The Pathless Path

The Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart was accused of blasphemy for phrases like the poem's first stanza below, for the church did not understand what he was saying. The first stanza is the ultimate prayer. He calls on God for the last remaining obstacle to live as God to be removed. Those who understand this can see for what he was praying. To live in complete oneness as God. To let go completely of any label or concept of God in his mind to be God directly. (God is the same as consciousness/awareness etc.). This statement was deemed blasphemy to those who do not understand the essential non-dual nature of consciousness. However, it is the ultimate prayer of non-duality. He lived in the 13th century, which, as an aside, is interesting as other important non-dualistic mystics in the East lived simultaneously. Here Meister Ekhart is praying for the dissolution of all objective conceptualisation, the last vestiges of separation, to be the ultimate subjective self (that he referred to as God). We don't become the essential nature of our being, for that would imply a path or journey where there is none in reality.

As Rupert Spira says, one of the most challenging aspects for those devoting themselves to oneness is to recognise that they are maintaining the great separation by maintaining their objects of devotion, including their teachers. In the final analysis, every object of experience must be dropped. So there is no subject and no object. As Rumi said, "In the existence of your love, I become non-existent". As TS Eliot says. "I said to my soul, be still and want without hope. For hope would be the hope of the wrong thing". In the words of the Sufis, the lover does not die to unite with God; the love dies in God. In all these insights, it is the direct being of God/awareness / and consciousness that is being described.

A Prayer by Meister Eckhart

I pray to God to rid me of God,

If I myself were not, God would not be either.

If I were not, God would not be God.

God is within, we are without.

The eye through which I see God & the eye through which God sees me is the same eye.

He is He because He is not He. This cannot be understood by the outer man,

Only the inner man.

Find the one desire behind all desires.

God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk.

Through nothing, I become what I am.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.