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Rupert Spira

Spira and Meister Eckhart

Updated 2026-06-20
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A Christian Voice at the Ground of Being

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) was a Dominican friar, theologian, and preacher who, in the market halls and convents of the Rhineland, gave voice to an understanding of the soul and God so radical that it would be condemned — posthumously — by Pope John XXII's bull In agro dominico (1329). He stands at the summit of the Christian mystical tradition, and the ideas he reached for in his German sermons bear a family resemblance to what Rupert Spira calls, from within the non-dual perspective: the recognition that Consciousness Is Fundamental.

This page does not claim that Eckhart was a non-dualist in the Advaita sense. The frameworks differ in important ways. What it does is trace where his inquiry converges on the same territory — and note honestly where the paths diverge.

The Ground (Grunt): Where God and Soul Are One

Eckhart's pivotal contribution is his teaching on the Grunt — the German word he chose for the deepest ground of the soul. He describes it as the soul's innermost, most naked core: featureless, timeless, uncreated. What makes this philosophically startling is the claim that accompanies it: the ground of the soul and the ground of God are not two separate grounds. In one of his most often-quoted formulations:

"Here God's ground is my ground and my ground is God's ground."

The Grunt is not a point where creature encounters Creator across a threshold. It is the place where distinction dissolves altogether. Eckhart is careful to insist this is not pantheism — the soul does not become identical with God as a particular being. What is disclosed in the ground is something prior to both: the Godhead (Gottheit), the supra-personal, undifferentiated absolute that Eckhart distinguishes sharply from "God" conceived as a personal creator with qualities and a will directed toward creatures.

From the perspective of The Direct Path, this maps onto a recognisable territory. Spira, drawing on the lineage of Atmananda Krishna Menon and Francis Lucille, points to pure awareness — the knowing presence that is always already present — as the ground in which all experience arises. The recognition is not the acquisition of something new, but the uncovering of what has never been absent. Eckhart's Grunt functions similarly: it is not produced by effort or reached by spiritual progress; it is what the soul already is, beneath the overlays of creaturely activity.

Detachment and Releasement: Emptying Rather Than Acquiring

To rest in the ground, Eckhart prescribes two closely related movements: Abgeschiedenheit (detachment) and Gelassenheit (releasement or letting-go). Together they describe not a withdrawal from the world, but a progressive release of inner clinging — to desires, to self-image, to outcomes, and finally even to concepts of God.

True detachment, for Eckhart, has nothing to do with emotional coldness. He describes it as remaining "as immovable against whatever may chance to it of joy and sorrow, honour, shame and disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands before a little breath of wind." The immovable is not a suppressed self but the recognition of the hinge on which everything else swings — a stillness at the core that is never actually disturbed by the movements of experience.

Spira expresses something very close in his exploration of Eckhart's teaching: "true detachment doesn't come from disciplining the mind, but from recognising something far deeper." In Peace, Happiness, and the Separate Self, this is the central move of The Direct Path: not a programme of self-improvement, but the direct recognition of that which is already free. The parallel is genuine.

Gelassenheit — letting-be — extends this into action. The detached person acts, loves, engages; they simply do so without the contracted grip of possessiveness. Heidegger, who drew heavily on Eckhart, made Gelassenheit a philosophical concept in its own right. But in Eckhart it is always theological: what is released is released into God's being, not into a neutral void.

The Birth of the Word in the Soul

One of Eckhart's most lyrical teachings concerns the eternal birth of the divine Word (Logos) within the soul's ground. The same begetting that the Father performs eternally — giving rise to the Son — is, Eckhart insists, not a once-for-all historical event but a continual, present-tense occurrence in the soul that is sufficiently emptied to receive it. "Out of overabundance of love," he writes, "the fertile God gives birth to the Son, the Word in all of us."

The soul does not travel to God to witness this: it becomes the place in which God's self-knowing occurs. When the intellect empties itself of all alien images, God, in Eckhart's startling phrase, "cannot refrain" from overflowing into that emptiness.

Within the non-dual framework, there is a structural echo here. Spira's understanding is that awareness knows itself — not by directing attention outward at objects, but by being what it already is. The Word being eternally born in the soul is Eckhart's way of pointing to the self-luminous, self-knowing character of the Godhead. It is not an event in time; it is the timeless nature of being itself, recognised from inside.

The Eye That Sees God

Perhaps the most quoted line in all of Eckhart's writing appears in his Sermon on Ecclesiasticus 24:30 (known in the CCEL collection as Sermon IV, "True Hearing"):

"The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love."

The eye of the soul and the eye of God are not two instruments looking at each other across a space. They are one act of knowing. The knower and the known have not been separated: what appears as the subject's gaze toward God and God's gaze toward the subject are, in the ground, a single event.

This is close to what Spira points to when he notes, in the context of the Christian tradition, that "I and my Father are one" points not to a devotional union between two parties but to the recognition that the 'I' — pure awareness, the knowing presence — is the very being the tradition calls God. The echo is real. The framing differs: for Eckhart, this unity is disclosed within a Trinitarian theology and a Christological frame; for the non-dual perspective that Spira articulates, the recognition is unmediated by doctrinal structure.

The God Beyond God: Apophasis and the Desert

Eckhart is one of the great practitioners of via negativa — the apophatic path, in which every positive attribute ascribed to God must ultimately be negated. His Sermon 52, "Blessed are the Poor in Spirit," presses this to its limit. A truly poor person, he says, wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing — including, scandalously, no experience of God. He coins what may be his most arresting prayer: "Let us pray to God that he might rid us of God" — meaning: free us from the conceptual God, the God that is an object in the mind, so that we might rest in the naked Godhead that is beyond all names.

He describes this Godhead as a "desert," a "nothingness," an absolute darkness in which distinctions do not arise. This is Eckhart's version of neti neti — see Neti Neti (Not This, Not This) — though rooted in the Dionysian apophatic tradition of Christian theology rather than the Upanishadic inquiry. Rudolf Otto drew this parallel explicitly, comparing Eckhart's thought to Shankara's Advaita Vedanta. D.T. Suzuki saw an affinity with Zen's sunyata. These comparisons illuminate real structural similarities; they should not, however, be taken to mean that Eckhart was teaching Advaita in a Christian costume. The debate opened by Reiner Schürmann — who argued that Eckhart's theocentrism differs fundamentally from Buddhist emptiness — is a healthy caution.

For Spira, the apophatic movement is not the goal but a preliminary stripping: the via negativa clears the conceptual ground so that recognition can arise. He has described Eastern Sources of the Direct Path and the apophatic Christian current as different cultural expressions of a single clearing move.

Where the Traditions Honestly Differ

To honour these two voices is to take their differences seriously.

The theistic frame. Eckhart operates within Christian theology: the Trinity is real; Christ is not merely a symbol but the pattern of divine-human unity; the soul is created. The ground of the soul may be uncreated in its innermost aspect, but the soul as soul remains a creature. The non-dual perspective that Spira articulates, rooted in Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism and Pratyabhijna (the Recognition School), does not posit a creator God to whom the soul returns. Awareness is not the ground of anything prior to it; it is primary, without remainder.

The role of grace and effort. For Eckhart, the birth of the Word in the soul has a distinct structure of divine initiative and human receptivity. Even the emptying is something God works in us. In the Direct Path, what is called for is a recognition — which may be aided by inquiry, but is not the result of God's free choice to enter a prepared vessel.

The condemnation. It is worth noting that Eckhart's most radical statements — precisely those closest to non-dual formulations — were the ones judged heretical by the Church's 1329 condemnation. This does not settle the philosophical question, but it does indicate that even within Christianity, these ideas strain the boundaries of orthodoxy.

The person of Christ. Eckhart's Christology is central to his mysticism: Christ is not a historical teacher who points to the ground, but the eternal Son who is the very act of the Father knowing Himself. This gives Eckhart's mysticism a particular shape that has no direct equivalent in the Eastern Sources of the Direct Path.

Spira's Engagement

Rupert Spira has engaged with Eckhart directly and at length. In September 2025 he led a week-long retreat titled Meister Eckhart and the Love of God, exploring Eckhart's sermons as a contemplative path. His framing is that the name 'I' — the bare sense of being oneself — functions as "the doorway through which the soul returns to her silent ground and rests as God's infinite being." He draws on Eckhart's detachment teaching as something that "flows naturally from the recognition of the nature of being," not as a spiritual discipline to be applied from outside.

This approach — reading Eckhart not as a historical curiosity but as a live pointing — is consistent with how the Direct Path treats all of its Eastern Sources of the Direct Path: as different cultural languages for a recognition that transcends any single tradition.

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Rupert Spira
Updated:
2026-06-20

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