Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
The Silence of the Ground
To withdraw beneath thoughts, words, and images into the still inner ‘ground’ of the soul and rest there in wordless silence, so that — Eckhart says — the eternal Word can be born in the quiet.
In 5 lines: Sit still and draw the senses inward. Set down thinking, planning, and every image — including images of God. Rest, alert and empty, in the silent inner ground. When thoughts re-form, notice, release, and sink back into the silence. Don’t manufacture anything; keep the silence and let what comes, come — then rise gently into your work.
What it is
Eckhart’s contemplative core is not a busy prayer but a descent into silence. Beneath the soul’s faculties — beneath thinking, willing, remembering, and every image — he locates an innermost “ground” (grunt) or “little spark” (Fünklein), a still point that he says is one with the ground of God.
The practice is to stop generating words, concepts, and images and simply rest in that wordless ground, alert but empty. Eckhart’s recurring image: “In the midst of the silence there was spoken in me a secret word” — the Word (the Son) is “eternally born” not in the noise of the faculties but in the soul’s silence.
So this technique is distinct from his Gelassenheit (the broad letting-go disposition) and from his “without a why” maxim: here the doable form is the sit itself — a sustained, non-conceptual interior stillness.
It is close kin to apophatic (“imageless”) contemplation: you do not picture God or talk to Him; you grow quiet enough that something can be received in the quiet.
The Method
Eckhart gave no numbered protocol; this distils the disposition his sermons repeatedly counsel (faithfully described, short quotes only):
- Settle the body and senses. Sit still, draw the senses inward, and let outer noise recede. Eckhart prizes a recollected, undistracted inwardness over outward show.
- Go beneath the faculties. Deliberately set aside thinking, planning, remembering, and imagining. The ground is below these powers, so the move is to stop running them, not to think harder.
- Drop words and images of God. Make no picture and no speech. Eckhart’s apophatic insistence: rest in the “naked” ground without representing God to yourself at all. (His boldest version: “I pray God to rid me of God” — let go even of your concept of God.)
- Keep silence — and keep returning to it. When thoughts re-form, don’t fight them; notice, release, and sink back into the still ground. “In the silence. the Word was spoken.” Silence is the condition.
- Receive, don’t produce. Do not strain to make an experience happen. The birth of the Word is, for Eckhart, God’s act in the emptied ground — you keep the silence; you do not manufacture the result.
- Rise gently into action. End slowly; carry the quiet inwardness into ordinary life rather than leaving it on the cushion (his “Martha and Mary” balance: contemplation flows into work). (Sourcing note: lines are attributed paraphrase and short quotation from the German sermons; not full reproduction.)
Source & Lineage
Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), German Dominican theologian, preacher, and mystic of the Rhineland, taught in Paris, Strasbourg, and Cologne.
His German sermons articulate an apophatic, ground-of-the-soul mysticism: the soul’s innermost ground is where it is one with the divine “Godhead” beyond the named God, and the “birth of the Word in the soul” happens in interior silence.
Some propositions were condemned shortly after his death, but his influence ran deep through the later Rhineland mystics and into modern contemplative prayer.
The Traditions' versions
The same move — fall silent beneath thought and image, and rest, imageless, in an inner depth — recurs across the apophatic and silent-prayer streams: - The Cloud of Unknowing — naked intent in darkness. Set all thoughts under a “cloud of forgetting” and reach into the dark with bare love.
- Centering Prayer (Keating). A sacred word gently returns the mind to silent, consenting interior rest.,
- Merton’s contemplative prayer — resting in presence. Wordless interior abiding rather than discursive prayer.
- Nicholas of Cusa — learned ignorance. Approaching God by unknowing, beyond concept.
- Secular silent meditation. Open, non-conceptual awareness, attention turned in on itself.
Common refinements
Trying to think your way down. The ground is beneath the faculties; analysing or visualising keeps you in them. The move is to stop, not to think better.
- Manufacturing an experience. Straining to “feel the birth” or to reach a special state is grasping; keep the silence and let go of the demand for an outcome.
- Fighting thoughts. Don’t wrestle them — notice, release, sink back. Resistance generates more noise.
- Filling the silence with words/images of God. This is meant to be imageless. Even rich devotional pictures are, here, something to set down.
- Leaving it on the cushion. Eckhart insists the still ground should flow into free, loving action — not become a private retreat from life.