Why Your Mind Is Holding You Back | Eckhart Tolle

Every thought is an energetic entity, and some thoughts are short-lived, other thoughts get lodged in your mind and take up their abode in your mind, and you can't get rid of them, and they become who you think you are. That's living through thought. And that's why the need to be right, which implies somebody else needs to be wrong, otherwise you can't be right, a very useful thing to detect within yourself, self-assertion. Self-assertion also is maybe the need to be noticed, the need to be seen, 'look at me.' Self-assertion operates continuously on Facebook. I'm not necessarily saying that everybody who uses Facebook is trapped in egoic self-assertion, no. But millions are. Now I'm sure many of you use Facebook not in an egoic sense. You don't go around every day with— You take the photo and then you go— and then others see you and they say, "She's— everything is going right for this person, but why not for me?" And then they get their phone out. So as we know, the ego is a conceptualized self-sense. I don't know if I talked to you about the myth of Narcissus, the guy who sees— going back thousands of years, a mythological figure— the young man who falls in love with his own image looking at a lake, a little pond or pool of water, and he goes, "Ah, so beautiful." That was the world's earliest selfie. But now you don't depend on the pool of water anymore, you have it in your pocket. So you have a self-image, a conceptual self and self-image that you live through without knowing it. And with the aid of technology, you now have something like Facebook where you can actually manufacture this image and polish it here and there. This is the image you want to project into the world of you. And again, I'm not saying that everybody who uses Facebook is doing that. There are other ways of using it, and that's fine. But millions are using it in that way without knowing it. They manufacture an image, they live through the image. But people have been doing that for thousands of years before Facebook ever arrived, except that now you have an an additional help to perpetuate and to amplify and to expand and send out into the world the mind-created image of who you are. And some people even believe in the image they have created for their Facebook page, and they live it. In the same way that famous, some famous people believe in the image that the world has of them. They live in this totally false identity and believe in that. And then, of course, what usually happens, they become gradually more and more unhappy. Because anybody who lives through a fictitious sense of self sooner or later, and usually very soon, becomes unhappy. And so you, and then you have to polish the image even more. And that is again a form of self-assertion, self-assertion through the form identity of me. Identifying with a political movement or religion can be also something that you add to the self-image and you have self-assertion. There's these days, as we know, there's a talk, a lot of extremism, extremism, religious extremism. You have especially young men, they say they become radicalized and then they do totally evil and crazy things. Those are extreme forms of ego, but the mechanism behind it is the same. Or to a more extreme manifestation, the mechanism behind it is the same as normal egos which are not as extreme. What is the mechanism behind it? It's a search for a sense of identity, and many humans have a sense of identity where there's something huge missing, so they're looking for a deeper identity through strengthening their ego. They don't know it. They're seeking more more self-assertion. And if there's a young man living in the West, perhaps even was born in the West, parents came from maybe a Muslim country, and this man doesn't like the society he lives in, maybe he can even see the emptiness of the society, or he doesn't participate fully, he's not given his due, ego, the ego seeks something to identify with, it wants assert itself. And then it gets— it uses religion as an ideology, and that becomes— you adopt certain belief systems which are bundles of thoughts and completely identify with that. It gives you your sense of self, and you have an enormously strong sense. You can now be so special that the entire society you live in, except those who share your particular belief system, is is regarded as evil. So you are trapped, and this is not uncommon. It's not only in that area. Entire nations sometimes go through a wave of deep collective unconsciousness when almost every human being in that nation is infected by a mental virus that takes possession of your entire mind. It happened, for example, in, well, certain countries like National Socialism in Germany, Soviet communism, Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution. It's like every human being becomes— is possessed by the same mental virus, which is thought structures that spread in your mind and take possession of almost 100% of all your mental content. Very much like a virus on a physical level. I mean, you've all experienced not being able to get a certain tune out of your head, a musical tune, which is a very minor variation of a mental virus that won't go away. And some of you may also have it, but of course after a while it does go away, and that's a harmless thing. But then you can have mental viruses of a personal nature. You have a certain, various thoughts that repeat themselves again and again and then become so deeply lodged in your mind that, like a parasite that gets its teeth into you and won't let go, and they infect other thoughts around them. And so some people go through life with preconceived ideas of what the world is like and what people are like, And these are very, very structured belief systems, and they interpret reality through the screen of their structured belief system, which may still be a normal thing. You might just have very strong political views or very strong religious views— not religion, the spiritual dimension of religion. Religion without the spiritual dimension is an ideology. So that can be still considered normal, and then you go take it a little bit further, and then you can see that it's actually a form of insanity. And so it's, for example, normal to have— I have a relative who I've known since my teenage, early teenage years. And this relative was always very critical of people and very highly critical and always, even when I was a teenager, I always thought there was always some hidden intention that he or she, I wouldn't want to define was looking for after going to some— visiting somebody's house. He said this, what did he mean by that? What was his intention? He had some evil intention. And then it's always looking for people wanting something from you, wanting something to do to you, wanting to And that was strange. And this person later developed— this grew and grew, this mental virus— and later had to go to a mental home with paranoid schizophrenia, which is basically an extreme mental virus that infects your mind that says that the world is full of people whose main function is to destroy you or to follow you or to do something to you, and you see these enemies everywhere. And it is also a way of unconscious self-assertion because you are so important that all these people are after you. So you make yourself really very special, but it's an unconscious process. So many normal egoic traits, when you take them to amplify them a little, then you can actually see it's a form of mental illness. So thought can be very much seen as little entities. Thoughts are energetic entities. Every thought is an energetic entity. And some thoughts are short-lived, other thoughts get lodged in your mind and take up their abode in your mind, and you can't get rid of them, and they become who you think you are. That's living through thought, and that's why what we are What the spiritual path is about is to not one by one take these thoughts out or figure out where they came from, but just pay attention to that which is beyond thought, first as little gaps and then as being aware that there is a dimension of stillness in you, and that's the only place where true sanity arises. And it's the only place where then, once you have that connectedness, then the mind is no longer insane. Then the mind can be a wonderful and helpful tool. And then you no longer seek yourself in the mind. You no longer have an identity that's based on a narrative in your mind or a mental image. And then you can use Facebook without becoming more unconscious through it. And you can actually present a true version of yourself on Facebook. It doesn't have to be the happy selfies necessarily anymore, although when you are happy, that's fine.