Don’t Forget to Be | 20 Minute Guided Meditation with Eckhart Tolle

Welcome and a Happy New Year to you. I wish you success in all your endeavors in the new Year. It do what you can, but don't expect ultimate satisfaction through what you do or what you achieve through the doing. It can give you temporary satisfaction, a feeling of increased aliveness, a stronger sense of identity, of being somebody, a feeling of expansion on the outer level, a certain satisfaction which comes with having overcome obstacles, generated inner resources that perhaps you didn't know you had until you were faced with these obstacles. That's all good. But the sense of satisfaction is not a lasting one. As long as you know that, it's fine. Because satisfaction, ultimately true satisfaction. Is not arrived at through doing or whatever you achieve through the doing. This satisfaction, which we could also call happiness, joyous aliveness, whatever comes from being rather than doing. So if you do and do and do but forget to be. Then you encounter frustrations one after the other. But what do I mean when I say forget to be? How can you forget to be? The forgetfulness of being is to overlook continuously a dimension in you that's always there. But in the case of most people, never realized it. So our meditation here, of course, is all about being. Going into that dimension within that is formless and timeless. That dimension of consciousness where you really step back from thinking. Because all thinking is also a kind of true doing, where you step back from thinking. Another way of putting it. Rise above thinking. And realize beyond all the doing and the successes and failures and conditions and situations of your life. And beyond your usual sense of self based on your past, there is something else in you. And it is that which is continuously overlooked. And it's very hard to put it into words. Because every word is a thought that has become a sound. So it's never it. You can only know what I'm talking about by realizing that dimension in yourself. Which is, by the way, the most important thing in your life. To realize that you can only realize it for yourself in the present moment. To know that you are. I am consciously to know the beingness that you are. And by know, I don't mean intellectual or conceptual knowing, but a direct realization. You don't know the apple by talking about it or describing it.