" nada, nada "...

The highest examples of Christian mysticism take the path of "nada, nada", (no-thing, no-thing), as found in the teaching of Saint John of the Cross. This teaching is really very much the same as the "neti, neti" teaching of Advaita Vedanta. We can not really know in any affirmative way, what or who God is, we can only know by a kind of "unknowing". We can only really know what and who God is not, rather than what or who God is....We can know that God is not this, not that....neti, neti, nada, nada....And this unknowing is also how we come to know who and what WE are because essentially, we ARE God at the core of our very beingness, our most basic sense of existence consciousness here and now..

This type of "negative" mystical teaching is pointing to the truth that the light of Divine Presence/Pure Consciousness/God is actually complete darkness to the mind/intellect/senses. The light of God's presence that is experienced in the practice of contemplative prayer or Atma Vichara (Self Investigation/resting in essential existential presence) empties these faculties of all merely human knowledge and understanding and puts the contemplative in touch with a mystical light that is darkness, a proclamation of the divine word that is silence.

God/Pure Consciousness/Awareness/Presence is absolutely beyond anything we can picture in our imagination or intellect, or conceive of in abstract concepts. We "know" it by simply resting in our being of it, by loving it and not by an "understanding" of it based on some kind of abstract philosophical or conceptual knowledge or indoctrinated ideas about it.....The best and most accurate thing we can ever say about it in words is always simply, "neti, neti, nada, nada......not this, not that.

Those who share this "knowledge" with others must be abiding and living experientially in the wordless presence in order for their words to have any power at all to illuminate anyone. They share this "knowing" of "unknowing" much more by their presence than they do by their words.....The words of any teaching or teacher, no matter how seemingly profound and "clear", are simply humble vehicles of the ineffable, wordless presence.


Francis Bennett