언어를 넘어선 만남: 2019년의 신성화로 에크하르트를 경험하다
Brief Explanation of Meister Eckhart’s ShinsungHwa:
Vast spiritual energy radiates outward from Meister Eckhart’s spiritual core and head, expanding in powerful waves. This energy became unmistakably palpable during the actual creation of the ShinsungHwa. The red coloring that envelops his entire form represents the complete saturation of spiritual energy throughout his being. As the ShinsungHwa process unfolded, I found myself spontaneously drawing the energy captured on paper into my own chest and head—an automatic response that occurred without conscious direction.
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The Medieval Mystic Who Dared to Look God in the Eye
In 14th-century Germany, while most people received their spiritual guidance from priests who spoke only Latin, a Dominican monk named Meister Eckhart was sharing radical ideas in plain German. He taught ordinary people that they could find God not in some distant heaven, but within their own souls.
What concerned Church authorities about Eckhart wasn’t just his teachings—it was his approach. Rather than keeping divine mysteries confined to scholarly Latin, he made them accessible through the everyday language people understood.
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
_Meister Eckhart
A Rebel in Robes
Born around 1260 near Gotha in what’s now central Germany, Eckhart von Hochheim lived during one of the most turbulent periods in Church history. The papacy had moved to Avignon, religious orders were fighting each other for influence, and tensions ran high between the Dominicans (Eckhart’s crew) and the Franciscans.
But Eckhart wasn’t your typical medieval monk. This guy traveled to Paris multiple times, earned his Master of Theology degree, and could hold his own in academic debates with the best scholars of his day. Yet what truly set him apart was his gift for translating complex theological concepts into ideas that ordinary German-speaking folks could grasp.
His popularity soared as he preached throughout the Rhine valley, especially to contemplative nuns who hung on his every word. But with fame came scrutiny, and the Church hierarchy began to worry about this charismatic preacher who encouraged people to think for themselves about God.
“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.”
_Meister Eckhart
The Eye That Sees God
Eckhart’s most famous quote captures the heart of his revolutionary teaching: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me”. What he meant was that there’s no real separation between the human soul and the divine—when we truly see God, we’re actually recognizing the divine spark that already exists within us.
This wasn’t just poetic language; Eckhart believed that at the deepest level of our being, we share the same essence as God himself. He called this deepest reality the “Gottheit” or “Godhead”—a kind of divine ground that exists beyond all the names, images, and concepts we usually associate with God.
To reach this mystical union, Eckhart taught that people needed to practice radical “detachment”—letting go of everything they thought they knew about God, about themselves, and about the world. Only by becoming completely empty could the soul make room for the divine to reveal itself.
“Wishing not to have so much as a speck of shame toward heaven until the day I die.”
_Meister Eckhart
Four Steps to the Divine
Eckhart outlined a four-stage journey that the soul takes toward union with God. First comes “dissimilarity,” where we recognize that compared to God’s infinite being, everything else (including ourselves) is essentially nothing. This might sound depressing, but Eckhart saw it as liberating—once you realize that things in themselves are empty, you can appreciate how they’re actually filled with God’s presence.
The second stage, “similarity,” happens when the detached soul begins to recognize itself as an image of God. The third stage, “identity,” involves a mystical experience where God’s actions and the soul’s experiences become one. But Eckhart didn’t stop there.
The fourth and most radical stage he called “breakthrough”—a point where the soul moves beyond even God as we normally think of him, into the pure “Godhead” that’s the source of everything. At this ultimate level, Eckhart daringly claimed, “If I were not, God would not be God”.
“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.”
_Meister Eckhart
Trouble with the Church
Naturally, this kind of talk made Church authorities nervous. In an era when questioning religious doctrine could get you burned at the stake, Eckhart’s teachings about finding God within yourself and transcending traditional concepts of the divine sounded dangerously close to heresy.
The Franciscans, already rivals of Eckhart’s Dominican order, began building a case against him. They compiled lists of supposedly heretical statements from his sermons and writings, particularly targeting his “Book of Divine Consolation”. In his sixties, Eckhart found himself hauled before church courts, first in Cologne and eventually before the Pope himself in Avignon.
Eckhart defended himself vigorously, famously declaring, “I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!”. He insisted that his teachings came from direct mystical experience, saying, “What I have taught is the naked truth”.
“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
_Meister Eckhart
The Timeless Message
Eckhart seems to have died before his trial concluded, sometime around 1327 or 1328. In March 1329, Pope John XXII issued a papal bull condemning 28 propositions extracted from Eckhart’s works, though it noted that Eckhart had retracted the errors before his death.
But condemnation couldn’t kill his ideas. Despite the Church’s attempts to suppress his teachings, Eckhart’s influence spread through his disciples like Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso. His emphasis on direct spiritual experience, inner transformation, and the divine spark within every soul would echo through centuries of Christian mysticism.
Today, scholars find fascinating parallels between Eckhart’s teachings and Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism’s emphasis on emptiness and non-attachment. Modern spiritual seekers, regardless of their religious background, continue to find wisdom in his paradoxical teachings about losing yourself to find God.
What makes Meister Eckhart’s message so enduring? Perhaps it’s his insistence that the most profound spiritual truths aren’t locked away in institutions or ancient texts, but can be discovered through direct personal experience. In an age of religious division and spiritual seeking, his core insight remains as radical as ever: the eye that sees God and the eye that God sees with are ultimately the same eye.
Seven centuries later, that’s still a pretty revolutionary idea.
“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”
_Meister Eckhart
