What Eckhart means by the digital hive mind | Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle describes smartphones and the internet as extensions of the human mind that amplify compulsive thinking and create addictive loops. He warns of a collective digital hive mind driven by social media reactions, and argues that lasting change requires sustained presence in everyday life, not temporary relief from music or sport.
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They are an extension of the mind. So when your phone takes over your life, it means your mind is taking over your life again. It's an addition, an additional— yes, it's a miraculous thing. So listening to music, giving it attention, playing an instrument can temporarily free you from yourself? It temporarily can be a help, it's not a permanent thing, but it can be an additional help, and this is people who even are not awakening yet can experience These brief moments occasionally when they listen to music or they make music or dance or sport activity can be very helpful too. So these are all things that can be helpful, but what is the most difficult thing to deal with is... The stuff of this world, the stuff that you need to deal with, no matter what your profession is, there's an enormous amount of things that you continuously need to deal with. And this is how many people lose— they say, I can be present in certain situations and environments, But for the rest, I cannot be present. I lose it all the time when I go back into normal everyday life. I lose it all the time because there's so many demands placed upon me. I just, I just cannot sustain presence. And so, of course, it's vital that you Bring presence into your everyday life, because that's where most of your life happens. First of all, we need to mention the— on a purely practical level, you need to have some discipline with your electronic devices, the devices that everybody lives with nowadays, smartphones, computers, and so on, so that they don't take over your life. They are an extension of the mind, so when your phone It takes over your life, it means your mind is taking over your life again. It's an addition, an additional— yes, it's a miraculous thing, but from the point of view of awakening, it amplifies what your mind was already doing even before there were these devices. Your mind was already taking you out, but now that there are these devices, they are an extension of the mind, and they have an addictive quality in the same way that incessant and compulsive thinking is addictive. People don't want to let go. What is an addiction? An addiction is You either you cannot or you don't even know the difference anymore between I cannot let go of it or I don't want to let go of it. You don't even know the difference anymore. But you may find that it's almost impossible to let go first. I often say thinking is the greatest addiction. You have been taken over by the mind. And now the mind has invented these devices that are an extension of the mind, and they have taken over your life, so it's a secondary mind. It becomes a collective hive mind that becomes more pronounced now, and this hive mind has its own momentum. This hive mind is in the tweets, The Facebook postings, the reactions of millions of people reacting to one event, and you're doing the same. The hive mind is— and so you have an additional thing to cope with nowadays with the technological advances. It's not just your so-called personal mind, you have the— The collective mind. The hive mind of the digital world, the Matrix, the Matrix is all around you. So you need to know that so that you can at least have a little bit of discipline so that your mind doesn't completely get taken over by the devices.