“Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time."”

— Eckhart Tolle , book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

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Eckhart Tolle 251

German writer 1948

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit," from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974), ch. 4
Context: The influence of Meister Eckhart is stronger today than it has been in hundreds of years. Eckhart met the problems of contingency and omnipotence, creator-and-creature-from-nothing by making God the only reality and the presence or imprint of God upon nothing, the source of reality in the creature. Reality in other words was a hierarchically structured participation of the creature in the creator. From the point of view of the creature this process could be reversed. If creatureliness is real, God becomes the Divine Nothing. God is not, as in scholasticism, the final subject of all predicates. He is being as unpredicable. The existence of the creature, in so far as it exists, is the existence of God, and the creature’s experience of God is therefore in the final analysis equally unpredicable. Neither can even be described; both can only be indicated. We can only point at reality, our own or God’s. The soul comes to the realization of God by knowledge, not as in the older Christian mysticism by love. Love is the garment of knowledge. The soul first trains itself by systematic unknowing until at last it confronts the only reality, the only knowledge, God manifest in itself. The soul can say nothing about this experience in the sense of defining it. It can only reveal it to others.

“The seed of God is in us, Meister Eckhart said. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seed into G o d .”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

“For the whole Past, as I keep repeating, is the possession of the Present; the Past had always something true, and is a precious possession. In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common Human Nature that has been developing itself. The actual True is the sum of all these; not any one of them by itself constitutes what of Human Nature is hitherto developed. Better to know them all than misknow them. "To which of these Three Religions do you specially adhere?" inquires Meister of his Teacher. "To all the Three!"”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

answers the other: "To all the Three; for they by their union first constitute the True Religion."
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

“Our own attitude to intercourse with "spirits" must be determined not by the authority of great teachers of the 13th or any other century, but by our examination in the light of the best secular knowledge of our time of the revelation of spiritual truth given by Christ.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

Spiritualism and the Christian Faith (1918)

“Shakespeare realised the thirteenth-century woman more vividly than the thirteenth-century poets ever did; but that is no new thing to say of Shakespeare.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Meister Eckhart, the German churchman and mystic of the fourteenth century; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth; Jacob Boehme, a German, in the sixteenth and seventeenth; Emanuel Swedenborg in the seventeenth and eighteenth. We are spiritually free, they said, the stewards of our own evolution. Humankind has a choice. We can awaken to our true nature. Drawing fully from our inner resources we can achieve a new dimension of mind; we can see more.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

“Time, talent, and treasure. If people give their time to God’s work, that’s very important, and use the talents that God gives you, not for yourself, it’s for the greater glory of God, but you use your talents. Everybody's got different kind of talents, but you use some of your talents for the greater glory of building up the Kingdom of God on Earth.”

Michael Wiwchar (1932) Ukrainian Catholic bishop in the United States and Canada.

Honouree Announcement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjTtG_muVhM (November 1, 2020)

“The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“It is not insignificant that the Church, in the rare places and times when she had power to do so, did not compel the mind. During all that intense intellectual life of the thirteenth century instruction was by choice: endowed—so that the poorest could reach the highest inspiration, but at the choice of the individual or family will, to be taken or left.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. IV The Main Opposition (iii) The "Modern" Mind

“Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.”

Ann Brashares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

“Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time."”

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Eckhart Tolle 251

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