In this article, I’ll share the wisdom of Meister Eckhart. Before we begin, I want to clarify that this piece doesn’t claim to represent Meister Eckhart’s teachings perfectly from a theological or scholastic perspective. Instead, I’m simply sharing my understanding of Meister Eckhart’s teachings based on my experiences and research.
The Core of Eckhart’s Teaching: Equality with the Divine
Let’s examine some words from Meister Eckhart that, in my opinion, perfectly summarize his main teaching:
“The soul desires the greatest happiness that the divine nature can realize, which is that it generates itself in the highest part of the soul. The greatest happiness in heaven and on earth lies in equality. What the divine nature realizes in the highest part of the soul is equality. No man can absolutely follow God if he does not have an equality with him within himself.”
– Meister Eckhart
Here, Eckhart is telling us that the goal of every spiritual seeker must be to achieve equality of their soul with God. As we’ll see shortly, Eckhart shares methodologies and advice in his sermons for spiritual seekers on how to achieve and understand this equality of the soul with the divine.
The Path to Divine Equality: Letting Go of the Self
How is it possible to recognize the soul’s equality with the divine, which is the purpose of spiritual seeking? Eckhart answers this question with this phrase: “Light and darkness cannot coexist, nor can God and creature. If God is to enter, the creature must exit.” It’s clear that to understand the soul’s equality with God, the idea that there’s a separation between the soul and God must be annihilated. The spiritual seeker’s identity must be completely abandoned, completely sacrificed.
This sacrifice of individuality constitutes the death of the flesh and the birth of the spirit. This is why it’s so difficult to understand God, to understand being, because to experience the equality of the soul and God, the death of the creature is necessary. Eckhart uses the word “creature” to refer to the ego mind.
Overcoming the Illusion of Separation
In other words, the separation you perceive between yourself and the rest of reality is illusory. If you stopped affirming your separation from God, you would recognize your equality with the divine. But this would mean the death of your ego and all other distinctions. The only way you can continue to exist as an entity separate from God is by projecting illusory distinctions into the pure being that underlies all existence.
Consequently, to experience the equality of the soul with God, you have the task of ceasing to affirm distinctions in the undifferentiated reality of being. According to Eckhart, the means by which the spiritual seeker can come to recognize the equality of their soul with the divine is through abandonment, the negation of the world.
The World as “nothing”: Understanding Meister Eckhart’s Perspective
In his sermons, Eckhart often says that the world is nothing, that reality is nothing. In this sense, Eckhart is saying that reality separate from God is nothing, has no substance. The world we perceive as separate from God has no substance, is unreal. The world only assumes value when it is perceived through God. The essence of the world, the essence of things, is God. But when we perceive reality through our ego, we make reality a nothing (with a lowercase ‘n’).
And it is precisely this perception of nothingness that makes us unhappy, unsatisfied, that distances us from the experience of the divine. When we persist living through the ego, living in the separate perception of reality, we perceive nothing that is real, we live in falsehood.
The Reality of God and the Illusion of Separation
And how can you be happy, how can you be satisfied, how can you experience love when you live in a world that is unreal? The world we perceive is unreal. The only thing that is real is God. And to reach God, we must strip ourselves of our separate being, we must strip ourselves of the ego that makes us perceive reality as a nothing and come to perceive reality as Nothing with a capital ‘N’, which would is God.
Meister Eckhart’s View on Hell
It is precisely for this reason that Meister Eckhart states that what burns in hell is nothingness.
“It is asked what burns in hell. The masters commonly say that it is self-will. But I say in truth that it is nothingness that burns in hell. To the extent that nothingness is attached to you, to that same extent you are imperfect. If therefore you want to be perfect, you must be free from nothingness.”
– Meister Eckhart
In other words, what burns in hell is the conviction that you are separate from God and that something can truly exist separate from God. The existential suffering we experience in life is directly proportional to the density of our ego. The more we are unable to abandon the idea of separation, the more we are destined to suffer. The key point to understand is that if the ego is nothing, sacrificing the ego is only an apparent sacrifice. One sacrifices the nothing with a lowercase ‘n’ in order to realize the Nothing with a capital ‘N’.
God’s Inseparability from All Things
“God is not separate from all things, because he is in all things more intimate to them than they are to themselves. Therefore God is not separate from anything. Man too must not be separate from anything, that is, he must be nothing in himself, absolutely out of himself, so as not to be separate from anything and to be all things. For, to the extent that you are nothing in yourself, to that extent you are all things and there is no separation between you and things. Therefore, to the extent that you are not separate from things, to that extent you are God and all things, because God’s divinity consists in the fact that he is not separate from anything.”
– Meister Eckhart
The equality of God with all things consists in the fact that what gives substance to all things is the same substance of God. The phenomenal world, when recognized as Nothing with a capital ‘N’, reveals itself as God.
Knowledge of God as Knowledge of All Things
In his sermons, Eckhart often quotes St. Augustine, and there is a phrase by St. Augustine that connects very well to the discourse we are making: “If I knew all things and did not know God, I would know nothing. But if I knew God and knew nothing else, I would know all things. The more deeply one knows God as One, the more one knows the root from which all things originate, the more one knows as one the root, the nucleus, the foundation of divinity, the more one knows all things.”
I invite you to reflect on the fact that a Buddhist sage says exactly the same thing in this phrase: “When the ten thousand things are seen in their oneness, we return to the origin and remain where we have always been.”
The Challenge of Recognizing Reality as God
If we are where we have always been, what is the reason why it is so complicated to understand that reality is nothing other than the manifestation of God, nothing other than spirit in motion? It is so complicated to understand that reality is God, because living in an absolute reality prevents you from living as a relative entity. Right now, you believe you are a person; you have an identity, you have a personality, you have an ego that separates you from reality. And to continue living as a relative entity, you must continue to believe that reality is relative and not absolute.
To realize the Absolute, you need to sacrifice the ego. If God is in all things, in order to recognize the equality between the soul and God we must become Nothing with a capital ‘N’, because our being something is what prevents us from realizing our union with God.
The Ego’s Resistance to Nothingness
And becoming Nothing doesn’t please the ego at all. You, as ego, can exist only in opposition to something external to yourself. But there is nothing outside of undifferentiated Being, which is what you really are.
It is no coincidence that Meister Eckhart describes the birth of equality between the soul and God as a silent, unlimited desert. The desert symbolizes the destruction of any distinction. To affirm the existence of the ego means to affirm your distinction from God, as the ego is distinction and God is equality and unity. It is for this reason that the birth of the spirit within the soul requires the annihilation of one’s egoic identity. The spirit can be born only when you are willing to sacrifice your separate identity. The spirit cannot be born where there is flesh, the spirit cannot be born where there is the idea of separation, where there is the obstinacy to believe in living in a relative reality, in a reality that, as Meister Eckhart tells us, is nothing, in a reality that is false.
The Practice of Detachment: Eckhart’s Spiritual Path
The spiritual practice that Meister Eckhart advises and proposes to those who read his sermons is the practice of detachment, the practice of renouncing one’s identity, the practice of sacrificing one’s ego, so as to be able to recognize the equality of the soul with divinity, so as to be able to experience the true unity of the soul with God, which is the experience of non-duality.
“Know for truth that the free spirit, when it remains in authentic detachment, forces God to come to its being, and if it could remain without form and without any accident, it would assume God’s own being. You must know that true detachment consists in nothing other than the fact that the spirit remains insensitive to all vicissitudes of joy and suffering, honor, damage and contempt, as a mountain of lead is insensitive to a light wind. This immutable detachment leads man to the greatest equality with God. For God is God by his immutable detachment, and it is from detachment that he draws his purity, his simplicity, his immutability. Therefore, if man is to become equal to God, insofar as a creature can have equality with God, this will happen through detachment. It leads man to purity, and from purity to simplicity, and from simplicity to immutability. From this derives an equality between God and man, but this equality must be the effect of grace, because grace removes man from all temporal things and purifies him from all ephemeral things.”
– Meister Eckhart
Detachment as a Practice of Forgiveness and Love
The practice of detachment that Eckhart proposes to us, from my point of view, is nothing other than the practice of forgiveness and love. Eckhart says that God is completely detached, and being completely detached means being able to love unconditionally. It is for this reason that God is love. God is love because he has no self, God is love because it is Absolutely Nothing, and as Absolutely Nothing, it loves unconditionally, because it has nothing to defend.
The reason why we are not able to love in the same way that God loves is because we have a self to defend. To realize divine love, the practice of unconditional love is necessary. And obviously, unconditional love is not at all easy, otherwise we would all be mystics. This does not detract from the fact that this practice of detachment that Meister Eckhart proposes to us is an extremely profound practice.
And reading Meister Eckhart’s words about detachment, the teachings of A Course in Miracles came back to my mind. In fact, in my opinion, there is no real difference between the practice of detachment and the practice of forgiveness. Practicing detachment means practicing forgiveness and practicing love.
Understanding God’s Love and Perfection
Very often when I state that reality is perfect or that God is love, I always receive comments from people who do not understand my words. God is love because it has no self, and since it has no self, it is able to love unconditionally. The reason why we are not able to love unconditionally is that we have a self to defend, we have the individuality of the body with which we are identified to defend.
It is only through the abandonment of one’s self that we can understand what love is — the perfect unity of reality. It is through the sacrifice of one’s flesh that we can realize love. When I refer to love, I am simply trying to indicate the fact that you exist, and that you are one with reality. This unity with reality is nothing other than the experience of love. To be able to experience love, it is necessary that you be willing to abandon all your ideas and beliefs about reality that allow you to exist as a self separate from reality.
What is the proof of the existence of love? What is the proof of the existence of the divine? The simple fact that existence exists and that you are a part of existence.
Acting Without Why: Approaching the Divine Motivation
This experience of love, this abandonment of one’s ego, according to Eckhart, leads man to act without a why, leads man to approach God’s same motivation. And as we will see shortly, God has no motivation. God acts without a why.
“If someone were to question life for a thousand years asking it why it lives, and it could answer, it would say nothing other than this: I live because I live. Because life lives from its own foundation and springs from its own being, for this reason it lives without why, because it lives for itself.”
– Meister Eckhart
Living Without Why: The Culmination of Spiritual Seeking
After the death of the ego, the spiritual seeker is back into everyday life, and experiences divine love and lives without a why.
When you feel united with the divine, the attractions of the world lose their value. All that has value is Being. It is only through the realization of Being that you can act without a why, that your spirit is totally free and you no longer have any material motivation to feel complete.
Living without a why brings you closer to God. God loves because it is pure intellect, and the highest form of intelligence possible is love. Love loves without a why, loves because it is love. If it had a why, it would not be love.
Acting without a why allows you to perceive the being that hides beyond the why of any phenomenal manifestation, and allows you to feel satisfied in yourself. The why Meister Eckhart talks about is nothing other than meaning and mind, and where there is meaning there is separation. The existence of meaning requires a subject separate from the object that judges the object itself. But spirit is the union of the subject, the object, and the process of perception.
Perceiving the Divine
When we attribute a why to the world, we move away from being and do not perceive the divine manifesting in reality. Reality, stripped of man’s why, reveals itself as absolute perfection. And so a rose or a piece of wood are no longer a rose or a piece of wood; a rose and a piece of wood reveal themselves to be the very manifestation of divine love.
I invite you to reflect that Meister Eckhart’s ethical teaching is very similar to the Taoist principle of Wu Wei and the Hindu teaching of Karma Yoga, in which individual will is annihilated and divine will arises that expresses itself freely through the individual. I hope you found this analysis of Meister Eckhart’s teaching interesting.