Dialogue 3: Eckhart’s Path of Detachment

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SPEAKER_2 (0:38)

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James Finley (0:46)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:49)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:51)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (1:01)

Welcome, everyone, to Season 7 of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to the German mystic, Meister Eckhart.

And I'm here with Jim, and we're going to dialogue about Jim's session three talk. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (1:17)

Yes, I was glad to rejoin you for Eckhart Chat.

Kirsten Oates (1:23)

What a rich session. This one was session three. There was just a lot in there to digest. I really enjoyed it. And I think I could listen to it over and over again to really capture everything and digest everything that you offered.

So I hope today we can explore a few of the concepts. And again, if people wanna send in their own questions, we do a question and response with listener questions at the end of the season. So I'm sure there'll be some additional questions that will be helpful to everyone coming in for that. So to get started, Jim, you said towards the end of the session that Eckhart is not teaching a method.

He is instead inviting us to be more consciously aware of choices we can make throughout the day. So would you say this is a way of life we're trying to adopt?

James Finley (2:18)

Yes, let's say for Eckhart, the point of departure is the generosity of God. So the glasenite, the generosity of God, is that the abyss-like depths of God, the ground, is by the generosity of God, given to us, in our nothingness without God.

So God's ground is my ground, my ground is God's. So there's a communion already given, like an infinite self-donating generosity. Then he says that the powers of the soul, the things as we go through the day, today we would say our faculties or our personality, our experience of ego-consciousness in our language. He would say maybe the interiority of our ego, or the interiority of our faculty, that our faculties that are knowing self and all that it knows, are remembering self, all that it remembers, are loving self and all that it loves, is exiled from the ground.

So that which we attain, we attain through our powers, through our knowing, our loving, our remembering, our senses, but not the ground.

And because we're exiled from the ground, we're subject to this notion that we're real all by ourself, without God, and that everything around us is real all by itself.

And because we think that there's nothing to us, but what we experience ourselves to be getting to another day, from life to death, we cling, possessiveness of heart, to understanding, to knowing, to having, to loving. And that clinging, it was really clinging to an illusion, namely the illusion of a self being real without God, because God is being poured out as the very reality of ourselves in our nothingness without God. And that clinging, then, is the hindrance that keeps pervading our discontent. So the next level for Eckhart, I think, is our faith. For in our faith, God accesses our powers.

So God accesses our understanding. So when we hear in the scriptures that God loves us, through the power of the Spirit that dwells in our hearts, we're given to a certain interior knowledge that God does love us. And in that sense, then, our understanding is transformed in knowing that we're infinitely understood.

Likewise, in our memory, through faith, is to know that God will never forget us, ever, ever, ever forget us. We're eternal. And God, this moment is eternal in God. Everything is forever in God. That we'll never be forgotten. And also, in love, is this infinite love so infinitely in love with us that it has given us the very abyss-like depth of itself as our own depth. And this faith we might call similarity. So we move from dissimilarity, possession of the heart, like the image looking in the mirror, and we think that we're real without God, to the similarity through faith, discipleship, devotional sincerity. And as that ripens over time, we get to a place where we come to the edge of ourself. We're really the hidden center of ourself. And he says, they're flash forth before my soul. If only I could attain it, I would possess all truth. It comes by stealth to steal the soul away from itself. And what you're really glimpsing is the ground. And having glimpsed the ground, you realize it's your homeland. And then you seek to go there, like longing for the ground. But how do I do that? And that's the path of Meister Eckhart. So he gives some practical strategies of, as we go through the day, that we can practice finding our way to the ground day by day consciousness by being sensitive to certain tendencies in our heart. And that's kind of the setup, I think, for Eckhart's path.