Under The Radar Mystics

The Cloud of Unknowing and why all shall be well

Image: Frontispiece to The Song of Los by William Blake

Last week, I wrote about Carl Jung and the prayer that turns to what is not known, not felt, not understood but is loved. This article is based on the transcript of a discussion I had with Tim Nash from the Nomad podcast, published as Silence and the Search for God.

Tim from Nomad Podcast
Mark, you’ve spoken before about being a priest, becoming disillusioned, and going through a kind of breakdown. When you look back now, what was actually falling apart for you at that time?

Mark
I was relying too much on how I imagined a connection with God might be. I read so much about it and been around people who seemed to have this connection. But I didn’t actually form one for myself or find out quite what my path was. That has become clearer to me more recently.

So having the freedom to discover what your point of contact with the divine actually is, is really fundamental. I could say more about what my particular path is: broadly speaking, is what’s known as the apophatic path. “The Cloud of Unknowing”, for example, one of the great mystical texts of Western Christianity, is one that directly captures that for me.

Tim
What did that period feel like?

Mark
There were moments of crisis, like leaving the church, and then periods of not being atheistic, but agnostic. An important step forward for me was learning some techniques of meditation. I gained that in a Buddhist context, a particular programme that was quite extensive over three years, learning how to be silent in a practical way – gaining a steadier focus and so not being so preoccupied with what’s going on inside my head.

In my experience, it’s not regularly a quiet mind that is the norm, but a more expansive sense of interiority; the chitter-chatter isn’t so central. That is a valuable thing to learn, as well as the technique.

In the Christian context, I’d picked up, or been taught, that silence is a kind of grace that you have to wait on somehow, which in retrospect wasn’t helpful, making it a gift to the few. So a platform upon which to then pursue a meditative or silent prayer practice was invaluable.

Contemplation and psychotherapy

Tim
You said, though, that it was both contemplative practice and psychotherapy that was crucial in helping you find your way back. What did each one give you that the other couldn’t?

Mark
The psychotherapy had two sides to it. One was getting to know my own interiority that bit better. So I mentioned trying to imitate what others were saying about contact with God, and that wasn’t just like going up a cul-de-sac that went so far but no further, but also wasn't my path. It also got entangled with my own pride about how well I was doing and what I could know of the wisdom of one way or another.

So becoming aware, through psychotherapy, of that cluster of feelings around pride, to pick one of the things that can trip you up, was essential. It is not as if pride disappears, of course, but you can start to feel around it; it’s not quite so dominant and preoccupying, controlling. So that was one aspect of what the psychotherapy brought.

Then the meditation: the prayer is about a focus on an interiority that isn’t just your personal interiority. It is sitting before the divine interiority, which is at once within you, but also everything is within it. And so the worldview that prayer or meditation brings is therefore really important – the sense that there is a transcendent aspect to the imminence of your inner life that in many, maybe most forms of psychology, is not dismissed but is psychologised away, as another aspect of your inner life.

Tim
So, what did contemplative practice change in you before it changed anything that you actually believed?

Mark
It made divine awareness phenomenologically real, and not dependent upon being in a particular place, or listening to certain music, or being inspired by particular kinds of writing – although those things can be tremendous.

The apophatic path is precisely the opposite. It’s putting all those good things to one side. The author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” talks about the cloud of forgetting, too. The practice is to put everything into the cloud of forgetting, and then being with a “naked intent” before the cloud of unknowing.

The wonder of the negative path, as it’s also called, is that as everything is put to one side, which again is an iterative process, there develops a trust of that which I can sit before without knowing.

A related aspect of the cloud practice is that there is a love, a yearning for the cloud, so a quality of attention towards God. That is at once cathartic, in the sense of feeling freer of what I do and don’t understand, or what might or might not be mediated by various forms of religious activity, and so to be open to a presence that doesn’t depend upon me or anyone else at all. A steady intuitive awareness.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Tim
So what does your own contemplative practice actually look like?

Mark
It’s a daily practice. I normally read a chapter from “The Cloud of Unknowing”, which is seventy-five or so very short chapters; so a few minutes lectio-style reading, which brings me back into the tradition.

It’s good to feel part of a tradition – wisdom that is lived and you know you can receive from. But this is also a few minutes to get into the zone. And then sitting silently. Nothing fancy. A bit of attention to the breath and using a repetitive word like “Jesus”, or “God”, or “love”. It seems to work for me to echo in my mind a word on the out breath, breathing normally, and that often falls away. It’s to help steady myself a bit, like reaching out for a handle when you walk up the stairs. And over the course of an hour, I’ll have moments where I think, oh, I was just thinking about something else for the last 10 minutes, and I only just realised; or there can be moments that feel stiller and quieter. But it’s as much afterwards that I feel the benefit of it. And if I have a day, and certainly more than a day, when I haven’t done the practice, I pretty quickly start to feel unmoored and lacking in that wider sense of presence.

Tim
You’ve spoken about having a spiritual director over many years. What has that relationship made possible in your life?

Mark
It is partly the many years element, because when you meet with someone every eight weeks to twelve weeks, it does help you gain a sense of how things have changed. You remember prior conversations or even, with the presence of someone who’s familiar, you realise how you used to feel differently when you were sat with them before.

So that’s certainly one big part of it. Also checking in, by describing how things seem. That can be valuable because, especially with a silent practice, to actually try and articulate what’s going on can be illuminating in itself. It’s not like my spiritual director corrects me but more like discerning – so suggestions like lean into this, say.

I increasingly value entering into a shared collective silence that, in my mind’s eye, is like a field that surrounds us all. So being with someone who completely gets that is good. Or, to use the biblical expression: where two or three are gathered together, there God is. That’s a mystical intuition as well as a social one. Interiority is as much around you as within you.

Tim
What do you think makes a good companion or guide when a person is trying to live more contemplatively or attend more deeply to God?

Mark
It is someone who has undergone a formation themselves, that this path of life is something that they’re engaged with actively. You can’t manualize it, which maybe is fairly obvious, so it is valuable to have someone who can participate with you in what you’re talking about, so know it as a lived vitality.

Then there’s also the sense of something being transmitted to you, a bit like enjoying the warmth of the sun, helping you orientate towards the sun.

I value images, as well, whether it be icons or images of figures who have practised the path that you’re practising as well. For instance, an icon of Christ, like the very famous icon of Christ Pantocrator from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, that instils that presence when I look at it.

I also have images of figures from other traditions, in whom I can sense the same kind of devotion. One is Ramana Maharshi, who’s a very well-known Tamil saint in India. I’ve been to his ashram - he’s died now – and the quality of divine silence is tangibly there. So to have an image of him helps bring my awareness to that silence as well. So he's a guide as well.

Mysticism in Christianity

Tim
You mentioned mysticism a moment ago. What drew you towards mysticism?

Mark
It’s the strand of Christianity that works for me, though it’s harder to find in the modern world, even in churches. It draws me as something that is in the vanguard, or on the edge of things, and I also found I could feel committed to it, unlike other Christian forms. I feel quite evangelical about it, as a part of our humanity that’s not well satisfied.

Tim
So, you weren’t finding that in other forms of Christianity or philosophy?

Mark
No. If you go to many churches and ask about the value of silence, everyone will say, “Oh, yes, yes, yes”. But if you then inquire what that means, they may not have much silence or, if they do, it may be a pause at some point in a service. That can be valuable, but it’s not really a silent practice as would be understood in the mystical traditions.

Support for your silent practice is only really found in places that are serious about it, that are putting in the time. The Buddhists, certainly Western Buddhists, are onto it; meditation has become the main practice imported from Buddhist traditions.

Then again, if you go to Buddhist countries, there will be all sorts of other things going on and I think that loss produces its own trouble in the West. A wider devotional context and worldview, a culture that supports these things, is really valuable.

So there is the richer Buddhist philosophy, for me, Vedantic traditions, because in that side of Indian spirituality there is an overt acknowledgement of God. For instance, Ramana Maharshi is associated with a strand of Hinduism called Shaivism. So at the ashram, there is the silence and also the devotion. Both are acknowledged and practised.

That said, there are a handful of Christian-focused organisations like The School for Contemplative Life and Christian meditation organisations teaching centring prayer, which is the closest to the cloud of unknowing tradition.

Listen to a new conversation with Susanne Sklar on reading Blake’s epic poem, Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion

The loss of the negative way

Tim
Why do you think the Christian tradition has become so detached from its own mystical stream.

Mark
It’s largely a product of the Reformation that, on the one hand, saw the heart pulled out of the body of the church in the closure of monasteries and religious houses. There was no doubt a lot of corruption in large monasteries, but we did lose a living tradition that was woven through those institutions.

But I think also that the key founders of the Reformation, Luther and Calvin in particular, deeply distrusted interiority. There’s Calvin’s famous remark about utter depravity of the human mind and then Luther’s anxiety about what he could trust within himself or, more to the point, how much he couldn’t trust about his interiority and so sought another basis upon which to found his faith. Hence, sola scriptura to guard and guide.

You get an echo of this wariness in Christian circles when meditation is thought to be pagan and there’s just no awareness that it was part of mainstream Christianity for centuries. There’s even a blindness to the fact that most of Jesus’s teaching on prayer is about going into your room and being silent. If there are about ten things in the Gospels that Jesus says about prayer, nine of them are in that vein.

Tim
You mention silence a number of times, but when most people hear the word mysticism, they might imagine visions or ecstatic or unusual experiences. How do you understand that?

Mark
That’s fair comment. Mysticism can seem mystifying or mystical or, if it’s not esoteric and strange, perhaps rather spectacular, ecstatic. But that’s not really mysticism.

The mysticism I’m talking about is much more like a steady intuition or a calm awareness that maybe, on occasion, might produce strange states of consciousness. But all the serious mystical teachers say, if that happens, ignore it, put it in the cloud of forgetting.

Someone like Teresa of Avila, who had extraordinary experiences, prayed for them to go. She did not seek to become more established in her levitation. She knew that was a distraction.

Mysticism comes from the word for secret, which doesn’t mean, only known to an elect, but just means that which is going on inside and is beyond anything that we might try and possess or control or induce or evoke. That’s really what mysticism means.

Strange experiences during meditation

Tim
Have you had unusual experiences, and if so, how have you come to understand those?

Mark
Intense, prolonged periods of silent practice definitely bring them about. For instance, there is a form of Buddhist meditation called Vipassana that is taught by a figure called Goenka. There are Vipassana centres in the UK and all around the world offering a ten day retreat taught by him that’s very strict: a lot of meditation, complete silence, no phones, no books. You get up very early in the morning. It is a bit of a marathon of meditative practices.

Doing that makes you more aware of things that might be going on in your body, for example, and, when I did one of those retreats, I had a day out of the ten when it felt like my whole body was sloshing around inside me, like a swimming pool – I guess because had become hyperaware of feelings in my body.

They have teachers on the retreat, a person you can speak to. I said I’m having this bizarre experience, like my stomach keeps hitting the back of my neck, and he said, just sit through it, it’ll pass, and sure enough, it did.

You might have something a bit more visionary, too. I remember on another day, seeing a blue light radiating from other people in the meditation hall and part of me got very excited about that. Is this it, I thought? And then, of course, it passes, and again, the teacher says, no.

Who knows quite what’s going on there. It might be a bit like shouting “eureka” when you have a realisation; it’s just a release, either a bodily or soulful release. And so it comes and goes and has not further significance. What is significant is re-founding your sense of who you are in God, and that doesn’t depend on any passing experience.

Contemplative refuge in everyday life

Tim
What might a mystical life look like in ordinary, everyday terms?

Mark
It might look like Meister Eckhart. He was a friar, living in the world, travelling around various parts of Europe, and so constantly on the move. He didn’t sit in a cell for ten years. So the mystical life can look quite like an otherwise normally engaged worldly life, but within that there will be some kind of focus that is different.

This is important now because people who are interested in mystical paths are probably not going to become religious or hermits. The innovative spiritually of our times is not, in my view, the New Age but how you can live with your life orientated around the traditional types of divine awareness but also with a job, a family: being in the world but not of the world. You don’t have to be a religious specialist. Then again, when you look at earlier spiritual movements like the Beguines, there probably always have been under the radar mystics.

Tim
I know you’ve also reflected deeply on Julian of Norwich. What can she teach us about the spiritual life?

Mark
She, too, is very much part of this apophatic tradition. She did have her dramatic showings during a few hours when she was almost dying, the visions of Christ on the cross. But she then spent decades as an anchorite in her cell contemplating what had happened and eventually arriving at her famous work and phrases, like “All shall be well, and all shall well be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

She came to that realisation apophatically when she realised that everything is fragile, everything is vulnerable, everything is constantly on the edge of falling out of existence altogether. That was self-evident: she lived in what’s been called the worst century in Europe to have ever lived, with the Black Death that killed a third to half of all people.

So she didn’t live in some blissful state and it was precisely because she realised the fragility of all things, that she knew there was only one reliable thing, and that was the divine presence. This is a tough paradox: accepting fragility tipped her into the awareness that all shall be well.

The other image that she’s known for is when she contemplates something about the size of a hazelnut. The point is the smallness of it, the easiness with which it could be crushed or even disappear. That’s what leads to this sense of the divine other that’s also here.

So she’s a great inspiration for what she articulates, but also for the lengths that she went to fully understand and articulate it.

The marriage of the negative and positive ways

Tim
You’ve written about William Blake in your book, “Awake”. What was it about him that drew you and what was he opening up that other mystics or spiritual writers weren’t?

Mark
I like him because he wrote in more or less modern English and lived in London, as I do, so he’s my local mystic. The great thing about Blake is that I can pick up a poem of his, some imagery of his, and be with it immediately.

He is the person that who says: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity for an hour.” So he seems, at first, to be more naturally associated with what sometimes called the way of affirmation, rather than the way of negation, or the cataphatic rather than the apophatic, to use the Greek terms. That is about seeing the transcendent imminently in all things, the minute particulars, as Blake puts it.

But I think he’s also a figure in whom you can see the way of affirmation coinciding with the way of negation because he’ll also say things like: “There’s a moment in each day that Satan cannot find, nor can his watch-fiends find it. But the industrious find this moment, and it multiply, and when it once is found, it renovates every moment of the day, if rightly placed.”

You might say that the way of negation meets the affirmation because the negation is a preparation for seeing all things in the light of the divine presence: seeing them better, if not fully.

Blake seems to have had a spontaneous awareness of the divine presence in all things, that wasn’t educated out of him, as he said. Quite the opposite. His practice as a painter and a poet deepens this prophetic capacity. He loved, for example, Teresa of Avila because he recognised in her another intelligent person that could have strange supernatural experiences or awareness, and yet it was founded on love of God.

Tim
What might Blake have to say to people now who feel spiritually hungry but can’t easily return to church?

Mark
He understands the presence of Jesus now as the presence of our imaginations. This is the creative logos, always active in life.

By imagination, he doesn’t just mean private fantasies. He understands imagination not as a private capacity we have, but rather as a flow of vitality that we’re constantly in, whether we like it or not.

We are speaking now and, in terms of the physics, I’m using my body to make vibrations on the air that get transmitted through the wonders of modern technology to you. You receive those vibrations and then make vibrations in response. But of course we don’t experience it like that. We experience ourselves having a conversation, exchanging words, even reaching for the right words that might facilitate the shared exchange, so that we can be in a shared communion around what we’re talking about. That is the imagination. That’s what makes us hear words with meaning and a shared participation, rather than just a buzzing confusion of vibrations on the air.

So everybody has the imagination fully operative. You can then decide to collaborate more fully with it, which might involve some sort of training or commitment to amplify those capacities. And you can add that the imagination is Christ active in and around us.

Tim
More generally, what might Christian mysticism offer people who still feel drawn to Christ but no longer easily fit inside institutional church life?

Mark
It offers something to be wholeheartedly committed to, that feels absolutely rooted in the Christian tradition, but at least in some significant measure circumvents that which can be so off-putting in institutional contexts. That seems to me to be valuable because it is not just a private or personal pursuit, but is plugging into a central, foundational, basic facet of Christianity.

Signs of spiritual bypassing

Tim
As a psychotherapist, how have you learned to recognise the difference between spiritual depth and spiritual escape?

Mark
It’s a really important question, one to keep asking.

There are some forms of escape that are quite florid, you might say, with a manic quality, or an obsession with peak experiences; a spiritual life that seems to revolve around the next retreat or, if psychedelics were involved, the next trip, as if that’s really the place that spiritual progress happens. That should make you wary, but there are more subtle things, too.

For example, if you find yourself able to trust the divine awareness when you’re feeling well on a good day, but then on a bad day it seems to go, or you get tripped up, then you know you’ve got work to do. You are probably, maybe unintentionally, still relying too much on a personal sense of wellbeing that you feel you have some sort of control over, rather than that which exceeds anything that might happen.

When you realise that more subtle bypassing, it can become part of the practice as well. The awareness of it can be an inflection point for this continual practice of letting go, releasing, turning from whatever you’re trying to grasp, towards the cloud of unknowing, towards the emptiness of Julian.

In Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, for example, in the first parts of the paradise, people are aware still of their sin. But that awareness has become the moment they spontaneously, habitually turn to God, rather than sin holding them fixed, as is the case in hell, or leaving them confused, as happens in purgatory.

So, florid bypassing, as they call it in psychotherapy, the “rush to health”, is fairly obvious. But the subtler patterns can become part of the practice too.

Silence in fragmented times

Tim
For those listening who are struggling with the idea of God and perhaps feel spiritually homeless, what small practices of attention or openness or prayer might be a good starting point for them?

Mark
It is silence. Little and often is better than rarely – with the directions for practice that are probably familiar: being in an alert position, following your breath, maybe using a simple word that helps you to become more attentive to that which is other than what normally fills your mind. Twice a day is often recommended, too.

The silence then becomes a marker, like a stake in the ground, so that even when you are in a part of the day that is very busy or otherwise preoccupying, you can still, in your mind’s eye, see the stake that you planted earlier and know that it is a vertical axis around which you can become more orientated.

I would say have a devotional reading practice as well, by which I mean a book like “The Cloud of Unknowing” or Mother Julian or Master Eckhart. Whatever appeals but probably a primary source, not just books about primary sources. Or a mystical reading of the Bible.

That can be quite hard to practice if you’ve had immersion in a Christian community before because the way that the Bible is read as an ethical or doctrinal text can be hard to shake off. Maybe get a different translation, one of the older, more beautiful translations. That might defamiliarize the text enough for a different spirit to come through.

A devotional practice feeds an emerging worldview that can support the silence and is a good counter to what our culture, even church culture, otherwise feeds you with: various forms of ethical demand, tribal belief, or forms of consumerism.

The internet can be great, too, for finding good teaching online. You can know that others are part of these activities by virtually joining that stream.

I’d also say always be confident when you are listening to others, even when you feel you know almost nothing. If what is said doesn’t feel quite right, then look elsewhere.

Don’t feel you must stick with an approach forever because of what’s promised. If there is something telling you that this teacher is not quite right for you, then don’t feel you’ve got to do it for years and years and then decide. Give yourself a day or two – it might just be a bad day – but relatively soon look elsewhere. Check your intention, as well, for sure.

Tim
And finally, in these uncertain times, what helps keep you rooted?

Mark
It’s very easy to get shocked by what you hear in the news, read about. But this practice, the silence, the mysticism: it teaches that in every moment something is struggling to be born. Things can go very wrong, but that which is right is always present as well. It’s just misunderstood. It’s lost to ignorance. But like Julian: she knew these amazing things in disturbing times, terrible times.

And that, too, is what the mystics teach us, that darkness and light go very close together, but the light never gets extinguished. In fact, sometimes in the darkness the light becomes clearer to you. This is a path of hope, precisely because it goes through the darkness.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY THIS MONTH:

2 June - Exploring sacred stories in a secular age, London - speakers include Linda Woodhead, Elizabeth Oldfield, David Smith MP - info here.

4 June - Exploring the sacred in human relations, Cambridge, the second in this series, info here.

5 June - Exploring the power of sacred stories, Oxford - speakers include David Bentley Hart - info here.

10 June - William Blake: The Imagination and Mysticism, is an evening I’m leading with the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred.

23 June - Philosophy Slam! live with Robert Rowland Smith at the Union Club, London.

25-28 June - Listen to Kim Willis to get a taste of the Realisation Festival, where she and others will be speaking, and consider joining us.