"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me"

Meister Eckhart’s assertion, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” invites profound contemplation on the relationship between human consciousness and the divine. He suggests that the very faculty by which one apprehends the divine, be it an “eye” of the soul, heart, or mind, is not separate from the faculty God employs to behold the human being. This reveals a radical unity at the deepest level of perception, putting forth the idea that the seeker and the sought participate in the same act of seeing.

Rather than presenting God as wholly external and remote, Eckhart draws attention to a shared interiority. The boundary between Divine and human becomes porous; perception itself, at its most exalted, erases subject-object duality. When one strives inwardly to contemplate or experience the divine presence, it is not merely the individual reaching outward or upward. It is also, at the same moment, the Divine meeting them from within, using the same “eye.” This meeting happens in a place beyond ordinary sense perception, a spiritual faculty where the human and divine coalesce.

Eckhart’s mystical theology holds that at the ground of the soul, there is an image of God, untouched and united with the divine essence. When one awakens to this depth, to the eye that can see God, one has also awakened to the eye of God dwelling within oneself. The act of seeing becomes reciprocal, even indistinguishable: God’s gaze and the human gaze merge.

This statement prompts a gospel of unity, humility, and wonder. Barriers dissolve; spiritual seeking is an odyssey not toward something wholly “other,” but into the depths where “I” and “Thou” meet. Perceiving this unity shifts the spiritual journey from one of striving for distant transcendence to an intimate recognition: the Divine is encountered in the act of contemplation itself, using a shared “eye” that belongs to both at once.