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Meister Eckhart and Non-conceptual Meditation

Mystics, Prophets, and Seers anticipate our own maturation as spiritual beings.  These people reveal our human potential and reconcile our relationship with the PervasiveLife, in which we participate.  Prophets are not demigods, they are people like the rest of us.  Buddha and Jesus of Nazareth were people -- people like you and me.

It is, however, understandable that there must be different perspectives on matters of Divinity. This diversity in Christianity has been historically traced, suggesting that the conception of God is evolving from a CosmicMonarch, towards a DemocracyOfBeing.  Though this DemocracyOfBeing is apparent today, with the remarkable popularity of meditation teachers like Eckhart Tolle, the trend is longstanding.  When the Buddha, in 500 BCE, was asked if he was a god, he responded that he was simply a person, awaken to DivineReality.  Similarly, Jesus of Nazareth, whose culture imagined God as a CosmicMonarch,  declared that the “son of man" was also the "son of God," suggesting that mankind, and God were familial.  He was misapprehended, by some of the Pharisees -- the orthodoxy of the times -- as an inflated, heretical fraud.  This sadly describes the reception that emerging prophets received from the entrenched Christian orthodoxy.  

So, in spite of the clarity and helpfulness of the Christian revelation, regressive forces are always at play in the Established Churches.  The shadow side of power archetypally arises eternally.  This cycle, however, does not squelch the prophetic spirit, which is also an eternal archetype.  

The Orthodox clergy’s decision to discredit mystics, and to persist in portraying Jesus as superhuman, a demigod, like Hercules, has had its costs.  "What good is it," critiques Meister Eckhart, "if Christ was born a hundred time, and not born in you."  Ill-considered Christian clericalism,  seeking to retain authority, has prompted a modern-day exodus to Buddhism, Hinduism and Secular Humanism.  Yet, some of these wayfarers, like myself, have returned to the Christian fold, after discovering that Christianity has a mystical tradition that is fully enlightened. Luminaries, like Jesus of Nazareth, as well as his disciple Meister Eckhart, point us to full communion with our true nature, which is InfiniteBeing itself _{see Incanting the Guidance of Meister Eckhart below}. 

The Medieval Dominican mystic taught there is a Christ potential in each person, just as Buddhism instructs its disciples to recognize that Buddha-nature is inherent in all beings.  At great peril, Eckhart confessed his own sonship with God.  His realizations, like those of the Nazarene, arise in non-dual awareness.  Eckhart taught the path of Non-Conceptual Meditation.  His practice bridges the gulf between nontheistic and theistic spirituality:  "Therefore we pray, God rid us of ‘God,’ so that we may grasp, and eternally enjoy, the truth where the highest angels, and the fly, and the soul are equal (Sermon 15.)" This is the testimony of the mystic, who lives in the equity of enlightenment.

"God is one in all ways. 

Every distinction is foreign to God.

Nature, too, itself, is one.

Each person, one and the same one that nature is."  Meister Eckhart

Eckhart’s confessions, published in his sermons, democratized God, at a time where monarchal hierarchy characterized the Church. Eleven year before Eckhart's condemnation in 1327 AD, Marguerite Porete was burned alive in a Paris square for circulating her mystical book The Mirror of Simple Souls.  Eckhart, like Marguerite, was redefining the relationship between the common man and the Godhead.  Throwing caution to the wind, Eckhart discloses: "Recently, Ι considered whether there was anything Ι would take, or ask from God. Ι shall take careful thought about this, because if Ι were accepting anything from God, Ι should be subject to him or below him as a servant or slave, and he in giving would be as a master. We shall not be so in life everlasting." (All the following quotes inthis introductory essay are from the Inquisition’s articles of evidence 9-13.)"  Apparently, Eckhart relinquished the notion of subordination to the Godhead, while simultaneously elevating humanity to a horizontal-interdependence with God, reminiscent of the equity in the persons  of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost.)   He organizes common people as equivalent to Christ in every way. 

Meister Eckhart published his mysticism, allowing it to survive to the current day.  For the sake of us all, he confessed: "Whatever God the Father gave to his Only-Begotten Son in human nature, he gave all this to me. . . .  [and] whatever the holy scripture says of Christ, all that is also true of every good and divine man."  Thus, Jesus Christ is characterized as mankind.  Eckhart does not stop there but encourages common people to birth Christ in themselves that they may also create collaboratively, with God. "Whatever is proper to the divine nature," Eckhart states, "all that is proper to the just and divine man. Because of that, this man performs whatever God performs, and he created heaven and earth together with God, and he is the begetter of the Eternal Word, and God would not know how to do anything without such a man."   We see, do we not, a remarkable similarity with Buddhism and the Eastern spiritual traditions.  Eckhart believes the common man is inherently Christ, and he wants the common man to know it.

Cesar

 

Incanting The Guidance Of Meister Eckhart

 

Understand this truly that remaining quite still,

Leaving memory, reason and will behind,

For as long at a time, as possible,

Is the best thing you can do.

 

Flee, as well, the activities of the senses and imagination,

Especially, all that you have in mind.

Bring all your powers to silence,

That God may look thus into Himself.

 

Hence, pray God to rid us of the notion of “God,” 

That we may know the truth,

Where the highest angels

And the fly, and the soul are equal.

 

If you wish to know God in the divine way,

Let your knowledge become pure ignorance, and forgetfulness of yourself.

You can never be better off then when in the darkness of such ignorance,

For, God enters, at the same time that the creature withdraws.