Revelling in Nothingness
I discover my freedom and the is-ness of things when I refuse to subject them to my whims, desires or needs. They are not there for me. They are just there, what they are.
When I “behold” them, I recognize them as nothing for me and nothing in themselves. Then they can become transparent, revealing some facet of the infinite creativity which loans them their transient, mutable, fragile and beautiful being-there. I, too, am such a creature….
Meister Eckhart preached the nothingness of the self, but a special kind of nothingness. Nothingness in myself, for I do not give myself being, but only receive it. Like the lilies of the field, I come and go, transient, limited and fragile.
It is not by denying but by accepting, even reveling in my nothingness that I extol the total being-there of God, who loans me existence. I am nothing for myself nor in truth for anyone else. No person is a thing.
When I recognize my essential no-thingness, when I escape the delusion of selfness, then I, too, can become transparent, clear, allowing the radiance of the divine splendor to shine within and through me.
More than that, by becoming transparent, I rid myself of my self, that is, the film of self-consciousness that so readily supervenes to spoil all my joys by reflexive self-preoccupation.
It is thus that our radical no-thingness, the pure and receptive unself-consciousness of “the mirror of the soul” is the truest and most creative image of God’s nothingness.
And that is why Eckhart tells us that when the powers of the soul have been stripped naked, when nothing can further prevent the shining-through of the eternal splendor, then God’s presence can — even, he goes so far to say, must — be revealed in loving, conscious immediacy, for it is God’s eternal will and nature to be so “born” in the human heart.
From: Eckhart’s Way, by Richard Woods. page 106
