Emma Jung – Reflections on a Passage by Meister Eckhart 1922
Reflections on a Passage by Meister Eckhart 1922
In one of Meister Eckhart’s so-called “Talks of Instruction” I read the following passage:
You should know that the pure will cannot lose God.
It is true that the sensibility of one’s temperament sometimes misses him and often succumbs to the belief that God has gone away.
What, then, should you do? The very same as you would do if you were experiencing the utmost consolation: learn to do the same when you are suffering most, and behave as you did then.
There is no better counsel for finding God than to leave him. There is no better counsel for finding God than to “leave God.”
What does that mean? How can that be? When the very feeling of having lost God is what goads us on most to seek him?
How far from self-evident this advice sounds.
The state in which we feel abandoned by God, or that we have lost him, is a terrible thing.
A deep night surrounds us—life and all that otherwise had meaning and value for us seems poor and senseless.
All strength is gone from us—we are all weakness, all emptiness, without any comfort.
And not only that: there is also fear, for in this weakness and helplessness of ours, are we not exposed to all the dark forces?
Have not all the devils and demons been waiting for just this moment, to burst in upon our emptiness and make us their playground?
With our soul in such distress, it is only natural that we want to find what we have lost at all costs, that we set out to seek God, whom we miss so painfully at all depths, on all heights, in the foggy past, in the distant future, on all the paths we can think of, and by any means.
With weeping and prayer, with repentance and penance and good resolutions, in any manner possible, we want to compel him to appear.
And isn’t it necessary to try everything? Is not our fear more than justified? Is not everything in peril in times like these?
And then we are told not to be bothered by it: I am to act as if I were “in the greatest comfort”—precisely what seems to me the least enlightening, the least promising, and the most difficult thing of all for me.
And why should I leave God? Why shouldn’t I seek Him? Here I find only one answer:
I really do not know what God is. Suddenly it is clear to me that I do not know God at all; how, then, am I supposed to search for him; how am I supposed to find him? Or is it not like this?
If my feeling tells me that God is far away, is it necessarily so? Does my feeling know what or where God is?
The thought that feeling can give me no certainty about this, that it could even lead me astray, dismays me. Upon what, then, should I depend? I have already seen that what I thought about God are simply my own—or someone else’s—thoughts.
I had to learn that what I sensed as God turned out to be the devil. I found the image offered to me to be only one of a thousand images by which we believe we know God. And now even feeling, that seemed to provide me with the greatest and most immediate certitude, shall that also fail?
Everything, then, that I am used to relying upon as my compass, must now be called into question, and the only certainty I am left with is the insight that I cannot know God. Yes, for my powers can only serve me in this world for which they were created; they are no use to me in another.
Therefore, no advice on how to find God will perhaps be as good as the advice to leave God.
For when I want to seek him, I seek either my idea of him or my feeling, the image that I created of him, or my sense of what I called God. But all this is not God; all this is, at bottom, just me again.
So, instead of God, I always find only myself, and—of this I am certain—God is definitely not me.
Or has it not everywhere and at all times been the case that for humans, the unknown was always the most divine aspect of their gods?
Did not the gods’ vitality, their divinity, steadily diminish in equal measure to the definite and clear form people gave them, in the belief that their essence could be understood? Some powers were, of course, left to us, powers that we were even able to put to use; but where is the Divine?
The might of the Christian God is also on the wane, and the affliction of our time is that it is “missing God.” Knowledge has killed faith; for faith lives only where there is no knowledge, where there can be none.
But God can never be attained through knowledge; his essence is mystery. But if I am convinced of this, then I give up seeking God; I “leave” him.
But suddenly I also see that it is not at all a question of my finding God, but rather of my being found; and I can only be found when I am standing in place—each of us in our own place.
That is why Meister Eckhart says, (Do) exactly the same as you would do if you were in the greatest comfort.
Learn not to vary in the depths of woe but to behave in every way the same. And this is not because, through patient suffering, I shall secure a place for myself in heaven, or—according to the Indian view—escape more quickly from the cycle of death and rebirth. Rather it is because I do not know if this, now, here—perhaps precisely this strange, frightening thing is God.
And because I must be aware that God is seeking me, at this hour, here and now, I must therefore be in my place at this hour, at every hour.
For all of us, our place is the earth. Here we live, and here God must find us. And we must be ready to be found today, this hour, this minute.
By shifting all the weight from the here and now onto eternity, away from this earth and this life, Christianity has shown us the way to the next world. By doing so, however, we have not found God, but rather we have lost both him and ourselves.
The troublesome thing for us now is to be ourselves, now and here on this earth, just as we are, today and here, not as we want to be or should be. But that is not all that I have to learn: I also have to face everyone else as they are, now and here—not as they were yesterday or may be tomorrow—as the person I am, right now and here. And the same is true for life in general.
This is particularly difficult for us, for we want anything but what is now and here, just as it is. We are always looking for possibilities, past or future, that could invalidate the here and now.
This tendency within us still has to die, along with the dying God who taught us to disdain this life for the sake of another, far-off one.
Now that I see that I do not know what, or where, God is, that I have fallen into a complete nothingness, into a frightening darkness, I also see that my only choice is to hold on to what is given to me:
The closest Here,
The shortest Now,
And the firmest Earth.
For if today my truth is that I know nothing about God, then this is to be accepted as my present reality, not as something to flee or to overcome, but ratheras something that exists and rightly persists.
Only in this way am I completely human; and only when I am completely human can God be completely God. And thus, it is up to us to prepare a place for him, by “leaving God.” ~Emma Jung, Dedicated to the Soul Writings and Drawings of Emma Jung, Page 156-159
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