To call Eckhart a pantheist or neoplatonist is, of course, a travesty. God is without attributes. God cannot be predicated. Therefore God is other. The only sign of God is our created nature. And the center of our created nature is value itself. We have the power to recognize value. But that also means that we are a value. The value is specific to who we are, since, by nature, value is always specific. But, in our present mode of experience, value opens moment-by-moment. The value that I am is a sequence of values - a sequence of values that points to a value. If we follow the sequence, wherever it leads, we will experience the presence of God, but the presence of God, finally, is a sign, a moment of experience. But God remains beyond predication.
            This is to explain Eckhart from my perspective. But that is the nature of Eckhart. He challenges us to see God in our own nature, but a God without attributes and beyond predication. But Eckhart masters his view from the Christ question, the issue raised by the church from the first. The otherness of God is not necessarily a popular starting point for a theistic understanding. To presume that Jesus is also the necessary link, the inevitable or absolute for God, is equally inevitable for the devoted follower. That the only moment of union is the moment of denial, in the ritualistic language of the psalm, is neither here nor there. Meditate on the cross with unfeigned devotion, and God will 'appear'.
            Therefore the church itself is pantheistic. God is everywhere present, mediated by the blood of Christ. The church is also neoplatonic by filiation, but not necessarily by genetics. Plotinus rejects Christianity because it abrogates 'philosophy'.
            So Eckhart has this problem. God is everywhere present. But God is absolutely without attributes or any predication in the world. But Eckhart is the father of Einstein. The dilemma, the paradox, is an illusion. Both assertions are simultaneously true. Listen carefully to his sermons, his tracts, his commentary.
            God is in the tree. God is in the tree for the tree. But the tree is not God. God is not the tree. God is in the tree for us. The tree in us can be a sign for God. But we are not God. Our seeing and knowing are not God. But when the tree is just a tree - so that God is in the tree for the tree in my experience, and therefore my experience ceases to be me - then God is both in the tree and my 'self', since my 'self' is not other than the moment of the tree. We could call it 'value'. We could call it 'objectivity'. But these words, unfortunately, have a force of their own. God is God, without attributes or predication.
            What is our experience, then? Because the issue, then, is as much my experience as God. But Eckhart simply makes the presentation. If we follow the whole, the presentation opens our consciousness.

- Jeremy