The Balance Between Being and Doing | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

Sometimes you may want to focus on one little thing, one flower, one leaf, one tree, one bird. And then at other times you can take in the totality of a particular view. So you have a totality here of trees and plants and one or two houses, sky, so you can take in. But whether you focus on one thing or you focus on a larger landscape, larger section, visual section, sense yourself as the presence while you look. And that is how you become aware of the sacredness of nature. And nobody could explain to you what sacredness means, but you will know when you sense it, you'll know it. It's all an expression of the one place, it's all an expression of the one, the underlying one life, one consciousness. And if you love whatever you see, there's a sense of no longer separateness, you love it. There's a joy that comes with seeing that, but the joy is there because you are in touch with yourself. So that is again an aspect of the balance between being and doing. To be aware of being while you do. And even when you are not doing something, not to lose consciousness. The danger is when you do activities, let's say your normal work situation, a little bit more complex than putting away clothes. The danger is that you lose yourself in the activity. And so you're no longer rooted in being, you're out there. And then the sign, the clear sign signal that you are out there and lost yourself in it, is something arises like stress, anxiety, some negative reactivity, Some believe that something out there is terribly important that needs to be done now, nothing else matters. So you lose yourself in the doing. Now, if you sit quietly in your room, the danger is that you drift off to sleep. At first you're there present, you're above thought. And then before you know it, you can observe it. Many years ago, I spent some time occasionally in Buddhist monasteries and you can observe the early morning meditation, especially when the monks sit 4:35 o' clock sitting for an hour from the early morning meditation. Now, I must have been not meditating all the time because occasionally I open my eyes and looked at the monks. And so at first they always there and then after 15, 20 minutes, some of them go. And of course, in a Zen monastery you have the head monk who may hit you if he sees you drifting off. That works. So don't overdo the being not doing anything. So do it sometimes. Don't say, I'm not going to sit for one hour in this room and be no, just take it as it comes. There's a time for being and There's a time for doing now. Many humans alive now actually feel very uncomfortable with just being. They can't do it. They can't do the being. Or when they're trying to be, they are trying to do the being, which is like trying to do the meditation. You can't do a meditation because the meditation is about being. Doing a meditation implies you want to get somewhere. But true meditation is you are somewhere. You go into the vertical dimension. So many humans are very uncomfortable with silence. Can't stand it, need some noise. Or they need continuous sensory or mental stimulation. Need something to get my mental teeth into. And when they don't have it, they were very restless. The worst thing that you could do to them is put them in a room where they have no devices to produce noise. That would be hell for many humans these days. Sense deprivation of noise. So not with you though, because all of you are comfortable with being and with the absence of noise and you actually appreciative of silence. It's precious and it's beautiful. Now. You wouldn't want to have it all the time. No. There needs to be a balance between noise and silence and between thinking and not thinking and doing and being. Some ancient cultures who are not yet lost in mental development, like our more advanced, so called more advanced cultures, some ancient cultures, the people have a natural ability to just be and they're not uncomfortable with being. It was reported by when North America, the Europeans came and settled the North American continent. I remember reading one doctor or somebody observed people lining up somewhere in the States for a doctor's appointment. And some of them were Europeans had come to America and some were Native Americans. And it took so long. The doctor was overburdened with work and these people. There were not enough chairs. People had to line up a long way. And whether it was a doctor or nurse who wrote about it, observed that all the Europeans became increasingly restless. And then they got very angry. What's going on? Been here now for three hours. And all the Native Americans were just completely happy with just standing there. So the person who wrote it was so amazed that he wrote about it. So there's a natural ability to drop in and go still now. Then the Westerners came and then of course there was a clash between the old culture of the Native Americans and the mind dominated culture of the West. And then many of the Native Americans became very confused and became very destructive for that culture. Now when we go there, we've been through the development of the intellectual faculty and the mental faculty and we come out the other end. And then we encounter that ability again and even more deeper. If you haven't lost something, don't appreciate it that much. You don't even know know it that much. So for thousands of years, humans could actually drop into stillness. I'm sure as these Native Americans could. They could drop into stillness quite easily. Perhaps they were fighting one moment and the next moment ago in the same way that a duck does it, as I describe in the Power of Now, the ducks get into a fight and then two minutes later flap their wings completely back into stillness. So. But they didn't even know. It's just, they just did it. They didn't know they did it. But once when you lose something and then you regain it, there's always an element of depth to it that wasn't there before because then you knowingly go into the stillness. It's not a natural thing anymore, it's a knowing thing. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.