The Balance of Being and Doing | Eckhart Tolle Teachings

There was a question somebody submitted. I don't have it here, but I remember it probably asked by a young man or woman, I'm not sure. And he said, this is somebody who is watching us. Hi. So he said, when I listen to you, I have this strong compulsion to become a spiritual teacher also. But when I listen to a big, great business leader, suddenly I have the compulsion to become a great business leader. What to do? And my recommendation to you is to try the business leader. I also recommend Tony Robbins seminars. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's one aspect of life. I can do it. Yeah, do it. Build up your energy. And it's quite enlivening. So it's not a bad place to go to and try things out. There is a. If you say. Let's say that he represents doing and I represent being. But there is, as you know, the symbol of yin yang, the intertwining, the two. And in the middle of the one, of the one polarity, the yang, there's a little dot, and that represents the other. And in the middle of the other, there's a little dot that represents the young. And so I have a little bit of the other in me too, as you can see. And I found, to my amazement, that Tony Robbins, I don't know when he started doing that. He has introduced short periods of meditation into his seminars, usually towards the end. And then he goes, now let's just be very quiet. Oh, so that's the other. The other what? The yin is coming into the yang. Well, that's good. Of course, ideally, in a human life, a human being. Human being. You remember how what that word means, those two words mean when you put them together. Human is the form that you are, and human is the doing. Whatever the form does, the being is who you are in your essence. So you are both. You are the being, the consciousness, and you are the form that that consciousness takes. And the form that that consciousness takes will do things and think and do and act upon the world and be acted upon. So there's hardly any human. There may be some human beings who are completely balanced between the human and the being who are in the being and the doing, the human and the being, they're right in the middle. Most people go a little bit that way or a little bit more that way. Our civilization as a whole, of course, has gone into the doing mode very, very far, to one extreme. So the civilization itself is actually mentally ill because of that. And the. The connectedness with being has been almost entirely lost. So it's a very fragile civilization, despite its many achievements. It's a little bit like when you go into a supermarket where they sell fruit. You look at the oranges and they look so shiny and polished. And the tomatoes, they look so shiny and polished. But often when you cut them open, they're completely dry inside and tasteless. So that's a little bit our civilization. The surface appearance is nice and shiny, but if you look deeper, you can see there is a. There's something that is something fundamental that is missing there. And therefore the civilization, unless it returns to back to some kind of balance between being and doing, it cannot survive for that much longer. And that's why we are here. And so predominantly what we focus on here is the being side, because that's. We need to redress the balance within the collective and in your personal life too. Because every individual conditioned by this society tends to live, even starts with little young children. They're already taught to be in the just do and think and to quiet mind gold. Let's get going. Okay. All attention goes out and then they start their video games and stuff. They can't focus on anything for very long. That's a huge disability. Many, many young people have that these days because of the influence of many, many factors and especially the video stuff and devices that they have. Cannot focus on anything for very long anymore. Cannot give attention to anything for very long. Because the mind goes. Because that's what. When you. When they watch video games or even many movies, the scene changes every few seconds. And so if you cannot give attention to something for a certain period of time, there's never a flow of creativity. You cannot. Because creativity, you have to. Your attention needs to rest upon something and you need to give it time and look and be with it and become still. And then creativity flows. If a whole generation grows up that is unable to do that, then the civilization cannot produce anything new and it cannot even cope with its problems anymore. Because even to cope with problems in a good way, you need to be able to look at a problem and be with it and then allow the greater intelligence to inspire you and then come up with a solution. So humans, as I call it, they are lost in doing, lost in the mind. They're lost in thinking. Because thinking is a kind of doing too. You're doing your thinking what you are not. The thinking is doing stuff to you. You're not even thinking. Thinking happens to you. Humans say I think they don't think. Thinking is an autonomous activity in their minds, a reflection of the collective mind. They are not thinking. They are being used by thought, which is. And their personal thoughts are just an aspect of the collective thoughts. And they don't know that. So you are being thought, you don't think so. And all that is doing. That's the doing mode. Those who are naturally more drawn towards being, they don't really fit into our society at all. In older cultures, there was some room for them. They could go. There were many monasteries they could go to, and there were many jobs that actually did not require you to do a lot of doing. You can just be. There were simple jobs that you could do. And nowadays it's harder for the. The humans who have this natural inclination towards being to fit into this world. Some of them are here now, but even those who are very effective at doing eventually become frustrated and unhappy because they realize the emptiness of their doing. So even those who have become very successful doers encounter frustration and emptiness. Not the Buddhist emptiness, a different kind of emptiness. And so society is. Our civilization is longing without knowing. It is longing to return to the roots, to the being dimension. And that's why things like these strange videos on YouTube are becoming so popular, because this is one way of getting a little bit of being and getting out of doing. And so you watch half an hour of somebody handling an object so lovely.