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IT IS ONLY in recent years that I have come to appreciate the mystical texts of the Christian teachings, having spent most of my life investigating Eastern philosophy, specifically Advaita Vedanta and the nondual message of Sri Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. The overt religiosity and pious rhetoric of Western theology quite frankly used to turn my stomach.
Many have argued that the so-called enlightenment states of Zen, Taoism and Advaita are not the same as the mysticism elucidated upon in seminal works such as the Gnostic Gospels and the writings of the mediaeval scholar, Meister Eckhart. I now disagree for how could it be possible to have multifarious interpretations of the all-pervading, undifferentiated whole?
The Middle Ages in Europe saw a flourishing of writers producing literature devoted to exploring transcendental levels of human experience—the Beguines, Thomas à Kempis, Julian of Norwich and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Composed in England (most probably in the East Midlands area) during the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Cloud is a spiritual handbook penned to an also anonymous twenty-four-year-old aspirant, guiding them to self-reflection and the art of contemplative prayer.
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