Eckhart guides a meditation on stillness and presence. He distinguishes between meditation as a technique and as a state of being, drawing on Zen practice to show how presence becomes embodied in everyday life.
Sa, if you are a meditator, of course you can use whatever method you are familiar with. But ultimately, don't confuse meditation with a method. This is very common. The method is designed to facilitate the state of consciousness. At some point, every meditation method needs to be dropped so that you can be in meditation, which is state of presence, which is not a method. If you get too attached to your method, then the method, which was very helpful for quite a while, gets transformed into an obstacle. In some schools, such as Zen, they mostly use no method at all. And that is why they call meditation sitting. So when you go to a Zen monastery, somebody may ask you, how long have you been sitting? And if you're not familiar with, then you say, I'm not sitting, I'm standing. But if you are familiar with the jargon, you'd say, yeah, I've been sitting for 25 years. And then you will be us. And you still haven't got it. So if you can enter presence directly without a message, it's of course, best. And ultimately, there is no longer meditation and the rest of my life, they come together. The rest of their life becomes meditation. Whatever you do, wherever you are, you embody presence.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
