The Cloud of Unknowing (Shambhala Pocket Library Book 19)

by Anonymous

Everyone has reasons to be sad, but if you are someone who feels your existence deeply, you’ll experience sorrow in an especially profound way. Compared to this, every other sadness seems a charade. To be aware you’re alive is genuinely painful, but if you’re fortunate enough to feel not merely who you are but that you are, you understand more than others do why sorrow is universal and inescapable.

We’re meant to be grateful for the gift of life. God gave us this precious present. But it’s also OK to wish with every moment that you could lose your awareness and feeling of your own being.

When beginners in the school of devotion hear lectures on godly sorrow and God-longing and are told to lift up their hearts to God with an unceasing desire to feel his love, sometimes their too-clever minds misinterpret this spiritual instruction superficially to mean that they should strain themselves physically and emotionally. So they push their bodies to do the work that only grace can do. They’re conceited and too inexperienced to know that intellectual vanity robs a person of grace and only leads to mental, physical, or emotional injury. But they think they can accomplish the work of contemplative prayer themselves, without grace, so they try and in a very short time, they exhaust themselves.

Also, pseudo-contemplative experiences and their unbelievable, wrong knowledge are as varied as each human is uniquely surprising in temperament and lifestyle. That’s equally true for those who practice real contemplative prayer. It’s different for each individual.

As you increase the joy in your contemplative work, you also increase its humility and genuine spirituality, but if you force it, your efforts sink into a crude physicality.

harsh straining in contemplative work is hard on our bodies and emotions, and it also has the sheer dryness that results when the dew of grace is absent.

I’m going to advise you to play a sort of game with God, seriously. Pretend you don’t want what you want as much as you want it. When you feel that beast, desire, stirring inside you with tremendous power, restrain it. Act as if you don’t want God to find out how much you long to see him, know him, and feel him. Hide all that.

Here’s one reason you should hide the longing of your heart from God. He sees the yearning you hide more clearly than what you bare, and your desire is fulfilled more quickly. There’s no better way of “showing” him what you want. Here’s another reason I believe this approach works. Learning to conceal what you wish revealed will wean you from a dependence on your fragile, fickle human emotions and deepen the purity of your spiritual awareness. Finally, this way helps you tie the spiritual knot of burning love between you and God in a mystical oneness of wills.

because God is spirit, the most obvious, open petition is whatever lies hidden in the depths of your spirit, rather than anything emotional or otherwise tainted by the senses. He has an affinity with our souls, so when we panic and get stressed, straining our emotions and our bodies, we are not close to God.

But I will say this to you about the harmonies and pleasures that come in by the windows of your intellect and may be good or may be evil. Always exercise yourself in this blind, heartfelt, joyful longing of love that is contemplation, and I have no doubt that it will tell you all about them and teach you to distinguish which is which. If you’re somewhat astonished at first by these strange and unfamiliar spiritual delights, contemplative prayer will help you with them because it binds your heart and keeps you calm, giving you the presence of mind to wait. You won’t endorse these until they’ve been fully approved, either from within by God’s wonderful Spirit, or from without, on the advice of some discerning spiritual mentor.

So I encourage you—bow eagerly to love. Follow its humble stirrings in your heart. Let it guide you in this life, and it will bring you safely to eternal bliss in the next. Love is the essence of all goodness. Without it, no kind work is ever begun or finished. Simply put, love is a good will in harmony with God. When you have it, you get supreme satisfaction and joy from everything he does.

Now I’m sure you see why it’s important that we focus our attention wholly on this humble stirring of love in the will. As for every other physical delight or spiritual gift, no matter how wonderful or how holy, I say with all due respect that we should take no notice of them.

When gentle emotions and tears come, an experienced love accepts them for the nourishment and comfort they provide the body’s senses, but it doesn’t grumble when they’re missing because it’s genuinely happy not to have them, if that’s God’s will.

When something is meant to be understood figuratively, we shouldn’t take it literally.

So seek this gift, and let grace help you. Those who have it learn to control themselves and their lives through it. When necessary, you’ll have the discernment to read the temperaments and needs of everyone you meet. You’ll also develop a knack for identifying with and making yourself at home with anyone, even stubborn sinners, without losing your essential personhood or falling into sin yourself—to the amazement of all. And through God’s grace, your gentle spirit will draw others to the work of contemplation. Too, if you’re a true contemplative, your life and words will overflow with spiritual wisdom, compassion, and fruitful insight, because you’re sure to measure out what you say carefully and calmly, eschewing lies and speaking without the shrill pretense of hypocrites.

I completely agree that if we feel moved during worship, we should lift up our flesh-and-blood eyes and hands, but I believe just as strongly that when we do the work of the spirit, we don’t actually move up or down or from side to side or forward or backward. Contemplative love has no up, down, left, right, front, or back. We experience it spiritually, unlimited by physical dimensions.

Every earthly revelation has a spiritual significance. I believe that if we humans were more spiritual, we wouldn’t need visions. These are given whenever someone hasn’t quite grasped an invisible spiritual lesson and needs a visual to go with it. We must learn to pull off this rough husk and feed on its sweet kernel.

anyone who longs for heaven is already there in spirit. The highway to heaven is measured by desires, not by feet. Our longing is the most direct route.

If you want to find your soul, look at what you love. That’s where your soul lives, just as it lives in your body, giving it life.

So be careful. Don’t take spiritual truths literally, even though they’re described with familiar words like up or down, in or out, behind or ahead, and on one side or another. We can’t not use these physical metaphors. No matter how spiritual something is, if we want to discuss it—since speech is a physical act made by the tongue that is part of the body—obviously we must use physical words. But how do we understand these? Do we take them literally? No, we learn to understand them spiritually.

From now on, whenever you come across the word yourself in spiritual books, remember that it refers to your soul, not to your body, and that your contemplative work is judged on the merit of your soul’s focus in it. The contours and worth of your contemplation depend on the objects of your spirit’s concentration and on whether your soul is looking at what’s below, within, or above you.

I call some of the powers of the soul major and others minor—not because the soul can be split into parts, because obviously it can’t, but its powers work with matters that can be analyzed into two categories: major or spiritual concerns and secondary or physical matters. Reason and will are the soul’s two major active powers. They work solely by themselves to accomplish all spiritual advancements, with no help from the secondary powers. On the other hand, imagination and sensuality work through the body’s five senses in the arena of the material, with things both present and absent, but they alone can’t help us understand creation. We need reason and will to know the virtue and nature of other creatures and their reasons for being here and for doing what they do. That’s why reason and will are called major powers, because only they work in the sphere of the spiritual. Imagination and sensuality are considered secondary because their activity is confined to the body and its five senses. The mind is also regarded as a major power because it spiritually comprehends not only all of the other powers but also all of the objects on which they work.

Reason is the power that helps us distinguish the evil from the good, the bad from the worse, the good from the better, the worse from the worst, and the better from the best. Before humanity sinned, reason did all of this naturally, but now reason and original sin are so fused that reason cannot do the work of discernment unless grace illuminates its blindness. Reason and its object are comprehended and contained in the mind.

Will is the power that helps us choose the good that has been selected by reason. It also helps us love and desire this good and rest in God, completely confident and joyful. Before humanity knew sin, the will was never deceived. It decided, loved, and acted with integrity. The will experienced and appreciated the real worth of everything then. Now it can’t, unless grace blesses its work. Infected by original sin, the will often delights in choosing something that only looks good, but is actually evil. The will and its object are contained and comprehended in the mind.

Imagination is the power that helps us form mental images of anything present or absent. Like reason and will, imagination and its work are contained in the mind. Before sin, imagination obeyed reason the way a good servant obeys its master—completely.

Unless imagination is restrained by the illumination of grace in our ability to reason, we’re plagued night and day by unhealthy images

Sensuality is the power that affects and controls our body’s perceptions. It allows us to know and experience all of physical creation, both pleasant and unpleasant. It works in two ways: it looks after our physical needs, and it also serves the pleasures of the five senses.

Like reason, will, and imagination, sensuality and its objects are contained in the mind. Before sin, our sensuality was so obedient to the will—as if it were its servant—that it never led the will down the wrong path. Unwholesome excess was never suggested, inordinate feelings of affection or dislike weren’t possible, and all bogus spiritual experiences were unknown.

If grace doesn’t rule the will, our sensuality never learns to suffer the consequences of original sin, because this submission requires humility.

We must also teach ourselves self-control for two reasons: so that we don’t lust after the wonderful necessities of life and so that we don’t rejoice too much in the absence of unpleasant but soul-nourishing godly sorrow.

When your mind is occupied with anything material, no matter how worthwhile, remember that this physical matter naturally ranks “below” you and that you are “outside” your spirit, but when your mind focuses on the mysterious nature of your soul’s faculties and on their complex behavior, you grow in self-knowledge. This introspection teaches you how each of the soul’s powers strengthens virtues and heals vices in you and in others on the same spiritual journey. During such self-reflection, you’re “within” yourself and are “on the same level” as your potential. Eventually, this analysis of soul will teach you who you are. You mature along the path of purification. Best of all, when your mind is focused on nothing physical or spiritual, it’s solely engaged with God’s very essence. This is the work of contemplation,

When contemplation makes you one with God in spirit, love, and will, you’re “above” yourself because you’ve only reached that state by grace and not by your own efforts.

during contemplative prayer steer clear of withdrawing into yourself. I also don’t want you outside, above, behind, or on one side or the other of yourself. “Where then,” you ask, “will I be? If I take your advice, I’ll end up ‘nowhere’!” You’re right. Well said. That’s exactly where I want you, because nowhere physically is everywhere spiritually. Make sure that your contemplative work is fully detached from the physical.

Persevere in contemplation with a renewed longing in your will to have God, remembering that your intellect cannot possess him.

So abandon the world’s “everywhere” and “something” in exchange for this infinitely more valuable nowhere and nothing.

Also remember that you can more easily feel this nothing than see it. It can be experienced but not grasped.

When a person experiences this nothing, the soul is blinded by an abundance of spiritual light, and not by actual darkness or by an absence of physical light.

So who labels this “nothing”? That would be our outer self. Our inner self calls it “all,” because experiencing this “nothing” gives us an intuitive sense of all creation, both physical and spiritual, without paying special attention to any one thing.