Aug. 8, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I don't know if you've read Carl Jung said that the greatest danger that humanity faces is not from any external force like natural disasters or diseases or pandemics. | ||
| He said the greatest danger that humanity faces is collective psychosis. | ||
| So To some extent, I see it happening, not quite as extreme yet as in places like Maoist China or Cambodia, where one third of the population got murdered. | ||
| Absurd, totally absurd ideas taking over people's minds. | ||
| For example, in Cambodia, we were there a few years ago. | ||
| At the time of Pol Pot, the Cambodian mad dictator, anybody who could read and write or anybody, if you wear glasses, you were an enemy of the people because you were regarded as the oppressor and likely to be killed. | ||
| If you had to show your hands and you're not doing manual work, | ||
| you're one of the enemies of the people. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is one of the most widely recognized spiritual teachers | ||
| on the planet. | ||
| His book, The Power of Now, sold 12 million. | ||
| That's a million copies. | ||
| And the follow-up, A New Earth, sold over 15 million copies. | ||
| Both have been translated in over 50 languages. | ||
| My friend Eckhart Tolle, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| Nice to see you again. | ||
| It's great to talk to you. | ||
| As my audience knows, we are at the beginning of August right now and I am technically off the grid. | ||
| I am in an undisclosed location with no technology, no phone, no computer, no news, no nothing. | ||
| So we're taping this at the end of July and I thought you would be the right person to sort of kick this month off with. | ||
| So before we get to sort of the off the grid stuff and digital detox, I wanted to ask you just sort of what do you make of the The spiritual health of the planet in this last year and a half, this sort of crazy year and a half that we've all had to deal with. | ||
| Yes, I believe crazy is quite a good word to describe it in many ways. | ||
| There's been many collective challenges. | ||
| The main one is the virus and the lockdowns. | ||
| And various other challenges. | ||
| I've had this strange feeling or idea in the past few months that a certain segment of humanity is losing the ability to think rationally. | ||
| There's a decrease in whether I call it IQ or whatever it may be. | ||
| There's a diminishment of rational faculty as reflected in many ways on the mainstream media, social media, and so on. | ||
| And another segment of humanity is actually becoming more aware, more aware, more conscious, is not drawn into the regressive, phase that some of humanity may be going through. | ||
| It's not unusual for humanity to occasionally collectively regress to a lower state of consciousness. | ||
| It has happened whenever a country or collective has been taken over by an almost one could say toxic ideology that has completely taken possession of millions of people's minds. | ||
| Look at, of course, National Socialism in Germany. | ||
| The Maoist Cultural Revolution was quite crazy. | ||
| What happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot. | ||
| Totally crazy ideas invaded millions of people's minds and reduce their ability to actually engage in rational thinking and things that happened, for example, in Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution. | ||
| Children reporting on their parents when they were angry with their parents. | ||
| All they had to do is go to school and report their parents that they had said something against the government. | ||
| The parents would be taken away and never seen again. | ||
| They went around public parks In big cities in China, tearing out flowers, because beauty was regarded as bourgeois. | ||
| You had to kill your pets, your dogs and cats. | ||
| Totally, and these are just a few examples of totally toxic and irrational thoughts taking over people's minds. | ||
| So that's, to some extent, I've been seeing this happening Collectively, not just in one country, in quite a few Western, many Western countries that I'm aware of. | ||
| But it has not affected everybody. | ||
| Some people have managed to remain aware. | ||
| They have not been, one could say, infected by what one could perhaps call a mental virus or mental viruses that reduce people's ability to actually see reality. | ||
| Reality then gets distorted through the veil of these mental viruses that have taken over people's minds. | ||
| This is a more serious pandemic than anything that happens on the physical level as far as pandemics are concerned. | ||
| The actual viruses Actually, you might, I don't know if you've read, Carl Jung said that the greatest danger that humanity faces is not from any external force like natural disasters or diseases or pandemics. | ||
| He said the greatest danger that humanity faces is collective psychosis. | ||
| So, To some extent, I see it happening, not quite as extreme yet, as in places like Maoist China or Cambodia, where one third of the population got murdered. | ||
| Absurd, totally absurd ideas taking over people's minds. | ||
| For example, in Cambodia, we were there a few years ago, At the time of Pol Pot, the Cambodian mad dictator, anybody who could | ||
| read and write or anybody, if you wear glasses, you were an enemy of the people because you were regarded as the oppressor and likely to be killed. | ||
| If you had to show your hands and you're not doing manual work, you're one of the enemies of the people that sent them away, got killed. | ||
| One third or more of the population got exterminated through the insanity taking over people's minds. | ||
| To some extent, so that you no longer can see reality as it is. | ||
| The famous example from 1984, Orwell, you have to believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5. | ||
| And if you don't believe it, then you are the enemy. | ||
| Which is sort of what we're being told these days from some pretty powerful people and some pretty powerful people that are pushing bad ideas. | ||
| But I suspect that you think if more people lived in the moment, if more people harnessed the power of now, that that would be the best inoculation from this mind virus? | ||
| Yes, inoculation or to have Inoculation is one word you could, one could use. | ||
| The key is immunity. | ||
| I think I would use immunity. | ||
| The key is what we could call awareness or as I'm just calling it presence, awareness. | ||
| It's this awareness of presence is nothing complicated or it's the ability to become aware of your thoughts. | ||
| So you can take a step back. | ||
| and observe what thoughts are going through your head. | ||
| For example, when this ability arises, I call that the beginning of a spiritual awakening. | ||
| Spiritual is no longer being completely trapped and identified with the movement of thinking. | ||
| This is particularly important now. | ||
| The danger of being trapped Infection, viral infection on a mental level has always been there, but it's now become magnified by the technology that we now have. | ||
| A toxic idea, a toxic thought can spread like wildfire through the internet within a few days and can take possession or become lodged in countless people's minds. | ||
| And once a thought has become lodged, then it will attract associated thoughts that resonate with it. | ||
| And then suddenly you see reality through the veil of that irrational thinking, but you don't know that this is happening because you do not have the immunity of awareness. | ||
| Awareness is the ability to know what your mind is doing. | ||
| It's also, for example, the ability, I think it was Aristotle who said, Talked about the ability of having two conflicting thoughts in your mind without necessarily identifying with either. | ||
| That implies there is an awareness there. | ||
| Without awareness, one thought will draw you in completely, you will identify with completely, and then everything else is then disregarded or regarded as threatening. | ||
| The egoic self likes, it identifies with one particular position. | ||
| This is just one example. | ||
| There are many similar examples one could give. | ||
| It identifies with one position and then everything else is regarded as whatever the term is. | ||
| What are the favorite terms these days? | ||
| Disinformation or whatever. | ||
| Anyone who disagrees with my mental position, that's disinformation. | ||
| We know many examples of that. | ||
| So what's the best way to immunize yourself against that? | ||
| I mean, I think about that all the time. | ||
| I try to bring information to people in as honest and decent way as possible. | ||
| And sometimes I think I'm pretty decent, probably sometimes not so decent, but I have no doubt that I have that veil as well. | ||
| And I have probable blind spots due to my history or whatever it might be. | ||
| How do you actually climb out of something if you're unaware of it at some level? | ||
| Yes, to become aware of one's thinking, there's no easy answer to that. | ||
| To many people, it happens naturally. | ||
| For example, it tends to happen sometimes to people on a personal level, whose thinking becomes so negative about, in other words, the stories they tell themselves. | ||
| Let's talk about narratives that people have in their heads, in their minds. | ||
| My life is so dreadful and all, I've been treated so unfairly by society and life and I've heard everything bad always happens to me. | ||
| I know these things because when I was young, I had similar thoughts in my mind, very negative, negative narratives. | ||
| And the more negative narratives you have, for some people, it's the negative narratives about the world out there, which is everything is Evil and they are out to sabotage me and so on. | ||
| All the negative narrative may be about myself. | ||
| There's something wrong with me. | ||
| Whatever it may be, it leads to an enormous amount of suffering, emotional suffering. | ||
| Because the emotion is usually a reflection of what you're telling yourself in your mind, creates a reflection on the emotional level. | ||
| So if your narrative is very negative, you feel, you then experience very negative emotions, anger, sadness, resentment, or if your narrative is very much directed towards the future, the fearful future, then there's a lot of anxiety and fear because the future is so uncertain. | ||
| And so people who are going through a lot of suffering, at some point, they sometimes realize that the suffering they experience is actually produced by their own minds. | ||
| For example, somebody might suddenly wake up and say, for the past few hours, I've been engaged in negative thinking. | ||
| about myself and the world. | ||
| Wow, isn't that amazing? | ||
| And I have these thoughts that come back again, they recur again and again, thoughts about myself, things I tell myself about myself, And so these thoughts are creating so much suffering. | ||
| You can stand back and say, well, I'm so negative. | ||
| Why am I always criticizing people? | ||
| Why am I always complaining about everything? | ||
| This is the beginning of becoming aware of what's happening. | ||
| Complaining is a big pattern in many people's minds. | ||
| They love complaining, complaining about what's out there, complaining about my life, complaining about them. | ||
| Complaining, and I'm not talking about complaining when you have the ability to change a situation. | ||
| Then sometimes it's good to speak out when there's possibility of change. | ||
| But in many cases, people just complain because it makes the ego feel bigger. | ||
| Because the more I complain about others, the bigger my ego feels. | ||
| Because I'm right and they are all wrong. | ||
| And the ego loves to be right. | ||
| You're perfectly spelling out exactly why I get off social media, because we all suffer from that. | ||
| If I get a lot of retweets, it has a certain dopamine effect to me, or sometimes I open it up and I'll look for negative comments, even though I don't consider myself a negative person. | ||
| Yes, but a very important thing when you have interviews or dialogues with people, there's usually a background field of a peaceful coming together. | ||
| There's a background field of, there's a certain connectedness, even if what your opinion and the person you're interviewing, maybe a very different viewpoints, very different thoughts. | ||
| Nevertheless, you're not so identified with a viewpoint, the mental position that any, Anybody who questions your viewpoint is unconsciously regarded as an enemy that needs to be defeated. | ||
| So that you have an awareness, perhaps you don't call it awareness, when you conduct interviews, there's still a background field of peace. | ||
| There is not antagonism. | ||
| I observed the same. | ||
| I was very happy to observe. | ||
| Russell Brand recently interviewed Shapiro. | ||
| Oh, Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Ben Shapiro. | ||
| And there was a lot of disagreement, but there was a mutual respect. | ||
| They come from completely different positions. | ||
| Russell Bryant is on the left, obviously. | ||
| Ben Shapiro is on the right. | ||
| And then they reversed it later. | ||
| Ben Shapiro had him on his show. | ||
| And it was very, really very pleasant to watch. | ||
| They were both able to express clearly their viewpoints and their mental positions without attacking each other at all. | ||
| So there was an undercurrent of awareness, as I would call it, which is a dimension of consciousness that is extremely important for humans to realize within themselves. | ||
| Because if you're not aware of what your mind is doing, so there's some separation from the mental position, which is the thought, and who you are. | ||
| Who you are is the aware presence in the background that frees you from being possessed by thoughts, by narratives, by mental positions. | ||
| And so that takes the ego out of the interaction. | ||
| And then you can have a fruitful interaction. | ||
| So you don't need to give up your viewpoints or your mental positions, but not be totally identified with it so that anybody who questions it becomes your enemy. | ||
| It's so interesting because obviously you're not a political beast, but what you're saying here is so applicable to everything that everyone's fighting about sort of politically these days. | ||
| But I want to ask you one other thing about the state of the world before we move into a little bit of the technology part of this and the off-the-grid sense, which is that I think you know a bit about my story. | ||
| I used to consider myself an atheist for probably most of my adult life, and I don't anymore for probably about four or five years. | ||
| I would say I'm more of a believer now than I've ever been in my adult life. | ||
| And I think that is connected to my ability to sort of stay sane within a very polarized political time and as someone that puts their opinions out there. | ||
| And I wonder what you think about that, just sort of what the state of belief is at the moment, you know, when we factor in this last year and a half and lockdowns and fearfulness of a disease and, you know, if I walk outside, this might happen and so on. | ||
| Yes, it's the, Belief really should lead to a little bit of a deeper realization. | ||
| Belief alone is fine. | ||
| To believe that your life has a purpose is good, that there is a greater purpose to life than just your personal life. | ||
| And somehow your personal life needs to be in alignment with a greater purpose that pervades the universe. | ||
| There is an intelligence that is transcendent to a sense-perceived reality that is beyond that. | ||
| An intelligence that manifests itself in this world, but is also beyond this world. | ||
| Now, whether we call that vast, inconceivable intelligence, God, or the divine, or no name at all, doesn't really matter. | ||
| So it's good to believe that that is there. | ||
| And then the next step is to have a little bit of an experience, to experience that which lies beyond the world of Form, which is physical forms and even mental forms. | ||
| And that which lies beyond the world of form is this transcendent dimension that humans can sense within themselves. | ||
| It sounds perhaps a little abstract right now, but you can sense it, for example, in between two thoughts. | ||
| When one thought comes to an end, And there's a moment of clear awareness. | ||
| You're looking around. | ||
| Sometimes this happens when you're out in nature. | ||
| You're able to stop thinking for a moment, but you don't lose consciousness. | ||
| There's still an awareness there, and you perceive everything against this background of awareness. | ||
| That is the light of consciousness. | ||
| This is why, again, it connects us with religion. | ||
| Jesus said to his disciples, you are the light of the world. | ||
| He's talking to everybody when he said that. | ||
| Now, this doesn't mean you're a very special human being, you're more special than others, because the people he talked to were not special on a worldly level. | ||
| They were not VIPs. | ||
| They were simple people. | ||
| But he said, you are the light of the world. | ||
| In another gospel, he said it about himself. | ||
| He said, I am the light of the world. | ||
| So both statements, he said. | ||
| Now, what does that mean? | ||
| If you are the light of the world, the light in you is the consciousness, the consciousness with which the world is perceived. | ||
| The consciousness without which no sense perception would be possible. | ||
| The consciousness without which no thought would be possible. | ||
| So you are this light of consciousness. | ||
| And to sense yourself as a consciousness that is far more vast than the personality, which consists of thought movement, to sense yourself for a moment, sense that inner stillness, but not go to sleep. | ||
| No, very alert. | ||
| Sense that inner stillness. | ||
| Then you can sense the dimension, the inner dimension that is Deeper than the personality, and that is the light of the world that emanates. | ||
| We're going a bit deep now, but let's do it. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it! | ||
| That is the light of the world, the light of consciousness that emanates from The transcendent source of all life. | ||
| So to me, God is the transcendent source of all lives. | ||
| God does not have a location in space or time. | ||
| God transcends space and time. | ||
| But God, it's a bit like the sun in the sensuous world. | ||
| The sun emanates life. | ||
| It emanates light, which is life continuously. | ||
| It emanates. | ||
| Now let's imagine that you are a ray of sunlight And suddenly you realize that who or what you are emanates from the sun. | ||
| Before you didn't know it because you thought you were a disconnected ray, just a little spark disconnected. | ||
| And then you become still for a moment and you sense the connectedness to something much deeper than the person. | ||
| So just a moment of stillness. | ||
| One of the Psalms in the Old Testament, it says, be still and know that I am God. | ||
| You can only know God in the stillness. | ||
| When you become still, then suddenly, to go back to the analogy, the ray of sunlight realizes its connectedness and oneness with the sun. | ||
| And some of the mystics who discovered that in themselves suddenly said, I am God. | ||
| That's not advisable to do. | ||
| And then we usually, people didn't like that. | ||
| So, because the ray of sunlight, yes, it's eternally connected. | ||
| It's an emanation of the sun, but it's not the sun. | ||
| You are an emanation or your consciousness is an emanation of The Godhead or God, but you are not God, but you are connected. | ||
| You are one with God and you are not seemingly paradoxical or contradictory statements. | ||
| So just the belief is good. | ||
| And then the belief can lead to something a little deeper than just the belief. | ||
| And then you can rest in that sense of connectedness to something that transcends the personality. | ||
| You rest in that. | ||
| And that is what is called, to me, that is the true meaning of faith. | ||
| Faith, to me, is not just an ideological belief that this is the case, or the belief that a certain story from the past actually happened. | ||
| Faith is trust. | ||
| And the trust comes with the realization that there's more to you than just the personality, the person. | ||
| And to be rooted in this trust is inner peace. | ||
| And then you can breathe more clearly. | ||
| There are people who are extremely knowledgeable about spirituality and everything else, but they have never gone that little step further from recognizing the truth on an intellectual level, which is good, To going a little bit further and realize the truth experientially in their own lives. | ||
| And that frees them from fear and anxiety. | ||
| It's a wonderful liberation to realize that. | ||
| Maybe not continuously, but you have more and more, you realize there is more to you than meets the eye, so to speak. | ||
| That you are not the physical body, you are not your mind even. | ||
| There's an invisible presence that is the essence of who you are. | ||
| And it's vital for humans to realize that. | ||
| I believe that's the next step, now that old-fashioned religions in many countries are beginning to disappear, the old religion. | ||
| But in a way, I can see why many humans cannot believe these stories anymore. | ||
| But we have to be very careful that the, what is the expression, the baby, throw out the baby with the bathwater, because there's something extremely valuable there still. | ||
| This is why I often refer back to that it just needs to be more than ideology. | ||
| We need to Take one step further into that realization. | ||
| So this is, we could talk about this for a long time, but I don't know whether this will help anybody, but I hope so. | ||
| No, well, first off, of course it's going to help people, but really you're describing my own personal journey almost to a T, and you're actually also describing why this will be my fifth year doing this Off The Grid August Situation because it was on the first one where I was sitting on a beach and David kept saying to me for days Why aren't you reading a book? | ||
| Why aren't you just sitting and staring at the ocean? | ||
| And I said that that's actually what I need right now And it was truly in that moment when the thought popped into my mind that I'm not an atheist And I would say in the five years since then have been the most rewarding and enriching and full years that I've had on this planet. | ||
| So I wonder, to connect that to what I'm doing with this month, I suppose someone like you kind of digs something like this, the idea that someone could put down the devices. | ||
| And I wonder, what do you think just in general about a world that is so obsessively connected to other people's thoughts all day long? | ||
| Yes, that's good. | ||
| So, over this excessive identification with thinking and overthinking, excessive thinking has been there for a long time, long before we came up with these devices. | ||
| But these devices amplify the human tendency to Engage or indulge in excessive thinking and problem-making thinking rather than constructive thinking, focused thinking. | ||
| So, what you are doing is very, very helpful because you are basically having a period of We could call it decluttering your mind. | ||
| You declutter your mind. | ||
| And this is necessary because our mind, most people's minds, have never been as cluttered as they are now. | ||
| Clutter means there's a continuous input of stuff that comes in through the devices. | ||
| The messages come in, Facebook posts, tweets, and continuously the devices demand your attention and say, this is important. | ||
| And a lot of it is not important. | ||
| But as we all know, There's an addictive quality to it. | ||
| It draws your attention to it. | ||
| And then every time it draws your attention, you add to the clutter of your mind. | ||
| A lot of it is not constructive. | ||
| A lot of it is just random. | ||
| People often see people, they get out their phones, And they do this random scrolling. | ||
| I can see it's random. | ||
| There's nothing specific, but they think they have to do it because everybody else is doing it around them. | ||
| Wherever you are these days, people are engaging with this and they're continuously taking in thoughts from others. | ||
| And as we said before, some of these thoughts may be toxic and they may easily become lodged in your mind. | ||
| So to declutter is extremely important. | ||
| And you can see if you even just not using a device for a day for many people is very, very hard. | ||
| And some think they can do it, but they can't. | ||
| So they are truly addicted. | ||
| Now, when you declutter your mind, First of all, you put down your phone, you don't use it. | ||
| Not everybody can do it for whole months like you. | ||
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Of course, of course. | |
| But I recommend to everybody to have certain periods of time when they do not engage. | ||
| So for example, in your bedroom might be a good place to start for not engaging with any device. | ||
| Certain periods of time when you go out into nature, Be there rather than carry that thing. | ||
| And every time it makes a noise, you still look up and you're still, even while you're surrounded by beauty and aliveness, you're still engaging with this or everything that you are looking at is an opportunity for an Instagram post, and you're just looking, look, I'm here now, me here, me there, and then he sent it out. | ||
| So you never again become completely trapped in the mind, more than even with these devices. | ||
| I'm very concerned about youngsters these days who grow up with them. | ||
| The first, perhaps this is the first generation, I don't know, the first iPhone was maybe 12, 13 years ago, something like that. | ||
| And these many youngsters, for many youngsters, the virtual reality is more important to them than it was. | ||
| And this is a very dangerous development. | ||
| They lose the ability to relate to other humans. | ||
| They spend several hours per day on devices, whereas before they would go out running around outside, playing their games, creative, coming up with new games, creative activities, relating to nature, climbing up trees, Yes, it's a little bit risky. | ||
| You might fall down, but again, our society is obsessed with safety and security. | ||
| but anyway, let's not go there right now. | ||
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(laughs) | |
| So I'm very concerned if it's not inconceivable | ||
| that it could have such a detrimental effect on consciousness that within two generations, | ||
| it could lead to the breakdown of civilization because humans would no longer be able | ||
| to creatively think, focus on a specific problem for long enough to find a solution, | ||
| connect with a deeper intelligence that is necessary to. | ||
| to do anything creative in this world, to give attention to something for a certain period of time, rather than have a short attention period. | ||
| You can't focus on anything for very long. | ||
| How can you solve a problem if you cannot look at it, face it, and then become still for a moment, activate your deeper intelligence, and then see what the solution might be? | ||
| So if we lose the ability to do that, It's parents' responsibility to limit their children's time with these devices. | ||
| And I would suggest periodically take them out into nature without these things so that they don't lose their ability to connect with nature. | ||
| Why is it so important to connect with nature? | ||
| Because you find sanity there. | ||
| That was my saving thing when I was a child. | ||
| I would get on my bike. | ||
| I was very unhappy in my home environment. | ||
| It was very dysfunctional. | ||
| My parents couldn't help it. | ||
| They were just in the grip of dysfunction. | ||
| And their parents had been in the grip of dysfunction. | ||
| And so I would get on my bike, go out into nature, like a 15 minute bike ride, not magnificent, fantastic nature, just normal fields, groves of trees. | ||
| And there I would suddenly get off my bike and say, I didn't have any devices to distract me, there weren't any. | ||
| I would actually be there and look. | ||
| And I would often say to myself, this will always be here. | ||
| I didn't know what that meant. | ||
| I could feel that nature was more important than the man-made world, the human-made world. | ||
| The human-made world for me was a very unhappy one. | ||
| And the natural world was where I found liberation whenever I went there. | ||
| But if I'd had these phones, I would have carried that with me and probably no longer be able to really relate to it. | ||
| You'll be happy to know that by the time we air this, I will probably be sitting in a treehouse in a rainforest doing exactly this. | ||
| I mean, this is exactly why I wanted to talk to you before I went off the grid. | ||
| But you mentioned something that I thought was really interesting, which is that it's not just that we're being inundated with other people's thoughts, but that we're never giving ourselves the space The moments where, in the old days, if you said you were gonna meet your friend at a restaurant, well, if you went to the restaurant first, and they weren't there, you might have to sit for a few moments. | ||
| You might have to, perhaps, talk to somebody else, but you might have to just stand, and look around, and think, and see people, where now, we don't do that at all. | ||
| What do we all immediately do? | ||
| So, it's really about creating that space, in many ways, is more important than inoculating or immunizing the thoughts. | ||
| That's almost the obvious one. | ||
| It's the other piece. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's very important. | ||
| And that is something that anybody can do to create that space. | ||
| It's very true what you say. | ||
| Almost nowhere do you see people, wherever people congregate at airports, cafes, Benches, park benches, wherever they are, most of them are engaged with their devices. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| So to consciously decide not to engage whenever, for example, you're waiting for something or someone, and a lot of the time we are waiting for things in this world. | ||
| You're waiting for somebody, as you set an example, for a friend to arrive and you're sitting there. | ||
| Why do you need to engage? | ||
| Why can't you just be, contemplate the world, look around? | ||
| and be and enjoy being in the moment, in this moment. | ||
| And those are the states where creative insights often arise. | ||
| If you don't give yourself space, it's very unlikely that any creative realizations, ideas, insights, realizations will arise in you because your mind is too cluttered. | ||
| So if you give yourself space, it's more likely that you will become more creative as a human being, because that's where these things, without space, Good new ideas, insights, and realizations don't arise. | ||
| There's no room for them to arise. | ||
| So give yourself a wonderful example. | ||
| You're waiting for somebody, just be there, unless there's actually something to communicate maybe. | ||
| He's texting, he says, I'll be five minutes late. | ||
| Fine, okay, and then you put it away. | ||
| I often recommend anytime you're waiting, Just be conscious of yourself in the present moment. | ||
| Elevators, even. | ||
| You press the button, elevator, and you're waiting. | ||
| Why do you need to get out your phone for not half a minute or one minute? | ||
| Why, why? | ||
| You don't need, just be, breathe consciously. | ||
| Have a little bit of inner space, inner space. | ||
| The loss of inner space is a terrible loss. | ||
| And that is the opposite of clutter. | ||
| Make sure that you become aware of this inner space where there's no clutter, there's just a lovely, aware presence. | ||
| You contemplate the world around you, you're aware perhaps that you're breathing, you're aware even perhaps that your body is alive, you can sense that your body is alive. | ||
| in their space. | ||
| Without spaciousness, your life is very unsatisfying. | ||
| The most satisfying thing in life is inner spaciousness, and many humans don't have that anymore. | ||
| We all know that it's true. | ||
| If we would take that moment to think about it, what you're describing, we all know is true. | ||
| You know, in the years that I've done this, when I come back in September, | ||
| I always notice I have a certain force field where I'm able to put the device down more, | ||
| where I'm able to pay less attention. | ||
| But then, of course, the news starts again, or there's an election, or something happened, and then it gets sort of smaller and smaller. | ||
| But I'm wondering, as you're discussing this, how much of this is just that we have to battle what our own nature is, in a way, that we have to battle what the ego is? | ||
| So, for example, if you go to a concert for a musician or a band that you love, instead of just being there and just being there, we're all taking the video, we're all taking the pictures, because we want the likes and all that, And that we're actually sort of denigrating the thing that gives us that transcendent experience. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So we're battling something within ourselves. | ||
| Yes, it's a certain conditioned patterns that we kind of collectively inherit. | ||
| We are born into this world and at an early age we already become conditioned by these collective patterns that are part, some belong to our family and background, some belong to the general culture that we grow up in. | ||
| So we become conditioned and to become aware of one's own conditioning. | ||
| And again, the key word is aware. | ||
| If you become aware of your conditioning, you're no longer totally in the grip of your conditioning. | ||
| It may still operate, yes, but you're not, you're one foot out and one foot in the conditioning, if you're aware. | ||
| And the example you gave is also interesting because whenever people see something, They have, the thing is there, they need to videotape, videotape or take selfies or snapshots. | ||
| So many people have lost the ability to experience something Because everything that arises is looked at as a possibility for a photo or video, and everything is experienced to the screen. | ||
| When people go on vacation, often you can see that they walk around maybe the most magnificent place And instead of experiencing it fully, they experience it through this. | ||
| And perhaps the idea is, when I get home and I look at this, then I'll be able to experience it fully. | ||
|
unidentified
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And of course, it doesn't either. | |
| And it never works that way. | ||
| It never works that way. | ||
| We're trying to hold on to something that we're not fully grasping in the first place. | ||
| Yes, and of course, obviously it's nice sometimes to be able to Film something. | ||
| It's sometimes nice. | ||
| I sometimes, one of my favorite subjects for taking for Photos is the sky. | ||
| I love the sky and the different, the clouds and the different formations. | ||
| I have hundreds of photos of the sky that I take on my phone, but I'm not absorbed by it. | ||
| I look at the sky maybe for five minutes. | ||
| I enjoy the beauty of it. | ||
| And then I get out my phone and I'm like, wow, this is so wonderful. | ||
| And That's fine, but I'm not treating it as a photo opportunity or a selfie opportunity. | ||
| Not that there's anything wrong with occasional selfies, but if the whole thing takes over your life, then that is dreadful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I have a feeling I wouldn't see you wandering down the street taking selfies with the clouds as the less important part. | ||
| I always say that the first, you know, the myth of the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, the man, this is where the term narcissism comes from, which is narcissism being an extreme form of ego. | ||
| So Narcissus was a beautiful young man. | ||
| He was very happy. | ||
| And one day he was walking and he saw a pool of water. | ||
| There were not any mirrors at that time. | ||
| In a pool of water, he saw his own reflection. | ||
| And the story goes that he fell in love with his own reflection. | ||
| What a better way of putting it is he became obsessed with his own reflection. | ||
| And from then on, he became very unhappy and his life didn't go well after that. | ||
| We don't need to go into what happened to him, but it wasn't good. | ||
| Now, this is a symbolic way of expressing what happened to human consciousness when the ego developed. | ||
| The ego is an image of who you are in your mind. | ||
| It's a self-image. | ||
| And when Narcissus saw himself, the myth is a symbolic expression of what happened to human consciousness as the ego developed as a, then you'd suddenly have an image of who you are. | ||
| I call it the first, the first selfie ever was when I see reflection in the mirror, in the pool of water. | ||
| And this also, the living through a persona, which persona is where the word person comes from, and the Latin word persona actually means mask. | ||
| Living through a mental image of who you are and projecting this mental image that was already there before we came up with all these devices. | ||
| But now it's become amplified because many, especially many young people, they live through Facebook and Instagram and they create an image for themselves that they project out into the world. | ||
| And it's totally, bears little resemblance to who they actually are. | ||
| Now there's the added thing, they can use filters in Photoshop. | ||
| Everybody can look beautiful, even I could look beautiful with a little bit of that filter. | ||
| And often you wouldn't recognize these if you saw them in the street. | ||
| Totally distorted, but they live through it. | ||
| It becomes more important to them than their own being. | ||
| Well, I realized, I mean, that in many ways is why I wanted to start doing this, because I realized as someone that talks to the camera, and people say nice things to me, and I get traction on Twitter and all those things, I felt that I was I wasn't trying to control it, | ||
| but it was becoming sort of bigger than me, which is why I want to do this. | ||
| So actually, I only want to ask you one more thing, 'cause I want to be respectful of your time. | ||
| But for most of my audience, what I sense people are going through right now | ||
| is they're deeply worried that the world that they knew is disappearing at a very rapid rate. | ||
| You sort of hinted at something like that at the beginning. | ||
| That the things that they cared about, about freedom and the individual, | ||
| that these things are going away and it's being amplified by social media | ||
| and bad political leaders and everything else. | ||
| What would you say is a way to battle it without becoming consumed by it? | ||
| That's what I try to do on my show all the time. | ||
| I always try to do it with a little bit of a smile and a little sense of humor because I don't want people to be crazy, but I'm obviously not perfect at this. | ||
| What would you say to the average person that wants to be aware, they want to be engaged in current events and politics, but also don't want to give their life to it at the expense of everything else that you've discussed here? | ||
| Yes, do everything with awareness so that instead of being reactive, let's say you see somebody's posting something and you feel you want to reply, don't be reactive and attack somebody that you have never even met and don't equate somebody's perhaps erroneous opinion with who they actually are. | ||
| I think it may be, if you feel called upon to do that, it may be good to point out what you regard as irrational, statements that are irrational, point out viewpoints that you think are toxic, Without attacking the human being that has these viewpoints, you can attack opinions and viewpoints or show them that they are erroneous without making the people who have them into absolute evil beings. | ||
| To separate what happens on the level of mind from the human being the human being underneath. | ||
| It's easier to do that in, when you're actually meeting a human being, then it's, you can, because you can see there's the, there's the, I sometimes call it the human and the being. | ||
| Everybody is a human being. | ||
| The human is the conditioned mind. | ||
| The personality, the conditioned entity is a human. | ||
| And the being is the consciousness that's beyond that. | ||
| That's the deeper being. | ||
| That's the, one could say the true human, that's the child of God. | ||
| Every human is a child of God, but the overlay may be very, very dense of conditioning. | ||
| That's the human level. | ||
| It's easier not to lose sight of the being dimension in another human. | ||
| When you see them face to face, then you perhaps, You can still sense that. | ||
| But when you're only relating to abstract words often on the screen, then you confuse what's produced by the human level with being. | ||
| You lose sight of their being completely. | ||
| you lose sight of being their being completely. | ||
| So, there's an absurd statement that you read | ||
| and you feel you want to clarify that. | ||
| It's perfectly fine to do that if you feel called upon to do it, if you think it has a purpose to do that. | ||
| Sometimes it might, sometimes it might not. | ||
| Without making the person who has that opinion into an enemy, although he or she will try to make you into an enemy, of course. | ||
| Don't, in other words, don't contribute to the insanity. | ||
| Bring sanity into this world. | ||
| Do not allow the insanity to pull you in because that can easily happen. | ||
| It pulls you in and then the Then you, the monster that you, in other words, I don't remember who said it, when you fight monsters, be careful that you don't become a monster. | ||
| Or when you, Nietzsche said, when you look into the abyss, then the abyss also looks into you or something like that. | ||
| So that is certainly the case. | ||
| So, I think to bear in mind to bring sanity into this world is your job. | ||
| To bring sanity into a world that in many ways is going in the opposite direction. | ||
| It's becoming more and more crazy. | ||
| So it's doubly important for you to represent, to embody the sanity. | ||
| And always be aware of the gravitational pull of craziness, which is there all around you. | ||
| And the gravitational pull, the reactivity that comes, you don't need that. | ||
| Give yourself a moment when you feel reactive before you post anything. | ||
| Give yourself a few minutes to calm down, become present, and then see what useful contribution you could make to this particular discussion on what it may be. | ||
| So who said it? | ||
| I don't remember the famous phrase, be the change that you want to see in this world. | ||
| Maybe it was Nelson Mandela. | ||
| I don't remember who is quite who said it, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| So if you want more sanity in this world, and if you see that there's a lot of insanity, in this world, then it's your job not to become part of the insanity. | ||
| You cannot fight insanity with more insanity. | ||
| So be aware, be present, be conscious, and don't be totally identified with your mental positions, but express them clearly. | ||
| But realize who you are is far deeper than your mental positions. | ||
| They are relatively important. | ||
| But not absolutely important. | ||
| One thing that's absolutely important is your being. | ||
| There's the human and there's the being. | ||
| You are both. | ||
| And you can exist in both dimensions consciously. | ||
| in the being and be active on the human level without losing yourself on the human level, which is the mind, which is the world, which is the internet, that's all the human level. | ||
| So be a real human being so that the two dimensions are active in you. | ||
| Well, Eckhart, you know, it's funny, I asked you to explain it for my audience, and I know you were talking directly to them there, but I genuinely felt like you were talking directly to me, and that's exactly why I do this Off The Grid for 30 days, and I give you my word that I will be trying to connect my human and my being, and What a great way to leave for me. | ||
| So I thank you so much, and I promise you that I'm gonna incorporate that even further when I get back in the fall. | ||
| Right, and have a wonderful time on your retreat. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about spirituality instead of non-stop yelling, check out our spirituality playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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