Meister Eckhart
. . . from Whom The Force Hid Nothing
“The eye with which I see The Force, is the very eye with which The Force sees me.”
“Though I put more faith in scriptures than in myself, it is easier and better for you to learn by means of arguments that can be verified.”
“Our best chance of finding The Force is to look in the place where we left It.”
“Be One, that you may know The Force.”
“To know The Truth one must dwell in unity, and be the unity.”
Great wisdom and compassion can be found in these quotations. Indeed, for most of his life, Meister Eckhart was a guide of souls. This saintly teacher who spoke so eloquently of the “laughter of The Force” did not live in an ivory tower. Day by day he was labouring to heal the suffering of his time and the suffering of souls entrusted to him. Indeed how much suffering does he continue to alleviate today? Such is the power of his writing.
However, as with much mystical writing, interpretation is key. Passages such as the following should carry a health warning:
“No one is more cheerful than the one who lives in the greatest detachment.”
“As The Force, having no motives, acts without them, so we act without motive.”
“We have no reason for what we do.”
While these sayings express the ultimate freedom of one who is totally at the disposal of The Force, they can all too easily be misinterpreted by any harebrained space cadet, or malevolent tyrant, who could misappropriate their inherent wisdom. However, many of his statements are less open to misinterpretation:
“There are some who think felicity consists of knowing The Force. But I would not subscribe to this. The first condition of bliss is to feel The Force in your core.”
“All those who want to make statements about The Force are wrong, for they fail to say anything. Those who want to say nothing are right, for no words can express The Force.”
“The Force is with us in our suffering” . . . With us! Eckhart is not describing the Ultimate as above the clouds, enthroned in immovable detachment. The Force is a lover who suffers when we suffer.
“The Force expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being, and let The Force be The Force in you.”
“If The Force is to be a giver, It must first find a taker, but no one may be a taker The Force’s gifts except by its humility.”
“If you seek The Force and seek It for your own profit and bliss, then in truth you are not seeking The Force.”
“We shall find The Force in everything alike, and find The Force always alike in everything.”
“The Force is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.”
“What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.”
“I do not find The Force outside myself or conceive him except as my own and in me.”
“I do not find The Force outside myself or conceive him except as my own and in me.”
“The most powerful prayer is the outcome of a quiet mind.”
“The Force is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.”
“You need seek The Force neither below or above. It is no farther away than the door of the heart.”
“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
“To seek The Force by rituals is to get the ritual and lose The Force in the process.”
“The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.”
“The Force is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.”
“Apprehend The Force in all things, for The Force is in all things.”
“The identity out of The Force, into The Force, and with The Force, is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing love”
According to Ananda Coomaraswamy Meister Eckhart represents “the spiritual being of Europe at its highest tension”. However, the modern impulse to understand that tension as the confrontation between a freethinker and an oppressive religious establishment is superficial. The real tension continues to be between philosophical concepts and the inexpressible, between words and silence, and between the human and The Divine. Eckhart inhabited that place where words become impossible, yet he dared to speak, and did so eloquently, honestly, and compassionately. More than 700 years after his death we are amazed at the relevance of his words today.
Indeed, his Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama feels quite at home in the world of Meister Eckhart, and his holiness Pope John Paul II quoted the same Meister Eckhart on occasion in a sermon. Should this come as a surprise? No, it shouldn’t surprise us, for Meister Eckhart is a mystic – and in our parlance – a Jedi. The mystics, The Jedi of all traditions, speak one and the same language, the language of religious experience.
When I use the term religious experience, I mean something that is not at all the private domain of those whom history has called “the mystics” in a special sense; rather I mean something familiar to you and me and to everyone likely to hear these words. Religious Experience is simply our awareness of communion with the Ultimate, communion with The Force. (Meister Eckhart calls the Ultimate “God”, but for those of us following the Jedi Way we are not barred from calling this same Ultimate – “The Force”).
Communion with The Force may surprise and consume us in peak moments of awareness – on horseback, on a mountaintop, under the firmament of the night sky, whilst playing music, or in a lover’s arms. Or it may happen that we experience the same communion with The Force as slowly, slowly dawning in us during a long-drawn-out struggle to remain faithful to ourselves or during a painful process of grieving. What counts is that it happens, not how. What counts is that we experience the limitless belonging to that indescribable mystery which alone ultimately matters.
For some, this experience lasts barely longer than the glimpse of a falling star, seen and forgotten; forgotten, or suppressed among a thousand preoccupations with worldly matters. “We had the experience, but missed the meaning,” as T.S. Eliot puts it. For a moment we touched a live spark, but we did not nurture it into a fire, we let it go out. Not so those whom we call the great mystics, The Great Jedi. They spend their lives in what all of us, in our best moments, long for. The poet Rilke expresses this longing in a glowing prayer:
O shooting star
That fell into my eyes and through my body:
Not to forget you. To endure.
The flash of direct, unmediated interaction with The Force challenges us to three all-demanding tasks: embodiment, remembrance, and endurance. Those brave ones who rise to this challenge endure the blinding light, remember it in whatever they do, and embody the vision in action. By this process, the fundamental Jedi experience becomes a way of life. It was the likely starting point for a new religious tradition.
Indeed, all religions can be traced back to an experience of communion with The Force by their founders and reformers. Historic and cultural circumstances then led to the great diversity of religious traditions. Yet all that diversity is only the many expressions of the one and same mystical core – expressions of the sense of ultimate identity and belonging in The Force. The mystical core is expressed in so many different rituals, myths and teachings precisely because The Force is beyond conception, and is inexhaustible.
The heart of all ritual is stillness, and the heart of all teaching is silence. The mystics of every tradition know this and repeat: “Those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak.” And yet, those same mystics write volumes and volumes! Meister Eckhart is no exception. However, the language of the mystics explodes ordinary language. What is left after that, is silence, a silence that unites.
Language can build bridges, but it also divides. It divides when we get stuck in concepts and abstractions, alienated from experience. It is a dreadful thing when this happens to religious language, yet the evidence suggests it tends to happen in every tradition. This is why we need the language of the mystics to blow to pieces the conceptual walls that divide us. This is why we use the non-denominational and uncontaminated language of Star Wars (The Force and The Jedi) just long enough for us to again touch that silent ground of our unity in experience. Once we are grounded in silence, conceptual thinking, too, will regain its proper function. No longer will concepts be the bars of a cognitive prison, but rather the bars of a musical score – for a music of silence.
In this light, the central theme of all Eckhart’s work has been succinctly expressed by the translator and scholar Raymond B. Blakney:
“It could be said that Meister Eckhart was a man of one idea – one very great idea, to whom nothing else mattered much. That idea was the unity of the divine and the human . . . No one ever expressed more divisively than he the immeasurable difference between The Force and the manifest, between The Force and humanity. Creatures, of themselves, he was never tired of saying, are nothings.
Still, in spite of their endless differences, if The Force and humanity are of the same genus, it must be possible to set free the divine kernel of being in a person’s innermost self by the ever-increasing conquest of their outer self-identity. This divine kernel, this ‘little spark’ of The Force which is concealed within the shell of selfhood, is as high above all that is purely human and personal as heaven is high above earth. It is the germ of eternal life and the seed of The Force, the point of divine grace from which people may derive their worth and hope.”
In this age of division, it is the mystics of every tradition who speak a language that unites. Think of Rumi, of Mirabai, of Kabir, of Black Elk. Or in the Christian tradition, Hildegaard, Teresa, John of The Cross, and our Meister Eckhart. Their wisdom has rarely been more needed than now.