This essay, part of the ‘Meister Eckhart and the Love of God’ series from our recent Mandali retreat in northern Italy, is a meditation on the nature of your being as it truly is: whole, undivided, at peace. It follows the guidance of Meister Eckhart, whose words point beyond the striving of the mind to the silent ground from which all things arise. There is nothing to become, nothing to add and nothing to perfect. Only the recognition that what you are, in your essence, is what God is. This is not knowledge in relationship but knowledge in identity – a knowing that dawns when all else falls away.
You do not need to change yourself, heal yourself, improve yourself or enlighten yourself. You need only know yourself.
You need only recognise yourself, not as the person you appear to be, but as the essence you truly are. If we may call it a self, it is the self that lies behind and beneath all experience – whole, free, at peace.
As Meister Eckhart says,
If the soul could know herself without image, she would know herself as she is in God, and God as He is in her. There she is what God is, and this knowing is her joy without end.
The Great Letting Go
To know your being as God’s being, and God’s being as your being, all that is required is to let go of the entire content of experience, not by rejecting any part of it, but simply allowing it to fall away. Thoughts, memories, feelings, narratives, activities, relationships – all that comes and goes.
