Eckhart Tolle explains how the thoughts that pass for "yours" are largely shaped by the culture you grew up in — the same person raised in Saudi Arabia versus Australia would think very different thoughts. He calls the unconscious identification with this conditioned mind a "dreadful fate" that hardens into rigid personalities who mistake their own opinions for the truth.
Transcript
The mind made sense of self is a terrible curse. And that is something that we need to transcend. So that we can actually use thinking in a powerful, focused, constructive way and actually create and manifest things through thinking. Thinking is a amazing tool. When thinking becomes destructive is when it assumes your identity. When when then when you do not think but thinking happens to you. People say, "I think." It's not true because the thoughts that go through their head, they have no control whatsoever of of over the thoughts that go through their head. So that to say, "I think." is actually not true. It would be truer to say, "I am being thought by my thoughts." Thinking has taken possession of me to such an extent that I think I am it. So in other words, I am actually possessed by my own mind. And the how how this possession manifest varies from person to person. It has something to do with your your past history. It is something to do with the cultural environment in which you grew up that conditioned your mind to think in certain ways. So that can that varies enormously. If you grew up in Saudi Arabia, you would think very different thoughts unless you lived in the West for a long time, but if you were in just in one just to take one example can you make many others you live in one particular culture enclosed and you get conditioned by the thoughts of that culture and if you join Australia you have different kinds of thoughts that go through your head you get conditioned the mind gets conditioned in that way but in either case if you are not awakening yet you are completely identified with that then you look at reality through this veil or this screen of mental concepts including the sense of identity which is mental and then you look at at the world through that and don't even know it you don't see anything clearly because you look at it through the veil of judgments and conceptualization and whatever you perceive you comment on it you immediately call it something and and in most cases you have some kind of opinion or mental position towards it including human beings every person you meet and immediately have mm the mind will tell you about something about them or situations you find yourself in places situations people wherever you are mm most people's uh attention is much more in the the narrative in their head than what's actually happening around them so that is it is a case of really being possessed by the conditioned mind it's a dreadful fate dreadful to not to not I can sometimes when I see people they are so burdened by their personality, which is the conditioned self. There's this They It Sometimes I feel as if the people Many people are carrying this heavy burden of this personality, which they've been carrying for years and can And then sometimes the older they get, the more rigid it becomes. And immediately they know everything. Whatever you say, they have no opinion about it. And they don't know it's an opinion, they think it's the truth. So And you can't argue with them. It's impossible. Completely pointless. So they are so identified with They believe in every thought that comes into their head. That's how it is. Let me tell you.