How to Protect Yourself from Toxic Beliefs | Eckhart Tolle

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1:08All right, ladies and gentlemen, as I tape this right now, it is 3.56 p.m. Eastern time on July 31st, 2025. About eight hours from now, I officially go off the grid for the month. And I could not possibly be more pleased to bring on my last guest of the season. We will be airing this on August 1st, my first day off the grid for the month. He is a legendary spiritual teacher and author, and perhaps I should ask him what he likes to be referred to most. But I like to call him my friend Eckhart Tolle. Eckhart, it is great to see you, and of course the author of Power of Now and many other books. How are you, my friend?

1:53Eckhart Tolle:I'm fine. Thank you. Good to see you again. It's been a few years since we had our last, well, we had a private conversation in Miami not long ago, but the last interview was perhaps four or five years ago, right? Yeah. Well, it's great to see you. Yeah. We saw each other in person just a few months ago, but my guys just checked. The first time we sat down in person was 2019, and then we did it again in 2021. So it's been about four years since you've been on the show. And I meant what I said up top. I don't think there could be anyone that I could end this season with, end this period of time with, and really put up as our first interview when I'm gone than you, because your life in some sense perfectly embodies, I think, why I'm trying or why I've been trying to take this month off the grid.

2:43So maybe before we get into that and sort of our relationship with technology and some of the other things that you talk about, particularly mindfulness, which is really why I'm, and being present, which is more than anything else, why I'm trying to do what I do. For somebody, if there's somebody out there that doesn't know you, how do you describe yourself at this point? I mean, I know everyone knows you, but how do you describe yourself at this point? Well, sometimes people ask me, what do you do?

3:14Eckhart Tolle:Well, I'm getting old now, so everybody probably assumes that I'm retired, but occasionally still people ask me, what do you do? Or they ask, what did you do? So sometimes it's best to simplify things, give people something that they can immediately relate to and understand. So the simplest answer I sometimes give is, I'm a writer. And sometimes that's it, but they're happy. And sometimes they ask another question, what do you write about? And then, of course, becomes a bit more complicated. Everybody has a certain conceptual identity. So obviously, I'm what one could call a spiritual teacher.

4:03Eckhart Tolle:And to some people, that term makes sense, to others it doesn't. But whatever conceptual identity one uses, that's not ultimately who or what I am. There's always a deeper level to your being. So the way I talk about it is say I'm a human being, so there's a twofold identity. Everybody has a twofold identity. On the one hand, you have the human identity. As a human, you have a physical body, and you have a mind, you have a psychological identity conditioned by the past. That's the personality, the person that you are as a human. And I call that sometimes your surface I. It's also what can be called the ego, the egoic identity.

5:08Eckhart Tolle:And for most people, that's all they are ever aware of. But there's always a possibility of accessing, of finding, of discovering a deep identity. I call it the deep I that transcends who or what you are as a person. and then you are no longer, when you access that, you can sense that, you can feel that deep identity and we'll be going into that perhaps in a few minutes to see how to access that. When you access that, you're no longer trapped in a conceptual identity. So if I believed, some people believe that what I talk about is nonsense, Other people say I'm fantastic, I'm a great teacher, but I refuse to carry around a conceptual identity.

6:02I sometimes have to tell people that's what I am, but I don't feel that that is my true identity.

6:09Eckhart Tolle:Nothing in the conceptual realm, which is thought, is my true identity. So I'm not looking for any identity in the dimension of thought or thinking. So, and on the dimension of form, man, woman, race, gender, age, personal history, achievements, victories, defeats, sufferings, what people did to me, what I've done to people, all those things become your personal identity. It's a collection of memories and reactive patterns. Everybody has that, but that becomes who you are as a personality, as a person. Our true, as I see it, our true purpose in life is to go deeper into the, we could call it the spiritual dimension, to connect with a level that is within yourself that is deeper than the personality, the deep eye.

7:27Eckhart Tolle:The deep eye transcends who or what you are as a person, and it connects you with something infinitely greater than you, than who or what you are as a person. And ultimately, one could say that is your connection with the spiritual dimension or that is your connection with God. In order to find it, because maybe that's your next question, in order to find it, you need to access within yourself a dimension that we could call stillness. where the mental noise or the mental clutter, because everybody lives with this mental noise, I call it the voice in the head, that comments on whatever you're perceiving, it comments on your experiences.

8:31This voice in the head thinks about the past a lot,

8:36Eckhart Tolle:thinks about the future a lot, has very little connection to actually the present moment. And if it connects to the present moment, it interprets the present moment through its mental conditioning. You have certain thoughts. You interpret what you perceive through the veil of these thoughts. For example, it could become an ideology. There are millions of people who are trapped in an ideology that they have taken on board, and they look at the world through the veil of their ideology and then that distorts reality completely. So you have thought. It's very important to ask what kind of relationship do you have with the thoughts in your head, with all their thinking.

9:29Eckhart Tolle:Are you aware of the thoughts in your head? And here we come to the key term, to the keyword awareness. Another word for that would be presence. If you're not aware of the thoughts that go through your head continuously, you are identified with all those thoughts, and you are completely conditioned by thoughts. They become a veil. You don't have the clarity to see reality as it is. And as you know, there are many types of thoughts that are actually completely dysfunctional, that are completely disconnected from reality. I first discovered that when I was young, one of my family members was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

10:23Eckhart Tolle:And I could see how he was unable to see reality as it is because he had a veil of assumptions and beliefs that all those people are out to get me. They're all out to destroy me. And so completely misinterpreting reality. So thought, without the awareness behind thought, can become quite a structure. Thought is a wonderful tool. You can manifest things through thought. It can be very creative. It's an amazing evolutionary step for humans to have developed the ability to think. But there is a downside to it, and that is thought can become your worst enemy. There are many people in this world for whom their greatest enemy lives between their two ears, in their mind, making your life impossibly difficult, creating problems that don't actually exist, and so on.

11:28Eckhart Tolle:So toxic thoughts, you've probably read in reference to contemporary culture, Garth Sartre wrote the book, The Parasitic Mind, a very good book. So he talks about how the human mind can be invaded by toxic thoughts that cut you off completely from reality. Carl Jung also pointed out that the greatest danger for human beings is not in the outside world. The greatest danger for humans is mass psychosis. When a large group of people become infected by thoughts that take over your mind, like a virus infection in the body, nobody actually knows what exactly a thought is because nobody knows exactly what consciousness is.

12:23Eckhart Tolle:Thoughts are a manifestation of consciousness. Obviously, it's a form that causes mistakes.

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12:58Eckhart Tolle:But thoughts are actually invisible. If somebody opened my brain and looking for the content of my mind, he wouldn't find it. Thoughts are actually, there's a connection between thought and the human brain, but I don't believe that the brain actually produces thought. It's like a radio receiver for thought. But let's put that aside for a moment. And so Aristotle said that it is a mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Very interesting statement. I don't know what the original Greek is. Educated, I would change that. I don't know whether he actually said educated.

13:54Eckhart Tolle:It is a mark of an aware mind, of a present mind, to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, which means you can look at a thought that arises in your mind or a thought that you see when you interact on social media. Something arises in your mind, and then you can stand back. If you are aware, you can look at the thought. then you have a kind of immunity against being taken over by a viral infection, a mental viral infection. You need that without the immunity, you are exposed to this danger of being taken over by thought and then believing that who or what you are. Then that's your personality, and then that's me.

14:53Eckhart Tolle:You have all kinds of opinions, not realizing that you are not actually thinking. The thinking is happening to you. You have involuntary, incessant mind activity, voice in the head. It doesn't create any great ideas, deep insights, interesting perspectives. No, it's repetitive. Often it's destructive, self-destructive, destructive of others, sometimes complaining continuously about this or that or the other. So people live with that identity that's based on conditioned thought activity. And that's the, in spiritual terms, that is the unawakened state. In spiritual times, you could say these people are actually unconscious, spiritually speaking, which means there's no awareness of their thoughts.

15:56Eckhart Tolle:They are so identified with their thoughts, they are. So they are trapped in a conditioned personality. And then life becomes very frustrating because this conditioned personality is never happy for long. it always needs some kind of enemy to fight against because it defines itself through the otherness of others. So it needs to emphasize the otherness of others. It loves its enemies. You can see it online, or people argue. So that gives food to this egoic identity. It's all fiction. It's all crazy. So what we need is an awakening, an awakening to this deeper dimension of consciousness that we could call awareness, or we could call it presence.

16:53Eckhart Tolle:awareness is a one could say a different dimension of consciousness it's not difficult all that is required is a moment of becoming present in this present moment, becoming aware looking around you're breathing you're alert to your sense perceptions You can sense your own being, perhaps, beyond thought, perhaps the aliveness within your body. And for a moment, the voice in the head subsides, and you're just there. Your tension is completely in the present moment, and you're free of the conditioned entity. You have gone deeper, or you could say higher, depends how you look at it, and you've started to access the deep eye that is beyond the conditioned mind.

18:01Eckhart Tolle:So the deep eye is you as consciousness itself, whereas the conditioned entity that is the surface eye is a form that consciousness has taken temporarily and become a person. So my true identity and your true identity is your consciousness. Then your secondary identity is consciousness has incarnated into a physical form, and consciousness has taken on the form of who or what you are as a personality. And that's fine. That's how it operates. But unfortunately, most people are completely trapped in the conditioned part of consciousness, having no access to the deeper, unconditioned part where you find inner peace, an intense sense of aliveness, a sense of beingness, almost sometimes you could say a joyful presence.

19:10It's simply, you become aware, and this sounds a little strange perhaps, you become aware that you are aware.

19:22Eckhart Tolle:You become conscious of being conscious. You can sense your own being as consciousness itself. This is not complicated. Don't even try to understand it, because it's not conceptual. to feel the being of you that is deeper than any thought or any emotion. And that is freedom from the conditioned entity of the person. And then the two can live together and face the challenges of this world so that you don't lose yourself in your mind and lose yourself in the stuff of this world so that there's always some connectedness with the deeper dimension of being. So another word is stillness. So the great opportunity, now that you're going away for months, disconnected from all the digital world, that is a wonderful opportunity to find the stillness within you.

20:38Eckhart Tolle:It is helpful to go out into nature as much as you can. Not everybody can take a whole month off, so you are privileged to be able to do that. But with all those people who are not able to do that, it's highly important to take opportunities is in a daily life, as much as possible, to step out of the continuous stream of thinking until it clutters your mind. A cluttered mind is not creative. When you have a cluttered mind, no creative solution to any problem will come to you. A cluttered mind creates its own problems continuously. You lose access to the realm of creativity within yourself. So I'm very concerned about what's happening, especially to youngsters, because their minds become totally cluttered.

21:44Eckhart Tolle:They're interacting with the digital world, social media, and so on. in many cases, five, six hours a day.

21:56Eckhart Tolle:The digital world, social media, which ultimately is really an externalization of what's within you, of the mind. So the mind was already a problem before we created all this new technology, but now we have the externalization of the mind in the form of social media that gives even more power to this useless thinking that people are trapped in. As you probably know, youngsters, young people who have grown up with social media and all that, many of them are incapable of forming true relationships anymore. Their attention span is extremely short. The mind is continuously cluttered. They do not have a moment of even boredom.

22:52Boredom, people used to complain about being bored.

22:57Eckhart Tolle:Nowadays, nobody's bored anymore. It's a terrible loss. Because with boredom, at least something opens up and says, hmm, what do I do now? Hmm, don't know what to do. At least there's a little bit of inner space. But nowadays, the moment you see the light is beginning upon, you pick up your phone and you start strolling, which means you're adding clutter to your mind. And so, I believe there are some indications that the level of intelligence in humanity is decreasing, that humans are becoming more stupid. If you look at many movements in politics and so on, or cultural movements, you can say, well, that's actually true, reminiscent of the now well-known movie Idiocracy that describes how humans, a decrease of intelligence in humans.

24:02Eckhart Tolle:So I'm very concerned about how social media affects the consciousness of humans, especially those humans who grow up with it now. It offers enormous possibilities, like what you are doing and other people are doing. So you're using the possibilities that social media offers. and it's a great thing because it means humans have an alternative to the brainwashing of mainstream media. So now you have an alternative and it's a wonderful thing. But on the other hand, there's a danger that humans lose touch with reality because the digital world is not real life Life is out here. And in the worst-case scenario, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it is the worst-case scenario, within one or two generations, civilization collapses because humans are incapable of creating anything new and solving their problems anymore.

25:14Eckhart Tolle:And so, you know, so let's not, it is the worst-case scenario. But, hopefully, that's not going to happen. Guys, it's time to strut into the bedroom like your junk just got a VIP invite to the party. Blue Chew's chewable tablets are a motivational coach for your man parts, giving you harder, stronger, longer-lasting edge, like your downstairs just chugged a protein shake and hit the weights. When you pop a Blue Chew tablet, your confidence will be so high that your shadow will call you Big Papa. It's not just sex. It's like your pelvis is auditioning for an action movie called The Boner Identity.

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26:33I mean, you just gave a better explanation, I think, of much of our political fighting and cultural fighting than people that, you know, do that for a living, actually. So much of what you described as a somewhat psychological, spiritual condition, I think, actually is a far better analysis of the political stuff. but I certainly don't want to do the political stuff with you. But also, interestingly, during your answer there, I tried my hardest to stay with you on the higher I there, right? I was trying my hardest to be with you. And when I'm interviewing somebody, that's where I want. I want to be as present as possible with them doing it.

27:12I find it's a little more difficult when I'm doing it digitally with someone as opposed to sitting across from them in person. But then there's the other part of me, the lower part that you're talking about, that you said so many brilliant things that you were giving me, you know, 50 different avenues to go off. And so I had to have an internal battle to be as present with you as possible, to hear you as much as possible. And yet the other piece of me saying, well, I'm interviewing somebody, I should be able to do the work that an interviewer should do. And I really just tried to traverse that to the best of my ability.

27:47I'm not sure. I'm not exactly sure how well I did it actually, but would you say that is the ultimate goal then as a human being to have presence? Do you want to have full presence all the time or is it just that you want to have accessibility to the presence perhaps more than your default position, if that makes sense?

28:13Eckhart Tolle:Yes. Well, before I go there, first of all, interesting point you mentioned about listening, listening to another person. That is a skill, that is an art, and it actually, true listening, which I believe you are able to do, although, as you said, as an interviewer, you always say, what's my next question going to be? because as an interviewer, you don't want to open. The interviewee suddenly stops talking. You need to know what the next question is. So that makes it a little bit more difficult. But in an ordinary interaction, the ability to truly listen to another person is a fantastic thing, and it requires awareness.

28:58Eckhart Tolle:It requires presence. It requires a certain alertness. in that alertness you listen to the words that are coming to you and you're not evaluating or preparing the next thing to say that actually greatly improves any relationship if you are able to listen to the other in that state of open presence it's a wonderful gift to give another person to simply give them attention listen and then if the moment this other person stops speaking perhaps there's a moment of stillness maybe a few seconds and then usually some kind of response or additional question comes to you so that's something to practice but it's actually a spiritual practice I would say to listen to another human being in that state of openness instead of mentally preparing, already preparing the counter argument.

30:07Eckhart Tolle:Now, your other question is being present all the time. I think that was your question, being present all the time. Is that really the goal to be present all the time, or is it to just understand yourself enough to have accessibility to it? Because we all live in a world where were hit with all of those things that you talked about. It would almost be impossible to function in a society that is not present, to be present all the time. I'm sure, I mean, I've spent, we had a meal together two months ago. I can't imagine that in the, well, it was, we were pretty present, actually, I would say, but to be there all the time seems Herculean or almost inhuman in some sense.