Meister Eckhart: “God Cannot Know Itself Without Me”
The 13th-century mystic and theologian’s paradoxical statement is not an assertion of human ego but a declaration of the intimate and inseparable relationship between the divine ground of being and its manifestation though seemingly individual consciousnesses.
For Eckhart, God, in its ultimate essence as the Godhead, is beyond all name, form, and attribute. It is the unmanifest, the primordial ground of all existence. This absolute Godhead is unknowable in its direct being. It is only through its manifestation, through the “birth of the Son” within the soul and the created world, that God comes into expression and thus, in a sense, “knows” itself.
Here, the “me” in Eckhart's quote refers not to the limited, egoic self, but to the divine spark of the soul, which Eckhart believed to be inherently one with God. This spark of the divine within each individual is the very locus where God's self-expression and self-awareness occur in the created realm.
From a nondual perspective, this aligns with the understanding that the one consciousness, the ultimate reality, manifests itself in countless forms, including human beings. Each individual consciousness is like a facet of a single jewel, reflecting and experiencing the light of the whole from a particular angle.
It is through our being, through our capacity to experience and reflect, that the unmanifest God finds expression and comes to know its own multifaceted nature in the world of form.
We are not separate entities striving to know God. We are the very instruments through which the divine knows itself in creation. We are, in this sense, the eyes through which the divine beholds its own glory.