The Cloud of Unknowing: Trusting the Mystery

Since my post last week, I’ve had a few people ask me how to connect to a higher self or ancestors, and, fighting my own imposter syndrome, I want to be quite clear that I am no expert in these practices. I am just beginning to understand what has always existed within me. I also thoroughly believe that connection to our guides, ancestors, and angels is not a special skill that only some possess, but an inborn ability that every single one of us can wield with practice and care. It is a skill that our ancestors knew readily in their daily lives but has been worked out of us systematically by modernity. Knowing that, I am called to share my journey and will always point you towards those I know who have a deeper and more solidified understanding of this work when I feel out of my element.

On that note, I spent most of the week stumped about what on earth to say next. Should I attempt to give some clarity about how I have engaged with these practices? Or get into the headier side of my frustrations of therapy versus mysticism? I finally stopped fighting myself and asked Spirit what I should say and they showed me a cloud.

The fun/sometimes frustrating part about how Spirit conveys things to me is that the messages come in images and then I have to decode what on earth they are “talking” about.

When those messages are clear and quick, I feel an instant welling of emotions in me, and I am learning that this is part of how I discern accuracy. Sometimes the meaning is less clear and I find myself mentally reaching for it, only to be told “you’re reaching again, let it come.” Then I wait. Sometimes my monkey brain wanders away from it all and I have to bring myself back to the guides (they are so very patient, though I suppose it is easy to be patient when time is irrelevant), and the meaning comes around slowly but less clear.

Today it was clear as day—the cloud is the The Cloud of Unknowing, and I knew what I should say.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a famous anonymous work of Christian mysticism from the 14th century that offers a contemplative approach to seeking God. If you’re not Christian, hang in there with me because the message transcends the religion (my favorite part about mysticism is the religious transcendence).

The Cloud of Unknowing tells us that to experience God, we must surrender the intellect and our egoic insistence that, somehow, we can define God and God’s attributes using our minds. It is when we surrender to the unknowability via the intellect that we can truly experience God. What a paradox, right?

Let’s remember that God need not be a religious God. For me, The Cloud of Unknowing is saying that a logical understanding of the consciousness I call Spirit is laughably a human conquest that only stands in the way of the connection I long for. This unknowing asks us to quiet our anxieties and desires for control, and surrender to the experience.

Some folks ask me who or what I think I am connected to in these meditations and I am comfortably uncomfortable not needing a definition because I feel the connection in every inch of my body. The most profound experiences I have had in practicing mediumship, psychic work, therapy, and my own meditations have reduced me to tears because of a deep sense of love and joy that these other worldly beings exist in and convey. When I reach for and grasp at answers and meaning, it scatters like smoke.

I suspect that Spirit wants to remind us all that a humble forgetting—unknowing—of modernity’s insistence on materialism, is all that is required to experience the faces of God, Spirit, consciousness, etc. I hesitate to oversimplify but modernity’s obsession with materialism has left us a system of world building that is entirely composed only of tangible matter. It abandons the imaginal realm that ancient Sufi mystics believed to be a bridge between our reality and the angelic realm. It leaves us alone and adrift to witness insurmountable suffering of our times.

There are many subsequent steps to connect with the Spirit realm that I promise to share more of over time, but in order to take you first step towards that opening, you must trust in the unknowing of the reality that we have been sold. There, on the precipice of the trust, lies the world beyond worlds. Waiting for you patiently, adorned in love.

Do you ever have a gut sense of something but question yourself? Have you had strange experiences that you know are real, but then talk yourself out of?

All of this is the logical reach that scatters the smoke.

There have been so many lessons in my journey already but the most potent is trust. Trust myself. Trust the images. Trust the experience. Trust Spirit. When we trust the unknowing and surrender the intellect, then somehow, we find what our deepest self has always known or hoped for:

We are not alone.