Rumi was a thirteenth century Persian Sufi poet and mystic. Meister Eckhart was a fourteenth century German Dominican theologian. The Baal Shem Tov was an eighteenth century Ukrainian rabbi who founded Hasidic Judaism. They lived in different centuries, different countries, different religious traditions, and they almost certainly never heard of each other.
They were describing the same experience.
Rumi wrote in the Masnavi: I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside. The knocking from the inside is not a metaphor about prayer. It is a description of the mystic's central insight: the thing being sought is not elsewhere. The seeker is already inside what is being sought.
Meister Eckhart wrote: The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye. This is Christian mysticism at its most direct and it got Eckhart into significant trouble with the Church because it sounded too close to claiming identity with God. But Eckhart was not claiming to be God. He was describing a kind of direct perception in which the usual subject-object distinction breaks down.
The Baal Shem Tov taught that God is present in everything, including in evil thoughts, because evil thoughts are created by God and contain a divine spark waiting to be released and elevated. The practice of the Hasid was not to repress or flee from difficult experiences but to find the divine presence within them. This is the Jewish mystical tradition's version of the same insight: the sacred is not separate from the world but hidden within it.
What these three teachers share is an emphasis on direct experience over doctrinal knowledge. You cannot think your way to what they are describing. You have to arrive somewhere through practice, through silence, through surrender, through what Eckhart called Gelassenheit, a German word meaning letting go or releasement. The traditions differ on the practices. They converge on what the practices are for.
The mystics have always been a minority within their traditions and they have always been suspected by the orthodox majority. Their language is too direct, their claims too large, their disregard for institutional structures too obvious. But they are also the ones who seem to have actually found what the traditions say they are looking for. That is worth paying attention to, regardless of which tradition you come from.
Traditions Covered