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Collection of quotes from Meister Eckhart I have said that there is one agent alone in the soul that is free. ... it is neither this nor that. ... It is free of all names and unconscious of any kind of forms. It is at once pure and free, as God himself is, and like him is perfect unity and uniformity... this little castle in the soul is exalted so high ... with such simplicity and uniformity, ... God himself cannot even peek into it for a moment--or steal into it--in so far as he has particular selfhood and the properties of a person. ... for the onefold One has neither a manner or properties. And therefore if God is to steal into it [the little castle in the soul] it [the adventure] will cost him all his divine names and personlike properties; He would have to forego all these if he is to gain entrance. Except as he is the onefold One, without ways or properties ... something that is neither this nor that ... only as he is One and onefold that he may enter into that One which I have called the Little Castle of the soul. The heavenly Father utters a Word and utters it eternally; ... That Word lies hidden in the soul, so that man neither knows nor hears it ... To hear it, all voices and sounds must die away and there must be pure quiet--perfect stillness. Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself. Go to the depths of the soul, the secret place of the Most High, to the roots, to the heights; for all that God can do is focused there. "The central silence is there, where no creature may enter, nor any idea, and there the soul neither thinks nor acts, nor entertains any idea, either of itself or of anything else." "In that core is the central silence, the pure peace, and abode of the heavenly birth, the place for this event: this utterance of God's word. "A man has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an ox's or a bear's, so thick and hard, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. And therefore, when a man accommodates himself barely to God, with love, he is unformed, then informed, and then transformed in the divine uniformity wherein he is one with God. . . . You must give up yourself, altogether give up self, and then you have really given up." --Source Unknown Back to Christian Masters |