This is a YouTube video titled "How Can We Collectively Deal With Traumatic Situations? | Eckhart Tolle" featuring a dialogue between Eckhart Tolle and a trauma surgeon from South Africa working in Somalia. The discussion centers on dealing with collective pain, unconsciousness, and violence such as terrorism and war, exploring themes of wisdom, defense, and the evolutionary process of human consciousness. The content is a reflective conversation on trauma, collective suffering, and spiritual awakening recorded in March 2022.
As a trauma surgeon, South Africa, working in Somalia, I encounter and help victims of the suicide bombings. Now, when, and you tell us when we are dealing with pain body, when the pain body is too big, we need to retreat. How can we as a collective deal with such severe pain body? And it's really a collective question because we face it. September 11th Boko Haram, ISIS so your just comments on something like enlightened military defense. I know might be an oxygen, but sometimes as a collective, we need to defend ourselves. When the unconsciousness is so bad that you prepare to strap bombs to yourself and go in. Yeah.
Yes, well, certainly. Thank you.
Thank you.
Certainly there are extreme manifestations of unconsciousness, and it is sometimes necessary to defend yourself against that in the right way. So we all know that in the past, when, for example, 911 happened, the reaction to 911 was not, to mutate, mildly the most wise thing it could have happened. In fact, it made everything infinitely worse because that was not a defense. It was an overreaction of the ego in the absence of complete absence of even the slightest trace of wisdom and insight and repercussions, not to mention other cultures and so on. So the unconsciousness that we see being perpetrated in those parts of the world is connected to the unconsciousness of the reaction to 9 11. Of course, everything is connected. There is not one entity to blame. But the unconscious affects not only one area of human culture or one religion. It manifests in different ways, even in seemingly more conscious places like here. Politicians were extremely unconscious at the time, and that opened the gates of hell and amplified the latent unconsciousness that was there in millions of other human beings or hundreds of thousands of other human beings. So everything is connected. Defense may be necessary sometimes, if it's done wisely and if it's not reactive, but a response to the situation. Wisdom is an absolute requirement for taking right decisions. But unfortunately, wisdom is hard to come by in political circles. It seems that as people go into politics, they might even have gone in with wisdom. But then it grinds you down and it seems very hard to stay conscious once you are in the political system. But there are people here and there who realize the importance. There is a congressman I met from Washington who is deeply interested in mindfulness and meditation and spirituality. And here and there, there are people who realize the importance of wisdom. So any decision one takes of how to defend oneself, wisdom is required so that whatever you do does not make things worse. So yes, in the face of extreme unconsciousness, you may need to defend yourself. Certainly another More general remark about these events. This is only one example of humans creating something that looks actually quite insane. It looks what they are doing like the suicide bombing and whatever they. It looks quite insane. But that is, how is it possible for humans to behave in such a way? And is this not evil? Go back to Europe in the first part of the 20th century. The whole first part of Europe in the 20th century. The first half of the 20th century was a nightmare. And what humans did to other humans at that time, First World War, Second World War, you know, infinitely worse than what's happening now with the terrorists. Infinitely worse. Just unimaginable horrors. So at every time period, the human collective, the unconsciousness that is embedded in the collective will manifest through certain groups of people. And if you close one door, another one opens and manifests over there in the same way that the need for an enemy that is also there manifests. The Cold War came to an end and said, oh, how wonderful. There's no enemy anymore. And not many years passed and quickly another big enemy arose somewhere else. Now we need to fight that one. There's a. I saw a funny movie about. It's a comedy about the fictitious American president who is probably won't get re elected in the next election. And he says, we need the Cold War. And this was done before the whole terrorist thing happened. But the Cold War had come to an end. The president says, okay, the advisor, you're not going to get reelected. Your opinion, poltergeist. We need an enemy. And so who can be our enemy? Because if a country has an enemy, everybody will unite behind the leader and they think and think, okay, we got it. Canada. And then the rest of the movie is the humorous how the media manipulates public opinion to convince people that Canada is the great enemy, the most unlikely enemy perhaps of the United States, except perhaps Switzerland or Denmark. But Canada is right next door, so why not Canada? Oh yes, it's called Canadian Bacon. That's the title of the movie. Now coming back to the atrocities that are perpetrated in different ways in different time periods. Now it's certainly the case that this is. We need to recognize that this is insane. It is a form of collective insanity, psychosis that is a benign way of looking at it. You could call it evil, but I would say it's just insanity because it seems to have no real purpose. They achieve nothing through that. So it's insanity. Now if we go then to a higher level of a higher perspective, then you see that the entire consciousness of humanity is involved in an evolutionary process. And that evolutionary process, if you look at humanity with one single whole, the consciousness of humanity as a single thing, being just one aspect of universal consciousness. So this consciousness, humanity and every human being is part of that one consciousness of humanity, which in itself is part of the universal consciousness. And consciousness, this consciousness of humanity, is involved in an awakening process. And you might know from your own life, and I know from my life, that the awakening process, for quite a while, involves intense suffering. So you know that from your personal life? I know it from my personal life. The awakening process, the intense suffering is part of the awakening process. So humanity as a whole is going through, also through intense suffering, because we are all going through the awakening process. It.
