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Wisdom Saying
"Truly this is the unending miracle of love: that one loving person, through his love, can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire creation. And this marvelous work of love goes on forever, for he whom we love is eternal."
*The Cloud of Unknowing
Comments
The anonymous, medieval, English author of the Cloud of Unknowing writes of the two capacities of rational creatures (including persons and angels). The powers are a knowing power and a loving power.
Much, indeed most, of Christianity is a Path of Love. Christian education has as its end a devotional relationship with Infinite Truth. Some Christians focus devotion more on God as Father, some on Jesus Christ, and some on the Holy Spirit. Regardless, the point of devotion is clear.
The author of the Cloud writes of the loving power, saying, "Truly this is the unending miracle of love: that one loving person, through his love, can embrace God, whose being fills and transcends the entire creation. And this marvelous work of love goes on forever, for he whom we love is eternal." He reminds us of a love that is toward God beyond knowing~at this point the word and concept "God" no longer applies~we are in knowning-by-unknowing, or what Nicolas of Cusa, 15th Century philosopher and bishop, called learned ignorance.
Our knowing power (i.e. intellectual) loses its capacity at some point: we can say it opens up in maturity to unknowing or, more starkly, implodes into unknowing. It is helpful until that point, for it enables informed faith. A stupid faith is never desirable, and a faith that ignores facts is not commendable or wise. Faith should never be an excuse to believe the ridiculous.
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Learning prepares the way to unknowing but can never give the raw, alarming experience of that Desert Where Knowledge Leaves Off. If you have not experienced this, then words can provide a hint of a far-off Reality that is as near as can ever be or become, for It has always been. All truths are echoes of this Truth; follow the echoes to the Voice. And, do not disdain truths, for truths are sure witnesses of Truth, even as branches are faithful testimonies to the stock.
I am speaking, not of stupidity or ignorance or anything like that, not at all. I am speaking of knowledge of Mystery partly prepared for and nurtured by learning about any truth that is helpful on the Christ Path. But, the divine ignorance provides a space of christened consciousness in which there is no difference between earthy and celestial. All distinction breaks down at this point into nondual Bliss, so much so that when trying to speak of it one may feel befuddled and in much frustration.
I am, also, speaking of a love that takes our knowledge into a knowing of the Divine directly~the gnosis spoken of by early mystical theologians, a knowing that does not leave off knowledge as useless but takes knowledge into an Abyss of Direct Realization of God. This Abyss is the Pleroma, or Divine Fullness.
Briefly, let me clarify. Imagine a Mirror. That Mirror decides to fracture itself to create other mirrors--pieces of Itself--, or possibly the nature of the Mirror is that it fractures. The very idea of otherness is in Being for the first time. Before, time was nonexistent, or only Existence was Being; without the other, or otherness~the fractures~, time was not. So, each little piece becomes other to the Other and others. Each piece of the Mirror is no longer the Mirror but part~emanations~of the Mirror: some would say it is both the Mirror and not the Mirror. Each piece reflects the Mirror~for it necessarily has the nature of It~and finds its being and purpose in remembering that Other Being, or that in which no object exists, but, so to speak, only Subject relating to subjects. Unity becomes multiplicity. The pieces of the Mirror, in historical emanation, or embodied incarnation, find their true nature in return of an intuitive, non-logical~not illogical~insight into oneness with the Mirror.
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