Gelassenheit

I’ve mentioned before here Martin Heidegger’s use (after Meister Eckhart) of the term Gelassenheit, but it is only recently that I’ve come to realise how closely it expresses my own experience. In a fascinating essay on the Metanoia website, Viktorija Lipič writes on exactly this:

…meditative thinking (or meditative contemplation) is understood as a form of receptivity and attentive waiting, while at the same time remaining open to what is (by contrast, not limiting oneself or determining one’s expectations to what one ought to be open to, ought to receive, ought to wait for etc.). It is a dwelling in openness…

For Heidegger, Gelassenheit holds within itself two main attributes: a) a releasement toward things and b) an openness to mystery. Releasement is one of the main aspects of what is our true nature. This nature by default also includes openness, and through this openness allows us to have an instantaneous and uninterrupted connection to Being. Releasement must therefore include openness and allow openness to come into being, allowing the being to open itself (to mystery) through releasement.

Releasement can be further separated into two elements: releasement from, and releasement to (this can also be thought of as ‘authentic releasement’). It is important to point out that meditative thinking is “not a simple opening to Being, as the nature of authentic releasement (or releasement to) might suggest, for it involves a resolve in regard to Being” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 26). Rather, it is in meditative contemplation that we are open to Being, and in the steadfastness of being open, are exposed to it (i.e., Being). What reveals Being, is therefore, as Heidegger would say, an “in-dwelling” in Being itself.

An exploration of Gelassenheit through Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger

In many ways, Gelassenheit reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s sense that presence in the Now is the openness to Being itself (The Power of Now, pp.64-65), but perhaps its most immediate resonance is with Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance:

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.”

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Radical Acceptance, pp. 315, 317

The number of words I’ve used here, and their apparently challenging nature, in fact totally belies the ease and simplicity of Gelassenheit itself. This “lett[ing] go into what is seen” is such a natural, instinctive thing to do that what is amazing is that somehow we’ve forgotten how to do it, and that for most of us it is only found (again?) after many cumulative hours of practice.

Amusingly enough, this last week I’ve been suffering with a particularly baroque example of the common cold; in facing an uncomfortable and inglorious illness like that, acceptance, and an openness to what merely is, transforms what could otherwise be an infuriating and miserable waste of time into something precious and valuable – the nose taking on the role of an oyster, perhaps. Of course it’s not that a stinking cold is in and of itself a pleasure; merely that if you truly don’t fight it, it has all sorts of hidden gifts and little revelations, places of peace and stillness concealed among the sniffles and the shivers.

The loveliness of open acceptance opens onto the field of Being almost directly – that is the entirely unexpected thing. There is nothing else to do, no extra technique to learn, no final supreme effort. The “vast and shining presence” simply is, and is isness in itself. There is no river to cross, no high and jagged peaks to climb; it was there all along, and we never knew.

[First published 16/6/2025]