Also read: Negation of ideas can open the doors to salvation
Thomas Edison had conducted over nine thousand experiments trying to device a new storage battery but not a single one succeeded. One of his friends, Walter Mallory, overcome with sympathy said, "Isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven't been able to get any results?" Edison replied with a smile, "Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work."
This little story tells us so much about the approach of assertion by way of negation, which the renowned eighth century CE philosopher Shankara propagated. The Sanskrit term for this is "neti neti" (na iti = not this) which essentially means "not this, not that." Read more.