Reading Meister Eckhart’s sermons, we learn that god is not to be found here, not to be found there. She is not to be found anywhere or in anything. Not here, not there, not found, not lost, god is by virtue of being not. By virtue of her being not all things receive life.
We learn that God is a no-thing-ness. We learn she is nowhere in the world, nor is she anywhere outside the world. Not in this world, not in another, that's where or what she is; the feted absence where the world and the word of the world arise. She is nowhere, being in no particular place, and she is everywhere, being the boundless opening where everything springs forth. “God is the true light: to see it, one must be blind, and must strip of God all that is ‘something.’- Eckhart.”
In a Taoist story, we are told of a master and his student walking side by side along a riverbank. After some time spent in silence, the student turns to the master to ask: Can you show me how to enter the Way? The master asks: "Do you hear the sound of the river running?" Yes, the student replies. Through the sound of the river, you can enter the Way, replies the master.
Seeking the Way may bring us closer to the river. But once we see its form detach from the mountain, we need to forget we came to its whereabouts to seek the Way. We need to forget the seeking of the river, the seeking of the Way, the seeking mind itself, to allow the streaming to pervade us. Entering the sound is the moment, not before and not after, when the river as embodiment of the Way enters us through our every pore.
The mind that forgets itself in the act of remembering something other and greater than itself is itself the Way; the boundless emptiness into which all forms, ideas, categories, bubbles on the surface of a stream, dream-bubbles, life-bubbles, death-bubbles, burst and disappear. Through the sound of water, we collapse into the river and are resurrected as the flow of wholeness.
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