Is Your Mind in a Negative Loop? - Escape Rumination | Eckhart Tolle

To see how important it is to go beyond victim identity has nothing to do with denial of what happened. You fully see what happened. You know that and you know the emotions that it created. Daily, I keep having the same thought loop in my mind. Oh, we've just been talking about similar things. I keep having the same thought loop in my mind. The theme is one of feeling betrayed, being mistreated, basically being a victim. With the thoughts and images, there's usually resentment and. Or anger. This thought loop has been occurring over a year now. I'm having challenges with being the observer. The story seems to be so mesmerizing. I'm feeling frustrated that I'm continuing to have these thoughts about the past as I understand holding on to the past is preventing a higher energy field to come through me. What recommendations do you have for working this issue? My suggestions. Any suggestions on forgiveness and letting go of the victim role so that I can express more of the deep I. The deep I is the. I don't know if I actually used this term. During our sessions here, I sometimes use it. The deep I is the awareness, deriving your sense of self from the awareness rather than from the surface I, which is the personality. So we have the surface I or the deep I. So the thought loop here that you are experiencing is to do with feeling betrayed, being mistreated, and being a victim. Now, since I believe Susan is not here, because it's a written question from New Mexico, but I assume these thoughts and emotions that are recurring again and again refer to actual events that took place. I assume that here. So there is a reliving of the events in the mind and the feeling of being mistreated, betrayed, being a victim, and there's resentment and anger with it. Been occurring over a year now. So I assume something happened a little bit before that perhaps, and people did something to you or somebody, one person. Now, some people have that not only for a year, as in this case, but some people have that kind of thinking, compulsive thinking, going on not for years and decades, sometimes going back to childhood, being badly treated in childhood or abused in childhood. So you have continuing to think about that. And the more you think about that, of course, the more you feel yourself being a victim of events, or usually people, other people who did something to you. And you dwell on it and you can't stop it because the mind has a momentum. These thoughts refuse to go away. And if there's not sufficient awareness because of the continuously recurring thoughts, they become part of your identity, your sense of self. And so they become a victim. To see the necessity and the possibility of going beyond a victim identity does not deny in any way that something painful happened to you in the past, that something was done to you, that some people did something to you. To see how important it is to go beyond victim identity has nothing to do with denial of what happened. You fully see what happened. You know that, and you know the emotions that it created. But the first thing is, how does a human being. How is a human being capable of inflicting suffering, for example, on a child or on another human? It happens all the time. It happens on an individual level, and it happens even more on a collective level. The ego, the human ego is dysfunctional enough in the individual, but it's infinitely more dysfunctional and dangerous and lethal when it operates as a collective ego in a group. This is why warfare, internal conflict, killings, and the humans who participate in these dreadful things, the perpetrators, when they operate as a collective ego, not a personal, they are capable of far worse atrocities and acts than than they would be as an individual. So in other words, the collective ego is even more unconscious and violent and dangerous than the individual ego it looks to. Sometimes when you identify with the collective, my country, for example, fighting for my country or the collective might be a political party, or it might be a religious group. And so people who belong to these entities, sometimes it seems that they become free of ego because they live completely in the service of these collective entities. I want to sacrifice myself for my country or my religion or whatever. It seems that they are completely free of the personal ego. And same thing happens in sects, in cults. Often people who live in cults, they are totally selfless. They don't want anything, they give everything of themselves. They want nothing for themselves. They have identified with the group, but of course their ego has actually had not diminished. Their ego has become enormously amplified because they now have adopted a group ego. And the group ego can only survive and subsist when it has a sufficient number of enemies out there. The group ego needs for its survival and its expansion because it wants to expand and survive, but it needs the other, who is very other. In other words, the other is the enemy. So that is how humans are drawn into deep unconsciousness, by identifying with the collective. It doesn't mean that you cannot. It's nothing to do with. You can belong to a religious group, you can even love your country without being identified with, and then needing other countries to be the enemy. With awareness, you can appreciate your country and you appreciate other countries too. They Are different. So first you see the need to be a victim. Identity also, unfortunately, is a form of ego. Because any conceptual identity is a form of ego. And even though you seem to be amply justified in having a victim identity because of the things that other humans did to you, you are finding yourself in a kind of prison that created by your mind. So there's no denial of that bad things happen to you. Yes. Now question is, how do you exit this mental present? The first step is perhaps to see that unconscious human beings, Unconscious human beings in the grip of their own conditioning, their own ego, they have virtually no free will. When you are unconscious, you are controlled by the mind patterns that are lodged in your psyche. You cannot really speak of free will by somebody who has zero awareness. And yet their entire makeup is conditioning from the past. So the famous sentence phrase used by Jesus in connection with forgiveness on the cross, he said, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Now, these points put together, forgive them. Why forgive them? They know not what they do. In other words, if he had spoken these days using our terminology, he probably would have said, they are completely unconscious. Because that's what it means, they know not what they do. They are completely unconscious. So when you see nobody can act beyond their level of consciousness, then you see that it's almost like. It becomes almost like the evil that was perpetrated becomes almost like a natural phenomenon that is like you've been hit by lightning or something. Or lived in very unpleasant climatic conditions that injured you. Near volcano My dad had problems with anger. Huge outbursts of anger quite frequently. It was living like next to a volcano that could erupt at any moment. And he could not help was impossible. There was no possibility of being different. And so these humans are run by unconscious conditioning. Usually goes back to their childhood and what happened there. I know why my father was angry. I realized much later that it all originated in his childhood. The reasons why he was so angry. And also for a while, also I felt a resentment towards that. And only when I was able to awaken out of egoic consciousness, I saw that there's nothing that he could have done differently because there wasn't enough awareness. Now, when you see that, then you don't personalize or you don't create an identity for other humans out of their unconsciousness. Because in essence, that's not who they are. The recognition that there's first recognition, then step one, you recognize that no human can act beyond their conditioning in the absence of awareness. If there's awareness, they can transcend their conditioning, and then they begin to become conscious of their own conditioned mental emotional. Dysfunctional mental emotional patterns. Yes. So they can't help it. So that's already a useful step in forgiveness. But you may not yet be able to arrive at full forgiveness because of that. Another before I continue with that, does that mean then a question may arise in your mind. Does that mean then humans are not really responsible for what they do? If they are unconscious, how are they responsible? And does that mean then that we shouldn't punish them for what they do? If they commit a crime, are they not guilty? That's an interesting question. The unconsciousness that operates in human Even if you are able to forgive a human, and we'll go more fully into that in a minute, even if you are able to forgive a human for their transgressions or whatever they did, this does not mean. And even though the human is not responsible for their unconsciousness, and yet it is built into the structure of human life, they still need to suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness.