l’Absolu

“In the Absolute, I am not, and you are not, and God (in His personal determination) is not, because He (the Absolute) is beyond the reach of all word and all thought.” Sri Ramakrishna [GTUFS: LSelf, A View of Yoga]

The Absolute is not the Absolute inasmuch as it contains aspects, but inasmuch as It transcends them. [GTUFS: UIslam, The Quran]

If we were to be asked what the Absolute is, we would reply first of all that it is necessary and not merely possible Reality; absolute Reality, hence infinite and perfect, precisely; and we would add – in conformity with the level of the question asked – that the Absolute is that which, in the world, is reflected as the existence of things. Without the Absolute, there is no existence; the aspect of absoluteness of a thing is what distinguishes it from inexistence, if one may so put it. Compared to empty space, each grain of sand is a miracle. [GTUFS: DivineHuman, The Interplay of the Hypostases]

The Absolute, or the Essence, intrinsically comprises Infinitude; it is as the Infinite that it radiates. Divine Radiation projects the Essence into the “void,” but without there being any “going out” whatsoever, for the Principle is immutable and indivisible, nothing can be taken away from it; by this projection on the surface of a nothingness that in itself is inexistent, the Essence is reflected in the mode of “forms” or “accidents.” But the “life” of the Infinite is not only centrifugal, it is also centripetal; it is alternately or simultaneously – depending on the relationships envisaged – Radiation and Reintegration; the latter is the apocatastatic “return” of forms and accidents into the Essence, without nevertheless there being anything added to the latter, for it is absolute Plenitude. Moreover, and even above all, Infinitude – like Perfection – is an intrinsic characteristic of the Absolute: it is as it were its inward life, or its love which by overflowing, so to speak prolongs itself and creates the world. [GTUFS: SufismVQ, Hypostatic Dimensions of Unity]
Only the definition of the Absolute as such is absolute, and every explanatory description belongs to relativity precisely on account of the differentiated nature of its content, which is not for that reason incorrect, to be sure, but rather, is limited and therefore replaceable; so that if one wishes to give an absolute definition of the Absolute, one has to say that God is One. “The testimony of Unity is one” (At-Tawhidu wahid), say the Sufis, and by this they mean that an expression, within the limits of its possibility, must be one with its content and its cause. [GTUFS: ChristIslam, Alternations in Semitic Monotheism]