like a prison whose bars grow out of your thoughts.  Note what you do to yourself, how your mind brainwashes you. Feel the emotional attachment you have to your victim story. Be aware of the compulsion to think or talk about it. Witness your inner state. You don’t have to do anything. With awareness comes transformation and freedom. Rather than practicing self-loathing and criticism, express self-love and acceptance to break through the bars.

6) Eliminate the inner judge. Complaining and wallowing are some of the ego's favorite mind patterns. They strengthen ego and feul a negative fire.  By doing this, you judge others or a situation "wrong" and yourself "right." Through being "right," you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen a sense of self. In reality, you only strengthen the illusion of ego. Can you observe patterns within and recognize the complaining voice in your head for what it is? In your dealings with people, can you detect subtle feelings of either superiority or inferiority?

7) Resist comparison. Envy is a by-product of the ego.  It may grow if good things happen for others, or someone has more, knows more, or can do more than you. The ego’s identity depends on comparison and feeds on more.  It grasps at anything.  If all else fails, you strengthen your fictitious sense of self through seeing yourself as more unfairly treated by life, more ill or worse off than others. Describe stories.  What are fictions from which you derive your sense of self?

8) Recognize addictions to patterns. The ego desiresconflict with something or someone. That explains why you seek peace and joy and love, but may not experience or tolerate them for long. You say you want happiness, but may be obsessed with unhappiness and reasons to change. Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from life conditions, but from the conditioning of your mind.

9) See through guilt. This is another attempt by the ego to create an identity, a sense of self. The ego doesn’t care whether that self is positive or negative. What you did or failed to do is a manifestation of unconsciousness. You personalize it.  Giving into ego will not free yourself from the ties that bind, enhance yourself or, your sense of importance. Even if you achieve a clearer identity, it won’t satisfy. What can you do to circumvent guilt or nip it in the bud?

10) Rethink goals. Understand that the achieving any aim is less important than your impetus led you to think. Experience in this moment is not a means to an end. Its the doing that is fulfilling in itself every moment.  Incremental goals may have high value individually, not part of big whole.