Love Quote by Meister Eckhart

Eckhart turns self-knowledge into a kind of spiritual anatomy lesson: not a sunny invitation to "look within", but a grim inventory of how much inner life is barricaded from us. The image is deliberately physical - skins, hides, thickness, hardness. He wants you to feel the resistance. The soul isn’t a delicate thing waiting to be expressed; it’s an excavation site sealed under layers tough enough to survive weather, work, and violence. That’s medieval mysticism at its most unsentimental: the inner life is real, but it’s not accessible on demand.

The intent is corrective. Eckhart is pushing back against the prestige of accumulated knowledge ("We know so many things") and against the assumption that spiritual truth is primarily intellectual. His jab lands because it sounds like ordinary experience: people can be competent, educated, even pious, and still remain opaque to themselves. The "thirty or forty" is exaggeration with purpose - it makes self-ignorance feel not like a personal failure but like the default human condition.

Subtext: those skins are not just psychological defenses; they’re habits, social identities, moral self-images, and theological concepts that become substitutes for direct encounter with the self and, by Eckhart’s logic, with God. "Go into your own ground" is crucial. It suggests depth, locality, and discipline - not self-expression but descent. In Eckhart’s historical context (a Dominican preaching in a church anxious about heterodoxy), this inward turn is radical and risky: authority shifts from external performance to interior transformation, where the hardest material to cut through is the version of yourself you most want to believe.