Inspired by Bernard McGinn's lecture for the Into the Mystics series, I've started dipping into a Meister Eckhart anthology. [1]

Eckhart's basic idea of our emergence from God (ebullitio) and our return to God (reditus) reminds me, of course, of Neoplatonism. Now, I'm ambivalent about mixing Neoplatonism with Christianity, since it represents a foreign intrusion. But that's another matter.

What occurred to me this morning is that Eckhart's ideas can also be seen in terms of Michael Washburn's model of the emergence of the ego from the dynamic ground of consciousness.

This is a perspective that Bernard McGinn doesn't mention in his introduction, since I know from elsewhere that McGinn regards psychological explanations of mysticism as reductionist. But to me, the explanation of the ego and the dynamic ground reveals what's really going on in Eckhart's mysticism.

[1] Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn, trans., Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1981).

Thanks Derek. I'd be interested in hearing more about the connections you're making between Eckhart's mysticism and Washburn's perspective. I think we can relate them without being reductionistic, but that would depend mostly on how one makes a distinction between God and Washburn's idea of Dynamic Ground. What are your thoughts on this?

The mystics often apply the word "God" to what is really their own fundamental consciousness or Dynamic Ground.

For example, John of the Cross says that during the night of the senses, "it is God Who is now working in the soul." The subjective experience is one of delicate inward refreshment, as though receiving "inward food" (Dark Night of the Soul, I.9).

What's really happening here is that the blissful repressed energy of the Dynamic Ground is seeping into conscious awareness. John of the Cross, having no knowledge of developmental psychology, attributes this experience to "God." It feels like the action of an Other because it is wholly outside the control of the Ego.

Your question was "how one makes a distinction between God and Washburn's idea of Dynamic Ground." I can see two possibilities:

(1) The Dynamic Ground of consciousness has nothing to do with God. It is purely a psychological phenomenon. Mystics who equate the Dynamic Ground with God are simply wrong.

(2) In a monistic view of the mind-body problem, where consciousness is seen as primary, the Dynamic Ground really is God.

I really don't know which of (1) or (2) is correct! How about you?

I think many mystics were quite discerning on what aspects of their experience were of their own inner depths, and which were from God. Of course, God also communicates through our own inner life, as well as from depths beyond, not to mention the whole realm of graced communications through words, symbols, sacraments, community, nature, etc.

My Kundalini Process book has reflection on the Dynamic Ground (a la Washburn) in relation to the divine and kundalini and so I won't repeat all that here. My own sense is that the Dynamic Ground refers to that deepest of experiences of existence received moment-by-moment from God, and so it is, in that sense, a kind of experience of God as well as the depths of self. I don't think it's our only experience of God, as noted above, nor is it the same as God's indwelling presence.

Yes, I think your key point is where you say (underneath Figure 1), "We are not a closed system." We can be influenced by other people, even though we are separate from other people, and we can be influenced by the Holy Spirit, even though we are not the Holy Spirit. The Dynamic Ground can respond to promptings from outside itself.