How Prejudice Can Affect the Collective Consciousness | Eckhart Tolle

A huge section of humanity through conceptualization to conceptualizing that section of humanity, say they are no longer human to you. Without the awareness, you are at the mercy of whatever goes on in your mind, including you have little or no immunity depending on your degree of presence or awareness. If there's little or no awareness, in other words, total identification with the stream of thinking, then you are very susceptible to mental illnesses and dysfunctions and mental. Even mental pandemics that affect large numbers of people. And this is interesting. You may have noticed on a personal level, sometimes it happens that certain thoughts. Usually there's a stream of useless thinking. And for many people it goes on and on. There are certain recurring patterns in it, yes, according to the particular conditioning of this person's mind. And occasionally it happens that one thought or a couple of bundle of related thoughts get stuck in your mind and they refuse to go away. They begin to influence and affect other thoughts and they spread in your mind. In some cases, reaching every thought that arises in your mind is in some way contaminated by one original faulty thought. That may be totally irrational, but it has taken its. It has taken possession of your mind in a very minor and relatively harmless way. It happens. So you say, I just can't get. I can't stop thinking about this. It just goes, I can't get rid of it. And then you have certain ideas in your mind that are a. Over. A distortion, a complete distortion of reality. And then you look at reality through the lens of that distorted lens of your thoughts. Any kind of prejudice, for example, is of that kind. Let's say you have a racial prejudice. Prejudice means prejudice, pre judgment. So before you know the reality, the judgment has already occurred. For example, in the case of racism, you have a judgment that a certain race has particular qualities that are regarded as negative in one way. And then that becomes a lens through which you can no longer meet any human being belonging to that race. Because the conceptualization in your mind has already told you that this has already deadened your perception to the aliveness of that human being. You are totally blinded by the concepts in your mind through which you look at reality. It could also be political. You can have certain political views of certain groups of people. As happened for example, in communism, where suddenly the belief arose and millions of people got infected by it. That reality or humanity can be divided into two groups, the oppressor and the oppressed. Now, oppression, of course, existed in humanity and exists to some extent, in some places more than others, to some extent exist. But it's only one of many factors that determine societies and how they function together. So if you take one and say this is the only one, the only valid one, that means a huge section of humanity through conceptualization to conceptualizing that section of humanity, say they are no longer human to you. The moment you do that, you conceptualize other humans, you are completely desensitized to their inherent aliveness, Let alone the ability to relate to them and to relate to them and recognize the essence of who they are. That is the same as your essence. So the moment you have, then this belief takes a hold of your mind, and you look, you classify immediately. Every human being that you come into contact with is he or she oppressor or oppressed. Once you have deadened yourself to the aliveness of other humans, the next step is very easy and often happens, and that's violence and even killing them, because to you, they are no longer human. And there is a dysfunction inherent in the human mind which can manifests itself collectively. And then it gets. It's really bad. And it manifests itself, of course, on a personal level. And there are times in human history when this dysfunction becomes magnified. So there are times of collective mental illness. They usually can last a few decades, they can last a few years. And then finally, just like a physical illness, finally, it exhausts itself and comes to an end. So this the basic dysfunction that's already built into the egoic consciousness. Then in a collective group setting, which could be a country or tribe or religion or a sect, it suddenly becomes amplified. And in a country, for example, millions of people can suddenly be trapped in exactly the same dysfunctional mindset. And usually violence happens. Then, as it happened, for example, under Soviet communism in Russia, national socialism in Germany, Mao's cultural revolution in China, millions upon millions killed. If you want to learn about human dysfunction, I recommend reading history books about that. Millions upon millions killed because they were regarded as not human anymore. They had been conceptualized as the enemy. In a small country like Cambodia, it happened in the, I believe it was the 70s or 80s, under the dictator Pol Pot. And the army was called the Khumar Rouge Army. They killed one third of the population, exterminated, totally tortured, put in prison camps. Everybody who lived in cities had to leave the city. Out in the countryside, if you had the slightest education, you were part of the oppressors. If you wore glasses, because it means you could read, you were part of the oppressors. If your hand did not show sign of manual labor, you were part of the oppressors. Immediately sent to labor camps or out to the countryside to work in the fields and starve there, and they did. One third of the population starved to death or was killed. And that was regarded as necessary to bring about a more just world. All in service of the future. So you transform the present into hell in order to create a better future. The means justifies the end. That's the belief. But unfortunately that is not the case. The means corrupts the end and the end becomes meaningless if you create hell in order to reach it. So it's easily recognized as insane. Completely insane. It.