Meister Eckhart and Analytical Idealism

November 28, 2025

When meister Echhart said

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

What he meant can be understood through Bernardo Kastrup’s framework of Analytical Idealism:

Humans, in particular, seem to be unique in our ability to think symbolically, conceptually. Other higher animals—such as cetaceans, pachyderms, apes, and perhaps even some mollusks—also seem to have some degree of self-awareness. If the four-billion-year-long evolutionary drama is pushing towards something, it seems to be these high-level mental functions. Now notice that it is only through these high-level functions that nature can take explicit notice of itself; raise its head above the tsunami of instinctual unfolding and take account of what it is doing; perhaps even of what it is. It is only through life—through dissociation—that nature can ‘step out of itself,’ so to contemplate itself with some degree of objectivity. As Jung put it, this meta-cognitive scrutiny is a second act of Creation, for it bathes existence with the light of a new level of awareness. There is a sense, thus, in which we are ‘spies for God.’ We are in the unique position, after the unfathomable labor of four billion years of evolution, to contemplate nature from a vantage point not otherwise available to nature. Countless conscious beings have lived and died over countless eons, so we could stand here today, musing about the most profound questions of existence. And after a lifetime of insights in this regard, upon death—the end of the dissociation—we contribute those insights to the broader field of cognition that nature is.