Beyond Why

“If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: ‘Why are you living?” life, if it could only answer, would only say this: ‘I live so that I may live.’ That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living. If anyone asks a truthful man who works out of his own ground: ‘Why are you performing your works?’ and if he were to give a straight answer, he would only say, ‘I work so that I may work.’”
— Everything as Divine: The Wisdom of Meister Eckhart, Sermon 5B

Eckhart was a Thomist, a thinker in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. Everything has an essence, and its nature is to be what it is. The nature of Life is to be living; the nature of Being is to Be; the nature of Love is to Love. When we get past all the clinging and aversion within our minds, we arrive at our own essence, the “Ground” as Eckhart calls it here, which is the Ground of all things. And from this source, we don’t have to ask a lot of “why” questions. Things just are as they are.

This same Ground has been inspiring spiritual thinkers since the dawn of human awareness. Consider this passage from the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.