The Cloud of Unknowing

[Ananda]

The Cloud of Unknowing is a christian book on mysticism, in the following Bill Lindley talks about it in the light of advaita.

A beautiful and simple gem to read:
http://ahimsananda.blogspot.com/2010/07/cloud-of-unknowing.html

Enjoy and benefit!

Love,
Ananda

[Jaycee]

Dear Ananda,

Thank you so much for this beautiful truth.  Anything else I might say would be inadequate.

[Ananda]

Glad you liked it[]

[machi]

The Cloud of Unknowing is a very inspiring book. Some things hardly change over the years

I read the work by Carmen Acevedo Butcher (ISBN 978-1590306222).
Some of my favorite quotes:


p9: Never confuse the worthiness of your calling with who you are.

p20: However, as long as you're thinking about anything, it's above you, an obstacle between you and God, and the more you have in your mind that is not God, the further you are from him.

p27: The active life starts and ends on earth, but the contemplative life begins on earth and never ends.

p29: As long as you are a soul living in a mortal body, your intellect, no matter how sharp and spiritually discerning, never sees God perfectly.

p53: He didn't want her to think that she could love and praise God above all concerns and also be busy with the affairs of this life.

p89: When understood properly, prayer is nothing but an intense longing for God, nurturing everything good and removing anything evil.

p92: That's why as long as you're living this mortal life, you'll always feel, one way or the other, this dirty, stinking hump of sin as an intrinsic part of your being, and that's why you must alternate your focus between these two words, sin and God, with this general understanding: if you possessed God, you would be sinless, and if you were sinless, you would have God.

p130: Contemplative love has no up, down, left, right, front, or back. We experience it spiritually, unlimited by physical dimension.

p137: In fact, anyone who longs for heaven is already there in spirit. The highway to heaven is measured by desires, not by feet. Our longing is the most direct route.

p149: When your mind is occupied with anything material, no matter how worthwhile, remember that this physical matter naturally ranks "below" you and that you are "outside" your spirit, but when your mind focusses on the mysterious nature of you soul's faculties and on their complex behavious, you grow in self-knowledge.


Book of Privy Counsel:

p173: When you consider God, think only that he is as he is, and when you focus on yourself, be simply aware that you are as you are.

p176: Don't focus on what you are, but that you are.

p184: You will come to understand that you don't need to busy yourself with subtle analyzing or ransack your brain with diverse thoughts about who you are and who God is.

p184: ... all you are and all you have come from him and he's the everything of you.

p189: Offer up your simple naked being to the joyful being of God, for you two are one in grace, though seperate by nature.

p190: ... All sickness and corruption befell our flesh when our souls fell from doing this work of contemplation / Also read the Middle Enlgish version, which is much more "imaginative": all seeknes and corupcion fel into the flesche whan the soule fel fro this werk.

p.201: Forget yourself entirely in exchange for a complete awareness of God's being.

p.202: Strip yourself of your self if you really want to be clothed in me, the long and flowing robe of everlasting love. (if that doesn't cause a heartgasm...)

p.202: Ache to run from your self as you would from poison.

p.209: Everyone has a unique calling, and it's none of your business what God calls others to do.

p.218: Learn humility.

p.221: Completely stripped of self, you're clothed in nothing but God alone.

[Shanti]

quote:Originally posted by machi

The Cloud of Unknowing is a very inspiring book. Some things hardly change over the years

p9: Never confuse the worthiness of your calling with who you are.

Never heard this one... but wow!

quote:Originally posted by machi


p.209: Everyone has a unique calling, and it's none of your business what God calls others to do.

So true...
Reminds me of Anthony deMello's words:
 

quote:” It’s not your actions, it’s your being that
counts. Then you might swing into action. You might or might not. You can’t decide that
until you’re awake. Unfortunately, all the emphasis is concentrated on changing the
world and very little emphasis is given to waking up. When you wake up, you will know
what to do or what not to do. Some mystics are very strange, you know. Like Jesus, who
said something like “I wasn’t sent to those people; I limit myself to what I am supposed
to do right now. Later, maybe.” Some mystics go silent. Mysteriously, some of them sing
songs. Some of them are into service. We’re never sure. They’re a law unto themselves;
they know exactly what is to be done. “Plunge into the heat of battle and keep your heart
at the lotus feet of the Lord,” as I said to you earlier.

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/tonyawareness.pdf

[maheswari]

quote:p92: That's why as long as you're living this mortal life, you'll always feel, one way or the other, this dirty, stinking hump of sin as an intrinsic part of your being, and that's why you must alternate your focus between these two words, sin and God, with this general understanding: if you possessed God, you would be sinless, and if you were sinless, you would have God.

totally disagree with this idea of sin that was mostly developed by institutionalized religions....the body is a temple and it is a beautiful one[^]

[Shanti]

Yogani explains "sin" very nicely here...
and if you fit what is written above in his definition, the above statement is also very true.


Lesson 132 - Q&A – What is sin?
 

quote:Surrendering to a high ideal is something else. It is a private matter in our heart, not subject to anyone else's scrutiny or judgement. As long as we are letting go for a higher ideal deep in our heart, our bhakti will have great purifying power, and draw us to spiritual practices.

If we have been trained to see ourselves as hopeless sinners, it will be wise to reconsider it carefully. For if we do not believe in our own divinity, it will be difficult to find the desire necessary to make the journey home. Our identity as sinners is a label we put on ourselves, while our identity as divine beings is a demonstrable human condition we can claim as our own.

and that's why you must alternate your focus between these two words, sin and God, with this general understanding: if you possessed God, you would be sinless, and if you were sinless, you would have God.

Our identity as sinners is a label we put on ourselves, while our identity as divine beings is a demonstrable human condition we can claim as our own.

[maheswari]

hmmm now i see ...yet it is not really clear..... Yogani explains it in a more straight forward simple way

[Shanti]

That is Yogani's strength!
His calling.
Very grateful for this.

[Ananda]

Thank you all for posting... This has been an enlightened read... Being raised "christian" myself... I grew up with sin and didn't realize how deep the thought was ingrained in me until I've met a certain advaita sage last year...

Francis Lucille once told me, hope I remember the words right: "There is no sin, really! Who is the sinner?"

Love,
Ananda

[maheswari]

quote:His calling.

yep
...
thx Ananda for sharing

[machi]

The concept of sin, as dogmatized by the Church, is a blend of guilt and remorse. Personally, I have a serious problem with the guilt aspect of sin, because I don't believe in it. If you swap guilt for karma, sin becomes a much more palatable concept to me. The remorse felt for past misdeeds can help a person to transform his inner being, helping him to avoid creating bad karma in the future. Guilt does not allow this dynamism, because whatever you do, the "guilt" remains fixed and becomes part of you. Also, it opens the door for malignant personalities that seek to subjugate psychologically and socially "weaker" personalities. In Western civilization, "Guilt" is stamped into a person and everybody tries to avoid this mark.

I once read in a translation of a Tibetan text that there is no Tibetan word for "guilt", only for "remorse".

[Jai]

In Greek—the language in which the New Testament was written—the word for “sin” is “amartia,” which literally means “to miss the mark.” The Greek Orthodox Church sees the Ecclesia as a hospital for the soul. The Eastern Church leans heavily on the practical definition of sin articulated by Evagrios, and adds to it another model: that of sin as an illness or infirmity. As Meyendorff (1974) points out: “Sin itself in Eastern Christian anthropology is primarily a disease.”
At the root of the experience of sin are the passions, which incline us to “miss the mark” and can develop into spiritual disease or sin. The understanding of sin as illness conforms to the spirit of Christ . Speaking to the Pharisees who were mocking Him, He said: "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Mt 9:12)
              The Hell and Damnation version of Sin was made up in the middle ages by the Papists although it has its roots in St. Augustinian concepts/dogma which the Eastern Orthodox Church never accepted.
"Augustine of Hippo is the fount of every distortion and alteration in the Church's truth in the West" Christos Yannaras
"Lord deliver us from the Augustinian dialectic". Saint Gennadius Scholarius.                    The original teaching of the church was lost to the Western Church after the Great Schism of 1054 when the Catholic Church was split into two, Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and then again a wider cap in 1351 with the Hesychast (meditative/direct experience of God) controversy which became the doctrine of the Orthodox Church which the West rejected in favour of Scholasticism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_–_Roman_Catholic_theological_differences

quote:Originally posted by machi

The concept of sin, as dogmatized by the Church, is a blend of guilt and remorse. Personally, I have a serious problem with the guilt aspect of sin, because I don't believe in it. If you swap guilt for karma, sin becomes a much more palatable concept to me. The remorse felt for past misdeeds can help a person to transform his inner being, helping him to avoid creating bad karma in the future. Guilt does not allow this dynamism, because whatever you do, the "guilt" remains fixed and becomes part of you. Also, it opens the door for malignant personalities that seek to subjugate psychologically and socially "weaker" personalities. In Western civilization, "Guilt" is stamped into a person and everybody tries to avoid this mark.

I once read in a translation of a Tibetan text that there is no Tibetan word for "guilt", only for "remorse".