Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart was a German Dominican friar, theologian, and preacher of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, trained in the scholastic tradition at Paris and Cologne under the intellectual lineage of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.

Yet his vernacular German sermons broke decisively from scholastic dryness into a radical mysticism of interiority. He taught that beneath the soul’s faculties lies an uncreated “ground” (grunt) or “spark” (Fünklein) that is identical with the ground of God, and that the goal of spiritual life is the “birth of God in the soul”—a stripping-away of self, image, and even the conceptual “God” until only the naked divine ground remains.

Some of his propositions were condemned as heretical shortly after his death, but his influence ran underground and proved immense. For a mind-power lineage, Eckhart is the most important Western statement of the idea that divinity is found within the human interior rather than only above it.

His doctrine that the soul-ground and God-ground are one prefigures the “god within” and “higher self” motifs that recur through Neoplatonism into New Thought and contemporary nondual teaching. His emphasis on Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-go) anticipates the surrender and detachment practices later instrumentalized by manifestation culture.

Eckhart thus stands as a pivotal bridge: a Christian, orthodox in intent, whose interior metaphysics supplied a vocabulary of inner divinity that secular and esoteric traditions would repeatedly reclaim.