Negative Knowledge

Negative knowledge (Skt: अनुपलब्धि, Anuplabdhi) has the characteristics of being neatly organised in memory. It is based on direct experience and logic. It is mostly derived out of absence of experience. So it is labelled as negative. The logical relations formed in the memory are based on that which is unmanifested (Skt: असद्रूप, Asadroop).

Negative knowledge is a state of knowledge.

"There is a no chair here". "My body was never fit and healthy", "I am not sad today", "I imagined not having a new car", "My father did not call me last week" - all these statements point to some negative experience. These things were not experienced and are there in the memory as an absence.

Note that negative does not mean bad here. It simply points to absence rather than presence.

Truth and Knowledge

Knowledge is based on Experience. All that is experienced is changing, and is therefore false. Hence all knowledge is based on that which is false. Which means all knowledge is false.

It turns out that all that can be concluded in a positive way is false knowledge.

The only true knowledge is negative knowledge. Which means we can only gather ignorance, not knowledge, and the actual knowing consists of letting go of this so called knowledge. The actual knowledge is cutting down the ignorance, not gaining knowledge. Or we can say, we "gain" knowledge only when we shed the ignorance, which is nothing but positive knowledge.