Eckhart Tolle explains why meditation techniques like mantras and breath-counting are just stepping stones. The real goal is stillness, a cessation of thought. He argues that treating meditation as a scheduled task misses the point: awakening requires no time, yet people often need suffering to realize it.
A human needs to suffer until they realize that suffering is no longer necessary. Is optimal. An interesting question you could ask yourself. Check within. Am I able to sit here in a state of awareness? In other words, am I able to sit in this room quietly, meaning without thought? Some of you are able to be without thought for what little, perhaps just brief moments here and there. It's good enough. To simply decide to be present instead of thinking like this. If it's still too difficult, you can put some attention on the breath as it leads you into presence. You're present with the breath. Stillness is a word we could use. It's a pointer to that there's a stillness within you. Still is an interesting word in English. It could refer to cessation of movement in the sense of sit still. You can tell a child, sit still, okay, Be still, meaning don't move. Or it could refer to the absence of noise, which could be external noise. Usually it's very still refers to external noise. But this is the inner stillness we're talking about, which is the absence of the movement of thought. And then you have achieved what the French philosopher was talking about, sitting quietly in a room. And traditionally that for many people it's associated with doing a meditation. So some people, when they meditate, they're able to be still. Usually they use some kind of technique which is the precursor to stillness. Hopefully the technique leads into that stillness and then the technique is not needed anymore. The technique could be a mantra, it could be counting for beginners, counting the breath. It could be some visualization, inner visualization, or focusing on some external object, like a flame of a candle. There's a meditation object or a meditation technique, and that's a good, perhaps intermediary step, intermediate step on your journey to stillness. But the problem that tends to arise is you get attached to the journey towards stillness, which is the technique. And the obstacle is, and I'm talking for many of you are practicing some form of meditation, a great hindrance in what otherwise could be a wonderful tool for awakening meditation. A hindrance is a certain idea, a certain perhaps unconscious assumption that meditation is something that you do. Some people even write it in their schedule every day. There's a lot to do. And then one of the doing is 7:00am Meditation, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, and then again 22, 10:00pm in between many other things to do. Dinner with, so and so meditation. Okay, now I'm doing the meditation. And then the body goes into certain position, Okay, And then you practice the technique, But you are trapped in the Movement of doing. And doing implies time, because every doing requires time, and every doing has a certain aim. You want to achieve something through the doing. So the aim here is. But you might not even know that. You might just think the aim is to become good at practicing the technique, but that's ultimately not the real aim. Maybe the teacher. Some teachers are very good at practicing their technique, but can they take you beyond that? Well, only you can do that, ultimately. So you're doing something. Whereas the essence of meditation is not any kind of doing. It's the realization of being, which can only be here and now, and you cannot do. To realize being, you have to let go of doing. So. It requires no time. The aim of meditation, ultimately, is to eventually realize that by doing your meditation, you can't get there. Why can't you get there? Because you're already there. You just don't know it. The being is already the underlying essence. However, there's a paradox, And I can be expressed in the following way. It appears that many people need time in order to realize. Or before they realize that they don't need time. They need time to realize that they don't need time. So even the Buddha practiced many techniques for several years because he thought he needed time to awaken. And then at some point, he let go of old techniques and sat under a tree, Gave up the techniques. His disciples left him. He said he lost it. And there he sat alone under a tree. All time came to an end. He wasn't going anywhere anymore. So then the realization of being happened. The question that then may arise is, couldn't he have done that from the very beginning? Or did he need to go through that and become so frustrated, searching through time and that frustration eventually? And the suffering that he created for himself through very extreme aesthetic practices of depriving himself of food and exposing himself to very unpleasant cold and heat and enduring it all but all? Yes, did he need to do that? Or was that a mistake that he could have avoided if somebody had told him that you don't need time? The quest remains unanswered. In the same way one could say that you need to. A human needs to suffer until they realize that suffering is no longer necessary, is optimal. I am talking about psychological suffering.
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