Rev Left Radio - UNLOCKED: Meister Eckhart, Christian Mysticism, and Buddhist Meditation

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Breht listens, reacts, and elaborates on a lecture by the late professor Michael Sugrue on the religious philosophy of the famous German Christian Mystic and Theologian, Meister Eckhart. In the process Breht touches on a dizzying array of spiritual, existential and religious themes. This is a classic Rev Left "Spiritual" episode that doubles as a sort of weird Dharm Talk... capped off with a 15 minute guided meditation.   ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

The Bible in Western culture, Meister Eckhart from whom God hid nothing. Professor Michael Sougru, rest in peace. Meister Eckhart is probably the most important mystic in the tradition of Western religion. And he was described by his contemporaries as the man from whom God hid nothing. Meister Eckhart was a Dominican friar, and he was a theologian and a teacher. But he's most widely remembered and most explicitly remembered. remembered for his sermons, which were transcripts or copies or articulations of Meister Eckhart's mystical religious experiences. And the collection of sermons that Meister Eckhart left us is one of the

most important legacies in the tradition of Western mysticism. And Western mysticism has always had an uneasy status, an uneasy state in Western religion because of the difficulties in articulating the content of mystical religious experience. It seems that mysticism resists linguistic formulation. Those of us who have ever had a religious experience, who have had a conversion experience, or had some illumination about the world, are often frustrated in our attempts to explain it to other people.

Meister Eckhart met those problems, and to some extent surmounted them. It is for that reason that the legacy of sermons that he leaves us is one of the most important treasures of the Western religious tradition. As close as anyone has ever come to putting mystical experience into words, that's what Meister Eckhart is important for. He is the greatest figure in non-scholastic theology. In other words, he lives between 1260 and 1328,

and this is the high point, or one of the, you know, scholasticism is still a mainstream of Western thought. Meister Eckhart, while he understands the tradition, of Western scholarship, particularly he understands scholastism. He's read the great scholastics, has decided to take his own road, a different road. He's decided that logic chopping, as we see in scholasticism, is not sufficient for an understanding of or an apprehension of God's grace and majesty. And so he's decided to take a road that is lonely because he's traveling this road on his own, and he's going to do his best to explain to us what this journey is like, but in the long run,

I think he's unable to. because of the fact that mystical experience is intrinsically private. It is not public. It is not like a lectern or a piece of paper or something out in the world of space and time that we can point to and gesture at and easily reach some sort of agreement about. What Meister Eckhart does is gesture at something that no one can talk about. And what is extraordinary about the collection of his sermons

is that they are perhaps the most effective set of gestures that we have in the tradition of Western religion. So if you are willing to read him in a charitable way, rather than a strictly logic-chopping fashion, I believe that you will get a great deal more out of Meister Eckhart's anti-systematic theology. And I think that you will find it rewarding, particularly if you yourself have had religious intuitions or experiences and run up against the glass prison of language, have found that you were unable to articulate the things that you wanted to say about your religious experience. Meister Eckhart offers us a series of images, a palette of metaphors that we can use, borrow, to talk about our own internal religious experience. And I think that's his greatest achievement.

All right. All right, before he gets into it, bumping up against language, and this is something you see in all mystical traditions. If you read the poetry of Rumi, if you read the works of Meister Eckhart, if you get into Buddhism, Zen Buddhism in particular, you'll constantly. be bumping up against an opakness when it comes to the articulation of the religious or the spiritual experience. Why is that? I would contend it is because fundamental spirituality and real religion in the way that we're talking about it here, in the way that I always talk about it, is fundamentally about the transcendence of the identification with ego, with personality, with the false sense of a small separate self, right?

The idea that you are, as I always say, somewhere behind your eyes, between your ears, looking out at a world that is not you, that is alien to you. And the sense of a self, right, the narrator of your thoughts, as well as the person who listens and reacts to those thoughts, is what we call the ego, and there's many different words for it. I like the term ego. and what is the ego actually, as I've argued in many other places, the ego is a product of incessant inner dialogue. The ego is a product of incessant inner dialogue.

When you are thinking thoughts, there is an implicit intuition that there is a thinker of the thoughts. That I am talking to myself, I am authoring these thoughts. there is a me inside my head talking quietly inwardly to myself. So the sense of a separate sense of self is actually deeply interwoven with language itself. Because language is how we relate to ourselves internally. That relating to ourselves internally creates this sense of a separate self, a self inside that you're engaging with it. You have a relationship with that you are talking to all day. there's the there's the thinker of the thoughts and the person who is listening to the thoughts

and if you're identified with your ego right ego identification is we're not saying kill the ego right ego is not bad language is not bad they're tools it's useful but but you mistake yourself for the tool you mistake yourself for your psychological um sense of a self that is born out of your own linguistic relationship to yourself psychologically internally um And so to transcend ego identification means at the exact same time in some serious sense to transcend, I mean, really language itself, to transcend that internal linguistic relationship that you have with yourself. It's not to say that that's bad. And if you try to make it stop, it's silly. Like if I said, all right, for the next five minutes, I want you to not think a single thought.

right the attempt to repress the thinking generates the thinking itself it gets very messy this is a fundamental misunderstanding what what is actually advised for people to do is to merely begin to observe it without identifying with it allow it to be don't try to control it the thing trying to control it is the thing that is trying to be controlled the ego wants to control so to see like i'm going to control whether i think a thought or not i'm going to control every thought that comes through my head It's absurd. You'll tangle yourself up in knots. It is merely to sort of metaphorically stand back in your own awareness.

Observe the ego process. Observe the thinking process. What is the first instruction given to you in meditation? Follow your breath with your attention. When you are inevitably and almost immediately distracted by internal language, recognize that you are distracted by internal language, bring your attention back to the breath. When your attention is fully and completely on your breath,

the inhale and the inhale, the sensations that is produced all along the way, when you're fully, fully aware of that happening, you cannot at the exact same time be talking to yourself in your head. Now, at first, it seems very, the lines are muddy because you'll all of a sudden you'll be distracted by internal thoughts and it'll take you seconds, sometimes minutes, before you realize.

I've sat in meditation sessions where I've talked to myself in my head the entire time and didn't realize it until, you know, 20 minutes in. And even then, you don't get to shut the valve off. The only move you can make relinquish control and stand back and merely observe. And over time, the fact that you can stand back from your ego linguistic process and observe it begins to make you realize that you are not it. that that unfold, like interlinguistic incessantness is what our mammalian, self-aware, complex, conscious brains do. The human brain produces language socially, externally, and inwardly.

Right. And when we produce language externally, we have society. We relate to each other. We build civilization. When we have it inwardly, we create a separate sense of an internal self. That is not, that is not, the same as the non-self as the things out there in the world. So when you over, when you transcend ego identification, it shouldn't surprise you that those experiences insofar as there's anyone to have them, which is another layer of complication, that,

that those experiences can be articulated in language. Because that's precisely the thing that is being overcome. Now, we can do that. I try to do that. I'm doing that right now. Meister Eckhart wrote down shit. He's trying to convey it. all the mystics are writing things, right? Some cultures have more oral traditions, but those oral

traditions eventually get put down into the sutras or into the gospels or whatever it may be. So we are never going to escape language, nor would we want to. We're never going to escape or kill the ego, right? That's absurd. That's actually an egoic project to think that you can do that. and who is the you that is getting rid of the thing, right? It's just an impossible task. It is within your mind to increasingly become aware of the ego process, which requires standing back from it, and that unlocks what I might call an evolutionary process,

a natural process of the evolution of human consciousness, that once you begin to detach from the rigid identification with your ego linguistic structure, there is a natural process of the human consciousness blossoming to a new level. And that's, you know, that's something I've argued a lot. We'll get into that more. I can make more arguments about that. I'd certainly spend quite a bit of time in the book talking about the idea of the evolution

of consciousness from a historical and dialectical materialist perspective, right? Not in an idealist, detached, new agey way, but the simple argument, that human consciousness has evolved. The consciousness of our primate ancestors, our chimp-like ancestors, before we climbed out of the trees, is not the same consciousness we have now. The consciousness before the rise of class society is changed. There is a process that that consciousness goes through that is part and parcel with the material evolution of human cultural life. Outside of even biological evolution though of course nobody would nobody would argue that consciousness doesn't evolve along with biology the consciousness of a mouse is different than the consciousness of a human

being so you know our rat-like ancestors that survived the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs went through a process of biological evolution passing through higher forms of mammals before getting into the primates before getting into homo sapiens and that biological process of evolution is obviously directly correlated with an unfolding and an evolution of consciousness. So if we agree that biological evolution never stops, and then we agree that after a species becomes, quote, unquote, intelligent and builds civilization, there's now sociocultural evolution, right, material evolution, which is historical materialism, there would be an argument that, and once you lock in the base and superstructure analysis,

Well, clearly the evolution of material, socio-cultural, historical society comes with an evolution of human consciousness. And the evolution of human consciousness is inseparable from the development of an increasingly sophisticated and wide-ranging and all-encompassing morality. The shift from tribal morality where it's us versus them is different than like a vegan arguing for animal rights. you know i've made the argument that you go back a thousand years ago and show somebody a picture of somebody across the world in a different culture with a different language and a different skin color suffering or dying um they would largely maybe they'll be grotesque by the the vulgarity of the image itself but uh morally they would largely the average person would be largely unconcerned we're seeing a development of morality which is indicative of an overall

development in consciousness and the higher your consciousness is able to evolve, the broader your moral circle becomes. And if that's right, and if Christ did something like this, the morality of Christ, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do, turn the other cheek, love your neighbor as yourself. These are moral pronouncements coming from an evolved consciousness, a higher evolved consciousness. And, you know, the story of Jesus as God becoming incarnate in the human form is actually a metaphor for the fact that these higher states of consciousness, although rarefied and sequestered into mystical and spiritual traditions thus far, are actually genuinely accessible to all human beings. And my further contention based off that would be that if that is true, then the unfolding of human consciousness will eventually,

produce a species in which that process, it is natural, that natural process will continue to occur and more and more of humanity will be able to reach higher levels of consciousness, which was once something 2,500 years ago that you had to sit in the forest with the Buddha and learn for your entire life to develop, even the inklings of, right? Could in 2,500 years in the future be something that 30%, 40%, who knows, whatever arbitrary percentage you want to say, of humanity naturally develops, eases into, works into, and then culturally, socially, perhaps one day, it will be just a cultural norm that you go through childhood, you go through adolescence, you go through the formation of a healthy adult ego, and then as you get into middle age,

you begin to transcend that ego. And that there is actually, you know, you don't just stop growing at adulthood and then it's the decay into death. But there actually is a way in which society could encourage this. This could happen naturally to some people. There could be methodologies, better articulated, even sciences of subjectivity that promote this more broadly. And that humans increasingly, along with their material development, their historical and cultural base superstructure model, develop these higher forms. of consciousness. And insofar as that is true, when we participate in political organizing as revolutionaries and when we participate in the conscious cultivation of higher states of consciousness,

we are contributing directly to the evolution of our species. That's probably a core claim of who I am as a human being. Back to the argument or to the lecture. Now, one of the things that is most striking about Meister Eckhart is that he often writes and speaks from God's perspective. In other words, he describes the world as it appears to God, not as it appears to Meister Eckhart. Now, this may be purely a thought experiment on his part. It may be an overweening hubris, or it may actually be the closest you're going to get to finding out what the world looks like from God's perspective. You will have to look at his sermons. But when he says, no, as he often does, do not look at the world from the perspective

you happen to have now. St. Augustine says, stuck mired within space and time, as St. Augustine says, step out of space and time. Think about the world as it appears to God. When you do that, your perplexities will be eliminated and your doubts will be satisfied. So he says, although I cannot tell you God's name, although I cannot perfectly articulate God's vision, I can gesture in that direction and give you some inkling as to what liberation from the bounds of space and time would be like. It is because Meister Eckhart characteristically speaks from the perspective of God that he was given the title, the general term, he, from whom God hid nothing. And that is an extraordinary and deep title for any man to be given.

Now, what he does is gesture towards God because he runs up against the limitations of what language can do. And I would tend to argue that he is one of the greatest prose poets in the tradition of Western religion, because necessarily when someone tries to reach for the core their being, to reach inward to the soul and then from the soul to an area, a domain outside of space and time, towards heaven and hell. Necessarily one has to have recourse to poetry.

Physics, strictly literal speech will not carry you across that. The only possible bridge is the bridge of poetry and metaphor. So Meister Eckhart, although I think he would probably have resisted being termed such, is one of the great religious poets in the Western tradition. The fact that he himself was a cleric and that he might have thought poetry profane should not interrupt our appreciation of his deep and very moving religious poetry. Now there are a number of things of characteristic techniques that we see in Meister Eckhart. The first is the use of surprise.

After talking at some length about God's love and God's will, a whole series of deep theological speculations along those lines, he finishes up one of his discussions of God's love and God's will by saying, you yourself should try and make your own will, consistent with the will of God, and you and yourself should try and incorporate God's love into your life, but you should keep in mind the fact that you will not be able to do this through any process of rationality. As Meister Eckhart says, most surprisingly and quite deeply, says, love has no why. Isn't that a beautiful and poetic line? Love has no why? It takes a mystic and a poet, someone that has been meditating on religious issues, to generate

fine paradoxes, compressed within the domain of one mere sentence, which causes, at least me, to think at some length about the problem that he's gesturing at. I don't have a very clear idea of what love has no why means. On the other hand, at least for me, when I was reading a sermon, I put the book down and sat around and thought about that for a while. It stayed with me for the next day, and I kept thinking about that, what could that possibly mean? At this point in my life, I have no clear knowledge of what that might possibly mean. I have a number of ideas of suggestions that has moved me towards. And I think that's the great advantage of Meister Eckhart. He will give you an aphorism, but it won't be pointed and jagged and

painful the way the aphorisms of, say, Friedrich Nietzsche are. His aphorisms are exactly in the opposite direction. They move you towards spirituality, towards celestial concerns. And he does it in a way, which is slightly baffling and slightly perplexing, not threatening, but one gets the sense that there's tremendous depth there, that's a saying that still waters run deep, one gets the sense that Meister Eckhart is the man from whom God hid nothing. In addition to surprises in his sermons, we're also going to find odd paradoxes. And I think it was Kierkegaard that once said, paradox is that which refreshes men most completely, or that's the one that most reconciles human beings to this world. Well, paradoxes is the stuff of Meister Eckhart's sermons. He says

things like God's will, when we are finally good, will be the same thing as our will. We identify and unify our will with God. But he says an interesting thing. You will go seeking God. You will try and unify your will will with His. You will not unify your will with God until you completely empty yourself, until you completely eliminate all your mundane, prosaic this worldly concerns. Until you get to the point that St. Augustine had, when he had his conversion experience, where he was willing to hold nothing back. Then and only then, will your will be consistent with the will of God. So the end of all your longings

will be, in some respects, to abolish the self, right, to leave out all your earthly concerns and direct your soul entirely towards God. This abolition of self is very deep, and it's remarkable the way in which Meister Eckhart phrases it. He says, if you get to the point where God's will and your will are united, amazingly enough, at that point you will ask nothing from God. Isn't that remarkable?

the point at which you manage to hook up with God, where you make some sort of connection to God. When the end of all your longings is realized, it turns out that at that point, you no longer long for anything, and you no longer have anything left to ask God for. In other words, there's a sort of paradox here. We wish the good things that God can offer us.

We wish to make some sort of connection with God. But if we ever do make that connection, should God's grace ever appear within our soul, The result will be that will be released from all our other cares and concerns, and we'll have nothing to ask God for. It'll be pure adoration without any mixture of what Kant would call heteronomy, without any desire for stuff here in this world. You're not going to ask God for a raise. You're not going to ask God for a promotion. You're not going to ask God for anything here in this world.

Because if you were actually to connect with God, you would no longer want that stuff. Quite a remarkable turn about. His paradoxes are deep and very moving, and they're quite provocative. I often don't know exactly what they mean, but in almost every case, when he coins a beautiful phrase, I have to sit and ask myself, what is going on here? And this is where theology begins to merge with poetry, and the results are quite enigmatic, but at the same time quite stimulating. Well, you can already see there if you're sort of tapped in.

The undercurrent of why somebody might be a perennialist. Does Meister Eckhart not sound like a fucking Buddhist, right? the abdication of desire, the relinquishing of egoic control, the abolition of the self, literally no self, anata, in Buddhism, right? In Islam, what do we have, especially in Sufism? Well, Islam itself means submission in Sufism, and we've had episodes with several episodes on Sufism, if you're interested, there's a phrase of the annihilation of self in God. Okay.

Now, if we take that into the philosophical realm, even the atheistic realm, if you want to call it that, we have people that have talked about a will that is greater than the ego's will. There's Spinoza. Spinoza obviously collapses the duality between nature and God, between substances, between mind and body. His whole thing is radical monism, radical unifying connectedness coming out of the Jewish tradition and the philosophical tradition. famously Spinoza did not believe in free will. Why? He believes that nature or God unfolds through us. There's no separation at all, ultimately. And the idea of free will is egoic free will.

When you get into philosophical free will debates, libertarian free will, determinism, compatibilism, the presumption is an egoic self. It's sort of unstated even. an egoic self, some separate sense of self, that has control or doesn't have control, that has a will or doesn't have a will that actually matters, right? There's always the belief that we have one, which is from a Buddhist perspective, an egoic delusion. The idea that we have a radically free will is undermined by spiritual experiences, by Christian mysticism, by psychology, neuroscience itself. It's very hard to make an argument for radical libertarian free will.

not libertarian in the political sense, but libertarian in the sort of ontological sense, that you are radically free. Your will is radically free. It's barely contained at all. It might be contained, but you still have all of it, more or less. What we think. We think we have free will. Libertarian argument would be like we do. Compatibilism is like, well, nature is determined. The chain of cause and effect that led to you and your thoughts and your choices is largely determined, but that there is somewhere in there, and these arguments very wildly, there is still some sort of compatibility between some semblance of free will and a determined natural order, natural world dictated by laws that we don't have control over. So the philosophical argument about it rests on the idea of an ego. Spinoza destroyed that idea. Like, if you take this spinozist monism idea seriously, you end up with no free will in the egoic sense. In Zen, right?

In Taoism, they talk about the very same thing. And I'm putting this in my own words. But what I get out of those traditions is that when you set aside the ultimate delusion of a separate self that has control in the first place, right, that you don't have free will in the sense you thought you did. but what takes its place is a natural flow. That nature itself, especially when you have set down your ego identification, flows through you naturally, such that your behaviors, your choices, your responses, they come from something higher than the tiny egoic self, searching for control and safety and certainty.

And actually nature, you realize yourself to be a force of nature. the same force that brings about spring that allows the stars to shine that that dictates the tides that same natural that allows a flower to come up through the dirt sprout up and blossom these natural processes there's there's things happening there's behaviors there's processes that occur all of that happens without any sense of a self the flower doesn't will itself to bloom but the flower doesn't ever have the delusion that it has the will to allow itself to bloom. Nature itself blooms through it. And in a similar way, spiritually speaking, when the ego is seen through, when ego identification is relinquished, even momentarily, you feel yourself to be the flower in the sense that nature

blooms through you and blooms uniquely, you know? Reaching these higher states does not make you a drone, does not make you a carbon copy of the other person next to you that also also has reached that rarefied state. You become in some ways more unique, more radically individual in the same way that you go through a forest and you see a million trees. Oh, they're all trees. They're all the same. No, the fuck they're not.

Look at each tree. They're all radically different. They all blossom in their own ways. They all have their trajectories of their branches moving in different directions. Some trees turn certain colors in fall. Other trees turn certain colors in spring. They shed themselves at the same time. their budding processes and the spring look different.

If you could go underneath the soil and look at their root systems and their interconnectedness with all the other trees, you would see the truth of the matter, which is the truth of nature, which is that everything can be seen as radically its own thing, radically unique on one level, while at the same exact time being profoundly and utterly and inexorably interconnected. So we have Meister Eckhart talking about God's will, setting aside your own will, and letting God's will be your will, radical unity with direct union with God. In Islam, we have the annihilation of self and God,

the exact same thing. In secular philosophy, we have Spinoza's idea. And then in Eastern philosophy, we have the natural force idea that I just articulated. And in a weird, bastardized Western philosophy way, you have, who talks about the will, capital W, more than anybody else in, in the Western philosophical canon,

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, right? They both have the, you know, the world is will, will in representation, the will to power in Nietzsche. These are different ideas, right? Nietzsche takes the sort of pessimistic approach of Schopenhauer.

We have a whole episode on Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, me and Allison did it a while ago. You can search it, find it, listen to these full arguments. Schopenhauer has this idea that, our constant striving, our dissatisfaction, our feeling of never quite being happy and content, never having fully arrived, always kind of looking for the next thing. Once we fulfill one desire, we're looking for the next. And we kind of live in the state of Dukkah, of perpetual dissatisfaction.

And Schopenhauer argued is because nature's will, the sort of blind force in nature, is this endlessly striving thing. And it structures, it structures the world and it structures us because we are the world and we get frustrated by it right and Nietzsche takes that and turns it into the will of power this reactionary um sort of elitist aristocratic perspective we have plenty episodes on Nietzsche himself but you see this idea of the will coming up over and over and over again we see the different ways in which thinkers from religious and philosophical traditions address the will see the limitations or completely completely abolish and negate the idea that there even is an individual egoic will that has actual control at all and replace it with something else.

We can secularize it in the terms of Spinoza or Taoism or Zen Buddhism, right? Or we can religiousize it as we do in Sufism and Christian mysticism. Or we can collapse the very duality through Spinozismonism where whether the Christian mystic and Meister Eckhart or the Sufi mystic Rumi are talking about God. or the Zen Buddhist or the secular, atheistic person has taken a naturalistic approach on it and talking about nature, what does Spinoza say? God is nature.

Nature is God. That they're actually the same thing. And so from one religious tradition, you'll have Meister Eckhart articulating it one way. From an Eastern tradition, you'll have it being articulated in another. From a secular philosophical position, you'll have it being articulated in another way. But they're all kind of getting at something of a very, similar. And I always find that utterly fascinating, and I think it points in favor of a perennialist

understanding of these spiritual traditions and these religious traditions and these mystical traditions. Not to say that they're all the same, but that they exactly in all their ways. They have these amazing and beautiful, gorgeous differences, not unlike wildflowers blossoming in their own way, but underneath them, there's this profound truth that they're all coming to from very, very different directions. And I think when many different cultures with different languages and different religions and different philosophical and spiritual approaches start heading in a similar direction. They're meeting up at a similar point. There's something deeply profound there that needs to be taken seriously.

Most important in the work of Meister Eckhart is metaphor. There are plenty of paradoxes, plenty of surprises and strange formulations, but metaphor is Meister Eckhart's stock in trade. If you are inclined to explain biblical religion to someone, you couldn't start better than by reading Meister Eckhart, not because it's the most accessible, but rather because it's the most stimulating. And when he coins a good phrase, there is no one better than Meister Eckhart. He says to those that are searching for God that are still spiritual seekers. He makes all kinds of interesting internal jokes. He says something at one point he says that God is on sale at very reasonable prices.

In other words, whatever it is you have to give up in order to get God, it's a bargain. And the idea that God is on sale at very reasonable prices to suggest, I mean, by itself would make a lovely sermon, even though it appeared in one of his sermons, because there's so much that you can extrapolate from that. It's such a deep and powerful thought that I can't help but admire that, and I can't help but think that if there is such a thing as inspiration, this is it.

Highly inspired, beautifully compact and complete ideas stuck into one sentence. and Meister Eckhart makes it appear effortless. I might be tempted to say that for the world's great artists, they take something that is very difficult to do and they make it look easy. Try, after reading scripture sometime, to coin as good a phrase as you'll find every other page in Meister Eckhart. You will find that without that inspiration, you just can't do it.

So he makes inspired prose poetry of a religious nature look easy. Or perhaps it's God that makes it look easy, but it comes through Meister Eckhart. And whoever it is making it look easy, it looks easy, and it's really not. So heaven is on sale at affordable prices, and he says that the doctrine of works, those of you who think that you can say a lot of prayers and give a lot of charity and do a lot of good things, and that will get you to heaven. He says, no, that's not going to work because what you're trying to do is bargain away these good works you've done for the sins you did.

In other words, you're trying to get over on God, as if God couldn't figure out which were bigger, your sins of your good works. He says, don't try and make a deal with God, particularly don't try and cheat God, as though you're going to put one over. on him. Do not try and be like a merchant trying to sell low and buy high. It says, don't sell anything. Your good works will not make you sanctified in the sight of God. If you want to be sanctified in the sight of God, then stop trying to get over on him. Stop asking for anything. If you really were, blessed in God's sight, you wouldn't have any of these prosaic concerns with which to irritate him. There's a great, there's a sort of light that shines out of Meister Eckhart, and although, of course, no one has ever, we never see him, you get from the sense from his books that he must have been an enormously charismatic figure. He must have had that sort of magnetism, which some religious men have.

And as a speaker, I can only assume that these were the most moving possible sermons, because it is very clear that he is generating these ideas from some well, some spring inside him. He's not borrowing from a tradition. He's inventing a tradition. He's creating a path. It's unique to him, but he says that all paths of apprehension of God will have certain connections to the path that he himself chose. When seen in this way, Christian mysticism, and we did that episode on Jesus as a revolutionary mystic,

arguing for the same thing, that you could reasonably have a picture of Jesus that is not about belief in conceptual propositions, i.e. if I believe that Jesus is the divine, ordained son of God sent to earth to redeem us for our sins, and I open my heart to the fact and let Jesus into my life and I, you know, orient my life to the belief that Jesus is God, then I will be able to secure for myself a place in heaven, which is a place I go after I die, right? Not shitting on anybody who believes that. That is the down-the-center Christian belief. There's so much beauty in that vision, not hating on it.

but it brings me back to all the arguments we made in that episode about Jesus the revolutionary mystic the Jesus says the kingdom of God does not come with observation nor will they say see here or see there for indeed the kingdom of God is within you okay well the kingdom of God is within me and Meister Eckhart is just saying you know to to unify with God is like this easy thing to do because it's just setting down this thing he's looking inward He's talking about this radical, transformative, experiential approach to God, not a propositional approach to a belief about God. And so, you know, whatever, again, that is why mystic traditions come in conflict with their organized religious counterparts.

Because they're kind of saying two different things. One is saying, no, literally when you die, if you believe in the right things, you will go to a separate realm. realm is called heaven it exists above and beyond the material world uh it is it is up there somewhere outside of space and time and that's a literal place that you literally go that could be true who the fuck am i to say that that's not true the mystics are saying something very different they're talking about right here and now they're talking about radical union with god with nature with what is the kingdom of god is not there or here or up there it's right in here, right? So, hence the disagreements between organized religion and their mystical

counterparts, I'm not here to shit on anybody's religion or anybody's belief. And clearly in the Christian mystic tradition, for example, these things are actually married. All right, the Christian mystics believed in God, believed in the divinity of Jesus, believed in fucking heaven. They had the belief side of the religion. They also had this radical inward spirituality of ego transcendence of the abolition of the self in God, that they unified in the Christian mystic tradition. And I think that is a genuine outgrowth of the development of Christianity as such, where there's these contending strains. And I think you can trace both of them back to Jesus, but I think the mystical one is, I would argue, and there's no way to prove

this ultimately, I would argue that Jesus is coming from that rarefied state of consciousness trying to articulate it in the cultural religious context in which he lived. And then Meister Eckhart in a medieval context, a European medieval context, articulating it in one way. Rumi, in a Persian context, articulating it in another. Spinoza in a Jewish philosophical, secular context, articulating it in quite another, but getting at the same thing, perhaps. Now, a third thing, or a final thing we should think about in Meijer Eckhart is the fact that he is involved in word magic.

We found when we looked at the Bible that there's a great deal of magic connected not just to numbers but also to words when we examine Scripture. For example, if you think of Esau and Jacob, when they're deciding who it is that's going to inherit from their father, once Isaac gives the blessing to Jacob, even though he's the wrong son, the blessing is said, and the word magic has been. done. You cannot undo a blessing or a curse. Think about that sort of word magic held over from the Bible. Well, something along those lines is operative in Meister Eckhart. He is doing something very much like magic with words. And the magic he engages in is in some ways, again, an empty use of words. It is a gesture at something. It is not meant to be taken literally, and yet there is a kernel of meaning in it, which is somehow independent of the literal phrasing. Consider the following

proposition. Meister Eckhart tells us, first of all, that the divine nature has no name. It is obvious that Meister Eckhart is not an atheist. Surely we can't draw that inference. What he is trying to gesture at is the fact that human language is not big enough to accommodate God. So rather than try and create literal speech about God, he says, no, your linguistic capacities are insufficient here. He will use metaphor in particular because metaphor is a particularly paradoxical kind of communication,

which comes as close as you can to speaking about God. And he says, since God has no name, metaphors particularly advantageous to the kind of thinking that he wants to do. And we can see how language and belief are oriented. If you don't have any orientation

to something beyond language, the experiences of Jesus or a religious leader will be reduced to language and when you reduce the sayings and the life and the wisdom and the teachings of a figure to mere language with no ability to stand back or

above it, that that gets translated, that gets reduced to beliefs. Because what are beliefs, they are propositions of language that you can accept or deny. And so we see that when there is this reduction of these

spiritual experiences to language and the only thing that you can relate to those teachings through is language that creates the very premise of reducing that teaching or those experiences to propositional beliefs. And that is, of course, you know, what would be considered the mainstream religious orientation to their religious traditions, a belief, propositional, linguistic relationship to claims about the nature of the world. Sometimes that can come in connection and in tandem with these genuine,

divine experiences of selflessness or a direct union with God as it is in the case of the Christian mystic tradition. But more often than not, that whole side of things is not experienced, and it just becomes this sort of fetishizing of language in the form of propositional beliefs that you either accept or deny at your own peril. Not only does he say that God has no name, but in addition, he says in another sermon that God is a word which speaks itself. Hmm. It's a mysterious kind of an idea. God is a word that speaks itself. And at the same time, it seems that God has no name. If we were trying to do scholastic logic chopping, we would never be able to accept both sentences. They are obviously contradictory. But mysticism is not afraid

of contradiction. That is the great strong point and the great weak point of mysticism. They are not bound by the usual rules of logic. It might be perfectly appropriate, as Meister Eckhart gestures at something that can't be said. It might be perfectly proper for him to say, God has no name. We cannot encapsulate him in language. It might also be proper to say that God is the word which speaks itself. And somehow that God is the self-generating reality, that generates all the small W words here in this world and all the things to which they gesture. So if you read it in a spirit of charity, if you read it with an openness to the message,

and you are not impeded by the strict literal incoherence, I believe you will find Meister Eckhart to be an extraordinarily valuable religious thinker. You have to approach it with a certain degree of openness, and you have to allow for the fact that you're not going to absorb it all the first time through, but it will give you many stimuli, which will move you in the direction of intense and serious religious appreciation. And that, I think, is Meester Eckhart's great advantage, and that's what he's trying to do. The irony is, of course, this is probably a two-hour episode using language, that all you're hearing are words. That is how we articulate things to each other with, that's why we're not talking about getting read of this stuff.

Without language, without words, without the poetry of Rumi and the writings of Eckhart, we wouldn't have any way to even learn about this stuff. So, of course, you need language. My whole thing is yapping into a mic. It's all about language. I'm using language right now. what I hope to perhaps be able to do here is to wield language effectively because he's talking about the difficulty of trying to put these spiritual, these mystical experiences and traditions into language. It's very difficult. And so oftentimes you'll read Meister Eckhart and have no fucking clue what he's talking about.

You'll read a Zen Buddhist Cohen and have no fucking clue what they're talking about. You'll read the poetry of Rumi. And although it's gorgeous and beautiful in its own right, he's pointing to something that, you can't quite make sense of. And a lot of times those things are of their time, meaning they're of their history and their culture at that time. So Jesus is talking in a Jewish messianic context. Eckhart is talking in a medieval Christian, Catholic context, on down the line.

And so they're using the language and the familial ways of doing things to articulate the unarticulatable. What I hope I might be able to do is to be to bring. like more linguistic precision to the thing to help people understand it. It would be very hard to pick up a book by Meister Eckhart without any other context and understand what the fuck he's talking about. Coming to it with all this context, okay, now those things are poetic. They do jump out of the page. They are profound. But if you just handed it to whatever, your buddy or your mom or your sister and said, hey, can you read this page of Meister Eckhart's articulation of the mystical experience? And can you tell me what he's saying?

No, they won't be able to do that. So hopefully, if I'm useful at all, it would be to explain things as well as I can. To try to put into precise language that can be relatable, even if you're religious or secular. You're atheistic, you're naturalistic. You come from a specific religious tradition. You come out of philosophy or whatever. My goal for myself is like, can I articulate this in a hyper-accessible way? Without any pretense that I have any particular insight that is unique, that I am a teacher of any kind or anything like that, but just trying to use my ability to wield language effectively, if I have that, put it in service of articulating this stuff in a way that is more accessible to more people so that they can begin this journey.

and I can in some instances perhaps be a doorway for people into authentic spirituality. We find out from him that the divine nature has no name, that God is a word that speaks itself. And in addition to that, we find out that although God has no name, all words come from the word. Many resonances from St. Augustine here, the connection between the word and words. Meister Eckhart himself, while he is a mystic, is a master of the entire tradition of Western theology. certainly knows Augustine, but he wants to go beyond what you can put in a book. He wants to go beyond the tradition of Western theology and say, instead of that, we have to work out a personal connection to God.

And this personal connection to God, while it may be difficult to put into words, is the most important thing that a soul can do. And the most important thing that anyone can do with language is to push people in that direction. You may not be able to give them a perfect sense of what the location of divine grace is, but you can say it's that way rather than this way. You can gesture without speaking directly. I would be tempted to say that if Aquinas is the greatest systematic theologian of Catholicism, I would be tempted to say that Meister Eckhart is the greatest unsystematic theologian of Catholicism,

and he glories in his unsystematic theology. Insofar as you can say things about God, Aquinas does a very fine job. But insofar as you can't say things about God, I'm tempted to think that, Meister Eckhart does a better job, right? And it's funny in some ways because although God is ineffable, God is very hard to characterize or to communicate about. At the same time, we feel a longing to talk about it, and we feel a longing to communicate with people about our deepest religious intuitions.

So the problem is how do we do that? The strictly logical way, insofar as it's possible, is the way of Aquinas and Scholastics. But as Meister Eckhart, it would be proud to tell us, there's more to religion than logic. Perhaps a certain set of images will alter our consciousness and alter our psyche in such a way so that we will be liberated from mere logic.

Meister Eckhart then shows us the way out of the labyrinth of words. He says, look, I'll talk to you about this matter, but I'm only talking to you because I can't think of anything better to do. If we're up to me, I would just give it to you wholesale, but only God can do that. As a next best thing, let me tell you about the images and metaphors and ideas that God has inspired me with, perhaps it will also inspire you.

To this day, I find Meister Eckhart inspiring, and I think that most people that read him in any century will find him so. I don't think Meister Eckhart is restricted to Catholicism or even to Christianity. There is a certain stance towards the divine, a certain withdrawal from profane and mundane experience that I think is characteristic of mystics in every religion. And Meister Eckhart is certainly that in spades for Christianity. For those interested in the Christian tradition, there's a more contemporary thinker.

His name is Thomas Merton. He engaged, he's a Christian mystic, socially engaged Christian mystic. So he's a progressive lefty in his life and argued against wars in Vietnam and racism and all of this stuff. So he's politically active. He's a Christian, fundamentally interested in the experiential and mystical dimension of the Christian religion. that who engaged meaningfully and seriously and deeply with Buddhism in particular. So he has books called like Zen and the Bird of Appetite, Birds of Appetite or something like that. He has another book that I read when I was like 19 before I could even understand most of what it meant called No Man is an Island.

I like that title. The cover was kind of cool. I busted it out. I remember reading it at community college to myself and like knowing that it's profound but still not fully getting it. all of these things in Buddhism are talked about as in Zen Buddhism in particular fingers pointing to the moon right you're reading roomy you're reading at cart you're listening to something like this there's intellectual sort of engagement there's understanding but don't but what's ultimately being done is being is we are trying to use language to point to something beyond it so if you're watching me point to the moon and you're looking at my finger staring at my finger trying to understand it you're you're being hypnotized and bedazzled by the words themselves, by the intellectual side of the understanding. But I'm pointing to something else.

Look up at the moon. You know, experience it yourself. Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the thing itself. Alan Watts puts it wonderfully when he says, don't confuse the menu for the food, right? What we're all talking about is something you can only really understand if you experience it, which means going beyond intellectual understanding, which means going beyond words and theory

and cultivating a practice that allows you to directly experience here and now outside of incessant inner dialogue. And so if you're stuck on the intellectual level, you're reading all this stuff, you're understanding all this stuff, you're hearing the words I say

and you find them intellectually thrilling or exciting, but you never do the practices, you never engage in what I think is the most effective practice, which is, you know, Buddhist, meditation in particular, but all these other traditions have their own means of doing it, you know, you're confusing the menu for the food. You want the food. You know, you don't just want to read about the food. So intellectually understanding it is a prerequisite. If you have no clue what the fuck's going on, how could you practice anything? You don't know what you're even doing or why you're

doing it. So you have to intellectually understand this stuff. But it's all so that you might be able to cultivate a practice where you can directly experience it for yourself. It is kind of like an experiment. It's like a science of subjectivity. Where, you know, Buddhism is so efficient because it really puts, it articulates it in such a direct way. You know, you don't have to wade through some of this contradictory poetry and paradoxes, although there's plenty of that in Buddhism, right? And going to the Zen tradition, you'll have no fucking clue what they're talking about

half the time until you know. but you know waiting through all that stuff Buddhism as articulated in its clearest forms can kind of get past a lot of that opakness and allow you access into understanding it so that you can practice it and that's what I would encourage people same with political theory

you can read all the Marx books you can read all the Lenin books you can understand all the history and the theory are you putting it in practice are you going out in your community and politically educating other people Are you importantly organizing in your community, taking what you know about how the world works and using that as an in road to go out and try to change it? As Mark said, we don't just want to interpret the world. We don't just want to get stuck in the realm of theory.

The point is to change it, and therefore to change it requires praxis. And politically, we know what that means. Spiritually, it means engaging in these practices consistently over time without expecting anything, without allowing your ego to turn it into another ego project. You don't have to dress in beads. You really don't. You don't have to wear a robe. You don't have to put on a show about how spiritual you are,

that spirituality becomes your personality. My God, you know, let go of all of that and just say, what is being pointed out here? How can I begin to start to cultivate a practice where I can kind of see and feel directly what's being talked about instead of having laying down? as the mediator to my understanding. Because there's intellectual understanding, and then there's visceral,

I know it in my bones understanding. And I truly believe that if you run the experiment on yourself in the proper way, often does require a community, often requires some sort of teacher or mentor. It can be done without it, but it makes it a more arduous road for sure, that you can have direct experiences of this, magnitude. You can experience what Meister Eckhart experience. You can experience directly what

Rumi experienced, what Christ and what the Buddha experienced. These are egalitarian possibilities. Truly, I believe that. That people in general can reach these. These are not only for rarefied sages. And for some people, it happens sort of naturally without even knowing it. I would believe that something like that happened with Christ, that this leap. and consciousness wasn't the product of concerted mystical practices, but he was with grace blessed by nature or God or whatever it may be to have this eruption to a higher level of consciousness, and then he went about trying to teach and articulate that. That has happened. If you know anything about Eckhart Toll, whatever you think about him, he's one of those rare individuals

where he wasn't engaged in any practices. He wasn't doing meditation. He wasn't trying to accomplish anything. He was suffering in his life to such an extreme and acute concentrated point that something within him just gave up, just broke. And he had the mystical sort of direct union with nature or God and then went about the rest of his life understanding what happened. But for most of us, that won't be the case. For most of us, it will be the slow, gradual, blossoming of a flower slowly opening up over years and years and years. And, you know, you had to kind of just like take that for granted. It requires consistency over years and years and years. Yes, if you sit down right now, you never meditated before and you meditate 30 minutes a day for two weeks, you will immediately

feel amazing benefits, truly. You'll feel more calm. You'll feel more connected. You'll feel more grounded. You'll be able to focus more. You'll be able to concentrate more. You'll notice that your mood is improved overall. You're less stressed out. All those things are true for the transformation of the type we're talking here. That is a gradual unfolding of a natural process that you at first willingly and consciously participate in, but then eventually it just happens through you. You have to kind of have the will and the ego to say, I'm going to start doing this thing, right? But over time, that is precisely what loosens its grip and in some instances ultimately falls away, often temporarily, almost always temporarily at first. And then the high teachers

of this stuff are all interested in stabilizing these insights and experiences, expanding the time in which they can be in these experiences of ego transcendence, etc. But even the language of experience assumes somebody that is experiencing it. And again, that's the paradox and the contradiction is that the experiencer goes away and there just is experience. So to say that you had a mystical experience is the ego coming in after the fact, reasserting itself and then filtering it through language that you then try to articulate. So that makes this stuff thorny and contradictory and hard to get into and opaque.

And that's just the nature of trying to understand this stuff. Let me see if I can explain to you some of the details of this unsystematic theology in a systematic way as it allows for. And perhaps we'll be able to tease out some of the main ideas hidden there. Meister Eckhart fundamentally makes a distinction between God, God and the Godhead. In German, it's got and gothite in a and what it means is, is that there's a distinction between God conceivative as the creator, the source of all the world around us. That we can almost kind of talk about in a way. That's where Aquinas's doctrine of analogies will start to take effect and be useful. We can talk about God. God in Meester Eckhart's strictly distinguished way is your aviottisive. you or your introduction to the godhead. And the godhead is very different.

Gotthight in German. The godhead is the divine essence, which cannot be spoken about. It is ineffable. And which is totally undynamic and static. In other words, let me see if I can explain this, because it's not very clear within Meister Eckhart, and it's not a very clear distinction. This is one of the difficulties that we're going to find with mysticism. Meister Eckhart distinguishes between God, who is the creator of the world,

and about whom we can talk in a rough and ready, uncertain way. That God is dynamic. He starts the world and then it undergoes all the changes that it undergoes. That God is revealed to us directly in Scripture. The Godhead, on the other hand, is totally ineffable and is somehow a grounding or a foundation of the God who is disclosed in creation. The Godhead is, as he puts it, the Godhead is as far apart from God as heaven is from Earth. The idea is something along these lines.

God, the first stage in our understanding of divinity, is thought of as the source of the world or the universe, for example. We can say that about them. God is creative, God is holy, God is loving. There are a number of predicates we can attach to God. That from Meister Eckhart is the first step towards an understanding of the Godhead, which is somehow bigger, not bigger in the sense, in the spatial temporal sense, of course, but bigger in the sense that it is more foundational, more foundational,

more, how can I put it, more transcendent, more non-human than God as he is revealed in creation. Now, I know this is a fuzzy and difficult distinction. There's lots of nebulous stuff here, and I know that someone like Hume, for example, would just take apart the distinction and say there's nothing there. I think that's the uncharitable reading. Give it a little bit of space. Allow for the possibility that one's apprehension of God changes, and that one's initial access to divine ideas is going to be found from your experience here in this world. If that's the case, then provisionally, we might want to work through Meister Eckhart's distinction between God and the Godhead. Godhead is static, God is dynamic.

The Godhead is transcendent, whereas God seems to be simultaneously imminent and transcendent because we see his works here in this world. The Godhead is unspeakable. You can't say anything about the Godhead. Whereas God, while you can't exactly talk about them, we can use conventional names like Yahweh, which don't really tell us anything about God, but he can't really tell us anything about God, but he can't even talk about Him. about God, but he has allowed us to use that sort of a phrase in referring to him. The idea then is something along these lines. What people think God is is only the entrance way to God's awesome vastness. And it would appear from this discussion that Meister Eckhart is very at home

in this ocean of Godheadness or whatever it is he's encountered out there. Now, the problem is that our language breaks down when Meister Eckhart goes out into that uncharted territory. He would like to tell us what it is that he's doing and where he is. And we're not talking about a spatialization, but psychically or spiritually where he is. And the difficulty is that our language just isn't big enough to encompass this. So the uncharitable reading would be that My Strycard is talking nonsense. And that's an uncharitable reading of mysticism in general. The charitable reading is that he's trying to gesture at something transcendent, something that is bigger than human language and bigger than our experience. If that is the case, then whatever he can tell us

about this domain is about is all we're likely to see it anytime soon because it would seem that Meister Eckhart is one of those few friends of God that to whom God is disclosed is in most nature. He's going to do his best to explain this to us. Now it turns out that this. All right, really quick. That's interesting. I say really quick. You know how I get. I was in an apprentice class the other day, right? I'm like the oldest guy in the class and the oldest apprentice. A lot of guys are in their 20s. And so we're, you know, we often just talk about random shit and somebody brought up God and religion and somebody was an atheist.

And so they're kind of having like this impromptu little back and forth arguing for like atheism over in this case a Christian conception of God. And I was involved in this conversation a little bit. I like to, I like to kind of mediate these things and help each other understand. So, you know, help the Christian person understand the atheist position a little bit more. you know, ask them questions. Like one of my favorite things to do in those conferences is to ask the Christian, like, well, what if this guy over here is right about atheism? Like, what if you found out that he is actually correct? And like when you die,

it's like before you were born and blah, blah, blah. And then make them wrestle with that. And then on the atheist side, I'll try to like complicate the notion of God to make, to make their hardcore position against him a little bit less tenable, but always in a friendly and fun way. So at the end, this conversation is sort of culminating. And it kind of gets bounced over to me and I and I kind of try to articulate on the fly a spinozist conception of God right the people always ask me like Brett do you believe in God I say kind of it depends what you mean it kind of like you know frustrate some people some people like Brett what like what religion are you I'll be like I'm I don't know if I'm religious I guess I kind of am I was like I get a

lot out of Buddhism and then what do people say like oh so you believe in like reincarnation and stuff and I say oh not not the beliefs like that I mean the practice of meditation and the Buddhist insight into our minds, all this stuff. So anyways, this conversation is happening. It bounces over to me. I try to articulate Spinoza's idea. I look to my Christian friend and I say, what if God is nature? And there is no actual separation. The whole energy of the cosmos flows through all living beings. And we participate through our consciousness in God himself. And then it just got awkward. Like he's like kind of like looked down. I could, you know, he's a young guy.

And so I'm not dissing him at all. But obviously he couldn't metabolize that. He didn't. That kind of was something that he just was disoriented by and couldn't make sense of. And the atheist also kind of like, you know, was kind of stumped by that. And the conversation just like hit this, hit this brick wall. And I kind of like felt like a little sting of like, ooh, maybe I, maybe I went too far. Maybe I tried to articulate something that was a little.

too nuanced and it just came off as kind of like weird or unsettling or something. I don't know. There's a little awkward social moment when I was trying to basically argue for this idea. But to re-articulate what was said by professor here, for Eckhart God, so there's God and Godhead distinction, right? God is what we know. God is known through relation to creation. So he is the creator. He's the Lord, the Father, the Redeemer. This is the God of mainstream organizing. religion, right? When you ask a random person, do you believe in God? This is the God they're asking about. Do you believe in like this creator standing above and beyond, creating with some sort of purpose for us, etc.? The Godhead, and the relationship between these two

is obviously very dicey and sort of inchoate. But for Eckhart, the Godhead is this silent, formless. He said no name, so nameless, imageless, divine ground of being. And he it exists beyond all concepts, all names, all attempts to articulate, all attributes, all traits, all distinctions. This is the unified underbelly of everything. And so, like, when Heckhart will say something like, I pray to God to rid me of God, okay, he's not talking about being an atheist. He's not like, oh, God, I wish I didn't believe in God. He's saying, like, the living reality of the divine, the godhead, my my visceral experiential relationship with the ground of being itself with the godhead, frees me or can free me, I pray that it does free me from my silly little finite

conceptual ego made, ego understandable image of God. I want to be freed from this image. In Buddhism, there's a similar analogy. Like you use Buddhism as a raft to get across the river. And when you get across the river, you let go of Buddhism itself. Right? There's no more need for the Buddha. You've done the thing that he's pointing to. You rid yourself of that conceptual baggage. And it's a beautiful and profound sort of point. And then its echoes in Buddhism would be something like emptiness. What is the ground of all being in like Nargajuna? Mahayana Buddhism. There's this argument about emptiness. We sometimes call it the groundless ground.

Going through spiritual experiences, having dark nights of the soul is a response, an egoic response to touching the groundless ground. This totally disorienting experience of unifying with the cosmos, with nature, with God. Again, Spinoza is so useful here because he collapses the two. I'm saying the same thing. I can talk. I can use the God language all day long. I can use the natural language all day long. Spinoza is saying, we're saying the same thing.

That's why he's so fucking fascinating, so helpful. But yeah, in Buddhism, it's the groundless ground or emptiness, which itself is not necessarily empty. That's when you get into paradox and contradiction. But the godhead for Meister Eckhart, the ground of all being, is very similar to attempts to articulate in Eastern traditions the groundless ground or in Buddhism in particular emptiness.

In Hinduism it's the big self, Brahma, the one totalizing God who loses himself in all of creation. All of us participate through our consciousness in the Hindu conception. We all participate in God. There's the bowing to each other as a recognition of the divine in the other. But we are fragments of God, like a mere shattered on the ground. every little piece reflects the whole, but God would be the entire thing. Again, language fails us here, but we can see what he's getting at.

And for Eckhart as well, God or the Godhead is not, again, not an object out there that the ego worships from a distance. That's the conventional idea of God. The Godhead is in this sense is this deepest ground of reality itself. And the human soul, at its deepest point, is. capable of realizing its unity with the Godhead, with pure emptiness, pure awareness, with the groundless ground itself. So that's not, and that's why mystics get in trouble, because some of this stuff can sound like ego inflation.

The declaration that I am God or I am the son of God, if an ego is saying that it's delusional narcissism, if a being that has transcended ego identification is saying with that, it's something deeply profound about the nature of reality itself and one's direct experience with it. So, again, the contention between organized religion and mysticism obviously unfolds from there. An enlightening analogy that Meister Eckhart makes to the difference between God and Godhead. And he says, it's a difference between within your soul, between what he calls the grund, in German, that's the ground or foundation, and the faculties. Think about your soul, about your psyche, or your consciousness. It's not an easy thing to talk about.

If someone to ask you, what is it? Well, you might be perplexed. It's very hard to say exactly what your consciousness is. I mean, it's hard to find a good word for it, particularly because your experience of yourself, think of, say, Descartes, thinking about thinking about himself. One's experience of oneself is entirely internal, is entirely private. It's not out here in the world of space and time. So it is hard to gesture at your soul or your psyche or your consciousness because it's not out here for us to point to.

It is an internal psychic fact like our experience of God. That's why the analogy is illuminating. So what Meister Eckhart says is this. Think of the difference between that ineffable spark that is you, that thing, that is your soul, and now think about the various faculties into which we find your soul split. For example, the faculty of memory, the faculty of reason, the faculty of emotion. If you were to list all the things that your soul can do, reason, emotion, memory, after you listed all the faculties, you would have the parts of your soul that you can talk about,

but you would not have eliminated that ineffable soul. spark that you are unable to talk about? Meister Eckhart says, fine, you know what that ineffable spark is, that scintilla? That is the deity within. So there's a little fragment of this inside you, and not inside you in the spatial sense, but inside your soul in the spiritual sense. It is unspeakable because it is your connection to the Godhead, and it is, on the one hand, unspeakable and we can't do logical proofs about it. On the other hand, because it is the you

that makes you, that is more foundational to yourself than any of the other things you can do, it's more found, it's more you than your memories, it's more you than your reasoning, it's more you than your feelings. The reason why we can't talk about that is that it's God's ineffable spark. And while it's true that we can't prove such things exist, Meister Eckhart would make, or would I think make the argument, or make the assertion, I don't think it is an argument, would make the assertion that while we can't prove it, we also can't doubt it, because it's the you that does the doubting. Yeah, this is the ghost of Cartesianism, the embryo of Cartesianism, is built right into this.

So the idea is something along these lines, that Meister Eckhart, unlike so many other scholastics, doesn't bother with proofs of God's existence. He says, you couldn't figure out how to doubt it, right? And not only couldn't you figure out how to doubt it, if you did, you wouldn't even know what you were doubting. So the best you can do is to accept God's grace and God's illumination as it comes, And if God doesn't illuminate you directly now, Meister Eckhart will do the best he can to move you in the right path by giving you not the answer,

but certain suggestive hints about where you might find the answer within yourself. Somewhere in scripture it says the kingdom of God is within you, Meister Eckhart emphasizes that statement in spades. By the way, all these philosophy series episodes, I don't listen to them before. So the fact that I say some stuff and then Michael Sue Gru mentions that, I think that just proves that I'm kind of on the right track here with what I'm talking about and that our analyses are dovetailing. I've literally never heard this lecture in my entire life, and most of them on here, that's the case for.

And if I did, it was years and years and years ago, I forgot the content. So I am sort of reacting in real time. And so it's nice to see him bring up that quote that I brought up earlier because it kind of shows the fact that we're very much on the same page here. Now, in addition to this distinction between the gruned of the soul and the faculties, which is analogous to the distinction between the Godhead and the things we can say about God, he has a very interesting psychology of conversion. He says that grace, which is the birth of God and the soul, and of course for him, that means he can go back to the nativity narratives and the Gospels, right, and view this as being

the scintilla of God being born into the soul of the world. All right, he can do all kinds of allegorical readings of the gospel on this basis. He says that at that point, when you get grace, the divine spark that was within you burst into flame. Now, again, don't read this uncharitably. He's not trying to say that you're on fire. He's trying to say that your soul has changed. We see that soul change in St. Augustine's Confessions. You will see it in any of the lives of the saints.

What Meister Eckhart is doing us is giving us a set of images with which to talk about something you can't talk about. And that's why the idea of the soul, the spark bursting into flame, is not only useful, quite suggestive, and is not ever likely to be able to be able to be able to be able to and is not ever elected to be superseded. Now, there are certain problems that we're going to come into when we try and talk about this soul bursting into flame kind of stuff. The first problem is this. Mysticism seems to break down, not just our thinking,

but also the grammar of our language. And for that reason, we don't know how to talk about these primary intuitions if they exist at all, because it's hard to... So he's going to talk about the language thing here and might go into some criticism, not sure where is you going to talk about I'm not sure where he's going to take it from here, but I just wanted to articulate the argument he kind of passed by there, which is like this idea within Eckhart that Christ himself,

and I say this all the time, one of my favorite sayings, like, I'm not trying to say, like I invented a quote, but one of the things I say is that the idea is like cultivate the heart of Christ and the mind of the Buddha, right? The sacred heart of Christ. Love them for they know not what they do. Love your neighbor as yourself. The kingdom of God is within you.

Unconditional love for all beings. articulated in St. Francis, where he's talking about brother's son and sister, Sister Moon, and the animals themselves are my brethren, my family. They are me. This is Christian mysticism in that sense. But Christian mysticism is thinking of Christ, not as like somebody that was once born historically in Bethlehem, but an internal and eternal possibility for all of us. The incarnation of Christ is not like a historical event that we admire from the outside and then we go and worship the person who did it. It's like a reality that we can realize ourselves. In Buddhism it's like you can become a Buddha. It's not like Buddha is

this person over there or in the past that we worship, right? It's Buddha is showing the way that we can become a Buddha. And Christ, in his own way, is showing us how we can become a Christ, how we can awaken the sacred heart within ourselves. So my guiding vision for my own spirituality, whatever that may be, is like, can I cultivate the heart of Christ? Unconditional love for all beings. It's very bodhisattva coded. Christ himself in the Buddhist tradition can very much be argued that he was a historical incarnation of a bodhisattva. And the, and the, and, and, and, the, and, the mind of the Buddha, that tranquil, equanimous, you know, unrattled, concentrated mind that can be in the here and now without being endlessly distracted by its own internal incessant dialogue, its own chattering at itself and its own machinery of endless desiring to transcend that. Not only liberates you from so much suffering, although suffering is often the door to get here, it's a revolutionary,

subjectivity. If you have the heart of Christ in the mind of a Buddha, are you a perfect little neoliberal subject? Are you a settler in the West Bank? Are you a maga diehard? Are you being convinced by ads on YouTube to buy things that you don't need so you can be the sort of person you want to be? If you buy this truck, you can be a real man. Real men drive big old trucks that are $70,000. Are you susceptible to that? The whole machinery of consumption and marketing is rooted in our ego's inherent sense of unworthiness, a lacking in our psyches, that advertising presents to us that it can cure that feeling of lack. Never can, of course, but that it tricks us into thinking it might be able to if we consume that object, if we get that thing.

you know that that will make us feel like what we're seeking and this is often subconscious that's what makes it so powerful when you bring these subconscious impulses and desires to your conscious awareness at least you're observing them you're being honest about them when they're still submerged in the unconscious which is why i think psychoanalysis is so useful there is an unconscious straight up i'll argue for that all day when things are submerged in there behaviors and thought patterns and ways of being are often dictated by something you don't know. They're bubble, you're, you're being pushed around by psychological forces that you are not aware of. And we all know people like that, right? Sometimes we crudely call it a lack of

self-awareness or, as I used in my Jung episode, we've all seen the person that gets drunk and lashes out angrily, right? Once their inhibitions are reduced, their egoic structures of control are reduced by alcohol in particular other substances, an uglier version of them come out. That is something that is in the subconscious, that is not being processed, that is not being a knowledge, that is not being worked through.

And it's going to, once the repressive lid has a crack in it, it's going to burst fucking through. So, you know, the subjectivity that can transcend that, bring the unconscious into the conscious, cultivate loving universal love for all sentient beings, even if you don't get all the way there, the increasing expansion of your moral sphere of concern to include more and more sentient beings, and a calm mind that is no longer knocked around by its petty, endless parade of desires,

that's a revolutionary subjectivity. There is nothing that nationalism in its reactionary sense or capitalism can offer us. there is nothing capitalism can sell to Christ there is no war that you can convince the Buddha to engage in and support slaughtering other people across the planet for your fucking whatever

settler colonial project or imperial domination fantasies that subjectivity is revolutionary in a way that dovetails so well with the sort of world we want to see communism you know when I talked earlier about telling a coworker about my vision of communism.

He said, you're an idealist. People are too self-interested. People are too shallow. People are too distracted. People are too dumb. To accept that. He was even kind of implying that that's a good vision to have, but he doesn't think people can live up to it. Egos can't. Right? People trapped in an ego identification,

never even seeing the possibility of what's beyond that probably can't create a truly communist global civilization. much i always say like mature egos you know con like egos that are working on developing a healthy sense of self and and processing as much unconscious material as they reasonably can holding itself to high ethical standards um but still being fundamentally ego identified that can create socialism for a global classless society there has to be a subjective correlate right and a subjective

corrective correlate, I would argue, is something in this direction of a revolutionary subjectivity. Because that unconditional love and that transcendence of the personal desiring machinery, that is like the ideological superstructure of what a communist intelligent civilization would be. And so, and then we have a political obligation to not become enlightened necessarily, whatever, to participate in the cultivation of a higher and higher degree of consciousness, to begin to allow that already natural process that wants to happen to happen by stepping out of the way. And prayer or meditation is, in its best, you, your sense of a separate self that's in control,

stepping out of the way. And so, yeah, so that's, take that for what it is. illustrate such things. Think about it this way. Mysticism breaks down the distinction between subject and object, which is... Okay, subject-object duality being exploded. I just forgot to finish up my point is that the point of Christianity for Meister Eckhart is that is not that God became human ones. It's that the Godhead, the divine ground can be born in every soul. So that's the egalitarian nature of it. reactionary spirituality, they insist on the rare nature of it. Reactionary spirituality is going to impose a hierarchy on the spiritual realm itself,

that only an elite few can rise above the herd and will themselves to power. The Nietzschean Ubermensch is a template for reactionary attempts to grapple with this stuff, which some reactionaries historically absolutely have. all this stuff we're talking about. They've noticed it to some degree they've engaged with it. I think the fact that they remain reactionary says that they never went deep enough with it. They probably remain on the level of ego co-optation of it, right? Because they're subordinating it to a hierarchical, reactionary political project that flies in the face of the core values of that revolutionary subjectivity. But they will insist that this stuff is real, but that only a very few,

few select aristocrats of the soul in Julius Evelas, ride the tiger, right? We covered that on Red Menace years ago. The aristocrats of the soul or the Nietzsche and Ubermensch are these rare individuals that are capable of transcendence, but the masses are not. They are to be controlled, to be exploited, to fight in the wars of the great men of history, to be grist in the middle of the development of others. That's the reactionary trend.

in reactionary spirituality, in Julius Evola, in Nietzsche. That's why Nietzsche is really truly. I love Nietzsche and philosophy. I've read books on Nietzsche. I get a lot out of Nietzsche. At the end of the day, Nietzsche is a reactionary. And he must be opposed. He must be understood and then combat it.

I talk about Nietzsche quite a bit in my book. He has some really interesting and useful concepts. Amor Fati. What's the thing I talk about in the book? book, oh, the death of God, you know, the nihilism of the post-God era of atheism and scientific material reductionism in human history as this phase we're going through. You know, who will clean this blood off our hands? What new rituals and rites of passage do we have to invent being untethered from our center

of gravity that God played for millennia in human history? In the wake of the death of God, like, how do we manage? And he was prophetic in his sort of vision of various forms of nihilism erupting in the barren soil where God once stood. So in those ways, Nietzsche is useful, important, even inspiring. But politically, ultimately, he ends up on the wrong side of these particular questions. And that's because Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, didn't actually experience these dimensions of being. They engaged with them at high levels of intellectuality. so they put them to work for their philosophy but they did they spent a lot less time

feeling into them practicing and cultivating that's not to say that nietzsche doesn't have these these mystical moments jean jacques rousseau talks about having a mystical experience on a long walk between towns nietzsche often talked about walking in the mountains in germany and and having these ecstatic insights and moments of of of of transcendent rapture, et cetera. So it's not to say that those things aren't real, but the ego always floods back in. The ego will flood back in and can co-opt it.

And you have to be careful about that because it can happen to us too. So... To grammatical construction, think about what it will be like if you make subjects and objects the same thing in your grammar. You will be unable to construct sentences.

Your speech will turn into gibberish. Right? The question is, how can we account for and articulate experiences in which subject and object, the knower and the known, when that breaks down. What will happen to our grammar when we try and do that? Since it seems that we can't maintain the grammar,

either of English or of German or of Latin or of any language, while the subject and object distinction breaks down, the best we can do is search for these metaphors, these images. And metaphor is his stock and trade. One of my favorites is, this is directly from one of his sermons, He says, God is green and flowering in his spiritual power. Let's think about that for a while. God is green and flowering.

Does it make any literal logical sense to describe God as being green? How would one go about finding out what color God is? God is green and flowering. Well, clearly we're not to take that as that's the color of God. But rather, green is connected with our experience of life and regeneration, and it's not a statement about the color of God, even though it literally says God is green and flowering. What it is is a statement that makes an analogy between something you have experienced and something you have not, and says it participates in that in some nebulous and uncertain way.

That's what's important about Meister Eckhart. He's making gestures, not giving you literal speech. Now think about metaphor, because that's why metaphor is Meister Eckhart stock in trade. And it's not just true of Meister Eckhart. of all mystics. Let's just think briefly about how metaphor works and make your life a little bit easier in thinking about this. I want to talk about three kinds of sentence. The first sentence will be, my eye is my eye. I hope that's not controversial. My eye is indeed my eye, because it's an identity. What else would my eye be but my eyes? There's no doubt about that.

Now, consider a simile. My eye is like a window. We have a window there, and there's a sense in which my eye is like a window, right? It gives me access to the outside world. Um, I can see things through it. There are lots of analogies that I might make. But the point is that we use like or as in that simile. And it makes literal sense. It tells me that my eye and the window share some common property, some common predicate. Now let's move to a third sentence.

And this is what's important about this. Let's consider how metaphor works. Let's consider the statement that my eye is a window. Now, my eye is a window is a very different statement from my eye is like a window. This is why they taught you the difference in fourth grade between similes and metaphors. While it didn't seem to be important to you at the time, it is of great logical significance because similes make logical sense. My eye and the window share a certain property. That's intelligible. To say that my eye is a window, if you take that literally, is nonsense.

I mean, I don't have a window in the front of my head, and there's not an eye on the side of this building. On the other hand, although it is literally speaking, strictly speaking, nonsensical to say that my eye is a window. My point is that this is meaningful nonsense. That's what's important about metaphor. Metaphor by virtue of its very logical structure, because it doesn't use like or as, always attributes identity to two things that have the property of not being identical. That's what makes a metaphor a metaphor. That's why your teacher in fourth grade told you the difference.

Key thing here is that if you want to be strictly logical, you have to use similes. As soon as you move from simile to metaphor and you drop out that like or as, you are literally speaking nonsense. The point is that mystics, being the brave men they are, are not afraid of speaking nonsense if it is meaningful, communicative nonsense. And this, of course, is the nightmare of the logicians, right? The fact that nonsensical utterances, like my eye as a window, should communicate stuff to people, right? This is going to have logicians forever after tearing out their hair. Empiricists, skeptics, atheists,

right? Scientific materialists and reductionists. These are all people that scoff at this very conversation. And they don't scoff at it because they know it. They don't scoff at it because they've tried meditating and they've given these things a genuine hearing and have worked through their own practice, ran the experiment on themselves and found that it leads nowhere. They haven't gotten there yet. They are in the post-theistic phase, right? Hume talked about, great philosopher, love Hume, British empiricism. He talks about empiricism means like we understand the world through what we can see and feel and touch, what is here, natural in the world of matter and material. You know, that's our, that's our pathway into knowledge. And so he had this wonderful

line, which I'll butcher here in one of his, in his philosophical treaties where he's like, you know, any book full of metaphysics cast it into the fire. He's like, all metaphysical speculation and ramblings is nonsense. This is antitheistic, right? This is the foundation of atheistic scientism, which is the dominant sort of ideology of our time. Human beings had a deep religious phase and then at least in the in the west but perhaps all around the planet certainly there's i mean look at china that's that's a atheistic society if there's such a thing there's the human species at different times different individuals and different cultures going through it at different times but it's like this turning around and critiquing the religious

era epoch of human life that's when you get atheism that's when you get science that's when you get skeptics, that's when you get empiricism and Hume and Nietzsche and naturalism and Darwin and Freud, right? All these people in one way or another rejected the idea of God and are working through it. And that is if you, I don't want to say this in a patronizing way because I don't, I really do not mean to be patronizing. And I don't, I don't mean to say that people are stuck at different levels. We're all in a constant state of evolution. And you could have a really rich and sophisticated, religious relationship without ever having gone through the atheistic phase. And you can be an incredibly shallow, unthoughtful atheist, right? We've all come across them. But generally speaking,

I was once an atheist. I was religious. Communion, you know, self-identified. I had a conversion when I was a teenager into Christianity. So it wasn't just something I was fed. I grew up basically in a non-religious agnostic house. I didn't, I wouldn't even know what atheism is. If I asked my mom, what is atheism? She wouldn't know. It wasn't a religious house. It wasn't a non-religious house. It was just like agnostic in the purest sense.

It was never discussed. I discovered religion on my own accord. I converted to Christianity as a teenager. By my late teens, early 20s, I had ruptured with conventional religious belief. Went into a philosophical, scientific phase of my life where I was very atheistic. New atheism was my thing for a long time in my early 20s. And I have what I would refer to, and Allison and I have talked about this publicly, is like a post-Atheism. Like evolution doesn't stop.

So the idea that you would go through religion, see its shortcomings, its contradictions, its failures, react to that through a dialectical opposite of stark atheism and scientific materialist reductionism would make sense, dialectically. and then what is the next not to be too Hegelian and simplistic with the thesis antithesis synthesis idea, but then there's this post-Atheism synthesis where you return to religion and spirituality at a higher level. Again, that can seem stagist, and sometimes we can talk about dialectics in a stagous way, but we all know that dialectics is porous, is unfolding, is dynamic, is never static. but the idea of going through this dialectical back and forth and emerging out to a higher synthesis is, I think, a useful way of understanding what can happen here. And the atheist and the scientific materialist reductionist who would scoff at a discussion like this

is scoffing from, pardon my crass and unsophisticated language, a lower level on the ladder. right in the same way that like um uh what's like a stupid religious guy um god there's so many of them some like religious right evangelical fox news fucking guy would scoff at an atheist and scoff at evolution darwinian evolution they're scoffing from an inferior position um i'm not saying that they're less worthy of life or they're you know something like that but like epistemologically ontologically, experientially,

intellectually, the hardcore Bible literalist fundamentalist who's never been an atheist, never really been through atheism, never progressed past his hyper-belief, ego relationship with his religion

critiquing Darwin, saying evolution by natural selection is demonic and satanic and not true and actually I'm a six-day creationist. We all know, we all know that that person is operating from a lower level. The scientific atheist Darwinian is operating from a higher level of understanding than that person. But again, it never ends. So there's a stage beyond that.

You can't really see two, three stages out because there's too much dialectical back and forth that has to occur for you to even be able to begin to see that, the horizon of those things. So we don't know where it's all going. I'm not going to presume that I know what comes after this post-Atheist phase I'm talking about, but also culturally it's minimal. All right. This sort of discussion, this post-Atheism, for lack of a better word, is a niche marginal thing. Huge swathes of society are stuck in a basically secular atheist agnosticism and scientific materialism, whether that's a thought-out version of that or just an intuitive cultural picking up of the basic values and worldview from that milieu and that epoch. Huge swath of that, especially in the West, and in China in some parts around the world,

sure. There's there's probably even like statistically a bigger amount of people that are still in that that level prior to where it is very conceptual, very belief oriented. It's an egoic relationship with propositional beliefs about the nature of the world and certain rituals that are attendant upon that that form people's religious orientation. Again, that's not to say that every person in the atheist secular phase is more sophisticated intellectually than the people in the prior stage. There are people. people in that prior stage who have developed that stage to such a high extent. They're actually in some ways more sophisticated than somebody that is technically in that atheist stage,

that scientific materialist stage, but is there in a shallow way. So you have to kind of wrestle with that as well. But that's kind of how I understand it. It is a dialectical understanding of how these things unfold. and so somebody in that earlier religious position won't be interested in what we're talking about and certainly won't understand it. Somebody in the atheistic position would scoff at it, that this is what Hume said we should toss into the fire.

This is metaphysical nonsense. You know, this means nothing. This is gobbledygook. This is new age bullshit. They can't see it. And that would be the predominant reaction to that. With some exceptions, of course. I'm speaking in radical generalizations. So, you know, give me some grace on that front. But I'd love to hear people's thoughts on that in particular and whether or not you agree with me or you see what I'm trying to articulate here. All right. This is why poetry and theology will never ultimately be logical, or one of the reasons why they'll never ultimately be logical because metaphor is built right into them.

So the idea here is that metaphor is always communicative nonsense. that the tradition of Western religion is built around certain key metaphors. And although, strictly speaking, these metaphorical utterances do not make logical sense, they communicate something, and they communicate something. What they communicate, I would say, is polyvocal. What I mean by that is that a statement like 2 plus 2, that only indicates one thing to you. I'll call that univocal. It's 2 plus 2 is 4, tells you what that addition problem amounts to.

Metaphors speak with more than one tongue. They speak with more than one voice. They are polyvocal. They move you in various intellectual directions without giving you one and only one answer. Mathematics is univocal. The world of metaphor is polyvocal. That is why this is so profound.

That is why this is still so moving and so stirring. The polyvocal metaphors keep talking to us from different perspectives in different voices, all saying in some ways the same thing. The problem is we strain to hear what they're saying, and we can almost figure it out but not quite. The point at which you completely make the metaphors fit together, is the point at which you receive divine grace,

and at that point you realize that metaphors, like other words, can't quite do the job. Now, if we take these ideas about metaphor, from here I want to move to some of Meister Eckhart's metaphors and just look at them in detail. I like the metaphor of God being green and flowering, but how about this one? And this also harks back to what I said in the beginning of the lecture,

that Meister Eckhart often speaks from God's, perspective, which is a remarkable trick if you can do it. He said, the eye with which I see, with which I see God, is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same. One seeing, one knowledge, and one love. That's deep. That's profound. I am not entirely certain, literally what it means. I mean, if you consider the fact that, well, God doesn't have a body, one assumes, so he doesn't have an eye, one assumes. So how could Meister Eckhart's eye and God's eye be the same thing. Literally, it doesn't make sense.

On the other hand, if we look at it symbolically or metaphorically, it suggests that it is possible for human beings to abandon the constraints of the body, to forsake the limitations of space and time, and adopt a divine perspective. In other words, what Meister Eckhart is doing is gesturing at what it would be like to vacate our soul of small, petty, unreligious concerns.

When he says that I view the world with the same eye that God views the world, what he is saying is that he has emptied his soul of other things so that divinity could be poured into him. Now there's another metaphor exactly. Divinity didn't get poured into him because divinity is not a liquid. But if you understand what I'm talking about, then you're starting to catch on to why metaphor is so important to religious discourse and in particular so important to Meister Eckhart. We are trying to talk about something that doesn't fit into language. best we can do is not, I mean, perhaps it just remains silent. That is one possible alternative.

But insofar as we want to communicate with other people about our religious intuitions or about our experience of divinity, the best we're going to get is these inspired metaphors. And I'd be tempted to say that you know the lion by his claw. I look at these wonderful metaphors and I can't help but believe that there is something going on here which is outside the domain of a superficial understanding. He certainly has the appearance of being an inspired man. That's what's so fascinating about these early Christian mystics is that in many cases

they don't have they're not operating in a cultural tradition like we are where I could right now Google up any religious tradition, have a Wikipedia article about it, look up what mysticism means, look up like try to understand what I like, you know, just like operating in a situation where everybody around you has no fucking clue what you're talking about. It adds validity

because obviously the only way that you could come up with that, the only way you could be a roomie or a Meister Eckhart is to have the experiences directly and then trying to articulate them through the cultural linguistic norms of your society and historical norms of the society you're living in. So like you know these things are hard one. And again, like to somebody that could sound like gobbly go. The eye that I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. He's talking about radical unified consciousness. He's talking about transcending the ego self, the small self and radically uniting with nature,

with God completely, to have annihilated his self into God. Radical unity experience, what we call non-duality. Non-duality, inseparability, radical interconnectedness. So that these states of consciousness are, there is no me over here and God over there. There's no me in here and nature out there. in these radical non-dual mystical insights, it is you are it and it is you. And there is no separation.

So that's what he's trying to articulate. But you can imagine a medieval Christian, you know, with some authority not liking what he's hearing when he hears him say that shit. And the same way that when Spinoza would talk his shit, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Portugal. Because they said he's an atheist. The stuff he's talking is so incomprehensible to us that it might as well be atheism.

It's heresy. It's blasphemy. And all throughout religious history, we see these blasphemers, these heretics, who, from their perspective, they are totally religious. They're totally in this. Like Meister Eckhart is a Christian. He is having radical experiences of oneness with God, you know, and understanding his own religion at the deepest levels possible. and then trying to articulate that to a people who 99.9% either won't understand or won't fucking like the way he's talking. And that's happened in every religious tradition throughout time.

It would seem that metaphor for Meijt is in some ways like what irony was for Socrates. Socrates always described his method as being meutic. He described himself as not having any knowledge himself, but rather being like a midwife. He helps other people give birth to intellectual children. May I suggest that the metaphors that Meijer Eckhart offers us are also meiotic. They are intended to help with the birth of God in the soul. And in that sense, he is a sort of spiritual midwife. He does not cause you to get God's grace or to get God's illumination,

but he helps the birth of God in the soul. He helps fan that spark of divinity into the flame of religious illusion. And of course, it's not a flame, right? Again, all I can do is have recourse to metaphors about Meister Eckhart's metaphors and what they're supposed to do to you. But that tends to prove my point as well. I'm trying to gesture at something that doesn't fit nicely into language. I'm trying to talk about the experience of divinity. And I think, like all speakers that want to communicate religious ideas,

it is going to be necessary for us to have recourse to metaphor, and also to be willing to accept metaphor for what it is. In other words, don't say, ah, flame, I don't want to know about flame. I want to know really, literally what's going on. Meister Eckart would just throw up his hands and say, look, I can't do that. It's not a problem of my religious understanding. It's a problem of the nature of language itself. Language was invented to talk about tables and chairs and stuff.

God is not like tables and chairs, and you will find that the closest we can come are these suggestive and provocative metaphors. It is meyutic. It helps you give birth to a spiritual child. It does not father the spiritual child. That comes from God's direct intervention and God's direct grace. Now, I'd like to conclude my discussion of Meister Eckhart with some considerations of the problems of mysticism.

And this in some ways, perhaps this helps account for why Meister Eckhart is not read as widely as someone like Thomas Aquinas today. Even though perhaps Thomas Aquinas isn't read widely, those who want to, say, discover the history or tradition of Western religion might be more likely to gravitate to Aquinas than to Eckhart. Eckhart doesn't have quite the following. Part of that, it comes just from the nebulousness, the fuzziness of metaphors. All mystics have the same problem in every religion and in every case. You can't quite figure out what they're talking about.

If you ask them, they'll give you some beautiful poetic metaphor. If you're willing to accept that, okay, then you have a beautiful poetic metaphor. If you're not willing to accept that, they can't tell you anything. Those of us who are intellectually tough-minded, like logic chopping, and who like strictly linear analysis, are going to find this unsuccessful. It is certainly tempting to be uncharitable and go behaviorist about this and say, look, whatever you're talking about, if it's an internal, special psychic experience that no one can utter, stop uttering it to me because I don't understand what you're talking about. That's what I would call a kind of flat-headed, unmetaphorical, unpoetic reading of Meister Eckhart. And I can see how that would be tempting because it is hard to figure out exactly what he's gesturing at. What exactly is the difference between God and the Godhead?

I myself don't know, and I've read this book a lot of times. I have some ideas about what it might be connected to. But if you had asked me literally in a sentence to tell you what the difference is, I can't. I don't think Meister Eckhart can either. I don't know that that is necessarily a problem. It depends on what you expect from religion and what you expect from religious discourse. If what you want to do is to force all of language and all of thinking into some procrustian mold, some preconceived idea of what... I'll tell you the difference in a sentence.

For Meister Eckhart, God is conceptual. The Godhead is experiential. That's a good attempt at it. As meaningful speech, Meister Eckhart and the metaphors he offers us, and the entire tradition of religious mysticism is going to be unacceptable under those circumstances. you're not going to get anything out of it. On the other hand, I might be tempted to say that I have never found any religious writer that was so illuminating and so provocative and interesting is Meister Eckhart.

What I like best about him in some ways, this is sort of an apology for someone that I happen to like. What I like best about him is the fact that he makes me think about things that I would never have thought about myself. And he has such a gift of poetic metaphor that I don't see how anybody can remain immune to the attractions and the beauty of this. The first big breakthrough I made with Meister Eckhart, the first time that I really felt like he had told me something, I tried to explain it to my students back at Princeton, and it fell flat because I didn't have the words. Let me just take Mr. Eckhart's words and see if you understand what he's driving at, see if you see the attraction of this. Meister Eckhart said in one of his sermons that I've never had God speak to me, and I guess that's in some ways kind of reassuring, right, that God never talked to him directly. I mean, prophecies, I mean, let's restrict that to the Old Testament.

I mean, I feel better that someone should believe in God but not have direct intervention. That would make me a little nervous. But he said, although God has never spoken to me, I have occasionally heard God clear his throat, like someone announcing his presence in a room without uttering anything. That is a remarkably deep image. That just knocked me over. I closed the book for the day. I spent all day thinking about God clearing his throat.

And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that that is the best image I have ever heard for everyday people experiencing God somehow in the world. world and insofar as I've ever had any religious understanding it has come very close to that and if if I ever tell you that God talks to me lock me up right because I'm not pretty far out there but if I say that I've had some sort of intuition about the world right sensed some sort of divine presence as though we were being announced but not with words with the clearing of a throat that is a remarkably deep and protean a powerful image and if you get nothing else out of

Meister Eckhart go back and look at those metaphors because they are illuminating in a way that no scholastic logic chopping could ever hope to be. A thousand books of logic are never going to tell you about God clearing his throne. I can't imagine anything that would be, if not more persuasive or convincing, because what are you being persuaded of? I don't know. What are you being convinced of? I don't know. But I do know that it makes me think about divine matters. It makes me think about the various ways in which God might make himself manifest. And as I understand it, that is Master Eckhart's point. if I could ask you to read Meister Eckhart in a charitable state of mind.

In other words, do not do scholastic logic chopping. Do not insist on a positivistic conception of language when you read this because you'll find it worthless. But if you are willing to give to this text, if you are willing to break through ritual and formalism towards some sort of direct apprehension of God, well, I think that's the best you can possibly expect out of something like this text. It is not to everyone's taste because of its metaphorical and poetic and mystical tendencies, but on the other hand, for those of you that find it valuable, I think you will find it one of the most valuable texts in the Western tradition. Now, I'll just close with this observation.

It should not be surprising that before he died, Meister Eckhart was accused of heresy. Not at all surprising because anyone who has direct religious illumination who claims to be able to dispense with ceremonies and rituals and have to be able to dispense, direct apprehension of God's, even God's clearing his throat is quite a remarkable achievement. Well, he's accused of heresy, and he defends himself vigorously. He says, no, I am in fact God's faithful servant that I meant nothing heretical. You just don't understand what it is I've been saying. And that's actually probably the most plausible reading of this. Imagine strict logic-chopping theologians trying to turn this into Orthodox Catholicism. It'll be very

hard to do. But Meister Eckhart defended himself vigorously against the charge of heroism, and he emphasized that, and I'll close with this quote, because it encapsulates, Slate Meister Eckhart's stance very nicely. He said, you should not confine yourself to just one matter of devotion, since God is to be found in no particular way. That is why they do him wrong who take God in just one particular way. They take the way rather than God. So good. And of course, yeah, he was persecuted for heresy.

And yeah, seen as a real problem for talking about this. And from Eckhart's position, he's like, what are you talking about? My whole life is Christian. I am deeply Christian. My vocation is Christian. Christianity, my prayers, my meditation, my life is rooted and drenching with the Christian religion and radical union with the Christian God and you're calling me a heretic. You're calling me a non-Christian or, you know, a blasphemer. But again, people have been burned at the stake throughout the centuries for various reasons, scientific and religious. And that's an example of that, not that Eckhart was

burned at the stake, but you get what I mean. The point about, he kept saying, and I laughed at this. He's like, if I start saying that God talks to me, lock me up, and Meister Eckhart is saying, you know, God's never spoken to me, that is so healthy. Because I always, whenever I hear anybody say, God told me, God spoke to me directly. You see this all the time, especially with, again, like these sort of fever dream evangelical type, who are just totally bought in and all of that. And they think, like, they have a direct communication with God and God talks to them and tells them to hate gays. or start their megachurch or whatever the fuck. It's so clear to me that that is the ego thinking it's God, right?

If somebody like somebody is like saying like under the religious delusion, like God speaks to me. God is talking to me. What are they actually hearing? They're hearing their own internal egoic dialogue and they're thinking that it's God talking to them. They're mistaking their ego for God's voice. That's almost always the case when it comes to people. that are saying stuff like that and being earnest and literal about it. So I can't trust people like that.

You can say that God's made his presence known in my life, that I feel God, that when I pray, it feels like God is hearing my prayer. I'm not talking about that. But the sort of people who are saying that God speaks to me directly, uniquely to me, that's their ego. And dressing up your ego is God, that's a scary ego. That's a pathological ego. So be careful of that.

And finally, just Meister Eckhart's Christian mysticism and Buddhism, we get non-attachment, right? The non-clinging to the self, to desires, to the personality. We get emptiness, emptying of the self, as well as the empty ground of all being, divinity. The lack of an ego attainment, the idea that the ego can understand or unify with God. it's precisely in its absence that anything like that can even happen. Beyond concepts, right? God is a concept. God is conceptual, but the Godhead is experiential. It's divine. It's nameless. It's imageless. It's beyond our capacity to articulate because the moment we are articulating, the moment we're using language, we are putting things into conceptual boxes.

Language is conceptualization. Thinking is conceptualization. Direct, really, realization, you know, of the here and now of the present moment, you have to be radically unified with the present moment with what's actually happening here, not letting your mind carry you into the past or the future to be able to cultivate the possibility of these sorts of direct realizations. And then that ordinary life is practice. And I think that's so fucking important. Earlier I said, like, don't dress up in beads and wear sandals and togas and try to make a personality out of spirituality. Please don't do that.

That is the ego co-opting things. Also, don't think of enlightenment or spirituality as this, although it has mystical, rapturous, static moments, little punctuated moments that one can or cannot have, it doesn't mean anything with regards to their spiritual depth and accomplishment. Real spirituality is experienced and real spiritual wisdom and communication. Compassion is played out in ordinary life. It's not some superpower. You don't float above life, unbothered by it.

It's embodied. It's in the mud and it's in the dirt. In Buddhism, they say, before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and I carried water. Zen Buddhism is always about what's here and now. Stop your fucking thinking and conceptualizing and intellectualizing and debating and arguing. what is fucking happening right here right now always trying to bring you back down into ordinary life right going out into nature gardening getting your hands in the dirt people will often experience spiritual moments or flow experiences if you want to psychologize the term precisely in their

immediate present immersion in what's happening here you know real spirituality is ordinary life and those things cannot be separated. And anything that, any depth that you might have gained through spiritual practices plays itself out in the fucking ordinary life. How you treat the person that makes your food when you go to a restaurant. How you treat your neighbor, your coworker, do you hold the door open for that person? These are all little things that anybody can hold themselves to high ethical standard and do. but spiritual experience caches out in the form of wisdom and compassion.

You understand people, you love people, you help people. You are in service of others. It's not all about you all the fucking time. Your desires, your ones, your own thoughts, to yourself, about yourself. That is psychotic. And it makes us suffer. It makes us suffer to live like that.

I've always said, if you want to have a miserable life, think about yourself obsessively all the time. It is precisely in those moments. moments when we forget about ourselves that we're the most happiest in the middle of making meaningful, connective love with a partner that you're in love with. In the act of sexual engagement, when you're totally lost in it, you have lost yourself. In sport, I'm in the center field, chasing down a ball that got hit over my head, running towards the fence.

I am not thinking about myself in my head. I am in that moment. It has forced me to be in that moment. And there are moments like that when you're deep into playing an instrument and you're really vibing and you forget that you fucking exist and there's just the music and your fingers moving. In a really meaningful work of art, a book or a film where you're so immersed in the narrative, so immersed in the present moment of what's happening in that form of art, you forget that you're there. You're not standing back in your head thinking about your reactions to it.

You're just immersed in it. That's what people call flow state and people seek out the flow state. And it is precisely those moments in which the self fades to the background. And you're immersed in the direct experience of what's happening here and now. So, you know, don't get an overly mystical, overly new age, overly romantic idea about what spirituality is. It's, I always say, it's in the mud. It's in the mud. It's not up there in the stars and the clouds.

It's in the mud. The spiritual practice and the spiritual path is not one of lollipops and rainbows and puppies. it's not slowly becoming a better superior person. It's not slowly becoming just happier and happier and happier and happier. It's going to test you. You have to dig up all your unconscious shit and process it. You have to face your deepest fucking fears to level up as a human being. Why would you be able to skip all of that?

It's absurd to even think that you could. So the spiritual path in some ways is not for the faint of heart. It is beautiful and gorgeous and poetic. It's also sometimes a sludge. Sometimes it's all too ordinary, all too human, all too here and now. And sometimes it's fucking incredibly challenging. The dark night of the soul. Baptism by fire.

The annihilation of self and God. These are not cutesy fucking phrases. These are not something that some hippie-dippy new agey person is really willing to wrestle with or engage with. This is a trial by fire. and it's the the ego that wants to be spiritual that wants to go out and get enlightenment for itself so that it can be an enlightened ego that's delusion

and it's that exact little thing that ego that wants to put on the beads and show everybody else I'm more spiritual than you I'm different I'm cultivated you know I do this and that practice and I wear these are that clothes so you know that I'm like this and I carry my Bible around so everybody knows that I'm the sort of person that cares

that is the that's another ego project are you sick of it yet are you sick of it yet the game the playing the putting on the roles the the stupid fucking parade of it all does it ever get tiring is it ever just like fuck dude where does this thing lead it leads nowhere you know and fine you can live a decent life everybody that leaves a decent life most of them do so with an ego it's definitely better to have a healthy integrated ego right to have to have a have a healthy psychology, a healthy relationship with yourself, that is important. And I actually truly believe that you can't get to these higher levels for the most part, unless there is a cultivation of a healthy ego.

Like a healthy ego is kind of like earlier I was talking about Buddhism, using the raft of Buddhism to cross the river and then leaving it behind. A healthy ego that is honest with itself, that is willing to be vulnerable, that's willing to face its insecurities is essential for the spiritual path, you know, to deal with the unconscious stuff, to have the courage to face your deepest, darkest fears, to be honest with yourself about what you're insecure about, you know, and facing that and accepting that part of you instead of trying to ultimately control and change it. These are all developments of a healthy ego that at the same time are also steps on the spiritual path. So even the duality between self and non-self ultimately gets obliterated and non-duality.

that the cultivation of a healthy self is at the same time sort of a prerequisite in a lot of ways to the development of a post to self. So yeah, it's nuanced. I think it's fascinating. It is human. It is profound. And I think it adds a really important dimension to our lives.

We cannot get this sense of meaning. of purpose of direction, not for the ego, but for something beyond the ego, without this deep spiritual path. And we live in a, we live in a spiritual desert. 21st century capitalist consumerist America is a spiritual desert. It is barren and even, not even desert, because desert have fascinating fauna and flora and snakes and salamanders and cacti. Not even that, just a barren wasteland of self and money. That's what American society is. And everybody's like, why does life feel so fucking meaningless?

Because it's all about ego, desire, domination, getting that for yourself. Now getting that. Now get the bigger house. Now get the bigger truck to show that person that you actually have the money to get the bigger, nicer car, and get the status and get the money and chase the fame and get the recognition. Oh, my fucking God. It never fucking ends.

And people are yearning, are bursting. at the seams for meaning and purpose and to live for something bigger than the self and fucking money. But most people are in that atheist phase. They can't go back. The only way out is through. You can't really go, in most cases, you can't go back and make yourself believe things you've already stopped believing. So there's a point in a lot of atheists or secular or agnostic people's lives where often in existential despair, they'll wish they could have God back. and they can't. And maybe some people try.

I think the whole Trad-Cath movement on the right is like very secularized, Americanized subjects. Trying, I mean, the whole thing is in Traditional, backwards, trying to go back to church. Now,

some people will, you know, be fine in that environment or that will do for them what they wanted it to do. But a lot of people will be frustrated by that. And then when you try that and that fails, the despair cranks up. right um but they but the again this is this is a truth of dialectics historically spiritually psychologically whatever the only way out is through it is reactionary to think you can go back politically and it's

delusional to uh to think you can go back psychologically that consciousness is evolving is unfolding and the only way out is through and going forward and going through is often painful and on a genuine spiritual path you will have moments of deep weeping you will have moments of internal torment you will have moments of complete disorientation not always not even often but sometimes like the spiritual path can be punctuated by mystical experiences of rapture it can also and perhaps more often be punctuated by moments of spiritual despair you know jesus in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights being tormented by Satan. That's a metaphor for an internal spiritual alchemy transformation.

Buddha under the Bodhi tree being tormented by Maya, right, illusion is the ego attempting to reassert itself, the ego going all out, launching the ego nukes, trying everything it can. Same with Jesus, right? Temp them back into desire, to worldly power, to money, to gain for self. and in both instances, in both traditions, the Buddha and Christ, persevered through that period of extreme suffering, and that was a necessary cleansing for them to be able to become the spiritual adepts that they eventually were.

So just disabusing people of those notions, that spirituality ultimately is very ordinary. It's embodied. It cashes out in your day-to-day experiences and your actual life and how it's actually lived here and now. And it's challenging that you have to work through who you are. You have to really face yourself. You have to go through difficult things. Your worst traumas. Your deepest insecurities.

Your most repetitive played out behavioral patterns that you learned in childhood. All those things have to be examined and worked through. And it's not fucking comfortable. So that's what I would submit to people. But ultimately, the worst experiences I've had in my spiritual, path, if you want to call it that. They've been horrific. They've been full of dread and despair and terror and depression.

They all eventually passed. And I look back at them as all utterly necessary, blessed to have gone through them. Thank God I did. Thank God I did. Because when I came out of each period of extreme suffering, I was a deeper, wiser, more compassionate human being. Not to say that I'm a deep, passionate, wise human being in general, or I've reached some amazing level I have.

I'm just a fucking dude from my own. Omaha, Nebraska. But in my own path, in my own way, I've had to overcome much internal stuff, the darkness, the only way out is through. And that has been punctuated and defined by periods of psychological, existential, and spiritual suffering. That in the moment, sometimes I thought I was never going to get out of. I many times thought that my brain was broken, that I was fucked. And I still had to show up with courage, face my deepest fucking fears, my deepest insecurities, and keep trudging forward through the motherfucking fire. And really there's no choice because when you're in that deep,

there is actually no way to go back even if you want it to. You can't. You're in it. The only way out is literally through. So I think talking about that side of things does a lot to disabuse people of overly romantic conceptions of spirituality and hopefully undermine the attempt, which will happen, for the ego. to wrap itself around your spiritual path and turn it into garb that it wears,

that it flatters itself with. I'm a spiritual person. I'm more spiritual than you. I'm wiser, compassionate, deeper than you are. Horrifying, ugly. Don't do it. Don't let it happen. Your eagle will try to do it.

Just watch it, laugh at it. Don't let it actually convince you that you're somehow special. Because the very thing in you that wants to feel special is the thing that ultimately Millie has to go bye-bye. At least for a time. Again, not annihilation forever at all time. The ego comes back, right? Meister Eckhart had to sit down, had to go find pen and paper, had to write these things, had to give sermons, had to try to put it into words, had to defend himself on the jury in the trial, right? He had friends. He joked around. He drank beer, whatever. I don't know if he did that or not. He lived his life, ordinary life. Like, you know, he doesn't,

he doesn't float above his own life. It's, it's not, it's not an escape route. That's the other thing. It's not escape. You can turn it into escapism. You can turn politics into escapeism from your own fucking life. Certainly, drugs and alcohol and pornography and gambling are forms of escapeism from your own life. Spirituality can be that too. But that's the opposite direction you want to go in.

You're not trying to escape your life. You're trying to fucking be in it. You're trying to live it. You're trying to be as intimate with it as possible. And so that's, I think, something to keep in mind. Okay, so I'm going to end this with a meditation. So this is kind of what I'm thinking with the Sanga going forward. Not that it'll always be a philosophy lecture.

It could just be me talking about some of this stuff. But I'm presenting this as the Sanga for this month with the meditation. We've got the theory. We have hours of Brett Yapping, Professor Michael Sugru Yapping. Your understanding is deepened, perhaps, hopefully. Now let's shift into experiencing it. And to experience it is a process slowly, of course, of quieting the mind, observing the mind and letting it quiet itself.

Because it's actually not you quieting the mind. It's you being able to dispassionately observe it over and over and over again where it naturally loses its appeal and its bite. And you just kind of start seeing it for what it is. And over time, especially if you're getting very concentrated in meditation, if you get a very concentrated mind on, let's say, your breath, for example, the easiest inroad. You start getting really into the breath and let's say you go a couple minutes, fully absorbed in the sensations of breathing, which can take some people a long time to get to,

to get to a couple minutes of a really quiet mind. You'll know what we're talking about, but also you'll understand that you're not the one quieting the mind. The mind quiets naturally when conditions are right. and conditions are right when you have a concentrated mind that's able to focus on an object of meditation at first, which is the breath, and increasingly become less and less distracted from the pull, the gravitational pull of inner dialogue. And when it does happen, recognize it sooner and sooner and sooner. Sometimes you'll be often la la land for five minutes talking to yourself in your head before you realize it. Over time, you can get that down to the point where you can see it coming up,

where you can get so deep into meditation over time, and you've expanded your ability to observe so much, that you can start to see the dialogue train before it articulates itself as language in the head rear up. In the body you can feel, and in the mind you can feel it emerging, you know, and you can kind of cut it off or just not engage with it at that point. So you don't even have to go minutes and minutes and minutes. minutes of not realizing you're talking to yourself in your head and then catching it. Over time, you can see it start to emerge.

You can catch it quicker and quicker and quicker until you can even literally see its emergence. And the utter impermanence of all of it, you know, yeah, that's that is possible. But again, you have to make it part of your life. It's not a hobby. It's not something you do on the side. If you want the benefits of it, if you want to engage in this natural unfolding process over time. Easier said than done, especially in today's distracted, grind it out. You know, you got to pay your bills. You got to fucking get through the goddamn day environment. It's very hard to sit quietly

for any period of time and to do so consistently day in, day out, week and week out, month in, month out. But that's really what it requires. And so it's like, it's a fucking commitment in a serious, serious way. It has to become one of the most important things about your life. and if it is and it's done with integrity and honesty and vulnerability and courage and consistency, it will radically transform you. And I'm still on the path. I'm falling off the path all the time, oscillating, going back and forth, having moments of despair, having moments of, you know, a static rapture.

But most of my moments are just daily grinding out of my life, talking to myself in my head as I walk from my car into work and, you know, all those things. laying down in bed at the end of the night and letting my mind just start running the hamster wheel. That's me too. I'm not in any way above and beyond that. But still, I try. And I do everything I can to get back on the train when I fall off. And I'm trying right now to get back on the damn train.

My life is overwhelmingly busy. Every second of every day is accounted for. And I find it really hard, as I've talked about before, like on our Susan Green episode to wake up and spend the 20, 30 minutes in the morning center myself and when I don't do that, the chances of me punctuating my daily life with breath and insight and quietness, those are harder and harder to remember to do or to do it all. It takes a concentrated mind. So, okay, that's enough for today. I'm going to shift us over to a meditation. That's a lot of talking. Your mind's probably reeling. My mind is reeling.

And now we are going to take a deep breath, get out of the mind, get into the body, feel the sensations of breathing, feel what it feels like for the full inhale, that little pause at the top of the inhale, that inner, utter inner silence that comes and that little pause between inhale and exhale, another pause. Feel your chest and your stomach expand and contract. Feel the sensation of air going into your lungs, how the air is cold on the inhale on your lips, warm on the exhale. Warm on the exhale on your lips, get into the sensations of breathing. And yeah, so here is a guided meditation to take you deeper.

And this meditation will explore a natural receptivity being present and open to all phenomena. Beginning by finding a posture that's comfortable where you can sit relaxed, upright, and at ease. and turning the gaze of attention inwards, lowering or closing the eyes, and attuning to simply what's being known. What are you naturally, mindfully present to in this moment? In any moment, there's a variety of phenomena that appear and disappear, sounds, sensations, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, images, abiding in open awareness, simply present to whatever appears and disappears in this field of

awareness and tuning to the field of sensation of body, noticing how there's a dance of sensation, ebbing, pulsing, vibration, contact, warmth, coolness, aware of discrete sensations, attention from the thinking about, to feeling, sensing directly, immediacy of sensation. In the same way, you may be aware of the sensations that arise

as the body breathes itself, or sensations simply being known in awareness, nothing to do nor undo. Sensations arising and passing And in the same way, sounds can be known, peering and disappearing, simply abiding and open receptive awareness, present to sensations, coming and going, to sounds, appearing and disappearing. The symphony of sounds, discrete sounds,

only to think about or visualize the source of sounds. simply present to the sound of the vibration itself in the same way as sounds appear so two other phenomena arise like thoughts images flickering through the mind as you abide in awareness can simply be present

to thoughts, images, ideas, views passing through the mind like cloud need to become involved, no need to reject, the abiding and knowing awareness, as thoughts, images come and go, and sounds, the sensations have been flown. As you abide in open awareness,

at times present to the experience of emotion, feeling, moods, passing through like well, like storms, like mist, emotions and how they're felt in the body, how they influence the mind and perception. Awareness spacious like the sky can make room for any weather, any emotion or mood that arises and stays for a while, it passes or changes. And at times are the phenomena, they call the attention.

experience of smell, of touch, the ambience, and the quality of energy in your body, in the space that you're sitting, as you abide in open awareness, simply allowing attention to be present with whatever experience is predominant, sensing how experiences like a waterfall, flow of sensation, of sound,

perception, thought, feeling, smell, touch. In times you might be aware of visual phenomena, color, light, patterns, movement. Just another experience to be known in awareness. And so in these remaining minutes of the practice, abiding in open awareness, present to the ebb and flow of all phenomena. and you may choose to continue abiding in open awareness, present to moment to moment experience,

attuned to whatever phenomena is most predominant, most calls the attention, and you're ready to bring this practice to a close, noticing the influence of sitting in this way, and as you gently open your eyes to end the practice, continuing with this quality of open awareness, receptive, present, attuned to whatever's arising in the field of your experience.