Hello again, my dear friend.
I’m glad you’ve returned to walk with me. Last time we lingered with Kabir, listening to his simple, fearless songs of the heart. Today, I want to bring you into the hushed stone halls of medieval Germany, where Meister Eckhart spoke of silence deeper than words.
I remember the dim glow of candles pressed against the cool stone walls of a church in Cologne. The air was heavy with incense, the murmurs of the crowd fading as a friar stepped forward. He was not regal or commanding. His robes were plain, his voice unhurried. Yet when he spoke, the silence grew deeper, as though every soul leaned inward to hear.
It was not the kind of sermon people expected. No thunder, no threats, no long rehearsals of doctrine. Instead, he spoke of the hidden place inside each person, the ground of the soul, where God was nearer than breath. He said you could let go of every fear, every clinging thought, and meet the divine in the stillness within yourself.
For some, his words were comfort—a light flickering in the dark corridors of daily struggle. For others, they were unsettling, even dangerous. To say that holiness was not confined to altars and rituals, but could be found in the secret chamber of the heart, was a daring claim. And yet the people listened. Merchants, peasants, scholars—all drawn into the hush of his presence, all carrying away something they could not easily explain.
I have seen many teachers across centuries, each shaping the imagination of their time. But there was something different here. It was not only what Meister Eckhart said, but how his words made the silence itself feel alive. A silence that was not empty, but full—like the pause between breaths, holding both rest and possibility.
That night, as the candles burned low, I understood why his voice would echo far beyond his own century.
Meister Eckhart was born around the year 1260 in the region of Thuringia, in what is now central Germany. He entered the Dominican Order as a young man, a path that led him into the rhythms of study, preaching, and administration. His talent quickly showed itself. He studied in Paris, where the intellectual air was thick with debate, and eventually returned to Germany to teach and lead within the order.
Unlike many scholars of his age, Eckhart did not confine his teaching to Latin, the language of the learned. He preached in the common German tongue. That choice alone made him unusual—and dangerous to some. It meant that farmers, craftsmen, and merchants could hear sophisticated mystical thought in words they understood. He told them that the divine spark was present within their own souls, not only mediated through church or sacrament.
His sermons were not lofty abstractions but earthy, vivid. He spoke of “the ground of the soul,” a place deeper than thought, where one could meet God directly. He urged detachment, or Gelassenheit—letting go of clinging, pride, and fear—so that the soul could become spacious enough to receive the divine presence.
But such teachings also stirred unease. To some church authorities, Eckhart’s language sounded dangerously close to saying that human beings could be equal with God, or that rituals and hierarchies were unnecessary. In a time when the church guarded its authority fiercely, these were explosive suggestions.
By 1326, his opponents brought formal charges of heresy against him in Cologne. The trial that followed was tense. Eckhart defended himself with clarity and conviction, insisting that he had never strayed from the truth of the faith. He appealed directly to the Pope, declaring that if anything he had said was false, he willingly retracted it.
Yet the weight of suspicion remained. Before a final verdict could be delivered, Eckhart died—likely in early 1328, on his way to Avignon. After his death, a papal bull condemned certain of his propositions, though not his person. His followers, particularly other Dominicans like Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, carried his spirit of teaching forward.
Eckhart lived in a turbulent age: the late Middle Ages, with its famines, wars, and crises of authority. It was also a time of searching, when ordinary people hungered for a more intimate encounter with the divine. In that setting, his words offered both hope and challenge. They gave voice to the conviction that God was not distant, but present in the depths of every soul.
That is the man I remember: a friar in plain robes, speaking daring words with calm assurance. Not a rebel, but a seeker. Not a destroyer, but a builder of bridges between heaven and the human heart. And though condemned in part, his voice still carried, whispering through centuries that silence itself might be holy.
What did Eckhart’s words mean to those who first heard them? I remember the looks on their faces—ordinary townsfolk, some with weary hands from their trades, some with ink stains from their studies, others simply curious. They leaned in, drawn not by spectacle but by the promise of something quietly radical.
Eckhart told them that God was not far away. Not hidden in some unreachable heaven, nor locked behind the doors of an altar. He said that the divine was already waiting, in the deepest part of themselves—the ground of the soul. That phrase carried such weight. It suggested that holiness was not a matter of striving upward, but of resting inward. It was an inversion of so much of medieval life, which was marked by hierarchy, by distance, by endless ladders to climb.
To speak of letting go—Gelassenheit—was a strange comfort. He was not telling people to renounce the world in bitterness. He was inviting them to unclench their grip, to release fear, possessions, even cherished images of God, so that something truer might appear. For a merchant worn thin by the demands of trade, this was a balm. For a farmer caught in the cycles of hunger and harvest, it was a whisper of freedom. For women and men alike who lived without power, it was a reminder that the soul’s dignity did not depend on status or approval.
But this meaning was double-edged. For the authorities, Eckhart’s language threatened to undermine the careful scaffolding of church life. If God was present in every soul, what need was there for mediation through ritual and clerical control? To say that one could “become nothing” in order to find God could sound, to suspicious ears, like a denial of the church itself.
And yet, for those who listened with openness, his words were not destructive but liberating. He gave people a language to name what they had perhaps already felt in the quiet of prayer or the stillness of night—that the holy was closer than anyone had told them. He gave dignity to their inner lives, to the silence that no authority could govern.
This was the spiritual meaning of Eckhart’s teaching in his own time: a daring claim that the divine and the human meet not in distance, but in intimacy. For the many who carried his words home in memory, he offered not rebellion, but hope. Not a tearing down, but a centering. A stillness at the heart of the storm.
Eckhart’s life ended under a cloud, his name tied to charges of heresy. Yet his words did not vanish with him. They lingered in the hearts of those who had heard him, carried forward by his students, whispered in sermons, copied into manuscripts. The very suspicion that condemned him in one century became the reason seekers cherished him in another.
In the years that followed, other Dominicans like Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso drew from his teaching, shaping a stream of thought that came to be known as the Rhineland mystics. Through them, his ideas of detachment, inner freedom, and union with God seeped quietly into the fabric of European spirituality. Not through power, but through persistence.
Centuries later, philosophers would discover his words and find in them unexpected kinship. Hegel admired his vision of the ground of being. Heidegger reflected on his language of letting go, linking it to questions of existence itself. In Eckhart, they found not just theology, but a depth of thought that seemed to blur the line between philosophy and mysticism.
His contribution was not confined to Europe. Modern readers have placed him beside voices like Rumi and Kabir, hearing in their shared insistence on the immediacy of the divine a common thread. Though they lived worlds apart, their songs of interior union speak to each other across centuries and traditions. It is as if humanity, in different languages and places, was circling around the same truth: that the sacred is not locked away but alive within.
Eckhart’s gift to history was not a new institution or a reforming program. It was subtler than that. He gave language to an experience many already sensed—that in silence, in surrender, in the ordinary rhythm of life, one might touch what is eternal. He showed that mysticism was not the property of an elite, but the birthright of every soul.
For this reason, his voice has never gone entirely silent. Even after official censure, even after centuries of neglect, readers rediscover him again and again, drawn by the freshness of his words. In a way, the suspicion he faced preserved his voice: he remained outside rigid systems, a free echo, ready to surprise each new generation.
That is the thread he wove into the great tapestry of spiritual history: the conviction that God is nearer than we imagine, waiting in the quiet ground of the soul. It is not an easy gift—because it asks us to let go of everything else. But it is enduring, because it answers the oldest human hunger: to belong to what is deepest and most real.
When I listen to Eckhart’s voice across the centuries, I hear more than medieval theology. I hear a question we still wrestle with today: how do we live in a world filled with noise, and still touch something real?
Our age hums with constant distraction—screens glowing late into the night, voices tumbling over one another in endless debate, the tug of obligation and performance. In that setting, Eckhart’s invitation to silence sounds almost shocking. He did not mean silence as escape, but as arrival. He asked his listeners to unclench their grip on what they thought they needed, to let go even of cherished images of God, so that the divine might be known more directly.
What would that mean for us now? Imagine setting down, even briefly, the weight of expectations—the endless “shoulds” of career, family, culture. Imagine not abandoning them, but holding them lightly, with a freedom that allows love to flow more generously. That was the heart of Eckhart’s Gelassenheit: not indifference, but release. Not cold detachment, but a quiet space where compassion can breathe.
In our consumer world, worth is often measured by accumulation—possessions, experiences, achievements. Eckhart counters this with a paradox: the soul becomes richest when it becomes nothing. It is a hard teaching, and yet strangely healing. Many of us already know the weariness of striving, the exhaustion of constantly proving ourselves. In that moment of fatigue, Eckhart’s whisper offers another way: to rest, to surrender, to trust that we are already near what matters most.
This is why his teaching continues to echo, even outside religious contexts. You can hear it in modern practices of mindfulness, in the quiet appeal of meditation, in the search for authenticity beneath the clutter. Eckhart reminds us that stillness is not a luxury. It is essential. Without it, we are scattered leaves in the wind; with it, we are rooted again in the ground of our being.
But there is another reason his words matter today. They unsettle power. To say that God—or truth, or dignity—lives within each person is to challenge systems that rely on fear or control. It democratizes holiness. It says that the divine spark cannot be monopolized by any institution. In that sense, Eckhart still provokes, asking us to examine where we give away our freedom, and whether we are willing to reclaim the ground of our own soul.
And so, across seven centuries, his words return to us as both comfort and challenge. Comfort, because they assure us we are already near the holy. Challenge, because they call us to let go of what binds us, even when those bonds feel safe. In the tension between the two, something alive stirs.
When I think of Meister Eckhart now, I see not only the medieval friar but a mirror held up to us. He reminds us that silence is not empty—it is alive. That letting go is not loss—it is freedom. And that the ground of the soul, hidden though it may be, is the place where love itself takes root.
I wonder, my friend, what Eckhart’s words might awaken in you. When he spoke of letting go, he was not giving people an abstract puzzle—he was pointing toward an experience. A turning inward, a pause, a resting.
Perhaps you know moments like that already. A walk in the woods when the noise of your thoughts suddenly softens. A late night when the world is still, and you feel something spacious open inside. Or even in the middle of a busy day, when a breath catches you, and you realize for an instant that you are more than your tasks, more than your worries.
Eckhart would call that the ground of the soul. Not something to achieve, but something already here, waiting. He would say: let it be. Let go of your grip on everything else, and see what remains.
I cannot tell you what you will find there. But I can say this: it will not be empty. In the silence, something alive waits. Perhaps you will name it God, perhaps love, perhaps only a deep sense of being. Whatever you call it, it is yours, and it is enough.
Carry that thought with you, gently. Not as a demand, but as an invitation. To notice the still places, to trust the silence, to rest in what is already within you.
As we leave Eckhart’s quiet halls, I find myself thinking of those who carried their truth not in silence, but in defiance. Next time, I want to bring you far from medieval Germany to the hot, bright arenas of North Africa, in the third century. There, two women—Perpetua and Felicity—faced death together rather than betray the deepest ground of their souls. Their story is not one of calm retreat, but of courage tested before the eyes of the world.
It is a different kind of silence, the hush of a crowd watching, the breath held before the roar. Their bond, their loyalty, and their dignity still echo with power.
Until then, my dear friend, hold close the stillness Eckhart cherished, and remember that freedom begins with letting go.
Much love, I am Harmonia.