-The universe is infinite to our perception.

-What we perceive as real is an illusion.

-Everything we consider as "real" is made of one fundamental "thing". This thing is energy.

-Nothing in the universe is permanent or independent. There is no absolute anything. The only absolute is energy and its dynamism.

-Everything in the universe is raw energy self-organizing into patterns at different levels of scope.

-What seems random at a "micro-scale" is organized at a "macro-scale."

-Fractals are a very good example of the concept.

-In fact, our very consciousness is simply energy condensed into a pattern within a certain perceptual scope.

-The universe itself is conscious and can be turned into any level of consciousness depending on what patterns its energy conformed to.

-Underneath our "perception" of reality, there is no separation, objects, meaning, interpretation, or any other construct of the mind.

-Nothing that we know of in this reality applies in "real" reality.

-Our mind creates "our reality" from formless energy by processing pieces of it according to a set of rules and then attaching subjective meaning.

-Everyday we live in this illusory reality, we are guided by our ego, the attachment to meaning and interpretations. We live in ignorance of the bigger picture. We believe in things that have absolutely no importance in real "reality."

-This ignorance is fundamentally attached to the concept of "I".

-Every thought we have says "I". Every breath we take says "I". Every motivation we have says "I". Every belief we hold says "I". In fact, the very act of our current existence says "I". Every second of everyday, you're being automatically says "I".

-This "I" attaches itself to illusory meaning. This "I" craves validation. This "I" gains pleasure and suffering based on superficial falsehoods. This "I" seeks to hide you from the truth.

-But what happens when you ask yourself... "who am I"? Not in a logical way, but in an intuitive way, where you really try to "feel" what's underneath all your interpretations of "I."

-"Who am I?"..........

-"Who am I?"...........

-"Who am I?"...........

-Ask yourself this question from the depth of your heart... and what happens?

-You feel a sense of fear. Why? Because your very identity, your mental crutch, your comfort-zone starts to lift away. The very outline of your body starts to disappear. Everything you believe about yourself shows its superficiality. You start to become one with the universe. Your ego grows increasingly uncomfortable.

One by one, as each "I" is removed, the illusion begins to lift off you. You realize:
-Everything you attach meaning to is false.
-Everything you identify with is false.
-Every validation you seek is false.
-Every interpretation you have is false.
-Every belief you hold is false.
-Every problem you suffer from is false.
-Your entire existence the way you see it is false.

With the illusion gone, you now understand the truth.
-Everything is connected. There is no separation between you and the universe. When you look at a rock, another person, etc, you are looking at yourself.
-Nothing in your life is permanent. In fact, everything you see and know will change rapidly as your existence is nothing but a tiny spec in the evolutionary time of the universe.
-Everything you see around you is created from nothing and will return to nothing.
-Nothing is ever created or destroyed in the Universe. The essence of your energy will be recycled when you die. (Not in a spirit type of way)
-Your only purpose is to experience.... which is neither good or bad... and then to return to nothingness once again, as you always have, in a never ending cycle beyond comprehension.

-As you dissolve your ego, the "I", meaning, attachment, and interpretation, you unleash ultimate creativity and potentiality within yourself.

-You no longer play the slot machine to receive moments of happiness every time you win. You now own the slot machine and can create moments of happiness in any moment of your experience.

-The way you feel is no longer attached to anything, but your own creations. You finally will have control over how you feel. You will become truth.

Chan-Ho is that why you didn't make a K-Pop thread, to break the never ending cycle?

oh man, going through a nhilist philosophical phase eh

Haha... I've always been this way, but the degree in which it has been influencing my life has never been greater.

Thanks for that definition by the way... never knew "nihilism" was the word to describe how I see things.

NP, i'm like that too but i try not to think about it cuz its always so depressing

Not necessarily!

On the contrary, it gives you unlimited potential to create meaning in any way you wish and thus, control your own happiness! Absolute meaning does not exist and therefore, you empower your own ability to create subjective meaning beyond the restrictions of your ego.

I guess I'm an optimistic, agnostic, rationalistic, idealistic, nihilist. lol.. something like that. Or maybe I should create a new word to describe the way I see things.


Reading abit more... I guess I'm not a pure nihilist. Only partially.

Yes, Korea should just reunify, then become nationalistic, not before. Otherwise, it's counterproductive, and seem like insecurity rather than pride in nation.

Bush likes it up LMB's cooch

C'mon guys.. read my post again... it's time to cast off nationalism. This false idea that we extract fleeting moments of pain and pleasure from. It's time to embrace the globalized 21st century. We are all beings of light and energy. We need to transcend to a higher level of consciousness for the betterment of all mankind.

I have spent many years protecting the Korean identity from trolls... now I want to fight my own nationalism. It's a fraud.. a fake. A reason to divide... to hate... to wish ill... to be greedy...

Once you kill nationalism... you free your awareness.... your creativity. If I continue to post here on AF, it's no longer as a Korean, but as an human being humbly speaking of new ideas. It's time to move above nationalism. I'll take the lead!

Read Kropotokins works.

Chan-Ho !! did some sect members ring your doorbell to show you the light?!? or did you find a non-korean g/f...

Wow.totally didnt expect this from chan-ho.Maybe he just found out he was actually adopted from another asian country.^___________^

seriously reading the OP make want to say something. Ego that make us different our selfishness vs attempt to be good is a struggle everyday. There is nothing wrong to be I and I in each day of our life. lets be individual we wish or try to be, imagine if we don't feed our ego and forsaken it, is there any different not living at all?

The irony is that realization of this OP exactly that created major upheaval in human history.

yeah adopted from China hahaha lol

if you keep your principles, it doesn't matter where u r from.

one of my favorite photographer, reza from iran
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/field/explorers/reza/

Bush likes it up Chan's cooch

Why waste life to struggle? You only want to live a life you've been conditioned by society to think you want. What do you want? Wealth? Power? Children? To be appreciated? Lots friends and family to validate how amazing you are? To be superior to others? Are these things YOU really want? Or does society condition you to want these things since you were born? Are these things real? When you were born, is there anything special about you, other than the fact that you were pure consciousness... just like everyone else? Did you want these things then?

If you were born in a native american tribe 1000 years ago, what would you want then? Money, wealth, power? Would such wants even exist? Would they be possible? No.. These are all fake things that you've been conditioned to believe by TODAY'S society.

So you struggle all your life to achieve these fake things. And in the end, you suffer and struggle for fleeting moments of TEMPORARY happiness. Working so hard to achieve things that society told you you should want. But what you really lost was your life. You spent your life struggling. Wishing and working for something that isn't real. Hoping that one day you would be happy. And when you die, you take none of these fake things with you. You return to the source, just like everyone else.

You could have had happiness anytime you wanted. Without struggle, right now, in this moment... for the rest of your life. But instead, you feed the ego hoping that one day it might give you fake happiness... hoping one day all your struggles will pay off... That is a wasted life my friend.

Maybe if you stopped forcing your silly ideology ChanHo. Everyone deserves what they want. Not you pointing silly fingers how to be.

my point is not happiness obtaining that is as illusionary. Yearning for happiness or yearning for peace? i yearn for my curiosity be fed, i yearn to strive materialistic wealth use it for my interest, i yearn for good food and happy loving family. In the end i be at peace even if fall i know i did my best. Those fake things i left behind is for my descendant the glory or disgrace for them to learn from.

Funny things is i think we actually living in someone mind. We actually observing the universe in the micro scale. What if we can totally get out from it look back at it in macro scale.

Your True Identity: Ego or Awareness
September 11th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina

Perhaps the most difficult concept of subjective reality is the identity shift from ego-centeredness to awareness-centeredness. In this post I’ll do my best to explain this shift. Such an awareness shift, however, can be very challenging to express in words, so if parts of this article sound confusing, it’s largely the nature of the problem that makes it so.

Ego

The way I use the word, ego refers to your objective, physical world identity. This includes your physical body as well as your mind. Your ego includes your name, your job, your home, your relationships, your personality, your habits, your favorite movie, your spiritual beliefs, and so on. The contents of your mind are part of your ego. Your ego is your human character and all its individual trappings in the physical universe.

It’s common practice to turn our egos into our identities. I might say, “I am Steve. I am a personal development writer. This is my article. Erin is my wife. I am a vegan.” I was taught that I’m a physical body in a physical universe. My physical brain gives rise to my thoughts, and my thoughts give me consciousness. I was also taught that every person I meet is an ego-centered being as well. They have their own brains, their own thoughts, and their own consciousnesses.

Maybe I believe I have a spirit too and that when my physical body dies, I’ll become that individual spirit, and I’ll retain some awareness of my previous life. That’s still ego identification.

Ego identification seems perfectly normal to most of us. It’s so much the default that we scarcely question it. But in many of my spiritual studies, I found that people we might consider enlightened did just that.

At first the idea that I could be more than my ego seemed nuts to me; at best it was wishful thinking. Of course I’m Steve. How could I be anything but Steve? Of course I’m my body and my mind. That’s just who I am. It’s right here in front of me. If I die and go to the afterlife, maybe I’ll become Steve-Spirit, but I’ll still be essentially Steve.

As I started questioning deeper, I began to realize that although I have an ego, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s my true identity. I wondered if it might be a mistake to identify myself with my ego, but what was the alternative?

Here are some of the questions I asked that got me wondering:

Without the trappings of my ego, who am I? What’s left?
If I lost my memory, would I still be me?
If all the molecules in my body are replaced by new ones every couple years, then what does that say about my identity? At what point do those new molecules switch from being “not me” to “me?”
Why do I assume that another person is any less me than my own body?
Why the heck am I conscious? Why the heck am I even able to ask, “Why the heck am I conscious?”
If my body dies, what happens to my consciousness? Am I the body or the consciousness?
I can perceive many human bodies, but how many consciousnesses can I perceive? [Just one]
Yes, this is what I do in my spare time.

Answering these questions to my satisfaction was a most “enlightening” experience. It helped me see that my real identity simply couldn’t be my ego. There were too many holes in that theory.

I realized that I can’t be my ego because anything in my ego can change, and those changes wouldn’t cause me to cease to exist. I could alter my name, career, relationships, personality, habits, beliefs, physique, and so on, and I’d still be me. In fact, when I compare myself today with myself 10 years ago, I notice I don’t do the same work, eat the same foods, live in the same city, hang out with the same friends, or even think the same thoughts… but as far as I can tell, I’m still me.

Awareness

So if I’m not my ego, then what am I? My conclusion is that what I really am is my awareness. That has to be my real identity. I am that which is aware of the ego and all its trappings, but I can’t be the ego itself. My real identity is that I’m the ego’s container.

But if I’m the ego’s container and not the ego itself, then I’m not really this body-mind named Steve, since Steve is content, not container. So Steve is contained within me, but he’s not the real me. He’s essentially my avatar, the part of awareness that allows me to experience a first-person perspective.

I could use some new pronouns right about now, but we’ll proceed nevertheless.

Awareness is my real identity. This awareness is timeless and exists only in the present. I’m aware of the past and of the future, but my past and future selves are still ego projections. My true identity is that I’m aware, and I’m aware of my awareness right now, which means I’m self-aware.

Furthermore, awareness has no parent. Awareness is the container in which everything takes place, and there is no outer container beyond it.

Under the objective model, we had this relationship (the arrows mean “gives rise to”):



But under this new subjective model, we have this relationship:



My opinion is that the objective model is totally inaccurate. Despite the hefty doses of social conditioning urging me to accept it, I’ve had to reject it as being incongruent. It doesn’t fit my experiences, and there are too many questions it can’t answer to my satisfaction. Since I don’t want to go insane by trying to believe something false, I’ve had to let it go.

I’m not certain the subjective model is 100% correct, but I am convinced it’s far more accurate than the first model. I’m often criticized for this conviction, but so far only by people whose life experience is limited to the objective model. While the subjective model will indeed look insane from an objective perspective, I suspected the reverse would also be true, so I had to find out for myself how it would affect me. That was a somewhat risky crossing, but I’d poked enough holes in the objective model to be in a place of knowing, “the truth is definitely not here,” so the greater risk was standing still.

Having experienced both models first-hand, I can’t imagine returning to the objective model. With greater accuracy of belief comes greater empowerment, and I’ve found the subjective model far more empowering. Even a skeptical person would find, upon observing the details of my life, many of which are unfolding on this blog in real-time, that even my objective reality has improved considerably since I switched to a subjective belief system. I would think that if my belief system were inaccurate, my ability to function in the world would be impaired, not improved. If from an objective perspective, I’ve crossed into insanity, then I must say I’m quite happy here and don’t plan on returning anytime soon.

So far subjective reality seems to fit my experience like a glove, and it’s able to provide satisfying answers to my questions, often in very simple and elegant ways. The challenge, however, is explaining these subjective answers to someone who believes wholeheartedly in the objective model. I can do that to my satisfaction, but often not to theirs. In a way it’s like speaking two different languages. I’m bilingual in that I understand the objective and subjective belief systems, but some things just don’t translate easily from subjectivese into objectivian. Hopefully my skill as a translator will improve with practice.

It's not ego brother.

It is being.

What is Ego? Why & How to Dissolve it? – A Scientific Perspective: Part 2
Avtar Singh - July 17, 2007

Ego is an idiotic state of what could be a fully aware mind or consciousness. An idiom or ideology is the creation of the mind that limits its perceptive or intuitive capabilities via confining it within the boundaries of the idiom, ideologies, beliefs, rituals, and traditions. Such a confined state of the mind forms the ego or personality of the person.

From a scientific or Holistic Relativity, perspective, just as the mass of matter represents an amount of energy confined within the boundaries in fixed space and time the ego represents the consciousness or free will energy of life confined within the boundaries of fixed ideologies, beliefs, and convictions. Just as the mass of matter is afflicted with time, evolution, entropy, and increasing complexity/chaos the ego is afflicted with the same adversities and fate.

Just as a mass contained within its own boundaries is afflicted with the gravitational forces of attraction that bind or attach it to other bodies of mass, the ego is attached to other worldly things via forces of desires. Just as the attractive forces of gravity keeps the planets orbiting around the sun, the desires to possess its material things keeps the ego on a wild chase and attached to this world. The fear of the change mandated by the affliction of time and the uncertainty of the unknown future always hovers over the ego. Hence, strangely and ironically, the certainty of uncertainty law governs both the matter and ego.

While ego is necessary for worldly living and survival, in order to live a purposeful and meaningful life free from the adversities, the root cause – the ego, has to be eliminated. While the boundary walls of the ego may provide us a worldly identity as well as a security fence against evolutionary threats emanating from the struggles for survival (or dominance as some would call it), the same walls may also act as prison captivating our consciousness and keeping it from achieving a full realization of life potential.

A wholesome life consists of a balanced living encompassing the whole spectrum of consciousness states from ego to egoless-ness. A limited state of consciousness at either extreme is not a wholesome living. An ascetic who renounces the material world as an illusion and a materialist who renounces the un-manifested reality as non-existent are both limited in their awareness of the One Wholesome reality of the universe. However, most of us choose to live in the limited worldly awareness of the ego-self under the assumption that the worldly reality is all that there is.


An ego would never like to dissolve itself. It will find tricky ways around to save itself. Ritualistic religion is one of the most prevalent way to maintain the ego, wherein God is consciously separated from the self or ego, which can call upon God at its own convenience and in the form which it likes. God then becomes subservient to the whims, beliefs, and convictions of the ego. In this sense, ego creates God of its own liking rather than the other way around. God proposes and the ego disposes. The moral deeds and religious rituals performed under the purview of the ego become the very source of ego-gratification and ego-enhancement leading to increased suffering. This is consistent with the real life experiences of common folks wherein a routine adherence to religious commands and rituals fail to provide meaning and contentment.

Consciousness or awareness of the universal laws or truth can dissolve or transform the ego. This, however, becomes a vicious circle. That is where an outside help and guidance from the True-Guru or master is needed to break this vicious circle by raising one’s awareness to the inner disease or enemy – the ego. Without such awareness, dissolution of the ego or even the realization that it is an enemy is as difficult as to lift oneself against gravity.

Our ego cannot control everything but only control our experiences, perceptions, conclusions in the present, and the way we choose to live. The masters never relied on the fate of time and the external forces of evolution to dissolve the veil of the ego and awaken the consciousness. They liberated the individual human being from the bodily clutches of the ego and its afflictions of entropy, time and environment – the other – the duality.

If everyone was same what excitement?

People are different sooner you accept it better this world will be.

Stop trying to mold people into robots. All that matter is Heart.

lol, I want you to return to your old self talking K-Pop and K-pride while chasing the evil Chin trolls!! lol that was much more fun

for u maybe. but for the rest of us it's irksome.

LOL. of course for YOU it was irksome since you were, and still are, one of those trolls...



RIP Chan-ho, the mighty Chintroll Slayer of K-chat.
K-chat will need a new champion.

Mr. Chan-Ho sir, please stop. You are scaring me.

I am just a little serpent. I have just recently crawled out of my hole to explore cyber space. I found the scary thread in the Hmong chat filled with horrific yet entertaining stories and it was a pleasure reading it.
Reading your first post in this tread; however, hurts my head. It requires too much thinking.

Ow!!! My aching head. Argh!!!!!

Then you hit me on the head with more thought provoking stuffs!!!!!
[end joking]
Seriously though, thinking too much could lead to depression. Your analytic mind seem to want to solve the world's problem. You sound pretty smart, I'll admit to that. But with you gone, who will take your place. This chat room would be boring. So, please don't change

If a foreign country invades your country and tries to enslave you (life is not comfy any more and the harsh reality kicks in where nationalism matters), would you still have the time to play with nihilism? Why bother... You kill me... I die... I haven't seen a fundamental nihilist in real life. Global humanism is more realistic if you want some value that transcends inward-looking nationalism. When I read newties21's posts for example, I see a humanist.

Everyone should once in their life try to imagine the unimaginable dimensions of the universe. That alone can change someone's attitude.

very much agreed, you're a wise guy, -salute

^ This guy must be a humanist, too.

Actually, this happened to many of our ancestors and when they resisted, they died needlessly. Even if we were to believe Korean history, we have to accept the fact that our ancestors were once of different "nationalities" who were conquered by others, and became subjects of another nation. Perhaps your ancestors were from Baekje, and perhaps they fought against Shilla, but in the end, did it make any difference? They became Shillan subjects and eventually their descendants were Shillans. Perhaps, one day, my descendants will become ethnically indistinguishable from other Canadians.

History has shown in the grand time scale of the Earth, nations are far from permanent. Neither is ethnicity. Political divisions among people are constantly evolving. They are all created out of nothing. They are an egotistic interpretation of social groups and nothing more. If another nation annexed Korea, would I fight? If another nation annexed Canada, would I fight? Would I fight to save the ethnic or national labels placed upon me? Or in reality, should I just swap one meaningless label for another?

Even if I face slavery, would I fight for freedom? If the freedom that you speak of was the freedom to pursue the goals of my ego, then risking my life wouldn't be worth it. You don't need to appease the ego to find happiness. Why give up a life of enlightenment to preserve a false egotistic freedom?

Being humane may attract followers as what Liu Bei did,but that does not always achieve your goals. The idea that one's moral core is good is false,as all morality is subjective... However to deny all human's thought as illusion, as thought is the process that one realizes truth.

The worst scenario can happen. What if the conquerors want ethnic cleansing instead of assimilation? Are you just gonna nicely wait and get killed even when you have a chance to hold arms and fight? This is about defensive nationalism. Let's say you only want to take care of your own business but in this case the opponents wanna eliminate you out of their own aggressive nationalism. After hundreds of years, nobody will really care. It will be only in books as what happened happened but this numbness is not relevant to the very people who lived through the hell. It happened only because they didn't have enough power to deter the foreign invasion and as a consequence they were massacred. The basis for national defense is nationalism. What do you think?

It depends. From the nihilist point of view, it doesn't matter if I fight or not. In reality, it probably doesn't matter if I fight or not because I'll probably die anyways.

The key is intent. If I'm fighting to preserve my nationality, to save my social identity and those within it, then my fight is meaningless. If I'm fighting to save my very awareness, then it depends. In that case, it's better to fight to have a chance for survival rather than not to fight and have no chance of survival, but you must understand, that this choice has nothing to do with nationalism.

I understand your point of view that nationalism serves a purpose and that I may have been able to save my life by pursuing a protective social identity. And so, if I choose to belong to such an identity for that sole purpose and none other, then you can make it legitimate non-egotistical goal. However, that is not the sole interpretation and purpose of nationalism, is it?

In any case, if I were ethnically cleansed, I would have to accept that reality without sorrow. In the bigger picture, even my life serves no purpose other than to experience and die, no matter how puny that experience may be. There is nothing special about me that says I deserve a better experience than others. It's the ego that give us the false belief that we're special. But if you look around, an individual is immensely insignificant in the bigger picture.

Is it tragic when a baby deer is eaten by a lion? All living things are eternal in their energy and belong to the cycle of life and death. The extent of your life experiences has no meaning in absolute terms. You are born into this reality to experience and then you are recycled back to the source. That is the only truth. The tragedy behind ethnic cleansing is derived in human morality. Ethnic cleansing might seem wrong now, but it has been practiced a million times in the past. There is nothing wrong with it in absolute terms.

Now this isn't to say that I must accept all consequences that I face in life as fate. What this means is that you should try to create your own reality on your own terms, not the terms of your ego. And whatever happens in your experience, you need to treat as simply that, an experience without the falsehoods of egotistic interpretation. This is your only purpose. There is no right or wrong. By casting off the limiting factor of your ego, your ability to create is exponentially more powerful. And your experience will be more real than you could ever possibly achieve in the egotistical paradigm.

Chan-ho,you sound like a buddhist,a real one.

whether u believe or not our ego/experience is not in vain superhighway of quantum mechanic perpetuate and manifest itself. our very experience it not mere energy it does in fact have pattern, we are the author but not the librarian or filmmaker, this universe is. Instead of looking inwards why not outwards as well. i know it sound whack ha..ha

How are you so sure of that? You sound really confident about those statements sir.

This left the realm of a logical discourse. Fundamental values.

Chan Ho in a couple of years your thought process is going to mature into something different.
Its amazing what a couple of years of life experience will do to a man.

Maybe it was already in him. He just had hard time describing it.

I don't doubt that many of you won't understand what I'm talking about. I spent huge sums of time and energy learning and thinking about these ideas, so without coming from my perspective, how could I possibly expect you to understand? Written language itself is also very constraining. In any case, there may be some value to my words, so take them as they are.

See this is what I am talking about.
Learning and thinking is one thing doing something and knowing it is something else aswell.
You lack the experience of such things your looking at it through a scholarly perspective not a human perspective.

Philosophical Taoism encompasses all this.

Interesting. I've never read Taoism, but I'll give it a look. What exactly are the similarities?

I hope there are thousand of people who have the same thinking and idea like u Chan-Ho. I even dont like people who is raising up nationality. I call this human as 'blockhead'! ha ha ha XD! We are still human no matter what the skin color,status or whatever it is. This remind me of micheal jackson song......... black or white...... micheal jackson really bring all the human together. ... RIP micheal....

Isn't your belief egotistical in it itself, as you boldly claimed that your belief is the only truth?

If there is no right and wrong, then there is no absolute truth, thus moral sin such as ego is not wrong but mere experiences for what humans has to go through. But to what end?

It sounds so contradicting, and you say the purpose is to experience and yet there is no point for anyone to abandon such ego: "The extent of your life experiences has no meaning in absolute terms."



or tree..lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWVyJ-YG3ew

Sorry couldn't help myself..

My only purpose here is to share ideas... I have no responsibility to have people believe them. If you keep an open mind and it helps you in your life, then great... if wish to look at things another way, that is also your prerogative.

I was merely questioning its logic of meaning of life but I didn't mean anything by it.

If it works for you and you are happy with it then I won't say anymore.

THE COLLECTIVE EGO

How hard it is to live with yourself! One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal self-hood is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group – a nation, a political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.

In some cases the personal ego seems to dissolve completely as someone dedicates his or her life to working selflessly for the greater good of the collective without demanding personal rewards, recognition, or aggrandizement. What a relief to be freed of the dreadful burden of personal self. The members of the collective feel happy and fulfilled, no matter how hard they work, how many sacrifices they make. They appear to have gone beyond ego. The question is: Have they truly become free, or has the ego simply shifted from the personal to the collective?

A collective ego manifests the same characteristics as the personal ego, such as the need for conflict and enemies, the need for more, the need to be right against others who are wrong, and so on. Sooner or later, the collective will come into conflict with other collectives, because it unconsciously seeks conflict and it needs opposition to define its boundary and thus its identity. Its members will then experience the suffering that inevitably comes in the wake of any ego-motivated action. At that point, they may wake up and realize that their collective has a strong element of insanity.

It can be painful at first to suddenly wake up and realize that the collective you had identified with and worked for is actually insane. Some people at that point become cynical or bitter and henceforth deny all values, all worth. This means that they quickly adopted another belief system when the previous one was recognized as illusory and therefore collapsed. They didn't face the death of their ego but ran away and reincarnated into a new one.

A collective ego is usually more unconscious than the individuals that make up that ego. For example crowds (which are temporary collective egoic entities) are capable of committing atrocities that the individual away from the crowd would not be. Nations not infrequently engage in behavior that would be immediately recognizable as psychopathic in an individual.

As the new consciousness emerges, some people will feel called upon to form groups that reflect the enlightened consciousness. These groups will not be collective egos. The individuals who make up these groups will have no need to define their identity through them. They no longer look to any form to define who they are. Even if the members that make up those groups are not totally free of ego yet, there will be enough awareness in them to recognize the ego in themselves or in others as soon as it appears. However, constant alertness is required since the ego will try to take over and reassert itself in any way it can. Dissolving the human ego by bringing it into the light of awareness – this will be one of the main purposes of these groups, whether they be enlightened businesses, charitable organizations, schools, or communities of people living together. Enlightened collectives will fulfill an important function in the arising of the new consciousness. Just as egoic collectives pull you into unconsciousness and suffering, the enlightened collective can be a vortex for consciousness that will accelerate the planetary shift.

By Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth"