Word: clouding
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...neatly summarizes the conventional, science-minded attitude: an approach to truth that bypasses "ordinary sense perception" adds up to nothing but "vague speculation." Yet mystics-the experimentalists of religion-may not seem so unscientific to a mid-20th century psychiatrist. This is the case in a new book, The Cloud of Unknowing (Julian Press; $4), a psychologist's rendition of one of the great mystical classics of Christianity...
Manhattan Psychologist Ira Progoff, author of The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (TIME, Dec. 24), feels that the insights of depth psychology in The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an unknown English monk around 1375, have made it "alive again with meaning and usefulness" for modern man. To enlarge the book's modern audience, Progoff has "translated" it from vivid, lilting 14th century English-which has made it a favorite treasure-trove of poets, including T. S. Eliot-into clearer, plainer language.* Progoff has also translated many of the book's spiritual precepts into psychological terms...
...Dart of Longing Love. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing was a true man of the Middle Ages; with a healthy horror of heresy he repeatedly affirms his allegiance to the teachings and observances of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet his discipline is a highly unorthodox struggle to pierce beyond teaching and observance to the incandescent reality of God himself. "Indeed," he writes, "if it will be considered courteous and proper to say so, it is of very little value or of no value at all in this work to think about the kindness or the great worth...
...outgoing diffusion of the personality must be quenched, as must all memories, pleasant and unpleasant, all attachments to the external, sensory world. Instead, the disciple must plunge into a kind of mental darkness. "And do not believe that because I call it a darkness or a cloud that it is a cloud formed out of the moisture in the air, nor that it is the kind of darkness that is in your house at night when the candle is out . . . When I speak of darkness, I am referring to a lack of knowing . . . And for this reason...
Into that cloud may come "a sudden stirring with no forewarning, instantly springing toward God as a spark from a coal." Still higher than the experience of this "sharp dart of longing love" is God's "beam of ghostly light," but of this the author forbears to speak...