Neti neti is the shortest method in Indian philosophy and one of the hardest to actually run. The phrase means not this, not this, and it appears in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad as the way the absolute is finally described: by declining every description offered. You are not the body, because you can observe the body. Not the breath, because you notice the breath change. Not the emotions, not the thoughts, not the memories, not the roles. Each candidate is examined and set down, not because it is worthless, but because it can be observed, and whatever is doing the observing cannot be the thing observed.
The method is subtractive, and that is unusual. Most systems build toward truth by accumulating: more doctrine, more distinctions, more precise definitions. Neti neti moves in the opposite direction, and its logic is strict. Anything you can hold as an object is by definition not the subject holding it. Since the Self is the one thing that is never an object, no positive statement about it can be complete. Every sentence beginning the Self is is already treating it as something in front of you.
What makes it demanding is that it does not stop at the easy candidates. Setting aside the body is straightforward enough. Setting aside your convictions, your sense of being a person with a history, the felt sense of being someone who is doing this practice, is a different matter, because these do not feel like objects. They feel like you. The technique is really a sustained attack on adhyasa, the superimposition by which awareness gets confused with its contents, and it proceeds by removing supports rather than offering them.
Neti neti does not tell you what you are. It removes what you are not, and lets the remainder be self-evident. To see how that remainder is described elsewhere in this system, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 7 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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