Cloud of Unknowing (c. 1375)
Presented on: Tuesday, August 2, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come now to my favorite. And the theory is the far, the cloud of unknowing deserves to play alongside of the Bhagavad Gita alongside of the finest collection of Sufi stories. Long side of the project, the Paramita literature of Mahayana Buddhism, the cloud of unknowing is in fact, one of the most elegant workbooks on spiritual discipline in the world. We know absolutely nothing about its author. He has no name. It is not even possible to identify with any certainty when he was born or when he died, where he lived, what he did. We know that he was English. We know that he lived sometime around the middle of the 14th century and we have in fact, other works from his pen confirmed by stylistic presentation, confirmed by vocabulary usage and all kinds of modern literary analytical tests. One of the world's most interesting perhaps to you, it was a very short introduction to the mystical teachings of Dionysius theory, opera Jay, and in the middle anguish, it was called Dionisy. He heed divinity.
And, uh, in this, uh, short little work, which is actually a presentation of the mystical theology of Dionysius, the Areopagite the very first paragraph bears. This description. Men can attain to this hidden deity by putting away all that is not God. So in one succinct probing sentence of integrity, we have the essential posture in terms of expressive accuracy of purpose of the author, of the cloud of unknowing. Since we have absolutely nothing to talk about in terms of the author, we have no way really to work in men with, uh, any monastic model, uh, establishment. There are no friends, so we need by necessity as he would surely have had it go to his work, the cloud of unknowing and in the cloud of unknowing, it is addressed to my friend in God. And now will he have seen this before in the 14th century of individuals who were both experienced in terms of inner life, interior exploration and experienced also in the sense of educators or directors of the progress of persons going through these stages of the inner life, the interior castle, always the works from their pen designate that the writing that is being now read and delivered by them is actually to be of practical usage, not on the level of advice, but on the level of exacting direction for the interior development.
We have seen the ladder of perfection last week from Walter Hilton, which reaches a very high level of sophistication indeed. But now we come to one of those works that seemed to take a quantum jump beyond excellence into a realm that is hardly conceivable, hardly believable to us. We live in an age, unfortunately, where we are schooled meticulously and a kind of primordial doubt, a materialistic doubt. And we tend to view other human beings as more or less like ourselves. And we can understand where there is talent or whether a skill, but it scarcely occurs to us that there are from time to time individuals who in their excellence transcend all bounds of decorum. They simply are masters. And so our great masterful unknown friend in the cloud of unknowing wishes to present to us in 75 chapters, very, very short 75 chapters, a complete view of the spiritual life.
And towards this end for the first half of the work, he makes certain that we start from scratch and begin to feel our way through the possibilities that are being offered to us. And only after the first half of exploration, does the author then assume that anyone who has red dust far, anyone who has come along with him to that point deserves to have the ride on the Eagle and he takes off. And he goes into the beyond and very, very swiftly out distances, almost anything that we have seen thus far great though. They have been. So at the very beginning, he describes in the very first chapter that there are in fact initially as a conceptual guideline for States to the religious life. And he's careful not to say that this is a axiomatic basis. It is not a geometry yet. That in terms of what can be said of the physical world, the material world, the conceptual world, that we could well be advised to conceive at least tentatively temporarily in our sensibility, four distinct stages.
And the stages are these. There is a common life which all humans seem to share in general, the common life. Then in that common life, there is a potential for a special capacity. There are special moments. There are even sequential special developments that we recognize in retrospect, as having been extraordinary in terms of our law, then beyond the common and the special, there is a stage of life, which he calls the solitary and in the solitary, we purposely begin to sense a capacity in ourselves for perception of a range of experience, which is beyond our common or special reckoning. And thus, it occurs to us in momentary flashes from time to time and perhaps through discipline and more enduring durational episodes, the capacity to experience what he calls the solitary life and that the solitary life progressively takes us a way from the common and even away from the special and hints to us of a fourth stage of life, which he calls the perfect, the perfect life.
And he counsels us to conceive just generally and our sensibility that the common, the special even the solitary life can be lived in this world, in this body, but that the perfect life is a qualitative transcendent beyond even the solitary life. And it cannot be completed in this world, in this form as it is. He very late in the book in one flashing insight sentence says that after judgment day after this world has refined itself into total perfection, there will come a time when human beings in their material perfected phase will move anywhere in the universe, as quick as a thought might fly. But that, until that happens, we must take the insight that the perfect life is not completed here is completed only. And then he will use the term a little bit colloquially at this point completed only in heaven. Thus, the perfect life can be engender here. It can be pursued to great extent, surprisingly great extent here, but can be completed only in heaven, not here and in. This is an insight of great spiritual capacity for were way to even suppose for a second or a nanosecond that the spiritual life could be led perfectly here. We would never arrest with any kind of growth, any kind of capacity until we had mastered it. And the conundrum is that the perfect life cannot be mastered.
It is not subject to our manipulation. And therefore the most wise caution that the perfect life is not ended here, allays in perpetuity that nagging suspicion that maybe I could do it all here, gets rid of that. So that one of the most hidden roots of pride are, is in a suspension is not allowed to take hold. And the author is extremely careful whenever he brings up the possibilities for empowerment in the sense of having capacity to do, he generally we'll give it a context which cautions us against trying to willfully Ben to our own purposes, saying always here is a clear and present danger do not go this way. It is better to be in suspension. It is better to fail. It is better not even to read this book or even try to live that life.
Then just subject it to these perversions. Okay. And he will be quite specific and go into this. So the four kinds of life, the common, the special, the solitary and the perfect in the second chapter, he extends a very helpful outlook. He says that we received an invitation. We received a divine invitation and attraction that there are many ways in which we begin to probe and develop delve into this, uh, staging of life. But that the best is when there is an invitation and attraction. Okay, well, one that we cannot put a language upon. We cannot describe it exactly in words, except that it occurs again and yet another time and yet more. And again, and that this invitation seems to invite us, to offer up ourselves as a receptive participation in some grand motion. And that as we statically, we conceive ourselves. We are unable from static form to participate in this formal motion.
And therefore he said exactly in the center of the crowd of unknowing, that God is a spirit. And that man moving in his spiritual way, that is the image and the likeness of God, not any static image, nothing that could be imagined, nothing that the memory could serve up in any way. Nothing that reason could refine with great accuracy, nothing that the will insist upon, however, humbly or not. So humbly, nothing that in the world of sensuality could present itself to the wholesomeness of the individual that the attraction and the invitation are in fact, from a region from which no descriptive accuracy whatsoever can be had. And thus, he will call it the cloud of unknowing.
And he says between man, and God is a cloud of annoying, which will not be dispersed in this lifetime. And this is not all, not only are we to face a perpetual cloud of unknowing above us, separating us from what issues, the invitation for what purposes this invitation has been issued. But we are encouraged increasingly to create a, another cloud below ourselves, the cloud of forgetting between ourselves and the world. And we are encouraged to float without assurance in between two clouds, one of unknowing, and one of forgetting, in other words, to suspend ourselves in an infinite and indefinite area and extent of experience, we therefore, he says, must school ourselves to wait in a perpetual darkness and not to have the reactions that naturally would come faced with the uncertainty, the darkness, the unknown aspect of it, not to Cavill against it, not to seek some sort of parity with it, not to look for handles and angles in order to master it, not to position imaginative lights, to portion it out and carve it up, but to wait in this cloud of unknowing for what can only be called God's mercy mercy.
Now, it's interesting that the author here injects mercy, because quite often in the Christian mystical literature, you hear a great deal about love, which we have. And you hear a great deal about wisdom, which we have and wisdom and love, obviously major moving identifiable qualities, but we hear very little about mercy, and yet it is mercy. That is the linking triad. The third quality that brings love and wisdom into an equanimity, that it is mercy. That in fact powers, the higher levels of spiritual life. One can begin with wisdom. And one can think of the wisdom literature of the old Testament. One can think of the wisdom of the, uh, uh, basic, uh, Hindu Vedas. One can think of the wisdom of a basic Buddhism. Most of the world's religions have at their core at their beginning horizon of development and expression in the very ground of their manifestation, the moving notions of wisdom, and these almost inevitably mature into the understanding of love and its profundity, but only after wisdom and love have been seen and understood, experienced and felt come into play.
Does that third level, that horizon beyond our control, totally someone once said in a graffiti that I read with great happiness in San Francisco, it is 100% out of your hands. Don't worry. That is mercy. That is mercy. Mercy is 100% out of your hands. Mercy is a gift freely given. There's no way to have it other than to experience the bestowal of it, which is why like in the Mariana, they buddy SATA of mercy is a Volokh teach FARA, which actually means she who looks down from on high so that there is a flowing down from on high. And he, uh, the author of the cloud of unknowing makes a great deal later on about the words up and in and saying, these are misunderstood all the time. They have no physical reference. They do not mean up here. That does not mean those stars. They're not mean that aspiration, but that the op in the end have spiritual connotations, not limited to objective reference, but in a motion of wholeness that develops beyond the individual in the cloud of unknowing.
So then he gives us in the fourth chapter and you can see how pregnant this is. We're only at the fourth chapter. He gives us the quantum physics of the 14th century. He tells us about the fact that as I will quote him, this work does not need a long time for its completion. Indeed it is the shortest work that can be imagined. All of the spiritual development happens in the shortest time imaginable. And he will go on to say that this is in fact mysteriously or not the only time in which it could happen. And what is the shortest time imaginable? It is. He writes no longer, no shorter than one atom, which as a philosopher of astronomy will tell you as the smallest division of time.
Now we are duped to thinking and atom refers to space. We have a spatiality complex in our time, sorry for the pun. One atom of time is the durational moment, which makes up the real flaw of the universe. And it is only in terms of that unit, that primordial reality that God can be experienced. And it is therefore a very difficult task for a man to come down from his high horse of imagined worlds, to gear himself down by discipline and humility, to come down to the real measurement of the universe. The time of the one atom at a time that the problem with man is that he is very sloppy, that he imagines all kinds of colors and forms, but that they are way away from the actual reality that is in that single moment. And in fact, man's image structure is prime more Julie geared to the atomic time of the universe.
And there's only one. He realizes that in fact, his own single impulse of will on a spiritual level is exactly that atomic time, a single impulse of will, which is the chief part of the soul. And when he has perceptual contact with reality has refined itself to that point. Can he understand that he could never have fit through any other threshold or portal to the divine? Because there is none there's only one and it occurs all the time, but only occurs in those atomic moments of reality. And only when man sinks himself in synchronicity with the pulse and beat of the universe, can he understand what is real and what he is other than that, he has only indefinitely illusion.
So he gives us then further because it is so small that it cannot be analyzed, which is why the reason she says is a major function of our mind, very valuable and eventually totally useless has no capacity because it can't analyze down to that level. It is almost beyond our grasp. It is in fact, right at the very edge of our grass, so that we almost have to cooperate with that, which we would grasp in order to sense it, that we can't get enough purchase on even to curl one knuckle around it. We can only meet it. And therefore we have to school ourselves spiritually to understand by a sense of whole touch of the pulse of reality, because that's all we have. That's all we are capable of. There is nothing else. We can't take it home and look at it. We can't put it in our pocket and save it.
We can't even say it's ours. We can only meet it through the fullness and the true humility of our approach. Thus, he writes it is almost beyond our grasp yet. It is. As long as the time of which it has been written quote all the time that is given to thee, it shall be asked to be how thou has spent it. And he will go on to say that, in fact, in our meditation, in our prayer, we school ourselves to rise up and fill the total height, the length and the breadth, the depth and duration of our spiritual tone or spiritual capacity. We need to be that full. We have to experience in that fullness because that fullness is there in the atomic moments of the impulses of the core of the soul and it's real motion and movement.
And it is quite right. He writes that you should have to give account of it. It is neither shorter, nor longer than a single impulse of your own will the chief part of your soul for there can be as many movements or desires of your will within the hour. As there are atoms of time. If grace had restored your soul to the state of Adam's soul before the fall, the state of Adam's soul before the fall, you would be in control of your, every impulse, not impulse as impulse to do something but impulse rather than the electronic connotation, every beat of your spiritual heart, that impulse, if you recall last weekend, a ladder of perfection that Walter Helton spoke of the image of Adam before the fall was absolutely nothing at all had no thingness had no objectivity had only a universality, which one conceived by the finite mind occurred to one as nothing, because there was not a capacity to analyze that either so that we find ourselves struggling mightily to no avail between two infinities that are not analyzable, the exact moment of temporal unity of creation and our affinity primordial, Julie structurally, with that and the other, the wholeness in order to give ourselves some image base within which to be sane within which one can be productive within which one could expressively at least talk, uh, towards what one would hope to achieve.
We therefore fall upon his vocabulary of say the grand, the magnificent, the macro aspect of the university as a cloud of unknowing. We just don't know we do experience it. We do move in it. We suspend ourselves indefinitely in it, even though we would experience it initially as a darkness and on the micro level, we engender in parallel to the cloud of unknowing, a cloud of forgetting, which we then experience increasingly as a possibility of mirroring in our own capacity, in the image of that, which created us to engender, right? The cloud of unknowing, the cloud of forgetting, therefore he says, and of course this is extraordinarily apt. He is putting his finger exactly on a place where contemporary physics and contemporary astronomy would have no difficulty understanding. They miraculous perception of someone 600 years ago about the real structural nature of our universe.
He says, if any man, we're so refashioned by the grace of God that he heated every impulse of his will, he would never be without some sense of the eternal sweetness, even in this life, nor without its full realization in the bliss of heaven. So do not be surprised if I urge you on. He writes it is this very thing that man would be doing today. If he had not sent, as you will be hearing later for this was manmade and all else was made to help him achieve this end. We are made, we are created, we are exactly functional, perfectly in a life sequencing in a reality pulsation, which totally transcends this phenomenal realm so much so that the cream of the possibilities of this life are sheer wreckage and junk compared to it. This of course is difficult to believe. And this is why he says that we have to assume that at some time in the past, man had a fall from his prime Orgill condition because he would never have known any other reality than what the universe was.
In fact, if it had not occurred, think of it, what you will. He says, something has brought man to the impasse to not even recognize himself, to mistake an image in a mirror as being somewhat accurate of what he really is to mistake some life where one could possess objects in some array and be able to manipulate, uh, beings in some sequence as to give us the illusion of certainty, the delusion that we are leading a life that we have a reality. And later on, he will put his finger exactly upon the area where a contemporary man falls a flat that is, he will say something about, uh, our sense of existence. And, uh, as you know, it was a very much the code word since he first wrote it. Uh, Descartes saying, I think, therefore I am positing the existence upon the ability of the mind to affect this.
And what he will say later on will be that one of the most difficult aspects of being human is to learn to forget one's existence. That in fact, the greatest suffering point available in the universe is the perception of existence in a solitary life. That this is a profound, pervasive, sorrow. It is a pain and to shy away from the recognition of this pain, we will imagine and do almost anything in a degradated state until we are slowly brought by invitation and mercy to a realization that we could sustain this sorrow because on an even more profound, truthful perception that the existence does not obtain that our life in fact is something other than what we thought it was. So he moves on having given us this time, time was made for a man in the sense that the motion of time it's structural constituents fit.
Exactly technically, probably marginally to the inner spiritual pace of man's realization. So that time and spirituality move in a very curious set, they're always together, but we do not experience them together because of the, as he would say, sinful nature, the nature of having bought the illusion, the sinful nature of our ignorance. We don't know. We don't believe that it could be, it seems too incredible to us. And so he says many places in the book. If you really cannot stomach this, put the book down, don't read it. It's not for everyone. It's okay. Go and live a nice life, live as good as you can. But if you have to know, if you've received that invitation and you can't let go, you will not be put away. Then he says, you must know the truth. There is no other way for you. You must be told, and it must be honest and experiential for yourself so that he gives us then a very interesting, um, way of explaining this. He goes into Mary, he goes into Mary Magdalene, Saint Mary.
He says that Mary Magdalene, more than anyone else at the time of Jesus was full of grace, that she manifested primordial mercy to the fullest extent in this way. She is very mysterious. She is the most mystical me of all. And if our site is not taken away too much by Mary, the mother, Mary Magdalene will give us an extraordinary clue. She was, as he says, perfectly heedful of every passing moment, which means in the terms of the cloud of unknowing, that she was tuned in to herself on this primordial spiritual reality of the way in which the will moves exactly single impulse by single impulse in tune with the atomic time of the creation and that having this synchronicity, she was able to see beyond the gaps and spaces into the all. And that's why Jesus loved her, loved her, loved her because she knew, and she manifested not just wisdom, not just love, but also mercy.
And that by leaving her out, many Christians have gone completely astray because they've roughed out mercy. They had no understanding, lots of wisdom, which tends to become tricky, lots of love, which tends to become sentimental. You need to have that mercy, which you don't have control on in order to bring all of it together and its accuracy. And this Mary Magdalen had full of grace, perfectly heedful of every passing moment. He says also that saints and angels by the divine grace have a proper account of every motion and I've every moment. But that in fact, angels are not superior to man that in all this universe at the profundity of spiritual truth, man has only one superior level and all of this structure formed and uninformed, and that is gone, that there are no other entities. There are no other structures that are superior to him in terms of capacity of attainment and of wholeness.
So that this is quite extraordinary to realize then that we are encouraged and told that we can sustain ourselves suspended between a cloud of forgetting and a cloud of unknowing because we have this capacity to even sustain and endure and understand this. He then brings us to quite an interesting, uh, statement it's on, uh, in the penguin classics translation, it's on page 65. And he says here that, um, for whoever hears or reads about all this and thinks it is fundamentally an activity of the mind and proceeds then to work it all out along these lines is on quite the wrong track.
If you think that it's a mental procedure or mental game or mental capacity, you are quite on the wrong track. He manufacturers in the experience that is neither spiritual, nor physical. He is dangerously misled and in real peril so much so that unless God and his great goodness intervenes with the miracle of mercy and makes him stop and submit to the advice of those who really know, he will go mad or suffer some other dreadful form of spiritual mischief in devilish deceit, indeed almost casually as it were. He may be lost body and soul. So for the love of God, be careful do not attempt to achieve this experience intellectually. I tell you truly cannot come this way. So leave it alone.
He says, do not think that because I call it a darkness or a cloud, it is the sort of cloud you see in the sky or the kind of darkness, you know, at home when the light is out, that kind of darkness or cloud, you can picture in your mind's eye in the height this summer, just as in the depth of, of winter's night, you can picture a clear and shining light. I do not mean this at all by darkness. I mean, a lack of knowing justice, anything that you do not know or may have forgotten, may be said to be dark to you for, you cannot see it with your inward eye. For this reason, it is called the cloud, not of the sky, of course, but of unknowing a cloud of unknowing between you and your God. So then he brings us interestingly to the statement of engendering, the cloud of forgetting that we need to have a sense of equanimity in ourselves in relation to the world. And therefore we must not be baited either by heaven or hell. We're not, must not be attracted by the good or repelled by the bad. And that one way in which this is engendered because a constituent structure of the mind is memory.
That is to say, memory could be isolated as a faculty of the mind, like reason and will like imagination and sensuality. But that actually in its workings memory is of the whole mind and memory participates in reason and well imagination and sensuality. So that memory is a different aspect instead of a function. It is a quality which participates structurally in all of the functions so that the engendering of the cloud of forgetting vis-a-vis the world is to get that the holds it has on you or the hold you have on ed are durable to let it go. And he says in connection with this, interestingly enough, he says, uh, later on, there are many people who spend a lot of time talking about the do's and don'ts, he says, don't worry over much about this. Not too much, not too little, that experienced teachers, that you will see that in engendering, the cloud of forgetting, please turn your cassette now. And we'll commence playing it down on the other side, after a brief pause.
END OF SIDE 1
You will see that in engendering, the cloud of forgetting you've come to a constant proportion. You don't have to over concern yourself with what you're eating or not eating with what you're doing or not doing that. That sense of proportion will occur to you. And as the cloud of forgetting begins to take shape, you get a resonant tone of individuality and individuality, which is not yours as an egotistical possession, but as increasingly a perception that you, if this and that this existence is over and against the divine and that it is this real core of existence over and against the divine, that is the very core of fall and suffering. And having that the limited exactly in one impulse of the will in one atom of time, you will know it for what it is.
I never, again, ever again, in any capacity need delude yourself or encourage in yourself, any illusion who blur or cover up that recognition because that fall of existence, poignant as it is occupied, but one moment in the universe, and that can be cleansed to vanishing by mercy, by mercy. So your wisdom, your ability to understand, and your love, your ability to enter relate. And interpenetrate this case with the divine, who that your love and wisdom bring you to the touch of mercy, right? At the edge of our graph. That's the healing moment as a curing moment, the cure of Phil, not the adjustment of goals, to be able to live without a Mercedes Benz or with a rolls Royce. That's the cure. Not only don't need a car, you don't need roads. You don't need a planet. The thing, those roads, none of them, none of them. Then he gives us the statement. He says the farther from God.
If there are thoughts of things on your mind, the, your mind thinks a thing. The farther you are from God, but printing and tooling, your mind not to think of things, yes, they occur. He think thoughts occur. You have to live. You have to do the operations of life, but the images of things need not stick in your mind, need not dominate your mind. And the last thing in image, one that you have on your mind, the better chance you have then of refining yourself spiritually. So then the question comes up if this is, so, if I'm not to think of things, then how in the world am I to think of God?
And he says, here have no image, none whatsoever what to have done. He says, you are in a cloud of unknown. You don't know you're engendering or cloud or forgetting. You're not going to remember what you do have is you have the sharp dart of love, of devotion that you wish to join. You wish to attain. You wish to have this contact. You wish to have this touch. And he says, in order to engender, then we therefore refine language down to its ultimate constituent, the single fillable. Therefore one should have a word to cry out as a single fillable, just as someone who perceiving that they are in a house on fire, we'll cry, fire or cry, help. He said, find some single syllable. What you can cry out to God.
And that crying out. He says death should be silent inside, but let that penetrate because it will kind of trait. He says that the short prayer, pure heaven, the short pair of prayer, pierces, Kevin single word to God, he says will be heard. How will it be heard? Because God is a home in the universe. And we are ever moving closer to being a spirit in that motion and less of a thing, less of an objective, wishing it had this and that and the other condition. And as we pull away from that, we pull away through this cloud of forgetting and immersing ourselves into the cloud of unknowing. We have no idea. We don't know where it was going. We have no idea to imagine it. We have no image. We have no thought, but we are there. And we are there with a devotional Fingal fillable word.
And then you bring down, interestingly enough, that thoughts in the mind, as they come out are the essence of temptation in doubt. And he says, you know, of course that the devil has a contempt contemplative just as God does that contemplation the universal functioning phenomenon. And there are evil contemplative just as there are virtually enlightened contemplative. Therefore the problem that came up in Walter Hilton that came up before in many of the individuals that we've discussed and taken. How can you tell whether it's legitimate or not? How can you tell whether it is spiritually good? How can you tell that they're not and spiritual materialism, which leads you down, which iMessages you when embroiled you the best way is to Google yourself, to cover off your, uh, desire for God. He says, do not think I'm playing a game with you. I'm not encouraging you to be a trickster, but if you keep covering it up and it keeps coming back, you keep it hidden.
You don't just fly it. You don't talk about it. It's still there. You will get a sense for the, for a reality reason becomes evil when pride in platelets so that all the seven deadly sins, and he goes into all the seven deadly sin. He in fact says, and I'll go into it. That the seven deadly sins have, uh, an interesting character. They are memory image, responsive, memory image, responsive, rooted, and magnetized to offensive, deadly sin cook. The seven deadly sins are really memory image responses that would become frozen into a habitual, right? And that's why they're thin because they lead you tangentially away from the spiritual presence that you would be engendering in yourself off on the tangential path. In this development. He then brings them the four basic stages of life. And a third your way, because we talked about the common life, the special life we've talked about the solitary life and the perfect life.
Now we're going to translate that into vertical growth. And we're going to say that on one hand, there is the active life. And on the other hand, there is the contemplative life. Both can be duped. Most can be imitated, almost picture perfect cook. There are ways to tell then the active and in the contemplative life, there are higher and lower stages. The higher stage of the active life is exactly the same as the lower stage of the contemplative life. So that the end date interpenetration between active and contemplative, there is at the core of the contemplative at its root core, the fruition of the active life and at the base of the contemplative life is the fruition of the active life that we seek to bring ourselves initially the act of spiritual integrity to practice his characters in the Mahayana called Donna Cherokee, Dakota Karody.
And my monities. He says the highest form of character. He is no one knows who gave, and no one knows who feed. So Cherokee can be practiced at the initial lowest stave of the acts of wife and charity. Then we have the sense that mercy mercy is an active ingredient because Cherokee participated in the mercy quality of the divine, however, small, however, into the testimony that yet participate, participate in it and lengthen at the very beginning to the highest capacity so that we can practice Cherokee. Given one gives up oneself, one cooperate with a goodness one, help one does this, the higher form of the act of life he has with awareness, virtual meditation and awareness, a sense of sympathetic understanding. So that one has a sense of parity and is aware that one has it. One is aware that there are purposes for this.
One is aware that there are meditative disciplines that can attenuate the accuracy. They expand the interpenetration of characters, this highest form of the act of life meet exactly implied over exactly into the low, lower stage of the contemplative life. What is different about it is that their spiritual meditation and awareness and sympathetic understanding begin to direct themselves, not to this world, but to the cloud of unknowing. One begins to have an awareness of the cloud of unknowing. One begins to have an awareness that there is a fake reality nom. The head one begins to have the sense that there is a, um, equanimity in, uh, action. One begins you sense that there is a viability and genuine now in the care for other creatures and other beings, it isn't just charity even raised the level of awareness of what you're doing, but it's a gladness to do it without any thought of doing it.
This leads into the contemplative life and the contemplative life then has a maturation that has a higher aspect. And new higher aspect is to be caught up in the cloud of unknowing, caught up in this darkness, reaching out, getting the sense of a love reaching out, but this time for the naked being of God, as it is not knowing and still reaching out at this highest stage of the contemplative life themes impossible from all our graded point of view, we would think of it. In fact, it was impossible. We were just, we were talking beautiful words don't mean anything, but he says to practice the higher active life part without temporarily pleasing from the lower part, leave the till the higher contemplative part. Do we take part in the active life to a point of maturation and we find ourselves interchanging with the contemplative life very easily.
It is there at that point that we should stop keeping control, stop keeping the fence of an outline and a score of what is going on. It began just to do it, just to do it, just to have it. If the grounding has been good and the act of life has been trained through disciplines up to that point, the transference of energy flows quite naturally from oneself to that otherness aspect of oneself and that effortless flow that print of our energy claw ourselves to that other energy PLA ourselves preparedness to make that shift inside. At this point, he does. Then we need to be aware of that. The unguarded mind, the unguarded mind at these beginning and developmental stages can give us an opening to the tangential, unconscious misleading that come to them. This is exactly where the peril is, and this is why we need a spiritual director, why we need to have some kind of tradition, pill, school, ourselves, a companion ability with others to help rebuild this terrific possibility of going to Dre right at the power point where the transference of the energy become free, floating it, leave our and our control and goes to that other directive that has to go to the other director that is exactly there.
And many people seeking power and control and money and disciple McCarthy and all that. And they're covering latch onto us because of the, there, with all the openness of good purposes in the world. We're most vulnerable to being misled by the clever simulated spirituality of the manipulated. And there it is, of course, when he says, one of the guidelines at this point is to realize and recognize to yourself that bear thought, and he uses it almost in a phenomenological thing. He says, bear thought of anything whatsoever rising. Unbidden remove you from your search, roll a flow.
Just think if you're still imagining structure, still imagining thoughts and adding sustaining qualities to those thoughts, how much more they would mislead you at this point, so that the Peru perfect of the search will dissolve and true that you have schooled yourself to engender the product for getting to school yourself, to be at home in the cloud of unknowing so that you could let go of those polarizing and magnetizing qualities of the mind that right at this point of energy transference would most eat mislead you and most be susceptible to the resonance of the lie and false program and the deceiver, the accuser that's sort of, um, insight. So he goes on and he, uh, he gives us, I'll have to skip over a few things. He talks about single-minded how, at this point, if we are single-minded, we recognize that in our single-mindedness we have paid profound attention to the fact that the impulse regularity of our soul through its primordial function of the will has found itself in harmony with the time sequencing of the puzzle.
And that we are in fact, moving along on a great energy sign, wave congruence, and that in bed, there is an indication that this form exists by gray of a background, which permitted to exist. And that in order for the background to permit such an all pervasive primordial form to occur that background must be infinite and universal and have capacity to allow this light wave phenomenon occur. In fact, that background is God, the unknowable spirit who allows a spirit form commensurate with the search wall form background to occur. And just as we are certain that we occur, we then are surging that the background occurred and having understood that we are able to lose the electric heating, polarizing digitally that has kept us frozen. Even at this primordial level, in the phenomenal universe, we no longer belong here. We belong there. Not because anyone told us though, and not because we wanted to, we do because structurally we are that and great affinity. Now there's so much in here. I, I hate to, uh, skip over, but I, I have to give you two paragraphs from him.
One is the madness of those who would pretend the madness I speak of is affected like that. They read, and here it said that they should stop the exterior working to their mind and work in lane. And because they do not know that this interior work means they do not know what it means. They do it wrong before they turn their actual physical mind inward to their body, which is an unnatural thing. And they strain as if, to see spiritually with their physical eyes and to hear within, with the outward Sears and to smell and taste and feel and so on inwardly and the same way they take the external template and force it upon the interior life and try to stamp out recognizable shape within it. Why I can control it.
That's why pride, inflate the mind and makes it imagine what is madness, the mind inflated with pride. So they pervert the natural order, which is that they turn it upside down. They pervert the natural order. And with this false ingenuity, they put their minds to such unnecessary strain that ultimately their brain, their attorneys, that once they're able to be deceived with false white sound we'd order, odor, wonderful case, glowing and burning in their heart, your stomach back loin, the limbs. And in this make believe they imagined they are peacefully contemplating their God. I'm hindered by vain thought. So they are in a fashion for, they are so stuff. We're falter that a little extra vanity cannot disturb them. Then it goes on in that way. He says then, and I have to get to the end of the book. I'm leaving a lot out the book exists.
You can buy it and read it. We'll talk about it. He says at the end, however, I do not want the loud mouth or flat earth or mock modest or busy bodies or tale, bearers, or contactless. You see this book for it never has been my intention to write all this for them. I'd rather they did not hear it. And also those learn and unlearn people who are merely curious. Yeah. Even if they are good men, judge, from the accident standpoint, all this will mean nothing to them, but not all those who read this book or hear it spoken out. And as a result, think it is a good and pleasant thing or therefore called by God to engage in this work because of the pleasant sensation they get. When they read it, this urge might well frame from a natural curiosity rather than a call of grave.
But if they want to test the origin of their earth, they can test it in this way. If they like in the first place, let them see whether they have done everything possible in the way of preliminary preparing for it. By cleansing their conscience. The conscience is the face of the soul, the conscience in the face of the soul, my cleansing, their content, according to the law of the Holy church and the advice of their director so far so good. If they seek further assurance, let them inquire whether this urge constantly and habitually claimed their attention more than other spiritual devotions. And if they come to believe that their content will not really approve anything, they do physical or spiritual, unless this secret little love, which could fix them. The cloud of unknowing is the main brain of their work spiritually. Then it is a sign that they're being called to this work by God.
Otherwise not saying, I'm not saying this earth goes on forever and continually fills the thoughts of those calls to contemplation. This is not. So for the actual feeling of verge is often withdrawn from the contemplative apprentice for a variety of reasons. And then he goes on to give some of the reasons, but he says for it is not what you are or have been that God looks at with his merciful fine, but what you would be. And of course what we would be in all great integrity is exactly what we are. A movement form and energy constant with the inadvertent that exists by virtue of a great well background that allows it to occur. Well, next week, we'll take a look at the greatest feminine mistake of all times, Julian of Norwich and her book, which has been called revelation for divine love, I think is best translated by the contemporary title. He was marvelous. He was a friend of our author, whoever he was the cloud of unknown. [inaudible].
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