Some might find this interesting, a form of christian meditation that invokes a mystical experience:
The Cloud of Unknowing
by frankiespeakin 7 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Band on the Run
I tried reading it during my marathon mysticism reading. It was difficult for me. Maybe your post is a reminder to give it another try.
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frankiespeakin
Band,
Good luck!
I would find this type of contemplation hard to do but i think I glimps at what is suppose to do,,perhaps get in touch with one's Quantum self and experience the profound bliss such awareness brings one or a mystical cosmic consciousness.
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frankiespeakin
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/clunintr.htm
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING: INTRODUCTION
The Cloud of Unknowing
Edited by Patrick J. Gallacher
Originally Published in The Cloud of Unknowing
Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997The 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).
We can begin to understand the meaning of the Cloud by looking at what may be the most famous quotation in Western mysticism, the passage in the Confessions, IX, 10, where Augustine muses upon the ecstasy at Ostia, an experience that he had in a final conversation with his mother, Monica (McGinn, p. 234). By its similarities and contrasts with the ideas of The Cloud of Unknowing, this brief classical statement of the contemplative ascent can introduce us to the whole mystical tradition:
If to any man the tumult of the flesh grew silent, silent the images of earth and sea and air: and if the heavens grew silent, and the very soul grew silent to herself and by not thinking of self mounted beyond self: if all dreams and imagined visions grew silent, and every tongue and every sign and whatsoever is transient - for indeed if any man could hear them, he should hear them saying with one voice: We did not make ourselves, but He made us who abides forever: but if, having uttered this and so set us to listening to Him who made them, they all grew silent, and in their silence He alone spoke to us, not by them but by Himself: so that we should hear His word, not by any tongue of flesh nor the voice of an angel nor the sound of thunder nor in the darkness of a parable, but that we should hear Himself whom in all these things we love, should hear Himself and not them: just as we two had but now reached forth and in a flash of the mind attained to touch the eternal Wisdom which abides over all: and if this could continue, and all other visions so different be quite taken away, and this one should so ravish and absorb and wrap the beholder in inward joys that his life should eternally be such as that one moment of understanding for which we had been sighing - would not this be: Enter Thou into thejoy of Thy Lord? (Confessions, trans. Sheed, pp. 200-01).
What is striking about this passage is the combination of two movements: a sweeping review of nature, human psychology, and the world of signs, followed by the "silencing" or negation of everything that is not God.
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Band on the Run
I believe I confused Dark Night of the Soul with the Cloud of Unknowing. Perhaps I don't have it correct even now. The book by St. John of the Cross in the Middle Ages.
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botchtowersociety
The book by St. John of the Cross in the Middle Ages.
There is also Sta. Teresa de Avila. All this is what is called "contemplative prayer."
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poppers
All this is what is called "contemplative prayer."
Yes.
Thomas Keating is an excellent source on how to practice centering prayer, which leads to contemplative prayer.
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botchtowersociety
Thomas Keating is an excellent source on how to practice centering prayer, which leads to contemplative prayer.
My mother has mentioned him before. She is into it.