Every tradition has the same embarrassment. Somebody reaches the thing everybody is aiming at, comes back, and cannot say anything useful about it. The reports are vague, they contradict each other, and they lean on words like ineffable which explain nothing.
The usual excuses are that language is too coarse, or that the hearer is unprepared, or that the teacher is guarding a secret. This material offers a fourth explanation, and it is structural rather than apologetic. So the question is worth asking as a complaint rather than a mystery. Why can nobody tell you what it was like?
The state is described first, and the description proceeds entirely by subtraction. To bind all things together inside one's own being, one must reach the Awareness of the Limitless Nothing — Unborn, Unbeing, Unbounded, Unilluminate, Unmanifest.1 Five negations, and nothing positive offered anywhere in the list.
Then the operative distinction, which the whole page depends on. In that state the "me" is erased and only "I" remain.1 Those are two different things, and the difference carries the whole argument. The me is the one with a history, a name and a position; the I is what is left when those go.
And the promise attached is conditional on the erasure. If the "me" can die and be born again Now, "I" will live eternally.1 In the Now nothing is repeatable and everything is everlasting — everything occurs eternally, because it is happening now.1
Now the argument proper, and it is a logical one rather than a mystical one. This is called the Ultimate Experience which cannot be experienced, but which one must be.2
The reasoning is given in a single step. If you are the Experience, you cannot really experience It — because to experience anything, you must be separate from that which is experienced.2 Experience is a relation, and a relation needs two terms.
That is a genuinely tight claim and it is worth sitting with, because it explains the failure without appealing to anything mysterious. Nobody is being coy and nothing is being withheld. The condition described removes the second term, and with it the possibility of experience in the ordinary sense.
The consequence for reporting follows immediately. It is impossible to tell anybody what this Experience is like, because the me — the medium through which the Experience is to be transmitted — is no more, and only I am.3
So the difficulty is not that the state is too large for language. It is that the thing which would do the reporting has been removed as a condition of the state. A report requires a reporter with a position, and having a position is exactly what has gone.
One route is left open, and it is offered without elaboration. The state cannot be explained or related in words or actions, but might be imparted in Silence.3 Whatever that means practically, it is consistent — silence is the only transmission that does not require a transmitter to occupy a standpoint.
Then a claim that sounds paradoxical and is actually a fairly ordinary point about where knowledge lives. The Experience, the True Knowledge, is there — but the Experiencer, the knower, is not.4 Both halves are meant.
The obvious objection gets answered directly. This does not mean the Knowledge fails to exist, merely because there is nobody to know it.4 Existence and being-known are being separated, and the separation is defended by an example anybody can check.
Even ordinary, worldly knowledge — or any so-called new knowledge we learn — was always there in the Now, long before mankind knew it.4 It was there prior to its physical manifestation, before it was separated from Divine Wisdom and emanated into physical existence. Nothing was created when somebody worked it out. Something was reached.
The geometry comes next, and it is easier than it looks. Ein Sof is the Infinity of the Absence of Things, and it is both the Centre and the Circumference at once.5 Not alternately, and not from different angles.
The way in is positional. Wherever I stand is the centre, perceiving the circumference about me. And you may stand elsewhere within my circumference, seeing yourself as the centre — in which case I am part of your circumference.5 Two people, each correctly the centre, each correctly part of the other's edge.
Then the qualification that dissolves the picture as soon as it has done its work. Centre and circumference imply space — and even space does not exist within No-Thing, since space is finite with respect to its absence. So is time.5 The conclusion is flat: everything is finite, and only No-Thing, the Essence of Things, is Infinite.5
The closing movement gives the condition its properties, and then its name. Ein Sof is Absolute Ultimate Perfection, called by the Rosicrucians Perfect Peace Profound.6 It is absolute perfection because there are no distinctions within It — no differentiations whatsoever.
Then the sentence that turns emptiness into potential. Because It is not, It can be anything.6 Absolute potential, without volition, except in Its relation to Itself within Itself — and, vibrant with the potency of Nothing, It emanates Infinite Power, Now.6
That internal relation is then unpacked as a relation between two words. Contemplating Ein, Nothing, we are thinking Infinitely Small — and the term Sof, Infinite, implies Infinitely Big.6 A relationship means a sharing of power, and to relate is to use energy. The force that manifests from that relating is called Or, Light — unmanifest potential within the Infinite Nothing, and when it manifests we speak of God manifest.6
Which produces the phrase the whole argument lands on. Ein, No-Thing, is Ein Sof, Infinite No-Thing — which a child might call the "small-big."6
You have been reading reports of mystical states and finding them useless, and you would like to know whether that is your fault. Four moves, and the first is to stop blaming the reporter.
Stop treating the vagueness as a failure of the reporter, because on this account it is a structural feature. A report requires somebody in a position, and the state described removes positions. Vagueness is what a truthful account of it would look like, and a vivid detailed one would be evidence against.
Then use the me and I distinction as the practical handle, since it is the only part of this you can work with. Notice how much of what you would say about yourself belongs to the me — the history, the name, the standing, the story. That is the part described as erasable, and noticing its extent is the first move.
Then run the centre-and-circumference exercise, because it is concrete and takes a minute. Stand where you are and register that you are at the centre of everything you can perceive. Then locate somebody else in your field and register that they are equally at the centre of theirs, with you on their edge. Both are true, and holding both at once is the whole of it.
And take the small-big seriously rather than as a charming aside. A child would use that phrase without noticing the contradiction, because the categories that make it contradictory have not been installed yet. That is offered as the correct name for the condition, and it is the only name offered here that anybody could actually say out loud.
The strongest thing here is not evidence but argument, and it is unusually clean. The claim that you cannot experience what you are, because experience requires separation, follows from the definition of experience and needs no mystical premise at all.
That argument also does real explanatory work, which is the test of a good one. It predicts exactly the pattern found in the literature — reports that are unanimous about the state's importance and useless about its content — without having to accuse anybody of evasion.
Tension left open. The state is described in detail across several paragraphs, by somebody transmitting it in words, in a passage which asserts that it cannot be transmitted in words. The obvious reply is that the description is about the state rather than of it, and that reply is never made here.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The claim that all knowledge was always there in the Now, prior to anyone knowing it, is asserted with no argument and is doing considerable work. 🚩 Imparted in Silence is offered as the one available transmission and is left entirely unspecified.
Take the reporting argument at full strength and it undercuts a great deal of what a tradition does. If the highest state cannot be transmitted in words or actions, teaching it is impossible and the literature about it is beside the point. Every book on the subject, including the one this comes from, is describing a doorway it cannot lead anybody through.
Now set that beside what this same body of work spends its length doing. Fifty named exercises. Preconditions, counts, markers, contraindications. An insistence that the primary symbols have fixed meanings and must be learned exactly.
The two hold together on a division of labour that is implied throughout and never stated: technique is transmissible and the state is not. Everything the syllabus contains is a method of approach, and none of it is a description of arrival. That is a coherent position and it is what most contemplative traditions actually do.
What it leaves unresolved is verification, and the gap is real. If the state cannot be reported, then no practitioner can be told whether they have reached it, no teacher can confirm it, and the whole scheme of stages and markers stops at the last step. Markers are offered for everything up to the threshold, and by the argument's own logic none can be offered for crossing it.
A Substratum Is Not a Stage — eastern-spirituality.
Devotees keep asking why a particular deity appears as a child, and the answer opens by ruling out the obvious reading. Baṭuka child form is not a symbol of immaturity. It is a primordial purity — ādi, the seed of the universe. The childness names what is underneath, rather than what comes first.
Both traditions reach for a child at exactly this point, and for the same structural reason. A child might call it the small-big, and the child is invoked because a child would say that without noticing the contradiction — the categories that make small and big exclusive have not been installed yet. Childness marks a condition prior to the distinctions, not a condition on the way to them.
And both are emphatic that this is not immaturity, which is the reading everybody brings. That agreement across two unrelated traditions is worth something on its own, because it suggests the child image is doing work rather than being decorative.
Where they part is instructive. The Indian version makes the childness a fact about what exists — it is the deity's actual form, the ground rather than a rung. The Kabbalistic version makes it a fact about what can be said — it is what a child would call the condition, a note about vocabulary rather than about being. Which gives a usable question for any tradition that reaches for a child at its deepest point. Ask whether the child is the thing itself, or the only available speaker of it. If the first, the tradition has a positive doctrine about the ground. If the second, it has conceded that its subject can only be named by somebody who does not yet know enough to find the name absurd — and that is a much more modest and much more honest claim.
Sharpest implication. If the reporter is removed as a condition of the state, then the vagueness of mystical testimony is evidence in its favour rather than against it — and a tradition producing rich, detailed, consistent accounts of its highest condition would be describing something else entirely.
Generative questions.