Cloud+of+Unknowing



The Cloud is a powerful text written by an anonymous mentor to a young monk. He is counseling the novice on what Keating and Pennington call the Centering Prayer. In the opening passages he makes it clear that the book should not be idly passed to those who are simply curiousity seekers. The book of a reverent discourse on encountering God's presence.

The most recent translation was done by William Johnston with a forward by Huston Smith: @http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Unknowing-Privy-Counseling-Original/dp/0385030975

The entire text is online as part of the Christian Classic Ethereal Library. It has the old English flair to it, so I recommend the new translation. But here it is nonetheless. It's precis: Some things never change, including the human need to connect with our creator. Prayer and meditation on the divine are techniques that have been used for millennia to grow in the knowledge of God. //Cloud of Unknowing// documents techniques used by the medieval monastic community to build and maintain that contemplative knowledge of God. Scholars date the anonymous authorship of //Cloud of Unknowing// to 1375, during the height of European monasticism. Written as a primer for the young monastic, the work is instructional, but does not have an austere didactic tone. Rather, the work embraces the reader with a maternal call to grow closer to God through meditation and prayer. @http://www.ccel.org/ccel/anonymous2/cloud.toc.html

This is Evelyn Underhill's translation of the medieval spiritual guidebook called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous English monk. At the core is a mystical approach to Christian prayer, in which God is found not through rote knowledge, but through 'blind love.' It has been described as Christianity with a Zen outlook. --J.B. Hare: @http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/cou/index.htm

//The Cloud of Unknowing,// a masterpiece of simplicity that distills a complex mystical epistemology and discipline into engagingly readable prose, embodies a paradox. It offers a method by which the suitably disposed reader may practice an advanced and even austere form of contemplation - the divesting of the mind of all images and concepts through an encounter with a "nothing and a nowhere" that leads to the mysterious and unfathomable being of God Himself. Yet as the account of this exercise unfolds, the genial and hospitable tone of the author humanizes the austerity of the method and persuasively draws the reader into what Evelyn Underhill calls "the loving discernment of Reality" (//Sequence,// p. 81). @http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/clunintr.htm

Wikipedia: @http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing

Summary: @http://www.margueriteporette.org/cloud_of_unknowning_summarized_in_modern_english.html Full Text http://www.margueriteporette.org/cloudofunknowing_oe.html


 * Pg 137**: When you go apart to be alone for prayer, put from your mind everything you have been doing or plan to do. Reject all thoughts, be they good or be they evil. Do not pray with words unless you are really drawn to this, or if you do pray with words, pay no attention to whether they are many of few. Do not weigh them or their meaning. Do not be concerned about what kind of prayers you use, for it is unimportant whether or not they are official liturgical prayers, psalms, hymns, or anthems; whether they are for a particular or general intentions, or whether you formulate them interiorly, by thoughts, or express them aloud in words. See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea //about// God (what he is like in himself or in his works) and keep only the simple awareness //that he is as he is//. Let he be thus, I pray you, and force him not to be otherwise. Search into him no further, but rest in this faith as on solid ground. This awareness, stripped of ideas and deliberately bound and anchored in faith, shall leave your thought and affection in emptiness except for a naked thought and blind feeling of your own being. It will feel as if your whole desire cried out to God and said:

That which I am I offer to you, O Lord, without looking to any quality of your being but only to the fact that you are as you are, and nothing more.