Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing is a 14th century spiritual classic by an anonymous English monk to give practical guidance for direct experience of God.

"So beware of behaving wildly like some animal, and learn to love God with quite, eager joy, at rest in body and soul. Remember your manners, and wait humbly upon our Lord's will. Do not snatch at it like some famished dog, however much you hunger for it. If I may use a funny example, I would suggest you do all you can to check your great and ungoverned spiritual urge; as though you were altogether unwilling that he should know how very glad you would be to see him, to have him, to feel him."

"Every one has something to sorrow over, but none more than he who knows and feels that he IS. All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but THAT he is. Let him who has never felt this sorrow be sorry indeed, for he does not yet know what perfect sorrow is. Such sorrow, when we have it, cleanses the soul not only of sin (ignorance,), but also of the suffering it's sin (ignorance) has produced. (not a deficit of morals, but a deficit of knowledge or understanding) And it makes the soul ready to receive that joy which is such that it takes from man all awareness of his own existence."

"So crush all knowledge and experience of all forms of created things, and of yourself above all. For it is on your own self-knowledge and experience that the knowledge and experience of everything else depend. Alongside this self-regard everything else is quickly forgotten. For if you will take the trouble to test it, you will find that when all other things and activities have been forgotten (even your own) there still remains between you and God the stark awareness of your own existence. And this awareness, too, must go, before you experience contemplation in it's perfection."

Ira Progoff writes: “The ultimate goal of the work of The Cloud of Unknowing is union with God, not as God is thought of or imagined to be, but as God is in [God’s] nature.…”

"It comes down to this, if God wants to work in your soul, God has to work in secret. If you knew, you would get puffed up, you would run in fear, you would try to take control of the process, or you would close down the whole Mystery with your rational mind. We each must learn to live in the cloud of our own unknowing." - Richard Rohr