Christ says:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:3
‘The kingdom of heaven’ is Christian lingo for the ultimate goal of spiritual life; it is the Christian equivalent of the Buddhist nirvāṇa. What could it mean that the goal of spirituality belongs to the poor in spirit? Shouldn’t the exact opposite be the case?
Shouldn’t we aim to accumulate virtue, wisdom, and good karma? Shouldn’t we let go of temporary material riches and replace them with the eternal treasures of spirit? What does it mean to be ‘poor in spirit’ anyway?
To make sense of all this, let’s hear what the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart has to say about it. ‘The man from whom God hides nothing’, people called him.
Eckhart says there are 3 forms of spiritual poverty:
[A] poor person is someone who desires nothing, knows nothing and possesses nothing.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
This is no random definition. As we’ll see, many of the world’s wisdom traditions agree with Eckhart here. So, let’s learn the 3 forms of spiritual poverty and let’s see how they can connect us with the divine mystery at the heart of it all.
(You can watch the video version of this essay on YouTube.)
I. Desire Nothing
Spiritual poverty is different from outer, material poverty, and yet it follows the same principles.
A nun might be proud of having no possessions and practicing the harshest asceticism – but this very pride makes her full of herself. So full, in fact, there’s no room for the spontaneity of spirit to flow through her. Rather than letting go of attachment, she has simply traded material attachment for attachment to spiritual goods. Spirituality for her has become a sense of superiority and good karma has become a vanity item. Asceticism, to be blunt, has become spiritual masturbation. All food for the ego.
Eckhart writes:
[Some] cling to their own egos in their penances and external devotions … These people are called holy because of what they are seen to do, but inside they are asses…
[S]uch people are not truly poor nor are they like those who are poor. They are greatly esteemed by people who know no better…
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
Non-Intention
Eckhart reminds us the best intentions are really the ego in disguise. Whether we consider ourselves a bodhisattva nurturing the enlightenment of others, or a preacher growing God’s Church, or a volunteer helping souls in need – we are serving an idea in our heads, usually one that makes us feel important.
This egoic impulse is crucial at the outset of the spiritual path, but it must be surrendered eventually. Eckhart writes:
[A]s long as you have the will to perform God’s will, and a desire for eternity and for God, you are not yet poor. They alone are poor who will nothing and desire nothing.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
The Ending Of Karma
The Buddha gives this same lesson with his teaching on karma. As we know, he teaches moral actions generate bright karma with joyful consequences and immoral actions generate dark karma with miserable consequences. What many tend to forget is that the Buddha does not recommend bright karma. Rather, he teaches bright karma too comes from a sense of egoic desire, attachment, and ignorance.
The Buddha’s recommendation is anti-karma, or what he calls ‘karma which leads to the ending of karma’. This means pure action free of intention. Free even of the intention of realizing nirvāṇa. Such action cannot be forced as this would make it intentional. It can only arise spontaneously from the conditions of wisdom and compassion when these are no longer obscured by the defilements of the mind.
If you want to learn more about this, I recommend our essay on Buddhist karma and rebirth.
II. Know Nothing
Eckhart’s second form of spiritual poverty is to ‘know nothing’. His ideal here could be Socrates, whom the oracle of Delphi called the wisest man in Greece. Why? Because Socrates alone knew that he knew nothing.
The opposite of this would be a conservative rabbi, or imam, or priest – so full of ideas about God and the holy life that it is his ideas that live and not he. This can also be any of us when we succumb to a sense of certainty about what’s right and what’s wrong, what the ultimate nature of reality is, and what a well-lived life looks like.
Eckhart writes:
[T]hey who wish to be poor in spirit, must be poor in all their knowing so that they have no knowledge of anything, neither of God, nor of creature, nor of themselves.
This is why it is necessary that we should desire to know or perceive nothing of God’s works. In this way we can become poor in knowing.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
As Ram Kir, the Indian mystic, says, ‘a God defined is a God confined’. In other words, the ultimate nature of reality transcends thoroughly the limits of our intellect. Any ideas we may have about it will be partially true at best.
If we crown any partial truth as the Ultimate Truth, we make a fiction of life. This fiction may provide us with a comfortable sense of certainty, of ‘being right’. But sooner or later the aspects of life we have failed to embrace surprise us most painfully. We may stubbornly resist facing these realities, but our resistance only deepens and prolongs our suffering.
Buddhism’s Emptiness Of Views
The Buddhist tradition recognizes this too with the teaching of no views.
Once, a man approached the Buddha’s closest disciple, Ananda. The man asked Ananda a number of metaphysical questions like: ‘Are the soul and the body one or are they separate?’, ‘Is the Cosmos eternal or not?’, ‘Does an enlightened being exist after death or not?’
Ananda refused to answer any of the questions.
Displeased, the man asked how could Ananda not know and see the answers of these questions. Isn’t he supposed to be a wise ascetic?
Ananda replied:
The extent to which there are viewpoints, view-stances, the taking up of views, obsessions of views, the cause of views, & the uprooting of views: that’s what I know. That’s what I see.
Kokanuda Sutta (AN 10.96)
In other words, it is by letting go of preconceived ideas, opinions, and beliefs that we become receptive to wisdom. Wisdom is not a library full of answers to life’s questions. It is freedom from answers, it is the understanding that no one answer can capture the essence.
III. Possess Nothing
The final kind of poverty Eckhart describes is the most mystical one. That is to say, it is the one where we most require personal experience to understand him. He says:
Whoever does not understand these words, should not be troubled. For as long as someone is not themselves akin to this truth, they will not understand my words, since this is an unconcealed truth which has come directly from the heart of God.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
To understand what it means to ‘possess nothing’, we must be ‘akin to this truth’. In other words, ‘possessing nothing’ refers to our very being; it is not an action we perform or a quality we have, but a reality we are.
Eckhart also calls it ‘an unconcealed truth’. An ever-present reality that remains obscure not because it is hidden, but because it is so obvious, so close, that we miss it all the time.
Until we don’t.
The Essence
Now let’s hear how the mystic himself describes this reality in his own peculiar language. Don’t get discouraged if the words sound strange at first. We will unpack them in a minute:
[I]n that essence, where God is above all existence and all multiplicity… I am my own self cause according to my essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is in time.
There I am unborn, and according to the manner of my unbornness, shall never die. According to the manner of my unborn nature, I have been eternal, as I am now and ever shall be.
But what I am according to my nature which was born into the world, that shall die and turn to nothing, for it is mortal…
Here God is one with our spirit, and this is poverty in its ultimate form.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
The Medieval character and the opaqueness of these words tempts us to dismiss them as abstract theology. But this cannot be further from the truth. Here Eckhart is describing a real subjective experience recorded throughout history in virtually every wisdom tradition. An experience you and I can have right now.
I Am
He is describing the recognition of one’s identity not with one’s temporary body and mind, but with the background of aware being that accompanies every moment of experience. This background of aware being is present right now as you are reading my words. It is what Eckhart calls the ‘essence’: the true referent of the pronoun ‘I’.
Now as I continue, please relate my words to your own present experience and test whether they make sense for you.
You Are What?
The essence of aware being experiences every moment of the flow of time; as such, it does not appear within the flow of time. Rather, time appears within it. This essence does not have a beginning or an ending in time. It is both ‘unborn’ and ‘undying’, and yet it is always present. In short, it’s eternal.
This is why Eckhart says:
There I am unborn, and according to the manner of my unbornness, shall never die… I have been eternal, as I am now and ever shall be.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
This is no superstitious belief in immortality. Eckhart is quite upfront about the impermanence of the personality and the physical body. He says:
[W]hat I am according to my nature which was born into the world, that shall die and turn to nothing, for it is mortal.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 22
Eckhart is simply pointing to the fact our ego and body are not what we truly are. They are rather appearances within what we truly are. They are carried along by the flow of time within the ever-present embrace of aware being. Our body-minds are temporary garments that life puts on for a while, and then discards, putting on something else.
Somebody else.
And beneath all these changing forms, there is one and the same essence. The true referent of the pronoun ‘I’.
Tat Tvam Asi
To the outrage of his colleagues, Eckhart claims this essence of ours is no different than God’s essence. This may sound like heresy to a conservative Christian, but in fact, the Bible bears it out.
In the Old Testament, God describes himself to Moses thus:
… I Am That I Am… Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.
Exodus 3:14
In the New Testament, Christ describes himself in a strikingly similar way:
Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.
John 8:58
Both Bible passages point to that essence unbound by time which yet penetrates time at every moment. An essence which always is and which can describe itself only as ‘I am’.
When Schrödinger says ‘the present is the only thing that has no end’, it is exactly this essence he is hinting at. An essence present in every conscious experience of every sentient being – past, present, and future.
Your essence.
I Am (Reprise)
To ‘possess nothing’ means to recognize not your relationship, but your identity with this eternal essence. An essence free of all qualities and actions except for the simple fact of being.
To shift your sense of identity from the separate ego to the essence, you must surrender all attachment to the contents of experience. Your body, name, biography, desires, fears, beliefs, ideas… all of these must be let go of as temporary appearances in an otherwise timeless condition.
This is core to many types of meditation, particularly in the Buddhist and Vedantic traditions. I would be surprised if Eckhart had not developed a similar spiritual practice of his own.
Spiritual Poverty (Reprise)
These then are the 3 kinds of spiritual poverty that bring about the kingdom of heaven: desire nothing, know nothing, and possess nothing.
Letting go of our pride, letting go of our ideas, and letting go of our identification with the ego. To see our treasures are dead weight and to surrender them is the poverty Christ speaks of.
This throws new light on another, often misunderstood, statement of His:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.
Mark 10:25
So, wherever you are on your journey, be mindful of the riches slowing you down. It is the joy of adolescence to accumulate, but maturity begins with letting go.
As we read in the Tao Te Ching:
One who seeks knowledge learns something new every day.
One who seeks the Tao unlearns something new every day.
Less and less remains until you arrive at non-action.
When you arrive at non-action, nothing will be left undone.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 48
This video was born of a conversation with a good friend of mine, Ivo Mihov. Thanks for the spark, Ivo!
