OH MY

A priest once said to Meister Eckhart: “I wish that your soul were in my body.”  To which he replied:


“You would really be foolish.  That would get nowhere – it would accomplish as little as for your soul to be in my body.  No soul can really do anything except through the body to which it is attached.”



From :  Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation by Raymond B. Blackney, New York, Harper & Row, 1941.


Kevin Ayers: Oh My (Link) 

PERFECTLY CLEAR

But now I have said that of all the good deeds a person does whilst under mortal sin not a single one remains, neither deeds nor time, and that is true in the meaning which I have just explained. I want to make it perfectly clear to you, even though it is contrary to every authority alive.

Meister Eckhart, The Sermons (“The fruits of good deeds live on”), trans. Raymond B. Blackney, 1941

Upper:  Andrea Mantegna, The Descent Into Limbo, painting, 1470-75

Lower:  Rudi Feld, The Dangers of Bolshevism, lithograph, 1919

Wailing Souls: Kingdom Rise Kingdom Fall (Link)

Wailing Souls: Things and Time (Link)

 

About Disinterest (Meister Eckhart)

I have read much of what has been written, both by heathen philosophers and the sages in the Old and New Testaments.  I have sought earnestly and with great diligence that good and high virtue by which man may draw closest to God and through which one may best approximate the idea God had of him before he was created, when there was no separation between man and God ; and having delved into all this writing, as far as my intelligence would permit, I find that [high virtue] to be pure disinterest ; that is, detachment from creatures.  Our Lord said to Martha : "Unum est necessarium," which is to say : to be untroubled and pure, one thing is necessary and that is disinterest.

The teachers praise love, and highly too, as St. Paul did when he said :  "No matter what I do, if I have not love, I am nothing.  Nevertheless, I put disinterest higher than love. My first reason is as follows.  The best thing about love is that it makes me love God.  Now, it is much more advantageous for me to move God toward myself than for me to move toward him, for my blessing in eternity depends on my being identified with God.  He is more able to deal with me and join me than I am to join him.  Disinterest brings God to me and I can demonstrate it this way :  Everything likes its own habitat best ;  God's habitat is purity and unity, which are due to disinterest.  Therefore God necessarily gives himself to the disinterested heart.

Photographs :  Ann Yoklavich

Text :  Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1 (excerpt).

From :  Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation by Raymond B. Blackney, New York, Harper & Row, 1941.

When the agents of the soul contact creatures

When the agents of the soul contact creatures, they take and make ideas and likenesses of them and bear them back again into the self.  It is by means of these ideas that the soul knows about external creatures.  Creatures cannot approach the soul except in this way and the soul cannot get at creatures except, on its own initiative, it first conceive ideas of them.  Thus the soul gets at things by means of ideas and the idea is an entity created by the soul's agents.  Be it a stone, or a rose, or a person, or whatever it is that is to be known, first an idea is taken and then absorbed, and in this way the soul connects with the phenomenal world.

Text:  Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1 (excerpt).

From:  Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation by Raymond B. Blackney, New York, Harper & Row, 1941.