This the sixth in a series of meditations adapted from ‘Meister Eckhart and the Love of God’, a retreat I led at the Mandali Retreat Centre in northern Italy in September 2025. It explores Meister Eckhart’s understanding of detachment as something that flows naturally from the recognition of the nature of being, and considers how this recognition gives rise to a life informed by peace, joy and love.
Meister Eckhart said,
If the heart is to receive the highest, it must rest on absolutely nothing. It must be empty of all things and images, as the space in which the highest can give itself completely without hindrance. In this resting on nothing, the soul finds everything.
Eckhart is pointing to a truth that can be recognised in the immediacy of your own experience. If you were to remove from the room in which you are sitting all the objects and people it contains, and the four walls within which it seems to be held, the space that once appeared limited would be revealed as the vast, borderless space of the universe. It is the one physical space shared by all buildings and rooms, filling every space without itself being contained or limited by any of them.
Likewise, if you were to remove the entire content of experience, that is, all your thoughts, feelings, images, memories, narratives, together with your perceiving faculties, you would stand revealed as you essentially are. You would not become anything new. You would not acquire anything. You would not know anything special.
You would simply stand revealed as the one unlimited, infinite being, God’s being, the one being from which all seemingly finite beings derive their apparently independent existence.
