What twenty years of daily meditation can still miss | Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle argues that genuine meditation isn't a technique or daily habit but direct realization of the present moment. When meditation becomes another task on your to-do list, it reinforces the future-focused mindset it's meant to dissolve. The Buddha's awakening came only when he stopped seeking and abandoned concepts entirely under the Bodhi tree.
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True meditation is the realization of being, the realization that you are now totally inseparable from present moment. Any kind of seeking implies future and becomes a hindrance. The important thing to realize, especially for spiritual seekers, is that the spiritual dimension, or the deep I, is not something that you can look to the future to find. You cannot find it in the future. So, So as a spiritual seeker, the fact that you are a seeker already implies that you won't find it, because seeking implies time and future. If you meditate, which is a lovely thing— meditation can be wonderfully helpful— but if you approach it In a wrong way, then you believe unconsciously that you are doing your meditations. Every day you do your meditations between 6 and 6:30. I'm doing my meditation, okay? After, at 6:30, I have to do something else. To do my meditation, Okay. Now, even after 20 years of doing a meditation, it might have improved your life, but if you're not doing it rightly, then it would just be another thing that you add to all the doings in your life. Because true meditation is the realization of being, the realization that you are now totally inseparable from present moment. Any kind of seeking implies future and becomes a hindrance. So to go deeper You need to use, one could say, the most obvious portal into that dimension, which is the present moment. The present moment that the human habitually overlooks, that keeps the human going as a human. It continuously overlooks The most vital thing there is, the present moment. The only thing there is, the present moment. There is nothing else. So, and it's the opening into the deep I, that the present moment is a portal into that dimension. And so it— doing doesn't get you there. Because it already is. Does that mean that all spiritual practice is pointless? Not necessarily. You may need spiritual practice to take you that point— to that point where you can drop it Enter the now. It's exactly the story of the Buddha. He was a young man, and although he lived in very luxury surroundings with all sensory satisfactions, he realized at an early age that the ultimate destiny of humans is to grow old and become ill and die. And he saw that and said, is that all there is to human life? Then he left his sumptuous surroundings and became a spiritual seeker, and he practiced all kinds of extreme practices— fasting, austerities— for several years. He became so good at every spiritual practice that many disciples came. They came to him and said, he's so good at this, And after a few years, something happened to him. He realized he's not there yet. Despite all his practices, he still hadn't realized the deep I, as I call it. And that was the moment when he just sat under a tree, the famous moment Buddha sat under a tree, said, that's it, I'm done. That's my free translation of the ancient sutras. He said, that's it, I'm done. I'm done seeking. No more. And they said— and the disciples said, he lost it. And most disciples left him. He didn't mind anymore. And that was— Then came the awakening. Wow! But only because he relinquished time completely, he relinquished everything, he went into being itself. And so the question may arise, couldn't he have done this at the very beginning before he tried all these extreme spiritual practices? Couldn't he have realized The being before all that and saved himself all that trouble. Apparently not.