The Eye Through Which God Sees
The Teaching
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
If I am to know God directly, I must become completely God, and God must become completely I, so that I and God are one.
God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground. Here I live from what is my own, as God lives from what is his own.
The very spark of the soul — Seelengrund — which God created for himself, akin to himself, is the meeting point where God and soul are one.
Commentary
Eckhart is the most daring voice in the Western mystical tradition, daring enough that the Church investigated him for heresy. What he says here is functionally identical to Advaita Vedanta: the distinction between individual consciousness and divine consciousness dissolves in the depths of contemplation.
The Seelengrund, the ground of the soul, is identical to the Atman as Brahman in the Upanishads, to the Buddha-nature in Zen, to Plotinus’s union of the soul with the One. Eckhart arrived here through the Christian contemplative path, not Eastern borrowing, which is precisely what confirms the perennial hypothesis.
Huxley cited Eckhart extensively in The Perennial Philosophy as proof of the universal mystical experience. He is the great bridge figure: fully Christian in vocabulary, fully Advaitic in realization.
Themes
Connections 28
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.
Travelled
Sufism reached Christianity by 1283 CE. Ramon Llull wrote his Book of the Lover and the Beloved ‘in the manner of the Sufis’ (c. 1283).
Unsure
The Gospel of Thomas was lost from late antiquity until 1945, though some of its sayings also survive in the canonical Gospels.
Travelled
Christianity reached Gnosticism by 100 CE. The same milieu. Irenaeus wrote against the Gnostics (c. 180); the Gospel of Thomas, whose Gnostic character is itself disputed, shares sayings with the Gospels.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Christian mysticism.
Travelled
Carl Jung read and drew on Christian mysticism.
Travelled
John Vervaeke read and drew on Christian mysticism.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Travelled
Hermeticism reached Christianity by 200 CE. Tertullian named ‘Mercurius Trismegistus’ (c. 200–210), Lactantius (c. 300) quoted Hermes Trismegistus as a pagan prophet. Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum for the Medici (1463).
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Travelled
Neoplatonism reached Christianity by 355 CE. Marius Victorinus used Plotinus (c. 355–362), Augustine read ‘the books of the Platonists’ (c. 386; Confessions VII), and Dionysius (c. 500) built on Proclus.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Arose apart
No known line from Christian mysticism to this scientific work.
Unsure
No documented reading of Christian mysticism by Krishnamurti.
Travelled
Judaism reached Christianity by 30 CE. Christianity began as a movement within Judaism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Christian mysticism.