Pure Nothing

Remember, if you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, for you are not seeking God alone. You are looking for something with God, treating God like a candle with which to look for something; and when you have found what you were looking for, you throw the candle away.

That is what you are doing: whatever you look for with God is nothing, whatever it might be, whether profit or reward or inwardness or anything at all: you are looking for nothing, and so you will find nothing. The reason why you find nothing is simply because you seek nothing. All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say they are a trifle or they are anything: they are pure nothing.

What has no being, is not. All creatures have no being, for their being consists in the presence of God. If God turned away for an instant from all creatures, they would perish. I have sometimes
said, and it is true, that he who possessed the whole world with God would have no more than if he had God by Himself. All creatures have nothing more without God than a midge would have without God - just the same, neither more nor less.

 —Meister Eckhart, from the complete mystical works, Sermon 40, page 226.