The Truth About Meditation No One Tells You | Eckhart Tolle

So spiritual seekers, they engage in this. Spiritual practice is good, meditation is good. The danger is when you meditate— as quite many of you probably have a meditation practice and it's wonderful— but what prevents the meditation practice from really being deeply effective is at the back of your mind The idea, the assumption that you are doing a meditation— I'm now going to do my meditation, I have got 30 minutes, and after that I have to do my emails, but first I'll do the meditation. Okay, I'm done for today. In a very subtle way, you are giving time, you're giving yourself time. You don't— what is real meditation? Real meditation is the the realization of being. You can't get there by doing, because doing already implies time. To do anything, you need time. Doing and time go together. On the surface reality, of course, that has its place. On the surface of reality, you need to do things. And you need time. We needed time to come together here. Without time, it would have taken a million or more years to come together here accidentally, a random coming together of people in this. We would have to wait a long time for this to happen, if at all. Probably not, would never happen. We needed time. Surface reality, time has its place, it's practical. You deal with the surface. But to realize who or what you are essentially at a deeper level, to awaken spiritually, time is the hindrance. So when you meditate, don't do a meditation, be completely present. Meditation is the realization of what is already within you as your essence, which had been obscured by mental and emotional noise and turbulence. It's always been there, a potential has always been there. So, I bet when you meditate, be absolutely present. And sometimes people need to meditate for a few years 10 years, 15, 20. Some people or many people need time to realize that they don't need time. That's interesting. You need time to realize that you don't need it at all, that Even the Buddha had to go through that. He was a spiritual seeker, the story goes, so he, for several years, he underwent all kinds of extreme spiritual practices, and he became very good at every spiritual practice, and he became so good at every spiritual practice, including extreme fasting and austerities and all kinds of things, He became so good that people admired him and he had more and more disciples. Just, wow, he's so good at it, and he could meditate, and he attracted his— but then the Buddha realized at some point that's not it, because he was still using time. That's not it. And at some point he gave up all his spiritual practices. And he sat under the famous tree, and he sat under the tree and said, 'This is it.' And the disciples were very disappointed. Most of them left him, and they said, 'He lost it, he's gone.' And then all doing came to an end, and there was simply the extreme, deepest realization of being. Past and future, personality, surface, I. And then a few people came and said, 'Who are you?' And he said, 'I'm Buddha. I'm awake. No particular person, just the state of being awake.' Wow! But so the question that sometimes people ask: why didn't he realize it before he undertook all these difficult spiritual practices? Why couldn't he have done it before? Couldn't he have realized it at the beginning? Apparently not. Some people need time to reach that point, and others come to that realization.