Fragment 212, word count: 491.

Tags: spirituality, de-culturing, Socrates, Sartre, nothingness, Deity, coercive power, existence.

The idea of “the cloud of unknowing” was introduced into conversations of philosophy by an unnamed Christian mystic writing in Middle English in the late 14th. century, around the time of Chaucer. In that 14th century Christian culture the thing most worthy and most urgently calling to be known was, of course, God, but even centuries later in a post-Christian culture, the same idea has relevance. The idea was that when someone earnestly seeks to commune with God, to know God directly through prayerful contemplation, what they encounter is not a distinct vision of the divine person but instead a region of experience that is not a nothing but also not a definable something. It is a cloud of unknowing. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing advises that to contemplate God it is in fact best to contemplate nothing. To contemplate something from experience is necessarily also to contemplate the self as the knower of this something, and so to over-aggrandize the self, which is almost nothing in comparison to the transcendence of God. To practice forgetting in order to empty the contemplative “I” of objects is to come closer to the truth of the spiritual existence of both God and the human person. What a thoroughgoing de-culturing! There is something distinctly Socratic in this. It invokes “my wisdom is knowing that I know nothing”. It also resonates with Sartre’s idea of nothingness: spiritual existence without essence.

The “cloud of unknowing” looms in the event of an individual’s reach for deity because it is the entirety of an individual’s engagement with an external world and with existence generally. Spiritual existence as a human “I”, is never really a categorical knowing, but instead always to some degree a distinct unknowing: a continuous searching, a guessing, a sketching and a supposing. It is a personal act of spiritually making something of what occurs and of what is encountered experientially: tentative and provisional and “good enough to get on with”. The fleeting nature of direct perception and learning experiences leaves its traces in what has been learned, in what is known, so that knowing is also an unknowing. The cloud of unknowing and the cloud of knowing are the same cloud: the drama-cloud of personal existence. This is spirituality, a cloud of active unknowing within which every individual constructs supposings, derived partly from fleeting experiences.

Spirituality without Deity

The ‘spirituality’ that requires a disembodied supernatural parent, lawgiver, enforcer, ledger keeper, surveillance practitioner, and executioner, is always a dystopian cultural tool of parasitic social factions with coercive power over others, used to control through fear. Authentic spirituality derives from the difference between the world that doesn’t matter, brute unintentional entropic and inertial nature, as distinct from the drama-clouds structured individually as a personal “I”. This is the existence that matters to itself and creates reasons for other things to matter through its caring and its needs and impulses.

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Fragment 210, February 13, 2025, Existence as Drama-Cloud (word count: 1,838)

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.