Meister Eckhart

About Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), born Eckhart von Hochheim in the village of Tambach in Thuringia (present-day central Germany), was a Dominican friar, theologian, philosopher, and mystic whose radical articulations of the relationship between God and the soul brought him to the edge of institutional Christianity and into a territory of thought that continues to resonate across philosophical, psychological, and contemplative traditions seven centuries after his death. He was the first and only major medieval mystic to be formally tried for heresy by the papal Inquisition — a trial that ended inconclusively with his death in 1328, followed by a papal bull (In Agro Dominico, 1329) that condemned twenty-eight propositions extracted from his works.

The details of Eckhart's early life are sparse. He entered the Dominican Order — the Order of Preachers, founded by Dominic de Guzman in 1216 — at a young age, probably around 1275, at the Erfurt priory. The Dominicans were an intellectual order whose mission combined contemplative life with preaching and teaching, and their institutional culture emphasized rigorous philosophical and theological education. Eckhart studied at the University of Paris — the preeminent center of European intellectual life — where he received the academic title 'Meister' (Master of Theology), a distinction that became permanently attached to his name. He held the prestigious Dominican chair at Paris twice (1302-1303 and 1311-1313), an honor shared with only Thomas Aquinas before him.

Eckhart's institutional career was extraordinary by any standard. He served as Prior of Erfurt, Vicar of Thuringia, Provincial of Saxonia (the largest Dominican province in Europe, covering most of Germany, the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia), and Vicar General of Bohemia. These administrative positions gave him authority over hundreds of Dominican houses and thousands of friars and nuns. He was also appointed to oversee the spiritual direction of the Dominican women's communities in the Rhineland — communities that were centers of intense mystical experience and that formed his most devoted and influential audience.

It was in the Rhineland, preaching in the vernacular German to communities of Dominican nuns and lay audiences (the Beguines and other semi-religious women's groups), that Eckhart developed the theological language that would make him both famous and suspect. His Latin academic works — the Opus Tripartitum (Tripartite Work), consisting of a Work of Propositions, a Work of Questions, and a Work of Commentaries — are sophisticated scholastic theology that engages Aquinas, Aristotle, Maimonides, and the Neoplatonic tradition with technical precision. His German sermons and treatises, however, go far beyond scholastic convention. They speak of the soul's union with God in terms so intimate, so absolute, and so seemingly dismissive of the mediating structures of church and sacrament that they alarmed the ecclesiastical authorities — and they continue to alarm and fascinate in equal measure.

The central claims of Eckhart's mystical theology, stated in their most radical form, include: that there is something in the soul (the 'spark,' Funklein, or 'little castle,' Burgelin) that is uncreated and uncreatable, that is identical with God's own being; that the true God is beyond all the divine attributes — beyond goodness, wisdom, truth, even beyond being itself — in a desert of the Godhead (Gottheit) that is utterly transcendent to everything the human mind can conceive; that the highest spiritual achievement is Gelassenheit (releasement, detachment, letting-be), the complete abandonment of self-will, self-image, and even the desire for God himself; and that in this state of absolute detachment, the soul gives birth to the Word (the Son, the Logos) in the same way that God the Father gives birth to the Son in the eternal Trinity — not metaphorically but really, because the ground of the soul and the ground of God are the same ground.

These claims were not abstract philosophical positions for Eckhart; they were descriptions of a lived reality that he communicated with extraordinary directness to audiences of women and laypeople who, in the estimation of his ecclesiastical superiors, were not equipped to handle such dangerous material. The heresy charges arose not because Eckhart's theology was necessarily incompatible with Christian orthodoxy — he himself insisted until his death that everything he taught could be reconciled with the faith — but because his language was so compressed, so paradoxical, and so seemingly dismissive of the institutional structures that the Church considered essential to salvation that it could be (and was) understood as a denial of the distinction between Creator and creature, a rejection of the sacraments, and an assertion that the human soul is divine in its own right rather than by grace.

The trial began in 1326, when the Archbishop of Cologne, Heinrich von Virneburg, initiated proceedings against Eckhart. This was unusual: Dominicans were normally exempt from episcopal jurisdiction and subject only to their own Order's discipline. The fact that the Archbishop pursued the case despite Dominican opposition suggests strong political motivations — the Dominican Order was a rival power center, and the Archbishop may have been using the heresy charges to assert episcopal authority over the mendicant orders. Eckhart initially appealed to the Pope, traveled to Avignon to defend himself, and made a public declaration in February 1327 that he was willing to retract anything found contrary to the faith. He died — probably in early 1328 — before the proceedings were complete. The papal bull In Agro Dominico, issued in March 1329 by Pope John XXII, condemned seventeen propositions as heretical and eleven as 'evil-sounding, rash, and suspect of heresy' — but noted that Eckhart had retracted these positions before his death, a qualification that has given his defenders room to argue that the condemnation was of propositions taken out of context rather than of Eckhart's actual theology.

Contributions

Eckhart's contributions span theology, philosophy, mysticism, and the German language itself — he is credited with creating many of the abstract terms that define modern German philosophical vocabulary, including words for 'being' (Wesen in its abstract sense), 'understanding' (Verstandnis), and 'impression' (Eindruck). But his deepest contributions are to the human understanding of the relationship between consciousness and ultimate reality.

His concept of Gelassenheit (detachment, releasement) represents the Western tradition's most thorough analysis of the role of the will in spiritual development. Eckhart argues that the fundamental obstacle to the soul's union with God is not sin, not ignorance, not the body, but the will's attachment to its own activity — including its attachment to virtue, to holiness, and to God himself. As long as the soul wills anything — even union with God — it maintains a separation between itself and what it seeks. Only when the will releases even its desire for God does the distinction between soul and God dissolve, because that distinction was maintained only by the will's activity. This analysis is at once psychological (it describes how the self-construct maintains itself through desire and aversion), philosophical (it analyzes the subject-object structure that desire creates and sustains), and theological (it describes how the soul returns to the Godhead by ceasing to maintain any position, including the position of being a soul that seeks God).

The concept of the Gottheit (Godhead) beyond God is Eckhart's most philosophically consequential contribution. God, in Eckhart's thought, is God only insofar as there are creatures who relate to God as creatures. God creates, knows, loves, judges — but all these activities presuppose a duality between God and that which God creates, knows, loves, judges. The Godhead precedes this duality. It is the ground from which the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) emerges, and it is simultaneously the ground of the soul — the 'desert' in which there is no distinction between Creator and creature because the categories of 'Creator' and 'creature' have not yet arisen. This is not pantheism (the claim that everything is God) but something more radical: the claim that the ultimate ground of reality precedes the distinction between God and not-God, and that the soul, in its deepest essence, shares this ground.

Eckhart's doctrine of the 'birth of the Word in the soul' translated abstract Trinitarian theology into mystical experience. The eternal generation of the Son by the Father is not merely a cosmic event in the distant reaches of the divine life — it happens continuously in the ground of every soul that has achieved sufficient detachment. The soul that has let go of everything, including itself, becomes the place where God gives birth to God. This teaching — which Eckhart preached in vernacular German to Dominican nuns and lay audiences — made the most exalted theological mysteries accessible as descriptions of potential experience, a democratization of mystical knowledge that both inspired and alarmed the authorities.

Eckhart's preaching to women's communities contributed to the flowering of the Rhineland mystical tradition, which produced Eckhart's disciples Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso as well as the anonymous Theologia Deutsch (German Theology) that Martin Luther would later publish, calling it (after the Bible and Augustine) the book from which he had learned the most about God. This Rhineland tradition influenced the Devotio Moderna, the Friends of God movement, and through these channels, the Protestant Reformation's emphasis on inner experience over external ceremony.

Eckhart's influence on philosophy — particularly through Heidegger, but also through Nicholas of Cusa, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer — constitutes a major strand of Western philosophical development. His willingness to think being beyond beings, God beyond God, truth beyond propositions, opened pathways that subsequent philosophers have continued to explore.

Eckhart's vernacular preaching strategy was itself a contribution of lasting significance. By choosing to deliver his most radical teachings in Middle High German rather than Latin, he created a precedent for philosophical and theological expression in the common tongue that preceded Martin Luther's German Bible by two centuries. His sermons were transcribed, copied, and circulated among beguine communities and Dominican convents throughout the Rhineland, creating a network of vernacular spiritual literature that operated outside the control of Latin-educated ecclesiastical authorities. This democratization of mystical teaching — making the most advanced spiritual insights available to educated laypeople and religious women who did not read Latin — represented a challenge to institutional authority that the papal condemnation may have been designed, in part, to contain.

Works

Eckhart's works survive in two bodies: the Latin academic works, composed for a university audience, and the German sermons and treatises, composed for Dominican nuns, Beguines, and lay audiences. Both bodies are incomplete — much has been lost or awaits critical editing — and the attribution of specific German sermons to Eckhart (as opposed to his disciples or later imitators) is an ongoing scholarly project.

The Opus Tripartitum (Tripartite Work), Eckhart's planned masterwork in Latin, was intended to comprise a Work of Propositions (Opus propositionum), a Work of Questions (Opus quaestionum), and a Work of Commentaries (Opus expositionum). Only portions survive: prologues to the first two works and substantial sections of the commentaries, including commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, the Book of Wisdom, and the Gospel of John. These Latin works reveal Eckhart's mastery of scholastic method and his deep engagement with Aquinas, Aristotle, Maimonides, and the Neoplatonic tradition (particularly Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius).

The German Sermons (Deutsche Predigten) are Eckhart's most influential works. Approximately 90 sermons are accepted as authentic by critical scholarship, though the number varies. These sermons, preached in Middle High German to audiences of Dominican nuns and lay people, are characterized by their extraordinary combination of philosophical depth and rhetorical immediacy. They include some of the most radical statements in the history of Western thought: 'The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me' (Sermon 12); 'God and I are one in this act of my perceiving him' (Sermon 6); 'If I had a God I could understand, I would no longer consider him God' (Sermon 56).

The Talks of Instruction (Reden der Unterweisung), composed early in Eckhart's career while he was Prior of Erfurt, are the most accessible of his works — practical spiritual guidance on topics including true obedience, abandonment of self-will, and the relationship between contemplative and active life.

The Book of Divine Comfort (Buch der gottlichen Trostung), written for Agnes of Hungary around 1308, applies Eckhart's mystical theology to the practical problem of suffering and consolation.

The On Detachment (Von Abgeschiedenheit) is a treatise — its attribution to Eckhart is debated — that presents detachment as the highest of all virtues, superior even to love and humility.

The Granum Sinapis (Grain of Mustard Seed), a poem in Middle High German with a Latin commentary, is Eckhart's most compressed mystical work — a poetic articulation of the soul's journey into the desert of the Godhead.

Controversies

The heresy trial of Meister Eckhart is the defining controversy of his legacy and remains theologically and politically significant nearly seven hundred years later.

The formal proceedings began in 1326 when Archbishop Heinrich von Virneburg of Cologne initiated an inquisitorial process against Eckhart. The specific propositions extracted from Eckhart's works and sermons fell into several categories: statements suggesting that the soul is uncreated and uncreatable (which would deny the fundamental Christian doctrine that all creatures are created by God); statements suggesting that the ground of the soul is identical with the ground of God (which could be interpreted as pantheism or as a denial of the Creator-creature distinction); statements suggesting that detachment surpasses even the desire for God (which could be read as dismissing the entire devotional and sacramental structure of the Church); and statements suggesting that the righteous person needs no external law, no sacraments, and no mediating institution (which struck directly at the Church's authority).

Eckhart defended himself vigorously. He argued that his statements were orthodox when properly understood — that the 'spark' of the soul is uncreated not in its created existence but in its ground, which is God's own ground; that the identity of soul and God is not a confusion of Creator and creature but a description of the mystical union that all Christian tradition affirms; that detachment does not replace the sacraments but is the inner condition that allows them to work; and that his preaching in the vernacular was legitimate because the Dominicans' mission was precisely to preach to all people. He famously declared: 'If the unlearned are not taught, no one will ever be learned.'

The political dimensions of the trial are significant. The Dominican Order was a powerful institution that competed with both the secular clergy and the Franciscan Order for influence. Archbishop Heinrich von Virneburg was a political opponent of the Dominicans. Some scholars argue that the heresy charges were primarily a weapon in this institutional conflict rather than a genuine theological assessment. Others maintain that Eckhart's language genuinely crossed theological boundaries and that the alarm was justified regardless of the political motivations.

The papal bull In Agro Dominico (March 27, 1329), issued after Eckhart's death, condemned seventeen propositions as heretical and eleven as suspect. The bull's reception was notably limited — it was addressed only to the Archbishop of Cologne, not promulgated universally — and its effectiveness in suppressing Eckhart's influence was minimal. His works continued to circulate, his disciples Tauler and Suso continued to teach, and the Rhineland mystical tradition he founded flourished for centuries.

In 1992, the Dominican Order officially petitioned Pope John Paul II to rehabilitate Eckhart. The petition has not been formally acted upon, though various Vatican officials have made statements suggesting that Eckhart's theology, properly understood, is compatible with Catholic doctrine. The situation remains technically unresolved — Eckhart is neither fully condemned nor fully rehabilitated.

The comparative religion controversy — whether Eckhart's thought is genuinely comparable to Zen Buddhism, Sufism, and Vedanta, or whether such comparisons flatten essential differences — is a modern scholarly debate of considerable intensity. D.T. Suzuki's claim that Eckhart was essentially a Zen master in Christian clothing has been both embraced (by comparative mystics) and rejected (by scholars who insist on the irreducible distinctiveness of each tradition). The most productive approach recognizes both the structural parallels (which are genuine and significant) and the irreducible differences (Eckhart's thought is Trinitarian, Christological, and sacramental in ways that have no Buddhist equivalent).

Notable Quotes

'The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love.' — Sermon 12 (Qui audit me), Eckhart's most famous statement of mystical identity

'If I had a God I could understand, I would no longer consider him God.' — Sermon 56, on the incomprehensibility of the divine

'God is not good, or else he could be better.' — from the German sermons, expressing the Godhead's transcendence of all attributes, including goodness

'The most powerful prayer, and almost the strongest of all to obtain everything, and the most honorable of all works, is that which proceeds from an empty mind.' — Talks of Instruction

'Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.' — attributed to Eckhart, expressing the via negativa

'Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.' — attributed to Eckhart, on the practice of detachment

'The seed of God is in us. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, hazel seeds into hazel trees, and God seeds into God.' — from the German sermons, on the divine spark within the soul

'What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.' — on the relationship between contemplative and active life

Legacy

Eckhart's legacy is paradoxical: a figure condemned for heresy in his own time whose influence has grown steadily over seven centuries and shows no sign of diminishing. His thought has been adopted, adapted, and argued over by such a diverse range of thinkers that he functions less as a historical figure than as a permanent challenge to the adequacy of any intellectual framework that claims to have captured the relationship between consciousness and ultimate reality.

The immediate legacy was the Rhineland mystical tradition. His disciples Johannes Tauler (c. 1300-1361) and Heinrich Suso (c. 1295-1366) continued and moderated his teaching, presenting Eckhart's insights in language less likely to attract inquisitorial attention. Tauler's sermons, which emphasize the practical dimensions of Gelassenheit, became enormously influential in the German-speaking world. Suso's Little Book of Truth and Little Book of Eternal Wisdom translated Eckhart's abstract theology into devotional literature. The anonymous Theologia Deutsch (German Theology), deeply influenced by Eckhart, was published by Martin Luther in 1516 and 1518 — Luther called it, after the Bible and Augustine, the book from which he had learned the most about 'what God, Christ, man, and all things are.'

Eckhart's influence on the Protestant Reformation, while indirect, is significant. His emphasis on inner experience over external ceremony, on direct encounter with God over institutional mediation, and on the soul's capacity for unmediated contact with the divine anticipated key Reformation themes. The Pietist and Quietist movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew on Eckhartian themes, and the concept of Gelassenheit became central to the Anabaptist tradition's understanding of spiritual surrender.

In modern philosophy, Eckhart's influence runs through multiple channels. Heidegger explicitly adopted Eckhart's term Gelassenheit for his own late philosophy of releasement toward Being, and scholars have traced extensive parallels between Eckhart's ontology and Heidegger's. Hegel's dialectical method — the movement through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis toward Absolute Spirit — bears structural similarities to Eckhart's description of the soul's movement through the persons of the Trinity toward the Godhead. Schopenhauer cited Eckhart as evidence that Christianity, at its mystical core, teaches the same truth as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Jung's engagement with Eckhart was deep and sustained. He regarded Eckhart as the most important Western mystic for psychology because Eckhart described the ground of the soul in terms that could be translated into psychological language without loss: the 'spark' of the soul is the Self; the Gottheit is the objective psyche; Gelassenheit is the ego's release of identification with its own constructs. Jung's concept of individuation — the process by which the ego realizes its dependence on and identity with a larger wholeness — is structurally identical to Eckhart's description of the soul's return to its ground in the Godhead.

The comparative religion dimension of Eckhart's legacy has grown steadily since D.T. Suzuki's studies of Eckhart and Zen in the 1950s. Raimon Panikkar, the Hindu-Christian-Buddhist scholar, regarded Eckhart as the key figure for interreligious dialogue because his thought demonstrates that the deepest insights of the Christian tradition converge with the deepest insights of the Eastern traditions. Rudolf Otto, in his study Mysticism East and West (1932), provided the first rigorous scholarly comparison of Eckhart and Shankara (the great Advaita Vedanta teacher), finding parallels so extensive that he concluded both thinkers had reached the same reality through different cultural and linguistic paths.

For the meditation and contemplative practice communities, Eckhart offers something rare: a Western contemplative teacher whose depth matches the great Eastern masters and whose language, while Christian in form, is universal in substance. His insistence that the soul must let go of everything — including God, including the spiritual path itself, including the desire for liberation — in order to arrive at the ground that was always already present resonates with practitioners across every tradition and speaks directly to the contemporary hunger for a spirituality that is both intellectually rigorous and experientially authentic.

Significance

Eckhart's significance extends far beyond the history of Christian mysticism into philosophy, psychology, comparative religion, and the contemporary search for spiritual frameworks that transcend institutional boundaries. He is simultaneously a figure of first-rank importance in the history of Western thought and one of the least adequately recognized — condemned in his lifetime, largely forgotten for centuries, and then rediscovered with an intensity that suggests his thought addresses questions that remain urgent.

His concept of Gelassenheit (detachment, releasement, letting-be) is his most practically consequential contribution. Gelassenheit is not indifference, not withdrawal from the world, not the suppression of desire. It is the complete relinquishment of the will's attachment to outcomes, to self-image, and ultimately to its own activity. The detached person acts fully in the world but without the grip of self-concern that normally distorts action. Eckhart's most provocative statement about detachment — that it surpasses even love and humility as a virtue, because love still has an object and humility still has a self that humbles itself, while detachment has let go of everything, including the desire to let go — anticipates the Buddhist concept of non-attachment and the Taoist concept of wu wei with a precision that has led scholars of comparative meditation to recognize Eckhart as the Western tradition's closest equivalent to the great Eastern contemplative teachers.

His concept of the Gottheit (Godhead) — the God beyond God, the divine ground that precedes all divine attributes, even being itself — is his most philosophically radical contribution. In Eckhart's theology, God as traditionally conceived (the God who creates, knows, loves, judges) is already a manifestation of something deeper: the Godhead, which is the absolute unity that precedes all distinction, including the distinction between God and creature. The Godhead is 'a desert' (wuste), 'a silence' (stille), 'a darkness' (vinsternis) — not because it lacks being but because it exceeds every category that the human mind can apply. This concept directly parallels the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the Neoplatonic One of Plotinus, the Ein Sof of Kabbalah, the Nirguna Brahman of Vedanta, and the Tao of Lao Tzu — and Eckhart's articulation of it is arguably the most philosophically sophisticated and spiritually direct in the Western tradition.

Eckhart's influence on subsequent thinkers is enormous, though often indirect. Martin Heidegger acknowledged Eckhart as a major influence on his concept of Gelassenheit (releasement) and his critique of Western metaphysics. Carl Jung drew on Eckhart's concept of the ground of the soul as a precursor to his own concept of the Self. Paul Tillich's concept of the 'God beyond the God of theism' is indebted to Eckhart's Gottheit. D.T. Suzuki, the great interpreter of Zen to the West, wrote extensively about the parallels between Eckhart and Zen Buddhism, calling Eckhart 'the one Zen thinker the West has produced.' The contemporary mindfulness movement, though rarely tracing its lineage explicitly to Eckhart, embodies principles — non-attachment, present-moment awareness, the letting go of conceptual frameworks — that Eckhart articulated with greater depth and philosophical rigor than most modern formulations.

The heresy trial itself is significant as a case study in the tension between mystical experience and institutional religion — a tension that appears in every tradition (the Sufi al-Hallaj executed for proclaiming 'Ana al-Haqq' — 'I am the Truth'; the Chan master Linji telling students to 'kill the Buddha'; the Kabbalists' tensions with rabbinic orthodoxy). Eckhart's case demonstrates that genuine contemplative insight, when articulated in language, necessarily strains the boundaries of the doctrinal frameworks that attempt to contain it — not because the mystic intends to be heretical but because the experience itself exceeds the categories that doctrine provides.

Connections

Eckhart's thought connects to virtually every contemplative and philosophical tradition in the Satyori Library, because the questions he addressed — What is the ground of the soul? What is the nature of God beyond all concepts? How does one achieve genuine freedom? — are the perennial questions that every serious spiritual tradition engages.

The meditation traditions find in Eckhart their most profound Western expression. His concept of Gelassenheit — the letting go of all content, all images, all concepts, even the concept of God — describes a state that meditation practitioners across traditions recognize as the aim of the deepest practice. The Zen concept of mushin (no-mind), the Dzogchen concept of rigpa (naked awareness prior to conceptual elaboration), and the Advaita Vedanta concept of turiya (the fourth state beyond waking, dreaming, and deep sleep) all correspond to what Eckhart calls Abgeschiedenheit (detachment) — the state of awareness that remains when every object of awareness has been released.

The Sufi tradition's concept of tawhid (divine unity) — particularly as developed by Ibn Arabi's wahdat al-wujud (unity of being) — provides the closest Islamic parallel to Eckhart's theology. Both thinkers arrived at the conclusion that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are identical; both used paradoxical, apophatic language to describe a reality that exceeds conceptual categories; and both were accused of heresy by the orthodox authorities of their respective traditions. The structural parallels between Eckhart's Gottheit and Ibn Arabi's Dhat (divine essence) suggest that independent contemplative investigation, conducted with sufficient depth, converges on similar recognitions regardless of the tradition within which it operates.

The Kabbalistic tradition, particularly the concept of Ein Sof (the Infinite that precedes all divine emanation), provides another parallel. Ein Sof is not one of the sefirot (divine attributes) but the ground from which all sefirot emerge — just as Eckhart's Godhead is not one of God's attributes but the ground from which all attributes arise. Both traditions recognize a reality beyond all characterization as the deepest truth about the divine.

Eckhart's influence on modern philosophy — particularly through Heidegger, who adopted Eckhart's term Gelassenheit for his own philosophical project — connects to the broader tradition of phenomenology and existential philosophy's attempt to think being beyond the subject-object dichotomy. Heidegger's 'Being beyond beings' (Sein beyond Seiendes) is structurally identical to Eckhart's 'God beyond God' — both point toward a ground that precedes and enables the distinction between subject and object, knower and known.

The psychological tradition, particularly Jung's analytical psychology, draws extensively on Eckhart. Jung cited Eckhart more frequently than any other Western mystic and regarded his concept of the ground of the soul as a precursor to the concept of the Self — the archetype of wholeness that transcends the ego and encompasses the totality of the psyche. Eckhart's insistence that the soul must let go of even its image of God in order to encounter the Godhead directly parallels Jung's understanding that individuation requires releasing identification with any partial image of wholeness in order to approach the Self.

The cross-tradition resonance of Eckhart's thought — the way his Christian mystical theology speaks directly to Buddhist, Sufi, Kabbalistic, and Hindu contemplatives — makes him a key figure for the kind of comparative spiritual investigation that the Satyori Library embodies. He demonstrates that the deepest insights of the Western Christian tradition are not incompatible with the deepest insights of the Eastern traditions but rather converge on the same recognition: that the ground of the self and the ground of reality are not two separate things.

The psychological dimension of Eckhart's teaching connects to the Library's exploration of consciousness and the contemplative neuroscience that studies what happens in the brain during states of ego-dissolution. Eckhart's description of Gelassenheit — the release of all self-referential mental activity — maps onto what neuroscience calls default mode network suppression, a state measurable in experienced meditators and in certain psychedelic experiences. The psilocybin research conducted at Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London has produced reports from participants that echo Eckhart's language with startling precision: the dissolution of the boundary between self and God, the recognition that awareness itself is the divine ground, the paradox of losing everything and finding everything simultaneously.

Further Reading