The Eye Through Which God Sees
The Teaching
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
If I am to know God directly, I must become completely God, and God must become completely I, so that I and God are one.
God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. Here I live from what is my own, as God lives from what is his own.
The very spark of the soul — Seelengrund — which God created for himself, akin to himself, is the meeting point where God and soul are one.
Commentary
Eckhart is the most daring voice in the Western mystical tradition, daring enough that the Church investigated him for heresy. What he says here is functionally identical to Advaita Vedanta: the distinction between individual consciousness and divine consciousness dissolves in the depths of contemplation.
The Seelengrund, the ground of the soul, is identical to the Atman as Brahman in the Upanishads, to the Buddha-nature in Zen, to Plotinus’s union of the soul with the One. Eckhart arrived here through the Christian contemplative path, not Eastern borrowing, which is precisely what confirms the perennial hypothesis.
Huxley cited Eckhart extensively in The Perennial Philosophy as proof of the universal mystical experience. He is the great bridge figure: fully Christian in vocabulary, fully Advaitic in realization.