The Process of Subtraction
The Teaching
God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.
The soul that would experience this birth must detach itself from all outward things and turn wholly within itself. It must not be scattered among many things but must collect itself into one. Know then that God is found in this ground of the soul as in the most proper place for him and in the most exalted. A man should not think that he can find God by spending his time seeking him everywhere. He ought to know that the inner life is in God and God is in the inner life, and that God is nearer to me than I am to myself.
To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.
Commentary
Eckhart is describing what the spiritual dryness is for. The experience of disconnection, the dark night, the dry season, the phone call where the line has gone quiet, is not an interruption of the spiritual life. It is the spiritual life working. What it is doing is subtraction.
Every tradition on this map points toward the same ground beneath the diversity of forms. The Tao that cannot be named. The Brahman that is prior to all description. The Ein Sof of Kabbalah, without limit or attribute. The God behind the God. What prevents the encounter with that ground is not the absence of spiritual experience but its presence, the consolations, the feelings, the frameworks, the very sense of spiritual achievement that the ego accumulates and mistakes for the destination.
Eckhart calls the destination the Seelengrund, the ground of the soul, the place 'where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach,' as Merton would later describe it. This ground is not something to be arrived at. It is something to be uncovered. And it is uncovered not by adding more practice, more theology, more spiritual experience, but by the subtraction of everything that is covering it.
The practical implication is unusual and somewhat frightening: the spiritual dryness may be exactly what is needed. Not a sign that the path is wrong, but a sign that the path is working, that the training wheels of consolation and felt presence are being removed because something more direct has become possible. John of the Cross called this the dark night. The Tao Te Ching calls it emptying daily. The Gita calls it the surrender of all fruits. Every tradition has a name for this movement away from accumulation and toward the bare ground that was always there.
A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on. Not a mind that has achieved peace through effort, but a mind that has released the effort itself. The distinction is everything.