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An Interview with Eckhart Tolle by Steven Donoso
The tendency to escape is a form of collective mental conditioning that is at work almost all the time in people’s lives, not just when situations turn out to be unpleasant or unsatisfying or difficult. In ordinary life, there is a continuous moving away from the moment to an imagined future that is unconsciously regarded as more important. Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever I “make it.” Our striving toward the future, our inner compulsion to deny the present moment, manifests itself as a continuous sense of unease and latent dissatisfaction with what is. This seems to be the “normal” state of our civilization. Freud recognized this when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents. A literal translation of the German title is The Unease in Culture. He saw that our normal state of consciousness could be described as one of continuous unease, more pronounced at some times than at others. Why are we not more aware of this state? Because it is everybody’s normal state. Children are conditioned to look to the future from the moment they enter school, always needing the next moment and the next. Even if the future moment is feared, there is still a projection toward it, which generates anxiety. Then the recognition can arise — and this is an amazing realization for people who have never looked at it clearly — that the present moment is all there ever is in one’s life. But aren’t our past experiences and our potential future experiences central to our lives? One never experiences the future, nor the past. One experiences only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can unfold only Now. The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one. Is having hope for the future a help to us or a hindrance? I wouldn’t recommend it. [Laughter.] It is more mental projection. It just gives you some new future that you think is going to save you. What keeps us living in either the past or the future? We live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image making — a world of thought. And that becomes our dwelling place. It is a world characterized by the inability ever to stop thinking. The mental noise is a continuous stream. Psychologists have found that 95 percent or more of it is totally repetitive. Perhaps 10 percent of those thought processes, at most, are actually needed to deal with life. Thought can sometimes be very useful [laughter], but in our world it has become obsessive, compulsive, almost like an addiction. People’s sense of identity, of self, gets bound up with their mental concepts and mental images of “I” and “me.” When does this begin? It begins when your parents tell you what your name is. That’s the first label you absorb; the mind says, “Oh, that’s me,” and you repeat your name. Subsequently, that name becomes like a basket in which further life experiences are collected: things that happen to you; things that people tell you about who you are. Some parents tell their children, “You’re not good enough; you’re stupid; you can’t do anything right.” Other parents say different things. But there is always conditioning that is absorbed. These things are then collected and become the contents of your mind. As you grow up, a story grows out of them, a story consisting of judgments and concepts and belief systems. In other words, the self is a story line that develops in the head, very much like a fictitious creation. Yet it forms the basis of most people’s sense of who they are, and that sense, of course, is reinforced by the surrounding world. This conceptual sense of self is also often threatened by other people, so it is always very uneasy and defensive and constantly needs to replenish and enhance itself. There is always the need for more of “me” to add to who I am. I need to add relationship; I need to add knowledge; I need to add material possessions; I need to add status. If people’s opinions of me are good, if they think highly of me, then I will have status in society, and that can become the basis of my identity. If they think badly of me, if I have no status, that, too, can serve as the basis for my identity — an identity that says, “I haven’t made it. I’m not good enough,” and is characterized by a continuous feeling of insufficiency, lack, fear. Either way, the story of “me” is not complete. Even those who in the eyes of the world have “made it” feel they haven’t arrived, that their story is incomplete, that so far it hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to go. So my sense of self is deficient because it’s incomplete. “There’s so much more that I need to be fully myself” is the feeling. And then there is the unsatisfactory nature of my story. Sometimes this is clearly seen, as when people are depressed. Other times it is pushed underneath the surface and becomes unconscious. The conscious mind might create images of “me” as the greatest, but underneath lie those images that say, “Oh, no, you’re not.” It may well be that the image I project is the opposite of what I truly feel. This is what people live with; this is what people are burdened with as a sense of self. The self is a story line that develops in the head, very much like a fictitious creation. Yet it forms the basis of most people’s sense of who they are, and that sense, of course, is reinforced by the surrounding world. A further characteristic of this fictional self is that it cannot sustain itself in the prolonged absence of conflict or strife. It needs other people and situations with which it can be in opposition, because to be in opposition to something strengthens our sense of self. If I have enemies, my identity is strengthened. And this applies, of course, to both a personalized sense of “me” and a collective sense of “us”: our tribe, our religion, our nation. In both cases, it is through enemies and conflict that the self defines itself, that it can declare itself “right.” This need for enemies is part of the insanity of normal human consciousness, which has afflicted us for many thousands of years. It lies at the root of the continuous violence, warfare, and conflict that you see when you open a newspaper or history book. I always recommend people read twentieth century history, because of all the periods of human history, surely the twentieth century is the maddest of all, in terms of suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. Any visitor from outer space who looked at that century would have to conclude that there is a strong streak of insanity running through the collective human psyche. The madness of the world is not just out there; the root of the madness lies in every person’s mind. Of course, it takes on more extreme forms in certain people and less extreme forms in others. An extreme manifestation of insanity is the terrorist who kills thousands of people, including himself. How can he do that? How can a person inflict suffering and, seemingly, not feel anything? How is that possible? It is possible because the terrorist has conceptualized a large group of people — the other religion, the other tribe, the other nation — as the enemy. And once he has made labels and judgments, he no longer sees them as human beings. He sees only the mental concept that he has created, the mental labels that he has attached. The moment you do that, whether collectively to a tribe or individually to another person, you have desensitized yourself, and you no longer sense the aliveness and the reality of that other human being. So you’ve killed them before you have killed them. Yes, that’s right. But, before one condemns the terrorists, one needs to see that terrorism is only a more extreme manifestation of the same dysfunction that exists in everyone. And that’s a sobering realization. It also means that you can’t make the terrorists into an “enemy” anymore. There is a summer camp near where I live in Maine called Seeds of Peace, founded by John Wallach. It brings together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers to live, eat, and play sports: to discover that the “enemy” has a human face. Yes, and gradually the mental construct loses its density, and they see some of the reality shine through. But it is important to realize we are all trapped in mental constructs, and so we separate ourselves from reality; the whole world loses its aliveness — or, rather, we lose our ability to sense that aliveness, the sacredness of nature. When we approach nature through the conceptualizing mind, we see a forest as a commodity, a concept. We no longer see it for what it truly is, but for what we want to use it as. It is reduced. This is how it becomes possible for humans to destroy the planet without realizing what they are doing. It’s all contained in the last words of Jesus: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This collective mental illness has been with us for a long time. In the time of Jesus, already, the illness was there. In the time of the Buddha, it was there. As time progresses, it has become more and more acute, more and more pronounced. The twentieth century — the “century of progress” — was the height of the madness so far. What role does technology play in all of this? Although science has created some miraculous inventions, most have also had very dramatic downsides to them. At first, we think a new invention is all good, and then we see the destructive side to it, the other polarity. During the First World War, technology and science multiplied the effects of human madness a thousand times. People began to ask, “My God, what have we done?” It was staring us in the face: this is the human condition; this is what we have created. And we had to turn our faces away. It is easier to see this outwardly, in society, than in our individual lives. First you see it
collectively, the reflection
of it out there. Then you see
its root in yourself: the tendency
to live continuously in
a world of concepts, which
is bound up with one’s identification
with thought processes,
which are always about abstraction and image making.
Although in some people a change is taking place, a shift
in consciousness, most people still completely identify with
their thinking minds. That’s why the French philosopher
Descartes, when he tried to state the deepest truth possible,
came up with “I think, therefore I am.” Of course, that is not
the truth. He was only expressing the error that was already
there in his time: equating being with thinking.
There is so much
more to a human
being than thought
activity. There is so
much more intelligence
beyond the
world of thought,
in the realm where
intuition, creativity,
and sudden realizations
come from.
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