The Dilemma of Encouraging “Nothingness”

I began my intentional spiritual journey 25 years ago. As a graduate student of chemistry in the mid-eighties I dappled with centering prayer. My intellect grabbed on to the scientific analogy between finding my “ground” or “center” and locking onto my own spiritual resonance frequency. I remember being able to “tune out” the chatter of my mind, much like shimming (fine-tuning) on an FID in an NMR experiment, trying to maximize the signal to noise ratio. Once I had spiritually “locked on to my own frequency” I was able to transcend the noise of my ego. It felt as if there was a sense of heightened awareness, or some type of enlightenment. However, I didn’t get too far with this as my ego simply gratified itself thinking that it was now at a new spiritual level! I was experiencing the generic arrogance that goes with trying to “achieve” spiritual depth.
Through the next two decades I occasionally tried to sit in silence with centering prayer, but found I gleaned more spiritual wisdom through lectio divina and dialoging with God. During these prayers I sat as openly as I could and I tried to “hear” God through His Word, through intuition, through my life’s events, and through others. St. Ignatius called this type of listening “active indifference,” where you try to be open to whichever way you discern that God is leading you, rather than you leading yourself. Occasionally, a gut feeling or a word or phrase might come to me at some random time during the day which would seem to point me in the way that God had wanted me to go. More often, over a period of time, there would be multiple coincidences that would seem to indicate a course of action desired by God. Note that these would be of a general nature and not a specific directive. Rarely, however, did I have great confidence in discerning God’s will for me and I was plagued with insatiable spiritual hunger. With my scientific mindset of optimizing the desired outcome by controlling the individual variables, this inability to know God’s will with any certainty caused me great anxiety.
At the roadblock of frustration caused by my inability to know God with certainty, my “failure” to control my relationship with Him and my lack of fulfillment in verbal prayer, I returned to the practice of centering prayer a couple of years ago. This intentional silent prayer paves the way for the possibility of contemplative prayer. Initially, I experienced a number of spiritual consolations, which drew me closer to God and satisfied my intimate longing for love and belonging. As I continued in the practice of centering prayer, the consolations diminished and I was left with just sitting faithfully in God’s presence, being as open and receptive to His love as I was able. I was aware of the lack of consolations, but I was at peace with this decrease. I had less need for them as I was in contact with the “ground of my being.”
What do I mean by the “ground of my being?” My best guess is that it is my soul; it is core to who I am and how God knows me. It is a place of pure being, in both a noun and verb sense. It has a different form than what I used to think was my soul. In fact it is formless, but seems to have some quality of heavy substance, a density to which I am drawn and yet there is a sense of nothingness. At and in this place, I just am. I am stripped down to nothing except being, being in God’s presence. There is something as foundational as to who I am at this point. I want to help others meet who they are at this point -- a naked and loved being in God’s presence. But knowing oneself at this level feels like there is “nothing” to one’s self. Perhaps it is the self emptying of self that allows one to be known in this capacity, known only by one’s core, or soul, rather than by external attributes and achievements. And yet this to me is Ultimate Knowing and Ultimate Known. This is the fundamental experience we are called to enter into, and yet it is also the big dilemma. How do you encourage others to embark on this arduous spiritual journey in hopes that they too might experience their “nothingness,” out of which they might find their true and fundamental identity?