A Teacher
The Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous)
Forgetting via love-knowing
The transmission
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of English Christian mysticism, written in Middle English around the 1370s, most likely by a Carthusian or other monastic spiritual director addressing a younger contemplative.
Drawing on the apophatic (“negative”) theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the unknown author teaches that God cannot be reached by thought or intellect but only by love. The contemplative is counseled to place all created things—and even all concepts and images of God—beneath a “cloud of forgetting,” while reaching up toward God through a “cloud of unknowing” with a simple, naked intention of love, often condensed into a single short word repeated as a focus.
The text’s significance for the mind-power and consciousness lineage is its remarkably practical method: a technique of deliberate cognitive emptying and single-pointed focus that strongly resembles later concentrative and non-conceptual meditation.
Its instruction to drop discursive thought and rest in contentless awareness anticipates both modern Centering Prayer (which explicitly draws on it) and the broader contemplative-meditation movement that feeds “presence” and “stillness” teaching in popular spirituality.
Because it is anonymous and method-focused rather than personality-driven, The Cloud functions in this Atlas as a system/text node rather than an authored biography—a transmissible practice more than a named teacher.
What they gave
Cloud of forgetting / unknowing: A concrete technique of cognitive emptying—dropping thoughts and images to rest in awareness.
- Love-knowing over intellect: Privileged a non-conceptual, affective mode of contact, paralleling “be here now” presence teaching.
- The single repeated word: A focusing device structurally akin to mantra and to centering practices.
- Method over doctrine: Framed contemplation as a learnable practice, aiding transmission across traditions.
In their words
And smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and go not thence for thing that befalleth.
This darkness and this cloud is, howsoever thou dost, betwixt thee and thy God, and letteth thee that thou mayest neither see Him clearly by light of understanding in thy reason, nor feel Him in sweetness of love in thine affection.
He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought.
Beat with a sharp dart of longing love upon this cloud of unknowing which is between you and your God.
Humility…is nothing else but a true knowledge and experience of yourself as you are.
A short prayer pierces heaven.
Because it is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.
Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of love; and mean Himself, and none of His goods.
He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius; the English eremitic and contemplative tradition; Augustinian interiority.
- Taught / Influenced: the modern Centering Prayer movement (Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington); contemporary Christian contemplative practice; non-conceptual and presence-based meditation teaching.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Cloud of Unknowingc.1375