The background noise of our age is a metallic hum. It is the sound of a narrative that pretends to be concluded, one that celebrates the triumph of organized matter. We are told, and we increasingly tell ourselves, that we are sophisticated biochemical aggregates, temporary machines of flesh and synapses, whose purpose is exhausted in adaptation, possession, production. A horizontal existence, confined to the measurable surface of things. This vision, a child of materialism that mistook method for dogma and "scientism" for ultimate truth, is not merely reductive. It is an ontological mutilation. It has built a cage of meaning so narrow it has made us forget the most essential key: that our truest substance is not only matter, but part of a greater cosmic Consciousness, a unique Whole of which we are an individual, yet not separate, expression. To rediscover this spiritual and immortal nature, a journey of return is necessary. A path that begins with asking, with childlike obstinacy, the fundamental questions, may pass through the direct and shattering experience – like that of temporary death – and finally arrive at the disciplined practice of encountering the inner divine. The voices of two mystics, distant in time and space but profoundly close at the heart of the matter – the German Dominican Meister Eckhart and the Indian master Paramahansa Yogananda – offer us not theoretical maps, but directions for a crossing.
Detachment and the Abyss: Meister Eckhart's Path to the Divine Nothingness
His voice comes from the 14th century, yet it digs deeper than many of our psychological scalpels. Meister Eckhart, a theologian whose thought was deemed "incandescent" and dangerous enough to face trial for heresy, does not speak of adding, but of subtracting. His is a negative way, a path of radical stripping. For him, the problem is not God's absence, but the clutter of the self. We are so full of ourselves, our images, our intellectual projects and our attachments, that we leave no room for the irruption of the Infinite. "Leave the place, leave time and also images! Proceed without a road on the narrow path and you will find the trace of the desert". This desert is detachment, the keystone of his mysticism.
Eckhartian detachment is not worldly escape, nor sterile asceticism. It is a surgical operation of the soul, a clean cut that does not stop at things, but goes so far as to dissect the attachment to the self. It is easy, he warns, to leave material goods; much more difficult is to leave one's constructed "I," one's very vision of God. For even the idea of God as an object, as a distinct Person, as a supreme Intellect, is an image, and as such, an obstacle. Here then is the most vertiginous passage: "You must love God as a Non-God, a Non-Intellect, a Non-Person, a Non-Image". This love leads to absolute simplicity, where all duality disappears.
What remains after this total stripping? The Divine Nothingness remains. An oxymoron containing the mystery. Not the nothingness of emptiness, but nothingness as the absence of all determination, as the dark and fertile ground of being, antecedent to every form. It is the pure, clear One into which, Eckhart says, we must eternally sink: "from Something to Nothing". In this abyss, the soul no longer meets God; it becomes one with Him. The ultimate goal is not adoration, but identification. As he wrote in a verse: "I must become God and / God must become me, so completely that / we share the same 'I' eternally. / Our truest I is God". Here there is no more room for the biological machine. There is only the eternal generation of the Word in the womb of a soul that has made itself empty.
Energy and Concentration: Paramahansa Yogananda's Science of Interiority
If Eckhart guides us into a descent into metaphysical silence, Paramahansa Yogananda, the master who brought the science of Yoga to the West, offers us a practical science for inner ascent. His path does not deny the world, but teaches how to redirect its energy. For Yogananda, we are indeed part of a cosmic Whole – an ocean of Consciousness – but we live as "individualized soul waves" forgetful of their watery nature. The problem is not matter itself, but the dispersion of our attention and our vital force (prana) outward, into the labyrinths of the senses and incessant thought.
His answer is a technical, gradual, and precise system. Meditation is not vague contemplation, but a scientific training to achieve higher states of consciousness. The first step is preparing the body-instrument: a stable posture with an erect spine (on a chair or on the floor), tensing and relaxing exercises to expel stress, breath control. Then, the heart of the practice for the beginner: withdrawing the senses and focusing all attention on the point between the eyebrows, the Christ Consciousness center, known as the "spiritual eye".
"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light" (Matthew 6:22). Yogananda interprets this "single eye" as the inner vision, the opening to the perception of unity.
By fixing attention at this point, the practitioner seeks to perceive the inner light – a golden halo, a circle of blue, a white, five-pointed star – and, through ever-deeper concentration, to penetrate it. This is not a visualization exercise, but an attempt to directly perceive the luminous energy of consciousness itself. The advanced technique of Kriya Yoga, of which Yogananda was a great apostle, acts directly on the subtle energy circuits of the spine and brain, accelerating, according to tradition, spiritual evolution. The aim is to produce a "deep inner stillness of body and mind," in which one experiences "a deepening interior peace and attunement with one's soul and with God".
While Eckhart invites us to become "non-intellectual" to love God, Yogananda provides the tools to calm the "mind-stuff" and directly experience the peace of the soul and, ultimately, Cosmic Consciousness: "He feels that peace everywhere — in the flowers, in every human being, in the atmosphere. He beholds the earth and all worlds floating like bubbles in that ocean of peace". Two languages, one apophatic and one technical, pointing to the same center: the immediate experience of the One.
The Forcing of Grace: Near-Death Experiences as Involuntary Initiation
There is a path that does not require years of detachment or disciplined meditation, but imposes itself with the violence of a limiting event: the near-death experience (NDE). For those who live it, it is not a theory, but a fact more real than daily reality. It is the body shutting down (heartbeat and breathing cease), but consciousness awakening to a totally different dimension. This phenomenon, studied for decades, represents the empirical, subjective yet overwhelming, refutation of the man-machine model.
The characteristics are surprisingly recurrent, transcending cultures and beliefs: an ineffable feeling of peace; separation from the physical body and seeing it from above, often with detailed and verifiable perceptions; travel through a tunnel or dark space toward a loving and intelligent light; encounter with beings of light or deceased relatives; the panoramic life review, experienced with total empathy and without judgment, understanding the impact of every action on others. Then, the decision or order to return.
The transformative impact is the most significant element for our inquiry. The "returnees" come back permanently changed, as if they had become "new people". And the changes resonate impressively with the teachings of the mystics:
- Loss of fear of death: They know they have survived their physical death. They know consciousness continues. The death of the body loses every shadow of finality.
- Change of values and authentic spirituality: The encounter with an absolute, unconditional Love (the "Light") often dissolves old religious conceptions based on judgment. A personal, direct spirituality emerges, centered on connection and compassion.
- Sense of purpose and interconnection: They often return with a strong feeling of having a mission to fulfill, an urgency to love and serve. They understand, at a visceral level, the unity of all creation.
- Disidentification from the body: They have experienced being free from the body. Although they return to it, they know they are not it. They live an incarnation, not an identification.
The NDE is a forcing of grace. It is as if the material veil suddenly tears, showing the individual his true nature as eternal and connected consciousness. It is dramatic proof that the bodily "machine" can stop, while the operator of consciousness not only continues to function, but accesses a vaster, more meaningful reality. It confirms, in a flash, what Eckhart and Yogananda aim for through a gradual path: that we are spirit, before we are matter.
Return to the Source: The Synthesis of a Healed Life
So, how to reconcile these two ways – the asceticism of emptiness and the science of energy – with the traumatic revelation of the near-death experience? And how to bring this understanding into the concreteness of an existence that must still deal with the material world?
The answer lies not in a flight from the world, but in a rooting in a different dimension. It is the difference between living in the world and living from the world of Spirit. Eckhart, the master of detachment, did not preach abandoning duties, but inner freedom from attachment to their fruits. Yogananda taught meditation techniques precisely to then bring calm and harmony "into every department of your life". The NDEr, after the experience, does not necessarily become an ascetic, but a human being who lives more intensely, lovingly, and presently, because they know every moment is precious and every relationship sacred.
The synthesis lies in seeing the spiritual path not as an addition to life, but as a change of source. The biological machine – the body, the mind – is not denied, but re-instructed. From an autonomous master focused on itself, it becomes an instrument of a vaster intelligence. Meditation, detachment, prayer of the heart, become the tools to maintain the connection with this source.
The peace, love, and harmony we seek are not states to be built in the future, but to be recognized as the substance of our most authentic being, beyond the noise of the ego. They are the spiritual umami – the deep and persistent flavor of reality when tasted with the senses of the soul. Eckhart invites us to descend into the naked ground of the soul to find it. Yogananda gives us the lens of concentration to see it. The near-death experience, for some, is the hammer blow that shatters the shell and suddenly makes it evident.
Is awakening not all about this? Understanding that individual consciousness is a reflection of cosmic Consciousness, that the wave is never separate from the ocean, and that bliss is not a reward, but the natural state of one who remembers this union. In an age of fragmentation and existential anxiety, this is not a luxury for refined souls. It is the only path of salvation from the aridity of a world that, having declared spirit dead, finds itself dying of cosmic loneliness. The hidden room of being is always open. One only needs to stop running back and forth in the corridor of things, and learn, once again, to cross its threshold.
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