Neti, Neti (not this, not that) - The Way of Paradox

The Sanskrit expression "neti, neti" means “Not this, not that" (from the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita). Benedictine priest Cyprian Smith, in The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart (1995), beautifully explains that contradictions are one way Spirit forces the mind to recognize that there is a higher truth:

We call the way taught by Eckhart The Way of Paradox because it is founded on the tension between opposites. If the Eye of the Heart were fully open, and we had attained complete Divine Knowledge, we would see that these contraries are all contained finally in an all-embracing unity. God and Man… are ultimately all one…. But we cannot reach this perception save through … the coming together of opposites.

This tension has to be experienced on two levels: first, in daily living; second in thought and speech. Another word for it is crucifixion, for the Cross is the perfect symbol of the tension between opposites, and the all-embracing unity in which they are reconciled… No part of me… can get through to God without passing through the clash of contraries…

This is baffling for the normal human mind, which works on the logical Principle of Contradiction, according to which a proposition cannot be both true and false at one and the same time. But according to Eckhart, that is exactly what the the highest truth is. It transcends the  Principle of Contradiction, and can be grasped only through paradox…

The purpose of paradox, too, is the same in both Eckhart’s Christianity and Buddhist Zen, that is, not to deny or destroy the human mind with nonsense, but to bring the normal human intellect to the awareness of its own limitations, and thus open it up to the possibility of a higher kind of knowing...

In practice, we tend to cling to one or several of the various forms in which God has revealed himself, as if they were the end rather than the means; the goal rather than the path leading to the goal. Yet this too is idolatry, and the genuine spiritual intellect, once awake, will have none of it.  The God revealed in Christ and preached by Eckhart is a transcendent God; he is not any of the finite, limited things he has made, however good or holy they may be. God is not anything that can be grasped by the senses, pictured by the imagination, or understood by the mind.  

… To accept and worship God in his transcendence… requires great courage because it means a leap into the void, it means abandoning things which are familiar, safe, secure. But it has some advantages…

The first is the allure of mystery… To say that at the heart of the world lies a mystery, is to glimpse the possibility that it may have some kind of ultimate meaning; that it may after all be worthwhile.

The second attraction of the transcendent God is the lure of adventure. A transcendent God is one who cannot be pinned down, controlled, or predicted… Safety and security have their own appeal, but on their own they cannot fully satisfy.

The third attraction of the transcendent God is the lure of truth… As we grow into the truth, the projections are cast aside; instead of seeing God as we would like him to be, we come closer to seeing him as he really is… The art is to withdraw the projection with great care and delicacy, so that what emerges at the end is not a hopeless vacuum but a deeper truth… We want a union with God which is, in Eckhart’s words, ohne mittel, im-mediate, not mediated through an image…

The Transcendent God is a truth which can only be realized gradually by a progressive stripping away of the veils. The first veil to remove is that of the material world… The second veil to be removed is more inward, concerned with our mental, imaginative and emotional life…

Since the Incarnation of Christ no one has the right to suggest that the use of religious images is wrong, either in theology or in worship… Eckhart wants us not to discard the images or cast them aside, but so to speak, to look through them, look beyond them to the Reality which they reflect and which we cannot as yet see.

Eckhart speaks of a “pure” prayer that does not use images or concepts, the type of prayer taught by Evagrius and the the author of The Cloud of Unknowing… Such prayer takes us to the simple Ground, into the silent Desert…