… the ego's greatest enemy of all is … the present moment, which is to say, life itself.
-- Eckhart Tolle

Occasionally, when I awaken from the deep sleep of the mind, that is, the unconscious, never-ending rubbish that passes for thought, and which keeps me isolated from everything and everyone, I pick up the odd book on how to stay that way. Here are a few quotes from the one I picked up this morning:

On a collective level, the mind-set "We are right and they are wrong" is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own "story …". Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of "accommodating a competing narrative," but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides regard themselves as victims and the "other" as evil, and because they have conceptualised and thereby dehumanised the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction.

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as "us" against "them" is even more insane than the "me," the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go so far as to say that on this planet "normal" equals insane.

War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war," your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on TV tonight.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, Penguin, 2005

The various selves who claim to represent who I am are taking bets on how many days, weeks, months will pass before I wake up again. The bastards. They know how hard it is. Some people never wake up. And they are the ones who rule the world.

-- Gort Slypesunder