The Seer

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Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a German Dominican monk and undoubtedly a seer or as we would say today, an awakened spiritual teacher. His vision of the intimate presence of God veered perilously close in the minds of the inquisitors to the heretical position called pantheism — the view that everything is somehow God.

Eckhart never taught pantheism. But he did develop the classical Christian teaching which for a century now has been known as “panentheism” — the view that God is present in all things, and conversely that all things mediate God’s presence to those able and willing to grasp the reality of that presence.

Further, God is present in particular acuteness in the spiritual essence of the human soul — another classical tenet that Eckhart made a touchstone of his preaching and teaching. That belief, too, came under official scrutiny and condemnation. The Meister said, “… God is unseparated from all things, for God is in all things and is more inwardly in them than they are in themselves.”

Again, he said, “God is in all things. The more He is in things, the more He is out of things; the more in, the more out, and the more out, the more in. (…) God is in all things; but as God is divine and intelligible, so God is nowhere so truly as in the soul, and in the angels if you will, in the inmost soul, in the summit of the soul. And when I say the inmost, I mean the highest, and when I say the highest, I mean the inmost part of the soul. In the inmost and the highest part of the soul — there I mean. them both together in one.”

… The all-important transition from darkness to light was for Eckhart the passage from ignorance to awareness of God’s constant presence in the depths of conscious experience — the birth of the Word in the soul.

From: Eckhart’s Way, by Richard Wood pp 52