Eckhart Tolle explains that spiritual awakening cannot be found through seeking or adding practices to your schedule. True meditation is realizing you are inseparable from the present moment. The Buddha awakened only after surrendering all seeking and sitting still, and awakening itself is a brief cessation of thinking while remaining conscious.
This spiritual dimension, or the deep eye, is not something that you can look to the future to find. You cannot find it in the future. So as a spiritual seeker, the fact that you are a seeker already implies so that you won't find it. Because seeking implies time and future. If you meditate, which is a lovely thing— meditation can be wonderfully helpful— but if you approach it in the wrong way, then you believe unconsciously that you are doing your meditations every day. You do your meditations between 6:00 and 6:30. I'm doing my meditation. Okay. After, at 6:30, I have to do something else. To do my meditation. Okay. Now, even after 20 years of doing a meditation, it might have improved your life, but if you're not doing it rightly, then it would just be another thing that you add to all the doings in your life, because true meditation is the realization of being. The realization that you are now totally inseparable from present moment. Any kind of seeking implies future and becomes a hindrance. So to go deeper, you need to use, one could say, The most obvious portal into that dimension, which is the present moment. The present moment that the human habitually overlooks, that keeps the human going as a human, continuously overlooks the most vital thing there is. The present moment, the only thing there is, present moment. There is nothing else. So, and it's the opening into the deep I, that the present moment is a portal into that dimension. And so, it— doing doesn't get you there because it already is. Does that mean that all spiritual practice is pointless? Not necessarily. You may need spiritual practice to take you to that point where you can drop it and enter the now. It's exactly the story of the Buddha. He was a young man, and although he lived in very luxury surroundings with all sensory satisfactions, he realized at an early age that the ultimate destiny of humans is to grow old and become ill and die. And he saw that and said, is that all there is to human life? Then he left his sumptuous surroundings and became a spiritual seeker. And he practiced all kinds of extreme practices: fasting, austerities, for several years. He became so good at every spiritual practice that many disciples came to him, said, 'He's so good at this.' And after a few years, something happened to him. He realized he's not there yet. But despite all his practices, he still hadn't realized the deep eye, as I call it. And that was the moment when he just sat under a tree, the famous moment Buddha sat under a tree, said, that's it, I'm done. That's my free translation of the ancient sutras. He said, 'That's it, I'm done. I'm done seeking, no more.' And they said— and the disciples said, 'He lost it.' Then most disciples left him. He didn't mind anymore. And that was— then came the awakening. But only because he relinquished time completely. He relinquished everything. He went into being itself. And so the question may arise, couldn't he have done this at the very beginning before he tried all these extreme spiritual practices? Couldn't he have realized the being before all that and saved himself all that trouble? Apparently not. And that may be the case with you also. You may need— it may take you to that point where you are not ready to surrender to the now, one could say. Now, The most important aspect of realizing the Being, the deep 'I', the 'I', is there needs to be a moment of cessation of thinking without loss of consciousness. Cessation, ending of thought activity, which most people have the voice in the head never stops talking, and they're identified with it. They are the voice in the head, and so their whole sense of self is in it. So people are very reluctant in many cases to let go of this stream of thinking because their self is in it. The self is in every thought that arises in their head. There's a self. Their thought processes are imbued with a sense of self, always me, identified with thinking, identified with emotions, That is the state of being spiritually asleep. Now you awaken. When I say identify with thought or identify with emotion, the important question that arises is, if you are not your thoughts and emotions and even sense perceptions, who is the one that does the identifying? So I say humans identify with thinking, they identify with emotions, They derive the meaning, they derive their sense of self from that. But who is the one that is doing the identifying? And that would be the true being of you. Ah, okay. Now we reach a point where concepts become difficult, because in order to even have a glimpse of you as the one that has been doing the identifying, perhaps up to this point, to you as the one that's doing the identifying, in order to realize that the stream of thinking must come to, even if for a short moment, come to a stop. But you're not falling below thinking, you're not becoming unconscious at all. You're highly conscious, but no thought activity. Even if it's just 20 seconds, you don't count it, that thought. Just thinking subsides. And what is left of you if you're not thinking, telling yourself who or what you are, remembering anything?
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