Yoga and the Cloud of Unknowing
Western pursuers of higher consciousness often seem apologetic in assuming that there is a paucity or utter absence of writings on the topic. After all, the Synoptic scriptures are less a road map for excursions into the human spirit than a series of biographical episodes and apologetic statements justifying Christian existence amidst the turmoil of the first century CE. In surveying the landscape of writings in the West, there are a few heirlooms worth investigating.
14th Century Excursions into Mysticism
In the late Middle Ages, an anonymous English monk sat down and wrote his reflections in two essays known as the Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Of the two the latter appears more refined, whereas the former gets all the attention. No doubt the entrancing title catches our imagination.
While these two gems seem to have emerged spontaneously, a little background shows hidden historical sources. If we walk back further in time to the sixth century, we come upon a curious masterpiece titled, Mystica Teologica (Mystical Theology). This text states:
Do thou then in the intent practice of mystic contemplation leave behind the senses and operations of the intellect and all those things that the senses and the intellect can perceive and all things which are not and things which are and strive upwards in an unknowing as far as may be toward the union with the divine who is above all things and knowledge. For by unceasing and absolute withdrawal from thyself and all things in purity, abandoning all and set free from all, thou shall be born up to the ray of divine darkness that surpasses all being.
That’s pretty potent stuff. No doubt some current psychologists would question the sanity of such a recommendation. In Chapter 3 of The Cloud of Unknowing the author says:
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Do all in your power to forget everything else keeping your thoughts and desires free from involvement with any of God’s creatures or affairs. Perhaps this will seem like an irresponsible attitude, just let all be, pay no attention. However, in the beginning it is usual to feel nothing but a kind of darkness upon your mind as it were a cloud of unknowing. You will seem to feel nothing or to know nothing except a naked intent toward God in the depths of your being. You will feel frustrated for your mind will be unable to grasp him and heart will not relish the delight of his love, but learn how to be at home in this darkness and return to it as often as you can. For in this life your hope to feel and see God as he is in himself it must be within this darkness and this cloud. But if you strive to fix your love on him, forgetting all else, which is the work of contemplation I have urged you to begin, I am confident that God in his goodness will bring you to a deep experience of himself.
The similarity of both writings is undeniable, as is their reference to the pursuit of a higher form of consciousness, or knowing. Contemplation—theory—means primarily to gaze upon. It does not mean that something is hidden; it just means the intent is to direct the mind to a particular view. We use that word today in English: “Why don’t you contemplate these thoughts?” or, “Go out and contemplate nature.” Contemplation can refer to an intellectual vision, or a reflective pondering, where insight emerges. It does not mean closing your eyes to be in darkness. Contemplation also can be accompanied by varying affective states, one’s bliss as it were.
Mystic and mystical are derived, on the other hand, from the sense of something hidden. Our English mystery is akin to them. In saying, “It’s a mystery,” we don’t mean something unreal. In general, we may be awed or perplexed. Somehow the mystery eludes our intelligence, our rational power, at least for the moment, but carries a certain fascination that compels us to probe the matter at hand.
My suspicions here are that the 14th century author urges you to enter into yourself and to forget your thoughts, feelings, images, ideas, and concepts, anything cognitive, past or present, that is generated by interaction between you and the world. Leave aside your memories, let go of any worldly aspirations, and somehow get beyond the ordinary discursive realm. At this juncture, we might ask, who is the audience for our author? Not Mom and Pop down the block, he is writing for reclusive monks. These chapters are not belles lettres for the average citizen; this is a manual for those who live a monastic lifestyle. Context is significant.
Entering the Cloud
The monk also remarks, later, about some of the characteristics that you might encounter in this endeavor:
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You wish to enter this cloud [of unknowing] to be at home in it and take up contemplative work here, as the cloud of unknowing lies above you between you and God. God is not a cloud, God is not darkness, God is light. So between you and God there is this cloud that you have to enter in order to get beyond. Between you and your God you must fashion a cloud of forgetting between you and every created thing.
The author is not referring to two clouds, one on top of another. Rather, first you endeavor to forget, and that condition spontaneously leads to the unknowing. Like the inner process of renouncing the inhabitants of the mind, the state of the cloud of forgetting means your internal indifference to every created entity. In other words, the object is to cultivate a certain laissez faire attitude about mundane reality. The author alerts us that this endeavor may leave you, psychologically, with the feeling that you are far from God. But no, if your endeavor is authentic, only the absence of a cloud of forgetting keeps you from the divine. So as long as you still have dominant affinities and aspirations toward things of the world, you haven’t built your cloud of forgetting. His notion, I believe, is a graphic metaphor to emphasize that you are to release any compelling attachments toward manifested reality. Nothing less is valid entry to the cloud. Yoga practitioners easily recognize this exercise in detachment.
Fostering the lack of thought is not repression of cognitive activity, nor are you inducing a comatose state. You are in silence, a dark silence that does not allow for thought to occur, nor conception of ideas to take place, nor feelings to stir. The major metaphor during the Middle Ages for cognition was light. Entering the Cloud would indicate a deliberate choice, a naked intent, as the author states, to forego embracing imaginative and sensible objects, a dowsing of the rational light, as it were. You proceed to transcend the rational or discursive mode of consciousness. You are immersing yourself in a realm of consciousness without an object.
Physically speaking is that darkness? Yes! Cognitively speaking, mentally speaking is that darkness? Yes! That condition of consciousness is affirmed by earlier Western mystical writings as well as contemporary authors. Even today, on Mt. Athos in the Aegean Sea more than two dozen Western and Eastern Christian monasteries carry on this tradition in full force. The monks’ silent experiments in searching the spirit are recorded in a remarkable series of volumes, Writings from the Philokalia, dating from the 3rd century and continuing into the present. Perusing these writings, one finds a vast compilation of diaries, axioms, essays, and narrations describing centuries of the struggles of men and women to attain the vision of the Absolute.
Linking the Cloud to a Universal Tradition
What makes the Cloud of Unknowing unique is that it is a first in the English-speaking world. Besides his English cultural heritage, the monk’s writings are connected to a tradition. A case can be made that he has hit upon the experiential discovery of common features and aspirations about the mind that are inherent in human nature, although the author has put it into a Christian context. He has discovered the intricacies of contemplation and meditation. Every practitioner, for example, knows that the moment one shuts out the stimulation of the outer world, one’s inner awareness instantaneously recognizes that what supposedly was left behind is still within. Your eyes may be shut but you are still seeing things. It’s time to embark on forgetting.
Instead of following a religious injunction, you have engaged the mind freely in an experience that can be confirmed by anyone, regardless of culture or religious preference. In essence, you are encountering a universal experience with individual nuances.
Let’s proceed further. To dwell within and to steady yourself in that striving, which our monk points out is a struggle, slowly diminishes the barrage of thoughts. Concepts dwindle in appearance. Interludes of quiet intersperse thoughts, with or without accompanying feelings. But there has been a subtle, gradual change, so that the mind itself does not seem to be so preoccupied now with its content, its inhabitants, and its memory bank. Things are getting quieter and quieter. There are no lights going on, no bells, and no whispers. Instead you are entering into, surprisingly, a state of unknowingness. There is no new cognitive matter to analyze, compare and contrast. Again, this is hardly a religious experience. You may arrive at a certain state of tranquility where unsuppressed thoughts are not sallying forth. Everything about you is quieting down. The darkness, the silence soon prevails. You are entering a new landscape—the Cloud of Unknowing.
The Cloud’s Hidden Goal
The Cloud is not your goal. It’s the means by which you can attain the goal. You want to pierce the darkness, so to speak, to reach the eternal light beyond it: the blissful vision. What characterized our author’s method is that he calls this deliberate embarkation a loving contemplation. Given the structures of our makeup as creatures that desire, the arousal of love must be proceeded by knowledge. Yet we can’t love nothing. For the monk the object of that loving contemplation is the hidden God, the Divine that awaits behind the Cloud. He places the natural dynamics of introversion into the context of a Christian journey within culminating in the Divine vision. He assumes religious belief.
Exactly in step with the yoga tradition, the author recognizes that sensory images are the natural ground of reasoning. Now, can you find God that way? Is there a sensory ground for God? And the author would say no. Why? Because God is beyond the particularity, the limitations, the temporality of the natural world. The creator is vastly beyond what has been created. Your mind’s natural proclivity is to know created reality even if it has the aspiration to know the creator. A certain frustration mounts. You want to know who is running the whole show? Who started all this? What is the source of it all? To look upon the earth and the heavens, its beauty prompts the mind to want to meet the artist. So here you are with a cognitive power that is aware of the beauty of nature. All this created reality and you can’t meet the artist with the same faculty that prompts you to contemplate the handiwork. Our author has sensitively this frustration. As a professional monk, he has given his whole life to this pursuit. One can sympathize with his plight. He appreciates the creative world for what it is, a stupendous work of majestic artistry. He ponders incessantly: I want to meet the originator, the sustainer of this vast cosmos. His intellect and heart converge. My mind, he might say, has stirred a question that it can’t answer.
No doubt when one starts the inner journey the skepticism rears up. It seems so incongruous to turn our back on the magnificent world at large for the emptiness of darkness. To shun the sounds of the ocean, nature’s breezes, the birds at dusk, the star filled night for the vacant silence within and sit still almost seems banal. Yet in the book of Privy Counsel, Chapter 19, our author reveals:
Your whole personality will be transformed. Your countenance will radiate in inner beauty. And for as long as you feel it nothing will sadden you. A thousand miles would you run to speak with another whom you knew really felt there, but when you got there, you find yourself speechless. Let others say what they will, your only joy would be to speak of it. Your words will be few, but so fruitful and full of fire. The little you say will hold a world of wisdom though it may seem nonsense to those still unable to transcend the limits of reason. Your silence will be peaceful, your speech healthful and your prayers secret to the depths of your being. Your self-esteem will be natural and unspoiled by conceit. Your way with others gentle, your laughter merry as you take delight in everything with the joy of a child. How dearly you will love to sit apart, by yourself, knowing that others not sharing your desire and attraction would only hinder you, but I won’t go that far. Gone will be all desire to read books, for your only desire will be to hear of it. Thus the mounting desire for contemplation and the joyful enthusiasm which ceases you when you hear or read of it, meet it or become one. These two sides one interior and one exterior agree. You may rely upon them as proof that God is calling you to enter within and begin a more intense life of grace.
The Task within the Cloud
I think now we have a picture. Getting through the Cloud is no easy task. Yet the consequences won’t be denied. A psychosomatic transformation affects. You come through with a whole new appreciation of reality. The author mentions a crucial disposition that exactly explains the demands of this inward task, less the aspirant has any doubts of the requirements for this journey. At the beginning, he states:
See that nothing remains in your conscious mind, say the naked intent stretching out toward the invisible God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God, what he is like in himself or in his work and the world at large. And keep only the simple awareness that he is as he is. Let him be thus I pray you and force him not to be otherwise. Search into him no further, but rest in this fate as on solid ground. This awareness stripped of ideas, deliberately bound and anchored in this fate. To leave your thought and affection in emptiness, except for a naked thought and flying feeling of your own being. Let that quite darkness be your whole mind like a mirror to you, for I want your thought of self to be as naked and as simple as your thought of God. So that you may be spiritually united to him, without any fragmentation and scattering of your mind. He is your being and in him you are what you are…Therefore in this contemplative work think of yourself and of him in the same way that is with the simple awareness that he as he is and that you are as you are and this way your thought will not be fragmented or scattered, but unified in him who is all.
To turn one’s back on creation may seem extreme but to abandon one’s concept of God? The radical rejection of those beautiful thoughts and consoling feelings about my chosen deity that have kept me going in life in times of despair seems like spiritual suicide, an absolute absurdity. The author refuses to compromise. However well the refuge our thoughts and affectations have served us in time and need, they are, in his mind, terrible constraints that restrain us forever in a suffering abyss from the divine. How could one contemplate the infinite in a finite concept? Stay with your ideas, however grandiose and theologically accurate, and all you have is an evaporating trickle of truth that turns into fading memories as you get older. Darkness must preclude the light. No plenum without first the void.
The starkness of this “naked intent” does not escape the author. Recognizing the faltering weaknesses of the aspirants, he bolsters their incentive frequently with inspirations of religious hope. He asserts confidently that the hidden God is drawing the practitioner onward with his grace.
Parallels and Convergence
The author’s display of that sense of humility regarding the ineptitude of the aspirant searching in darkness for the ineffable light reminds one of the yogic refrain: not this, not this. Like the author, yoga recognizes an indistinguishable thrust towards life on all levels. And that thrust heads towards transcendence. Yoga would be less askance toward the cosmos and all that life offers. The yogi, likewise, wants to know what is beyond the limitations of her body and rational mind, without hinting at demeaning lesser truths. An appeasable desire for immortality is agreeable to the author and the yogi. The devout author acclaims the indispensable necessity of divine assistance to fulfill that yearning. For him, humans are creatures and therefore depended upon the Creator. Yoga would acquiesce more with the mind of Plato who would say we are born with amnesia, a certain spiritual forgetfulness of our true, innate identity and destiny. Encountering life in all its wonder slowly erases that darkness to reveal the Inner Light of the divine residence.
Curiously, the various metaphors, literary devises, and rhythmical language of the genre mystical literature, while not exactly expressing digital precision, nevertheless, attempts the more accurate immediacy of the experience. Critical acumen is not the order of the day. Meeting life at the mystical realm is less analytical than dithyrambic. It is to the reader’s advantage that some mystics describe those truer realities in poetical nuances. When we dialogue the Cloud with the Yoga Sutras, we engage in a fascinating excursion into clarifying the human endeavor of meditation.
Viewed as a contribution to the Western genre of meditation masterpieces, the author can be enormously appreciated for connecting the strands of a viable tradition within the human community.
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