Dave ONeal - The Pocket Meister Eckhart

His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama feels quite at home in the world of Meister Eckhart, and His Holiness Pope John Paul II quotes the same Meister Eckhart on occasion in a sermon. Now, theres a bridge builder between traditions! Should this come as a surprise? No, it shouldnt surprise us, for Meister Eckhart is a mystic. The mystics of all traditions speak one and the same language, the language of religious experience.

When I use the term religious experience, I mean something that is not at all the private domain of those whom history has called the mystics in a special sense; rather, I mean something familiar to you and me and to everyone likely to read this book. Religious experience is simply our awareness of communion with the Ultimate. (Meister Eckhart calls the Ultimate God, but those who feel less comfortable with that word are certainly not barred for that reason from experiencing the reality to which the word God points.)

Communion with the Ultimate may surprise and overwhelm us unawares in peak moments of alivenesson horseback, on a mountaintop, on the prow of a ship, under the dome of the night sky, or in a lovers arms. Or it may happen that we experience the same communion with the Ultimate as slowly, slowly dawning on us during a long-drawn-out struggle to remain faithful to ourselves, during a painful process of grieving, or during seemingly endless nights at the bedside of a dying friend. What counts is that it happens, not how. What counts is that we somehow experience a limitless belonging to that unspeakable mystery that alone ultimately matters.

For some, this experience lasts barely longer than the glimpse of a falling star, seen and forgotten; forgotten or suppressed among a thousand preoccupations with other matters. We had the experience, but missed the meaning, as T. S. Eliot puts it. For a moment we touched a live spark, but we did not fan it into fire, we let it go out. Not so those whom we call the great mystics. They spend their lives on what all of us, in our best moments, long for. The poet Rilke expresses this longing in a glowing prayer (as translated by Steven Mitchell):

O shooting star

that fell into my eyes and through my body:

Not to forget you. To endure.

The flash of religious experience challenges us to three all-demanding tasks: embodiment, remembrance, endurance. Those brave ones who rise to this challenge endure the blinding vision, remember it in whatever they do, and so embody vision in action. By this process, mysticism becomes a way of life. It may even become the starting point for a religious tradition.

All the different religions can be traced back to an experience of communion with the Ultimate by their founders or reformers. Historic circumstances lead then to the great diversity of religious traditions. Yet all those diversities are only so many expressions of one and the same mystical coreexpressions of the sense of ultimate belonging. This mystical core needs to bring forth so many different myths and teachings, needs to be celebrated in so many different rituals, because it is inexhaustible.

Not only is the mystical core of religion inexhaustible, it is also ultimately unspeakable. The heart of all ritual is stillness; the heart of all teaching is silence. The mystics of every tradition know this and keep telling us that those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak. Yet those same mystics write volumes and volumes. Meister Eckhart is no exception. The language of mystics, however, explodes ordinary language. What is left, after that, is silence, a silence that unites.

Language is meant to build bridges. Yet how often language divides. It divides when we get stuck in concepts and abstractions, alienated from experience. It is a dreadful thing when this happens to religious language, yet it tends to happen in every tradition. This is why we need the language of mystics to blow to pieces the conceptual walls that divide uslong enough for us to get in touch again with that silent ground of our unity in experience. Once we are grounded in silence, conceptual thinking, too, will regain its proper function. No longer will concepts be the bars of a mental prison, but rather the bars of a musical scorefor a music of silence.

Never before in history was it more urgent for all of us to learn the language of the mystics than in our time, when division threatens to destroy us. The mystics of every tradition speak a language that unites. Think of Rumi, of Mirabai, of Kabir, of Black Elk. Or in the Christian tradition, Hildegard, Teresa, John of the Cross, and our Meister Eckhart. No wonder their readership is continually expanding. More and more people realize that the writings of mystics are an urgently needed medicine for our time. Yet reading them is not always an easy task. And Meister Eckhart is for some of us the most difficult one to read.

Let me admit my own difficulties with Meister Eckhart. Quite likely the moment you hear his name some favorite quotation comes to your mind. The eye with which I see God is the very eye with which God sees me, is one of my own favorites. Id venture the guess that Meister Eckhart is a hundred times more often quoted than read. Those who make the effort to read him find two kinds of books: collections of short quotations and editions of longer texts. That is where my trouble starts. Whenever I browse through quotations, I want to see them in their wider context, but when I start digging through longer passages, I find that one needs to move a lot of soil before hitting one of those precious nuggets.

At his best, Meister Eckhart deliberately appeals to the readers own experience. Though I put more faith in the scriptures than in myself, he writes, it is easier and better for you to learn by means of arguments that can be verified. Whenever he follows this plan, he speaks to me; experience speaks to experience, heart speaks to heart. But soon I find myself in the midst of the most arid scholastic abstractions and am reminded of the time after a forest fire had laid waste to the woods around our monastery. I trudge through lifeless stretches, highlighter in hand, until I hit again upon a patch of fresh green, a spot where a spring of mystic experience bubbles out. This book whets our appetite by a section of short quotations and then offers us larger excerpts of Meister Eckharts writings. I do recommend to its readers to highlight their favorite sayings.