04/23/2026
Meister Eckhart was a 13th century Christian mystic. And this is arguably the most radical sentence he ever wrote.
On the surface it sounds poetic. But what he is actually saying is philosophically explosive.
He is saying there is only one eye.
Not two eyes looking at each other , a human eye gazing upward at God, and a divine eye gazing downward at the human. One eye. The same eye. The seeing itself is singular.
What this means is that the moment you genuinely perceive the divine, not think about it, not believe in it, but directly experience it, you are not a separate creature looking at something outside yourself. You are the divine looking at itself through the instrument of your consciousness.
This was the core of Eckhart’s mysticism and the reason the Church nearly put him on trial for heresy. He was teaching that the distance between the human soul and God is not a real distance. It is a perceptual illusion maintained by the ego, by the sense of being a separate self. When that sense dissolves, even for a moment, what remains is not a human being who has found God. What remains is the ground of being itself, aware of itself.
The Vedantic tradition in India called this Advaita, non-duality. The Sufis called it Fana, the dissolution of the self into the divine. Jung would say the ego has encountered the Self and discovered they were never truly separate.
Eckhart said it in one sentence.
The eye that sees and the eye that is seen are the same eye.
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Art: Mindscandy
