“When one enters the deeper layers of contemplative prayer one sooner or later experiences the void, the emptiness, the nothingness, the darkness, the unknowing, the profound mystical silence. All these words point to the same reality. Yes, it is as though there is within me an immense and bottomless void. And when one first experiences this void there is an absence of thought and imaginative pictures, and perhaps there is a certain forgetfulness, as forms are buried beneath a cloud of forgetting. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing, and even on the mountain nothing.’ But the nothing is all; the emptiness is fullness, the void is plentitude. To experience the vast inner nothing is to experience the vast inner all. It is to experience the ‘eternal now.’ This is the doctrine of St. John of the Cross and the whole apophatic tradition which he represents.”

– William Johnson, Letters to Contemplatives