The Unobserved Mind, with Eckhart Tolle

And whenever the mind is not, when the ever awareness disappears, whatever the mind does sooner or later becomes a form of insanity in the absence of awareness. So communism was a wonderful thing to start with. Communism was, you could see the dreadful inequality between how people, certain groups of people were exploiting all the millions of workers. And somebody saw that we need to change that. Look, these people, they're exploiting all these workers. We need to have remove the power from these capitalists and the state will run things. It's all wonderful. So they wanted to create a better world. It's a great idea. But what they had not thought about is their own state of consciousness. And the ego. The ego. That ego, by the way, is the unconsciousness of identifying with your mind completely. So they had looked at how do we need to change the world? But what they forgot is how. What about my state of consciousness? And then the same evils that they wanted to eliminate, they recreated in another way. And you find it in all the countries, in many third world countries where every few years the government gets overthrown and a new government comes in. And of course, very often the people who want to overthrow the government, they have good intentions. They say, these people are corrupt, we need to get rid of them. Look, they're exploiting the people. True, true, true. So vote me in or don't vote, I'll. Whether you want me or not, I will remove this government, this corrupt government and I will create a better government for you people. And the moment they achieve power, the latent ego in them suddenly grows. Give power to a seemingly meek person who has no worldly power and seems, oh, this person is relatively egoless. He saw this is a person who has a job. He's told what to do and he does it. Or she seems the ego is always in these, the politicians, they have the big egos. And look, this, this man has no, virtually no ego. The moment you. And this is because the ego has not many opportunities to enhance itself. The only place where his ego function is at home, when he relates to his wife and his children. That's where the ego can have little bit of strengthening, but give this person real power and the ego will suddenly, the, the latent ego will suddenly grow to a monstrous size. And this has even happened in spiritual communities. There was a spiritual community in Oregon last century, where some of you may know it also the spiritual teacher had to come into Oregon. A few people were given power in that community and they were very, very meek and mild people. Especially one woman was given all power. A woman was before very, very almost subservient. And seemed to have no ego whatsoever. And the moment she was given power, it only took a few weeks, a few months. And suddenly ego inflation happened very quickly. And suddenly you have a monster there. And suddenly people started walking around with machine guns in the spiritual ashram. She said, we need to protect ourselves from these evil people outside ego. The ego loves its enemies. It needs its enemies in order to enhance its own fictitious sense of self. So it creates the enemies un totally unconscious. And that's how many politicians do it. When other countries are demonized, the media do it. All forms of unconsciousness, lack of awareness when ego takes over and runs the show. And the suffering that humans are enduring, the collective suffering, most of it is not due to, at least not in the past 2, 300 years, is not due to natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods and volcanic eruptions and tidal waves and so on. Larger part of it is human created. And that's an amazing fact. Millions of people going through, living through hell in the 20th century alone. But the hell is created by other humans. That is the state of consciousness that has been prevalent for a very long time on the planet. And I need to, I do not usually predict the future because it's. I believe you cannot really predict it because there are many factors that are involved here. I am absolutely certain of the awakening of humanity, that it will happen. And the fact that we are here is a sign, of course, that it is happening already on a certain scale on a certain level. What I am not certain of is whether the awakening that's arising in a certain percentage of humanity now, the spiritual awakening, whether that is sufficient to prevent the gravitational pull of the old consciousness, to call it that, from creating enormous havoc, thereby producing suffering for millions of people on a collective scale, which in turn will eventually bring about an arising of the new. So the only question is here, is the new consciousness of humanity going to arise out of where we are now, or are we going to experience before there is a large scale awakening of humanity? Because this is not yet large scale. It's large scale in certain small areas of the planet. Does humanity. Is the unconsciousness so heavy that humans need to go through a period of intense suffering before there is a collective awakening and the intense suffering will be self created and that quest that arise. That question applies to any individual also. Is this human being capable of spiritual awakening? Or does he need, or he or she need to go through more suffering before it can happen? It's a simple thing that applies on all levels. Both personal and collective for the individual and the collective. People have told me that they were given a book like Power of Now or New Earth by a friend or relative 10 years ago. And they looked at it and what is that stuff? Who writes this thing? And they put it on the shelf and then they got on with their lives and then they suffered a bit more. They had another failed marriage and then they lost their job. And then the stock market crashed and then they developed an illness. And suddenly the pressure of suffering created a crack in the shell of ego. It became so much. And then a day came when suddenly. Oh, got it. And they picked up the book again and then they. Oh, my God, now I understand it. That is spiritual. That is the first spiritual awakening. It would not have happened if this human had not gone through this period of intense suffering. A lot of it may have been and probably was self created by the ego. The dreadful marriage, the continuous fighting in their job, at their workplace, continuous negative states towards other humans and so on. All the suffering that generates whatever they experience as their reality. Self created to a large extent. And then an illness. Now you could say maybe the illness was not self created. Maybe there is a correlation between their state of consciousness and the illness, which is sometimes the case, may not be every illness, but sometimes, of course, if you live in continuous negativity, in continuous, stressful negativity, even mainstream medicine recognizes that, that stress and negativity is an important factor in the rising of illness. So the suffering is self created. So it's a little paradox here. The ego, in its attempt to survive and strengthen itself and enhance itself, creates suffering, that is the unobserved mind, that is the ego. But. But the suffering that the ego creates eventually leads to the destruction of the ego.