Author: David L. Collins, PhD
Title: University of Texas at Austin Staff
Affiliation: University of Texas
Twitter: @bodhidave3
Date: October 4, 2018
The short piece, An Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings, was written by the same anonymous Middle English author who gave us the classic work of Western mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing. Like The Cloud, Discretion was written for someone who had asked its author for some advice regarding contemplative practice. “Stirrings” in their time meant “impulses” or “inclinations,” or sometimes “callings,” and “discretion” had the same basic meaning it does for us, but in this case it was tied to the question of spiritual discernment. In Discretion, its author is focused on one question: how to make decisions in life as a contemplative.
The issue this person was asking advice for was whether or not he should engage in some of the ascetic practices that are commonly associated with contemplative life. To that end, he lists a series of contrasts, including ordinary eating versus fasting, living with others versus living in solitude, and speaking versus maintaining silence. He tells the author that, on the one hand, he feels he is held back in his spiritual life by his involvement in ordinary activities in the world, but, on the other, he’s hesitant about engaging in ascetic practices, since he is worried he’ll be perceived as acting more holy than he really is. He is unsure how to proceed, and he is hoping the author will tell him what to do.
In his reply, the author mentions that he doesn’t really know this individual as well as he would like to give him the most effective guidance, but he then goes on to say that there’s a general principle of considerable worth which can be practiced in such situations. In key respects, the approach he suggests is identical to teachings that he’d given in The Cloud for how to practice contemplative unknowing. What he recommends ends up illustrating the essential link between meditation practice and ethical discernment.
Before he offers his core piece of advice, the author first makes a couple of general observations. He notes, for instance, that the matter of discernment in asceticism is rather important—before suggesting a resolution for his student’s dilemma, he effectively intensifies it by pointing out that it is in fact possible to go wrong. When carried out on one’s own, without enough clarity and guidance, ascetic practices can sometimes become unnatural and unbalanced activities. The author raises the question, too, of how well this person really knows himself.
This article first appeared in issue 1 of The Side View Journal. Purchase your own copy here.
In light of the instruction the author is getting ready to offer, it may serve his purpose to first sow some doubt in his reader’s mind this way. He’s suggesting it’s important in these matters not to possess a false sense of certainty. In fact, he says, it’s often only by going through some tribulations in our lives—risings and fallings, or “ups and downs”—that we really come to know significant things about ourselves. And one of the things we might come to realize is that in those moments we find life to be most blessed, there’s typically little we ourselves have done to make that experience come about. In other words, the author suggests that in the moments of life’s greatest worth and beauty, there’s often a kind of grace present.
In this way, the author implies that a sort of insecurity or even a kind of marked doubt, along with an openness to grace and to functioning at a level other than our conscious intellectual deliberation, can be key elements for real discernment. This sort of insecurity the author recommends is in the end a kind of humility, and the openness to grace he calls for is a type of fundamental honesty.
As for the specific issue his reader had asked him about, namely, which of the two sides he should choose in the series of opposites that he’d mentioned—to speak or to keep still, to eat or to fast, to live with others or to live alone—the author’s instruction comes down to this: choose neither. That’s his advice, his answer, to his student’s dilemma. He puts it this way:
Just to speak or just to be still, just to eat or just to fast, just to be with others or just to be by yourself, I don’t think I’ll recommend at this time; because perfecting yourself doesn’t rest in those things. But here’s the general suggestion I’d give you for dealing with such choices, and any like them, when you are finding two opposites . . .
I urge you to let go of them both, because that’s the easiest to do if you’re wanting to be humble. And let go of any inquisitive looking and searching in your mind to decide which one is better. Do this, instead: put the one on the one side and the other on the other side, and choose something for yourself that’s hidden between them, which when you have it will give you the chance, in a freedom of spirit, to begin and to end any embrace with either as fully as you like, without any fault.
There’s a place in The Cloud where the author had said something very similar to this. There he’d written that while others would recommend we “go within” to practice contemplation, he’d rather not suggest that. Nor, he says, does he want to suggest that we go outside of ourselves, or above ourselves, or below, or to one side or to the other. And he had anticipated his reader’s response would be, “Where then will I be? Nowhere from what you’re saying!”, to which the author then replied, “Now you’re actually speaking well, because that’s where I’d like you to be.”
There is a simple reason the author talks like this. He wants to help his reader make a shift in his customary relationship to his own experience. He wants him to come out from under his habitual way of looking at things. The author wants him to abandon his reliance on habits and presumptions. He wants him instead to enter into a kind of utter humility and radical honesty, and by doing so to come to another, supremely valuable way of knowing and doing.
This author understands that there’s a limiting effect that our ordinary patterns of thought have on our experience. He compares it to an archer focusing on a target toward which he or she is aiming an arrow. So long as our mind is engaged in customary intellectual deliberation—so long as we have a discrete mental object as our conscious focus and target—we’re unavailable for and unmindful of other possibilities for experience. We’re preoccupied, and in relying unquestioningly on our conscious thinking ability, our minds become trapped in a net of their own construction. We end up prejudiced—pre‑shaped and pre-limited—by our unquestioned assumptions about the appropriateness of our own dominant functioning. We thereby become blinded by our typical manner of seeing and captured by what our minds hold on to.
When we practice contemplative unknowing, we let go of all of our conceited conceptualizations, and we come to rest in a more fundamental experience of being alive.
When our attention is preoccupied in that way, we are, in a word, “conceited.” In The Cloud author’s time, to have a “conceit” meant to possess a concept or to hold an opinion. In an early portion of Discretion the author uses “conceit” in just that way, saying in the Middle English, I dare not lean to my conceit, affirming it as fast true, which means, “I don’t dare depend on my own opinion, asserting it as absolutely right.” And neither, he feels, should we.
It is a trademark of this author to emphasize the crucial importance in spiritual matters of “not knowing.” But the kind “not knowing” he talks about isn’t a mere negativism or fatalism. It’s more like a kind of fundamental affirmation. It is a means towards another kind of knowing, an “unknowing,” which this author understands is deeply valuable. For him, to uncover and allow the experience of unknowing is the very heart of contemplative practice.
When we practice contemplative unknowing, we let go of all of our conceited conceptualizations, and we come to rest in a more fundamental experience of being alive. Unknowing is an exercise of utter simplicity—it involves letting go of our thoughts and images and sensations, and a coming to rest in a blind, naked awareness of the fact of existence. And it is here, this author tells us, that we come to experience what he calls “the feeling of God.”
In Middle English, “feeling” could mean “awareness” or “consciousness.” And, as a Christian, for the author of The Cloud, “the feeling of God” was a lived participation in what’s always already true—what’s always already here—before we construct any intellectual notions about the nature of the divine. The experience we uncover in the practice of contemplation is something which is literally too simple for words.
That experience is the focus of The Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud is essentially a manual for contemplative practice, and it was written for someone who was already living in solitude and was devoting all his time to meditation practice and monastic study. But in Discretion—which is concerned with how we can enact appropriate choices in our lives, regardless of our outward manner of living—the author makes the same suggestion.
In both Discretion and The Cloud, their author says that “the feeling of God” should be the true aim, the real purpose, of all our actions. So his advice is: don’t choose eating and don’t choose fasting—choose God. The Christian author of The Cloud understood that, while we have being, God is being, and he suggests that our lives can be most fully appreciated when we’ve let go of the conceit that they're actually “ours.” All of us, for The Cloud author, are ultimately expressions of the divine, and he understood that that matter-of-fact truth is something we can realize in our immediate experience.
When we have “the feeling of God” in and as the radical humility and utter honesty of contemplative unknowing, full far from fantasy [and any] feigned folly formed in phantom—that is, at a level that is well removed from any mere concept or fabricated idea—we realize a true love. And for The Cloud author it is in that love that we are to do everything we do. There is nothing more important, there is nothing more wonderful, and there is nothing more simple. The author suggests that in this radically simple love and “oneing wisdom” we will know what to do.
It is God for whom you should be quiet, if you should be quiet, and for whom you should speak, if you should speak…. Because being quiet isn’t God, and speaking isn’t God … nor are any other two opposites. He is hidden between them, and can’t be found by the effort of your mind, but only by the love of your heart. He can’t be known by reasoning. He can’t be thought, or had, or tracked, by understanding. But he can be loved and chosen by the true, loving will of your heart. Choose him and you’ll be silently speaking and speakingly silent, fastingly eating and eatingly fasting, and so on for all the rest.
There are two eyes of the soul, reason and love. By reason we can track how mighty, how wise, and how good God is in his creations, but not in himself. But whenever reason falls short, then love likes to come alive and learn to be in play; for by love we can find him, feel him, and touch him even in himself.
In both The Cloud of Unknowing and An Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings—the one an instruction manual for how to practice meditative contemplation and the other a letter about how to enact discernment in our daily actions—the author provides the same core instruction. When we practice meditative contemplation, we come to a point where the question of what we are is found to be less important than the miracle that we are. And, similarly, for this author, when we’re looking to discern the most fitting actions for our daily lives, the critical issue comes to be less what we do than how we do it.
The spiritual activity this author recommends is, to borrow from Michel Foucault, “a technology of the soul.” It is an experiential practice. It is, in the end, the opposite of any sort of rote dogmatism. It is an open-eyed going and looking. It’s “another kind of knowing,” one that ultimately comprises a kind of self-evident certitude and a loving clarity. It is what the author calls the clean will of a true heart. And it might be mentioned in passing that the way The Cloud author suggests we approach dilemmas of choice bears notable similarities to the Zen Buddhist practice of working with koans. In both, an apparent either/or personal dilemma, intensified by a sense of existential importance and uncertainty, comes to be resolved in a thorough engagement with, and a non-deliberated, “grace-filled” expression of, what we most fundamentally are. The practice The Cloud author describes is reminiscent, as well, of Quaker spiritual practice, where the activity of contemplative worship is not different from the process used to discern matters of business and conscience.
The Cloud author’s discussions of contemplative practice and spiritual discernment are both sober and poetic. (His occasional employment of alliteration, for instance, is a Middle English equivalent of verse, as in “ever when reason defaileth, then list love live and learn for to play.”) That combination of sobriety and artistic sensitivity is a key. In the end, discernment and moral choice are to be carried out like the decisions of poetic and artistic creation, where we decide with our whole heart and being what is the most fitting way to experience and express ourselves in beauty and purpose.
It’s sometimes suggested that contemplatives are uninterested in or oblivious to the practical moral issues faced by persons who live actively in the world. The Cloud author’s remarks in An Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings suggest otherwise. He understands that in all situations, whether they’re active or contemplative, there is a discretion we can discover in offering up our naked, blind being to the divinely true, a practice which uncovers and embodies an experienced joy, a vital love, and a naturally sensed clarity for what’s needed.
This article is based on work for a book in progress on contemplative practice in The Cloud of Unknowing and Zen master Dōgen, tentatively titled, “To Know Like Love.”
The original Middle English text of An Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings can be found in Phyllis Hodgson, ed., Deonise Hid Divinitie: And Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to The Cloud of Unknowing (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). The Middle English of The Cloud is available in Phyllis Hodgson, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing: And the Book of Privy Counselling (London: Oxford University Press, 1944).
For parallels in Zen to the Cloud author’s teaching on discernment, see for instance Zentatsu Richard Baker’s comments on spiritual practice, poetry, and conscience in Thomas Cleary’s Timeless Spring: A Soto Zen Anthology (New York: Weatherhill, 1980), pp. 9-11, and Zen Master Dōgen’s teaching, in his essay, Genjōkōan, in Thomas Cleary, Shōbōgenzō: Zen Essays by Dogen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), pp. 29-35.