The Seer

by Richard Rohr, OFM

“Although Eckhart Tolle is arousing great interest today, many think he is a novelty, New Age, or even non-religious. The process — and that is what it is — that he is teaching, can be traced through the Greek and Latin traditions of contemplation, the apophatic tradition in particular, and the long history of what was sometimes called “The Sacrament of the Present Moment” (Brother Lawrence, OCD, Francisco de Osuna, OFM, Jean Pierre de Caussade, S.J.).

Eckhart Tolle is teaching a form of natural mysticism or contemplative practice. He is NOT asking you to believe anythin. He is asking you to TRY something! You will know if it is true, if you try it, and you will not know if it is true or false, if you don’t try it. No point in arguing it theoretically or in the abstract.

For Tolle, Being, Consciousness, God, Reality are all the same thing, which is not all bad, when you come to think of it. Of course, his very point is that you cannot think of it at all, you can only realize it. I would not call him pantheistic (all things are God) as much as panentheistic (God is IN all things).

I must join with Paul who in preaching to the secular Athenians, said “God is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and have our very being.” (Acts 17:28). That is an excellent foundation for trusting Tolle’s natural mysticism. We are also preaching to a largely secular world, and must find a language that they can understand and draw from, as Paul did, and not insist that they learn our vocabulary before we can even talk to them or hear them. “How else can we ever be ?all things to all people.” (1 Corinthians 9:22) or dare to think that we can “preach the Gospel to all creation.” (Mark 16:16):”

~ To read Rohr’s complete article, >>>Click Here,

You can also hear Eckhart Tolle in a rare, recent interview on Namaste Radio. Some of the topics Eckhart discusses include: the current state of the world, living in the Now, how to raise present-minded children, sex and the pain body, what it takes to be a great leader and more. To listen, just >>>Click Here.

When the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart was first hailed into court by the heresy-hunters of the Archbishop of Cologne in 1326, one of his sayings they objected to was this famous and mysterious remark: p>

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love.” (From German Sermon No. 12.)

Eckhart replied by citing a famous passage from Saint Augustine about God’s intimacy with us. Not that it did much good, although the objectionable passage did not make it into the final list denounced by the pope’s bull of condemnation two years later and published a year after Eckhart’s death. For in fact, what he was teaching was not heretical, but ancient Christian spirituality.

But the Cologne censors also objected to a similar statement in Sermon 10, which makes the point even clearer if less dramatically:

“The nearness of God and the soul makes no distinction in truth. The same knowing in which God knows Himself is the knowing of every detached spirit, and no other. The soul takes her being immediately from God. Therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself,’ and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.”

Here again, Eckhart was citing Saint Augustine on the divine intimacy. In another sermon (German Sermon 5b), he put it this way: “God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.”

What Eckhart is getting at in all these koan-like passages is that our union with God is so intimate that it is impossible to distinguish the Lover from the Beloved. (The implication must have upset the inquisitors deeply: then why bother to?) For Eckhart, such total union with

God is both the original source of our existence and the final point of our destiny. Still, between our original unity in the eternal womb of the Godhead and our ultimate union with God , the goal of all our questing, the difference made by awareness is all-important.

In German Sermon 68, Eckhart said, beginning again with his favorite passage from Augustine,

” God is closer to me than I am to myself: my being depends on God’s being near me and present to me. So God is also in a stone or a log of wood, only they do not know it. If the wood knew God and realized how close God is to it as the highest angel does, it would be as blissful as the highest angel. And so a human is more blessed than a stone or a piece of wood because she or he is aware of God and knows how close God is. And I am the more blessed, the more I realize this, and I am the less blessed, the less I know this. I am not blessed because God is in me and is near me and because I possess Him, but because I am aware of how close God is to me, and that I know God .”

Eventually, however, Eckhart insists that we must go beyond even this awareness. As long as we are aware of the difference between God and our own selves, between the “I” and the “Thou,” we are not truly one. So Eckhart could say in all sincerity, as he did in Sermon 52, “I pray God to rid me of God.”

Eckhart never confuses God and creatures. But he denies that union with God ultimately admits of any experienced duality of Lover and Beloved.

It is like the ecstasy of lovers gazing into each others’ eyes, oblivious of anything except their love. True intercourse means forgetting any distinction between “your” joy and “my” joy, or love, or being, or presence, or anything else. Such awareness expands even beyond any awareness of “our” into an unimaginable and ineffable dimension of one-ness, what in Hindu teaching is called Sat-chit-ananda – “being-awareness-bliss.”

No wonder that Hindus think of Eckhart as a Hindu, Buddhists think of him as a Buddhist, and Sufis regard him as one of their own. He speaks the mystical language of the world’s greatest lovers, those who really KNOW .

~ Richard Woods , O.P. is a leading authority on Meister Eckhart. He is author of many books including Eckhart’s Way , a study of the life and enlightened understanding of the 14th century German mystic.

“Jesus … was what he was because he knew of himself that: “I and the Father are one,” and not — obviously — because he had accepted Jesus as his Saviour. But, from the beginning, institutional Christianity has hardly contemplated the possibitity that the consciousness of Jesus might be the consciousness of the Christian, that the whole point of the Gospel is that everyone may experience union with God in the same way and to the same degree as Jesus himself. On the contrary, one who says, with Eckhart, that “the eye with which I see God is.the same eye with which God sees me” is condemned as a heretic. … To see the light, it is only necessary to stop dreaming and open the eyes.”

~ From: Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, by Alan Watts

The Journey is but letting go,
Arriving at the One we know
We are, the One we’ve always been,
The One I AM, the never seen,
The Light.

Customer to optician …

“At first I was a humanist agnostic, then I saw the light!

I became an earnest seeker after truth, then I saw the light!

I became a theist, then I saw that Jesus was the light and became a Christian.

At first I went to the Anglican church, but soon I saw the light and brecame a Baptist.

Then I saw the light, got baptized in the Spirit and became a Pentecostal.

Then I really saw the light and became a charismatic Catholic.

Then I really, really saw the light and became an apophatic contemplative.

And now, at last, I see the true light shining directly from God’s throne in heaven and I’ve decided to become a Cistercian monk!!!

Please … I’d like to buy a pair of your strongest wrap-around sun-glasses.”

~ Cartoon