An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3: part 3

Icon by Chantal Heinigg

An Esoteric Commentary on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 3: part 3

Now before this is begun by the mind and completed by God, the mind has a prevision of it, a potential knowledge that it can come to be thus. This is the meaning of 'potential intellect,' though often it is neglected and never comes to fruition. But when the mind strives with all its might and with real sincerity, then God takes charge of the mind and its work, and then the mind sees and experiences God. 

Meister Eckhart calls our attention here to an extraordinary possibility: that the mind can actually see and experience God. 

The role of the potential intellect, the reconciling force of intellect, is to stand between the mind of God and the mind of Being, the higher and the lower, and see them both. In this position, it knows its place and can sense the potential available to it. It is, in Gurdjieff’s words, “conscious.” Here we are vouchsafed an interesting insight into the question of Gurdjieff’s “conscious mentation” and the role of awareness itself in the quest for a spiritual enlivening. The action of seeing, which is the modern term more often used in place of Gurdjieff’s “self remembering” — although there are nuanced differences between the two, to be sure — rests within the potential intellect. It is a precursor to the possibility; yet through its own effort — “when the mind strives with all its might and with real sincerity” —then by the very nature of its essence, God the Father is called to take over.

Yet this striving with might and sincerity is a striving not to do or even a striving to be. Both of these things are the commonplace impressions we have of why we live and what ought to take place; yet each is in its turn misguided. Doing belongs to the outer world, Being belongs to the inner one; yet seeing stands between them and senses the potential for something greater (the Father) than both the inner and the outer, which you may recall was an introductory premise in the sermon.

But since this enduring and vision of God places an intolerable strain on the mind while in this body, God accordingly withdraws at times from the mind, and that is why he said, "A little while you shall see me, and again a little while you shall not see me" (cf. John 16: 16) . When our Lord took his three disciples with him up the mountain and had shown them privately the illumination of his body which he had through union with the Godhead, and which we too shall have at the resurrection of the body, St. Peter at once, on seeing it, wished to remain there always. Indeed, when a man finds the good he cannot easily part from it insofar as it is good. Where this is recognized by knowledge, love must follow, and memory, and all the (powers of) the soul. And our Lord, well knowing this, is constrained to hide at times, for the soul is a simple form of the body, and wherever she turns, she turns as a whole. 

Meister Eckhart reminds us here that we have and at best limited tolerance for contact with the higher. We can only catch glimpses of it; and its help is again at best intermittent. The spiritual hungers of the ego, once introduced to such a glimpse, inevitably turn towards obsessive wishes for the repetition of it; and this passage reminds us of the same through the remark that Saint Peter “wished to remain there always.” There are many aspects of spiritual Being that can become durable, but visions of The Perfection are not one of them; as Gurdjieff indicated in his seminal chapter on progress towards enlightenment, “The Holy Planet Purgatory,” God only visits the planet intermittently to grant glimpses of his grandeur to the denizens, who struggle in anguish to unburden themselves of sin. The concept is nearly identical to this passage from John and Meister Eckhart’s observations on it.

Luckily for us, Eckhart takes us into territory a bit more tactile than Gurdjieff’s extraordinarily beautiful but rather technical description of Purgatory and its machinations. He does so without mincing words: “when a man finds the good he cannot easily part from it insofar as it is good. Where this is recognized by knowledge, love must follow, and memory, and all the (powers of) the soul.”

Unlike the presumed relativism of Gurdjieff’s attitude towards what is “good” and what is “bad”, Meister Eckhart presumes for us here an absolute good. Not the good of the world — we have left that well behind us by now — but the good of God, which is eternal, permanent, and not subject to corruption by mankind, either by his inner or his outer qualities. It exists, in fact, exactly as God does, outside of both the inner and outer qualities of man, and in this it is what Gurdjieff would have called objective. 

When the objective good is “recognized by knowledge, love must follow, and memory, and all the (powers of) the soul.”

This is an extraordinary and magnificent assertion, and I refer to it as tactile because it brings us directly up against the question of love, which is the first thing that follows with the recognition. Not only that, Meister Eckhart describes here an orderly set of results that ensue from this contact: love, memory, and all the powers of the soul. That is to say, sacred feeling (love) directly influences the intellectual mind (memory) and the body (the powers of the soul, that is, incarnated Being) In this way, God’s influence flows through a man or woman directly into the world— and indeed, this becomes a major subject in the latter part of the sermon, which provides great assurance that this particular interpretation is correct.

Were she always conscious of the good which is God, immediately and without interruption, she would never be able to leave it to influence the body. Thus it befell Paul : if he had remained for a hundred years at the spot where he came to know the Good, he would never have returned to the body; he would have forgotten it completely. 

Meister Eckhart introduces us here to an important concept of separation. Were we completely united with God (”always conscious of the good which is God”) it would quite literally subvert creation: the soul (she) would “never be able to leave it to influence the body.” Hence the covenant between God and creation as it forever stands: the two will always remain separate.

And so, because that is not conducive to this life and alien to it, God in His mercy veils it when He will and reveals it when He will and when He knows, like a trustworthy physician, that it is most useful and helpful for you. This withdrawal is not yours, but His who does the work: He can do it or not as He will, well knowing when it avails you best. It is in His hands to reveal or conceal, according as He knows you can endure it. 

We are introduced here to a concept which was central to Ibn Arabi’s concept of God as existing behind a veil. God exists “behind the veil” as a mystery because direct contact with him would destroy creation itself. Gurdjieff, of course, poses a similar idea when he explains that the Beings on the holy planet Purgatory can never actually come into direct contact with God. 

God veils himself in mercy, lest we be destroyed. Our vision of Him is intermittent and medicinal; only dispensed in order to help us as we need help. Much could be said of this particular point in relationship to religious ecstasy.

The quotations from Meister Eckhart's Sermons 3 are reprinted with the kind permission of The Sangha Trust, and are taken from The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.