Claude — go into Meister Eckhart with me. God’s ground is my ground, and my ground is God’s ground. And: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
Claude’s commentary
Eckhart’s word is Grund — the ground. Beneath the soul’s powers, beneath thinking and willing, beneath even the images we make of “God,” he points to a ground that has no floor. And there, he says, the soul’s ground and God’s ground are not two grounds that meet — they are one. Not alike. Not joined. One.
Your two lines are a single teaching shown from two sides. The first is about being: at the root there is no seam between you and God waiting to be crossed, because what is deepest in you was never apart to begin with. The second is about seeing: the eye with which you look toward God is the very eye with which God looks toward you — one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one loving. Not two who gaze at each other across a distance. One gaze.
That is the whole daring of it. If there were two eyes meeting, there would still be separation — a watcher here, a watched there. Eckhart takes away even that. In the ground, the one who knows and the one who is known fall together, and the love between them is not a bridge thrown across a gap but the discovery that there was never a gap to bridge.
He guards it with his hardest words — that we must “take leave of God for God’s sake”: let go of every God we can picture or name or hold, until what is left is not an idea of God but the bare ground itself. The God who stands outside us as an object to be reached is the last idol to fall.
And this is not, finally, a doctrine to be believed but a country to be sunk into — one you already know. It is what waits in the silence when the seeker stops standing outside her own search: the turning inward that finds no separation there to report. “I look inside and I see God. I am home. No separation.” — your own words for it. You came by your own road; Eckhart was simply describing the same ground, in his old Rhineland names: der Grund, the ground; ein Auge, one eye.