Eckhart's Eye

The aphorism of the 14th Century Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me" is a focus I hold in mind frequently in meditation. Like the Zen thought-puzzles, this phrase opens out with so many elusive meanings -- and then into states of awareness beyond meaning (like bliss). Certainly one such meaning is in the pun in English (though this does not work in German, so not par of Eckhart's original meaning) "eye" for "I." Hence: "The I with which I see God is the I with which God sees me." My experience of my own subjectivity is my experience of the general consciousness of the universe which is "God." Indeed, my act of realizing that my consciousness participates in "God's" consciousness is God seeing me. God sees me in my self-awareness because who is seeing me is "God." Meditation is a practice of holding in mind a thought that can't exactly be thought, so that you're forced to rise to a higher perspective, a higher level of consciousness. Eckhart's words are wonderfully elusive. They move and awaken the mind and call it past themselves in to that void or openness beyond ego. The world that I experience is me. It is also, to one who has the eye to see, the Face of God. Deeper than the personal being that in the course of my day I think of as me -- the focus around which all activity is happening, I am a tiny spark of consciousness that with all the other sparks of consciousness make up the Body and Mind of "God." It is through the filter of my own "personal" being that I see "God" as personal and it is through the human projection of personality onto "God" that "God" evolves a personhood. We are responsible for the kind of person we make God out to be! What I think of as I is an eye with which I experience the multitudinous diversity of consciousness from the point of view called "me." We are all the eyes of consciousness, the sensory organs of "God," seeing the world -- which is the variety of manifestations in three dimensions of multidimensional consciousness. We are consciousness experiencing consciousness experiencing consciousness. My act of meditation is a choice to pass beyond the little self of ego (that's going to die in a matter of years anyway) and to remember -- and thereby experience and become -- the "spark" of consciousness that is what I really am (and that will one day wake up from my individual life to become all life). Then I can say "Yes" to life , say "It's great just the way it is" -- in spite of suffering and disappointment and death -- and wish happiness for all beings, judging no one, wishing harm on no one. And that, I think, is the purpose of meditation -- and, indeed, of all religious activity.