The Salmon of Knowledge, the Cloud of Unknowing, and Other Accounts of Instant Knowing

Michael McGlynn

The Salmon of Knowledge, The Cloud of Unknowing, And Other Accounts of Instant Knowing

SUMMARY – This article considers the fourteenth-century treatise The Cloud of Unknowing as a description of instant, non-sensory cognition. The text has an ostensibly particular function as an instruction manual in Christian contemplation, but bears on a universal experience, that of quickly knowing without knowing how we know. To demonstrate the universality of quick knowing, the literary motif of instant knowing is briefly considered, and a survey of intuition and non-sensory cognition in cognitive science is sustained throughout. A case is made that the author-mystic’s experience of unknowing is not unrelated to some aspects of everyday cognition. A corollary argument is made that early religious and literary texts provide new meaning when viewed as ethnographically and empirically valuable (as opposed to recursive and indeterminate).

1. Nowhere Bodily

There is a robust and continuous tradition in the mythical and mystical texts of medieval Europe which posit, implicitly or explicitly, a theory of cognition beyond sensation, of knowing beyond physicality. This robust tradition stretches from the oldest mythical narratives of Europe through the present-day West, operating under a scientific paradigm. Toward the beginning of our chronology, or at least the beginning of the medieval period, the legendary Irish hero Finn mac Cool’s immediate and complete acquisition of knowledge of the world through one taste of the salmon of knowledge obviates the need for hard-won empirical data, i.e., life experience.1 A belief in the non-physicality of reality and therefore of the cognition of reality is also expressed in assertions such as this, from The Cloud of Unknowing, ‘Because nowhere bodily is everywhere spiritually’.2 This quotation from chapter sixty-eight elaborates ‘unknowing’ as no place, a spatial metaphor for the absence of physical sensation, for cognition

1 The Boyhood Deeds of Finn survive in the Psalter of Cashel, an Old Irish manuscript. 2 ch. 68, p.121: ‘For whi nogh-where bodily is euerywhere goostly’. This and all references to the Cloud of Unknowing are taken from Phylis Hodgson’s edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1944).

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based not on processing sensory inputs, but rather on instantaneous intuited realization; in metaphysical terms ‘nowhere’ is a quality of the formless absolute. ‘Unknowing’ is the Cloud-author’s term for the cognition of reality through contemplation. ‘Unknowing’ and other grammatical tropes of the ineffability of reality and truth are the leitmotiv of this and many other texts written about the mystical experience, enlightenment, and ultimate reality in many religious and philosophical traditions. In the Cloud-author’s theological language, physical things are subject to spiritual things, and not the opposite.3 This statement is not a moralizing Church platitude about life after death, so much as a theory of, if we may borrow contemporary language, non-physical, non-local causality. This is the gist of the Cloud-author’s program of ‘spiritual reading’ (ch. 51), which is really an imma- terialist epistemology in which ‘up’ is not spatial but metaphorical and ‘heart’ refers to the ‘spiritual heart’, or faculty of will (ch. 51), which the author says is stirred only by God (ch. 34). Theories of non-physical causality are common to an esoteric tradition which runs parallel to and also intersects with mainstream tradition throughout Western history – Pythagoras, Plato, Gnostic Christianity, Paracelsus, Quietists, Mesmer, Berkeley, Swedenborg. In this essay I explain a 14th-century theory of non-discursive, non-sensory cognition in light of 21st- century cognitive science, including neurological correlates of religious experience, somatosensory experience and cognition, and theories of perception. One purpose for exploring this idea of non-sensory cognition is to consider the idea that texts now treated as ‘literature’ might be empirically valid, phe- nomenologically real, and historically valuable – in short, that they refer to real and valid experience as opposed to referring to nothing because ‘text’ is inherently indeterminate and recursive or because political concerns motivate people to fabricate most of what they write.4 Literary episodes such as the Salmon of Knowledge and treatises such as the Cloud of Unknowing represent some aspect of cognition or some psychological reality. To draw a simple analogy, everyone with legs has the capacity to run, but only a few develop marathon-running skill. The exercise explained in the Cloud develops into a skill a latent universal human capacity.5 Trance states can be productive. Medieval Studies scholars need not

3 ch. 61, p.113: ‘For alle bodily þing is sogette unto goostly þing & is reuild þerafter, & not agenward’ (‘For every physical thing is subject to and governed by spiritual things, and not the opposite’). 4 I am referring here to certain currents of postmodern and Foucauldian criticism that suppose all experience and meaning to be relative and all motivation to be self-interested. 5 hageman et al. posit a biological mechanism underlying all trance phenomena; Joan H. Hageman et al., ‘The neurobiology of trance and mediumship in Brazil’, in: Christian G. Jensen, Stanley Krippner & Harris L. Friedman (Eds.), Mysterious minds: The neurobiology of psychics, mediums, and other extraordinary people, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger: 2009, 93.

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be apologetic about their texts, assuming they make no truth-claims simply because Medieval Studies scholarship is produced within the metanarrative that views things religious as the proverbial Marxian opiate. This reduction might be innocent; religious studies has traditionally claimed that its object of study is irreducible to the terms of any other discipline.6 Our quickly-globalizing schol- arly community can now see cognition (experience) without subjecting it to the presuppositions or conceptual priorities of disciplines which would reify it beyond ordinary use or reduce it to something below common interest. Medita- tion is conditioning with real effects on the physiology of the brain and somatic experience. Davidson et al. found that mindfulness meditation had ‘demonstra- ble effects on brain and immune function’.7 Kaplan cites research that shows that meditation hypoactivates the parietal lobe, resulting in a diminishing of the distinction between subject and object, which Kaplan then shows to be both a somatic experience (an experience of reality) measureable in the brain and in subjective experience as well as a goal of Advaita Vedanta (Hinduism).8 Lutz et al. famously showed physical changes in the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks resulting from more than 10,000 hours of meditation on compassion.9 In his article on the origin of the universal human experience of ‘being a subject among objects’ in Vedanta and neurology, Kaplan tries to dignify seemingly opposed disciplines. He writes, Contrary to the existential feeling of the average person’, who believes that their subjectivity is an indisputable fact independent of any phenomenal objects and is confirmed merely by their thinking it so, this research has disclosed that our sense of subjectivity unfolds only in relation to a phenomenal world (…) both Advaita and the neurosciences attest to that.10 Both Kaplan’s conclusion and his methodology support the thesis I am advanc- ing here, namely, that the Cloud is a kind of research still valuable today.

6 Ann Taves, ‘Ascription, attribution, and cognition in the study of experiences deemed religious’, in: Religion 38 (2005), 126. 7 richard J. Davidson et al., ‘Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation’, in: Psychosomatic Medicine 65 (2003), 564. 8 Kaplan takes a religious proclamation – ‘that there is no subject without object and neither without the movement of the mind’ – and shows that this ‘is no longer merely an abstract philosophical statement’; Stephen Kaplan, ‘Grasping at ontological straws: Overcoming reductionism in the Advaita Vedanta-neuroscience dialogue’, in: Journal of the American Acad- emy of Religion 77 (2009) no.2, 264. 9 A. Lutz et al., ‘Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: Effects of meditative expertise’, in: PLoS ONE 3 (2008) no.3, e1897 (doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0001897). 10 Kaplan, ‘Grasping at ontological straws’, 264.

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Overview of Cognitive Science There is no single cognitive science. In simple terms, cognitive science is the fruit of various academic disciplines researching the mind. In his introductory study for non-scientists, Hogan writes that cognitive science is an ‘interdisciplinary study [that] grew out of post-Behaviorist psychology, linguistics, computer science, neurobiology [with] connections with virtually every discipline in the modern university’.11 Conclusions reached by different disciplines are often contradictory, though there are broadly recognizable trends. I find no more attrac- tive statement of these trends than in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. The opening salvo of their rewriting of the Western philosophical tradition is pithy and pointed: ‘The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. These are three major findings of cognitive science’.12 Cognitive science moves in what traditional disciplines might take to be contradictory directions. On the one hand, cognitive science insists on the role of the body in cognition; at the same time, it insists on something more than ‘eliminative physicalism’, which is not logically coherent because it fails to take into account subjective experience, what it’s like to be an experiencing subject.13 Of utmost importance to understanding the mystical experience and the Cloud of Unknowing in particular are cognitive science findings on conceptual thought. Contrary to opinio communis, deduction and reason are slow,14 and work with emotions, as opposed to being their opposite.15 Concepts do not have a strict definition16 but are often generated in particular contexts by interacting elements17 rather than by minimal qualifica- tions.18 Concepts are based ultimately on sensory experience codified as metaphors.19 ‘From a biological perspective, it is eminently plausible that reason has grown out of the sensory motor system’.20 Our sense of reality grows out of our

11 Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive science, literature, and the arts: A guide for humanists, New York: Routledge, 2003, 29. 12 george Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the flesh, New York: Basic Books, 1999. Kindle Edition, location 57. 13 Hogan, Cognitive science, 30; Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 8. 14 Paul Thagard, Mind: Introduction to cognitive science. 2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, 29. 15 Thagard, Mind, 51; Dylan Evans, Emotions: A very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2001 (Kindle Edition), location 190. 16 Thagard, Mind, 74. 17 Ibid., 125. 18 Ibid., 126. 19 lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the flesh, location 273. 20 Ibid., location 589.

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body21 and we are not free to think beyond whatever conceptual system we have learned,22 even though there are other ways to think. If there were anything like the non-conceptual, preter-rational cognitive experience claimed by the Cloud, it would have to be non-physical according to 21st-century cognitive science, because all concepts are physical, ultimately. And ‘non-bodily’ is precisely how the Cloud-author describes knowing through the contemplative process.23

Critical Reception of the Cloud Although the Cloud of Unknowing is well known, and not infrequently men- tioned, it is often treated only in the context of other mystical writings. Schol- arly studies of the Cloud focus mostly on important and expected academic cruces typical of medieval texts, such as its authorship, its dialect, and its relationship to its historical context.24 It has been compared in practitioners’ circles to

21 Ibid., location 232. 22 Ibid., location 86. 23 unknowing would be non-conceptual congnition. each primary metaphor is embodied in three ways: (1) It is embodied through bodily experience in the world, which pairs sensorimotor experience with subjective experience. (2) The source-domain logic arises from the inferential structure of the sensorimotor system. And (3) it is instantiated neurally in the synaptic weights associated with neural connections. (Lakoff, locations 918-920). Thus the cloud of unknowing would have to be nowhere, or nonspatial. The experience of a nonphysical God would have to be non-ordinary and nonconceptual, which means that, if such a spirtual (non-physical) entity or dimension exists, the Cloud-author’s propositions are at least logically consistent. According to Lakoff and Johnson, language and reason are material and corporeal, which does not contradict the religious claim that there is a non-physical reality inaccessible to ordinary cognitive states, or, perhaps more subtly expressed, only imma- nent to ordinary cognitive states. 24 davies considers fundamental historical questions: authorship, institutional affiliation (Car- thusian), the theology of the Cloud in historical context, and the relation of the Cloud to medieval mysticism (Oliver Davies, The mystical tradition in Europe, New York: Paulist Press, 1988). Chartrand-Burke attempts to correct our reception of the Cloud by establishing the context behind the author’s espousal of the contemplative life (Tony Chartrand-Burke, ‘Against the proud scholars of the devil: Anti-intellectual rhetoric in the Cloud of Unknowing’, in: Mystics Quarterly 23 [1997] no.3, 115-136). Morris analyzes the ‘rhetorical stance’ of the author, including his choice of epistolary form, and the various rhetorical persons (narrator as mentor, the apprentice reader, etc.; T.J. Morris, ‘An approach to The Cloud of Unknowing and its related treatises’, in: Mystics Quarterly 15 [1989] no.1, 13-20). Fanous and Ellis provide a very general outline of the Cloud, paying special attention to its relationship with heresy (Roger Ellis & Samuel Fanous, ‘1349-1412: Texts’, in: Samuel Fanous & Vincent Gillespie [Eds.], Medieval English mysticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Of course the introductions provided by Walsh, Spearing, and other translators as introduction to their translations are studies of the essential context and meaning of the Cloud (see James Walsh,

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Buddhist mediation,25 and has even been the subject of post-modern readings.26 Scholars of the Middle Ages are free to discuss the Cloud in its historical import, but in general make no attempt to assess the value of the technique therein explained, which is odd if we consider that the text is an instruction manual. It’s not even a work of devotion, yet Catholics – devotees – are the only people who have attempted to assess the value of the text.27 The Centering Prayer movement in the Catholic Church is based in part on the Cloud.28 Assessments of the knowledge the Cloud purports to convey vary according to religious affiliation. Academia, a generally atheistic enterprise, takes no notice of the Cloud except as an historical phenomenon. Catholic criticism is generally less interested in its history than its content. Wouldn’t an intelligent reception of any text have to do both, have to consider both historical context and also assess its stated purpose? An awareness of the historical context of the Cloud informs us about the via negativa of Dionysian theology, the genealogy of mystical writings in medieval Europe, the Thomist theological elements in the Cloud, the particular prove- nance of this text, the dangers of heresy, the debates about active and contemplative lifestyles, etc. We could not understand the text without this background. However, what the author would have considered the most important part of the text is off limits for most academic investigations (unless it is carried out by

[Ed.], The Cloud of Unknowing, Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981; A.C. Spearing, The Cloud of Unknowing and other works, London: Penguin, 2001). 25 The first volume (1981) of the University of Hawaii journal Buddhist-Christian Studies contains two articles on the Cloud as compared to Buddhist practice (85-96). See also volume 9 (1989), 43-60. 26 for the most recent application of cultural theory to the Cloud, see Carmel Bendon Davis, Mysticism and space: Space and spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing Author and Julian of Norwich, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Pokorn applies postmodern theory to the Cloud, seeing similarities in between Decon- struction and the Cloud in their distrust of discursive reason (Nike Kocijanèiè Pokorn, ‘The language and discourse of The Cloud of Unknowing’, in: Literature and Theology 11 [1997] no.4, 408-421). Young and Taylor see in the Cloud a kind of proto-postmodern concern with ‘the practices of the self’ (Glenn Young, ‘Forget yourself and your deeds for God: Awareness and transcendence of self in The Cloud of Unknowing’, in: Mystics Quarterly 31 [2005], 9-22; Cheryl Taylor, ‘The Cloud texts and some aspects of modern theory’, in: Mystics Quarterly 27 [2001] no.4, 143-153). 27 will and Rissanen, in their respective articles, attempt to explain aspects of the the mechanism of the contemplative prayer exercise described in the Cloud: Maika J. Will, ‘The role of passivity in the prayer of the Cloud of Unknowing’, in: Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993) no.2, 63-70; Paavo Rissanen, ‘The prayer of being in The Cloud of Unknowing’, in: Mystics Quar- terly 13 (1987) no.3, 140-145. 28 See Thomas Keating, Centering prayer in daily life and ministry (ed. Gustave Reininger), New York: Continuum, 1998, 26.

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a Catholic theologian), yet the experience of what the author calls ‘God’ is still worth academic investigation. If we can understand the historical particularities well enough to register their relativity, then I think we can also discern in the Cloud certain universals, namely a cognitive experience that is usually associated with religion but which has recently come under scrutiny of neuroscientists (see comments on Newberg and Persinger below). The subject matter treated in the Cloud might be better understood by means of experiential knowledge, or at least by studying those with experiential knowledge. ‘Spiritual knowing’, according to Ferrer, requires participatory understanding.29 Nor do we have to meditate to understand, though that might work. Rather, if we realize that the Cloud deals with a phenomenon within the bounds of human experience, though expressed emically (as Catholic doctrine), then we can make use of scholarship on the context of the Cloud, neuroscience on the subject matter of the Cloud, and even practitioners’ responses to the contemplative exercise explained in the Cloud. Specifically, we might try to see beyond the Western epistemological assumption that “matter” and “spirit” are opposites. The Western cultural logic that cognition is synonymous with conscious awa- renss will make us read the Cloud wrongly. The Cloud espouses a model of cognition through non-conscious awareness. The convergence of matter and immaterial spirit is paradoxical in the West because of widely accepted and deeply established categories of thought.30 It is for this reason that the Cloud seems ‘oriental’ to some. However, the body is always a bridge to the ineffable: ecstasy, despite its etymology, is nonetheless an embodied state. (Meditators always begin with their body – establishing a posture, refraining from caffeine, fasting, etc. – in order to carry out their work). Therefore, we can agree with both materialists and idealists. Texts such as the Cloud provide more data for our understanding of cognition.

Senses and Cognition in the Middle Ages Naturally, there were a number of theories of perception and sensation in Medi- eval Europe, including mystographical theories of sensus spirituales. The Cloud- author’s theory of sensation was mostly in agreement with his peers, which is to say, generally Thomistic. His understanding of the senses is orthodox with regard

29 Jorge N. Ferrer & Jacob H. Sherman, The participatory turn: Spirituality, mysticism, and religious studies, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008, 158. 30 See Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, ‘Naïve sensualism, docta ignorantia: Tibetan liberation through the senses’, in: Numen 47 (2000) no.1, 69-112, for an interesting article on what we might call the materiality of spiritual practices in the East, and how this differs from the Christian mystical idea of the immateriality of things spiritual.

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to both Church and mystical tradition.31 For the Cloud-author, the nature of cognition of reality (‘God’) is affective, or love (louyng might).32 In chapter four it is explained that God is cognizable, with the help of grace, through love, though not through intellect, or knowyng might.33 The distinction is fundamental, for this kind of cognition, louying might, is typically marginalized in Western discourse as feminine, dark, intuitive; in short, as the negative side of traditional Western, rational values, yet in mystical theology it is called cognitio experimentalis,34 and has the value of cognition.35 The notion of spiritual faculties of sense is at least as old as Origen,36 continues through church fathers such as Augustine and theologians and mystics such as Gregory the Great, Bonaven- ture and into the Renaissance works of San Juan de la Cruz in the sixteenth century. The notion of non-sensory cognition was widely explored by medieval theologians from the second century, beginning with Origen’s theory of an immaterial intellect.37 For Origen, matter and spirit are opposed and God, as mens, is spiritual substance and cannot be perceived by humanity in our carnal- ity but only by that in us which is spiritual.38 Substance, of course, is the term used in the Western philosophical tradition to refer to the basic building blocks of reality. We do not have to look too far for non-materialist definitions of substance. Fourteenth-century Catholic visionary Julian of Norwich and eight- eenth century Irish philosopher George Berkeley posit substance as good and as spiritual.39

31 hodgson, ‘Introduction’, in: The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counsel, lxi. 32 According to Thomas Gallus Vercellensis, who influenced the Cloud-author (Hodgson, ‘Intro- duction’, lxiii) affectus is the highest faculty (ibid., lxiii), and comprises spiritual taste, touch and smell (Karl-Heinz Steinmetz, ‘Heich savour of the Godheed: Some reflections on the “Cloud of Unknowing” [sic] and the discourse of perceiving God in fourteenth [sic] century England’, in: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 6 [2008], 489). 33 Cloud of unknowing, 18-19. The author repeats the idea in chapter 8 (p.33): Loue may reche to God in þis liif, bot not knowing. He also repeats that the contemplative is to use is ‘love’ (or ‘God’) (7, p.28). 34 Steinmetz, ‘Heich savour of the Godheed’, 484. 35 Ibid., 485. 36 Ibid., 487. 37 See Gordon Rudy’s chapter one (Mystical language of sensation in the later Middle Ages, New York: Routledge, 2002) for an overview of the theory of spiritual senses, and chapter two for Origen. Here is the relevant quotation in Origen: Ad ipsum deum refertur injuria, cum putant eum per naturum corpoream posse intelligi (On First Principles 1.1.7). 38 Rudy, Mystical language of sensation, 17-18. 39 See chapter 27 of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love: ‘But I saw not synne, for I beleve it hath no manner of substance ne no party of being’ (Julian of Norwich, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich [ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton], Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994); and section 55 of Berkeley’s Principles: ‘there is not any other substance than spirit, or

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In contemporary scientific language, the mystical concept that spiritual senses are required to perceive spiritual substance most resemble current theories of intuition. Recent neuro-scientific research on ordinary cognitive functions traditionally associated with reason shows that emotion and intuition play important roles in reasoning.40 In the Cloud’s schema, feeling comes before knowledge (ch. 45); love, not knowledge, reaches God, which suggests that this is a non- intellectual process probably best characterized as ‘intuition’ in modern language. Even a ‘demystified’ definition of intuition opens up the Cloud to new meaning: ‘intuition is simply a conspicuous, if heretofore puzzling, example of fringe feelings doing cognitive work in the absence of a sensory content’.41 Intu- ition is a kind of cognition just as much as reason; the difference is that intuition is quick, is effortless, and is a process which is not accessible to consciousness whereas reason is slow, involves effort, and comprises a series of steps in conscious awareness.42

2. Alternative Epistemological Traditions

Mythical Knowing European myth registers the idea of instant, complete knowing, which resembles in some ways the claims of the mystics to have immediate, non-sensory, experiential knowledge of reality itself. In the Salmon of Knowledge incident from The Boyhood Deeds of Finn, Fionn, who knows himself only as Deimne, accidentally tastes a supernatural salmon that the poet and druid Finnéices has caught after years of seeking. In an instant, Fionn knows all that can be known of the world (‘And nothing would be unknown to him afterwards’).43 For

that which perceives’ (George Berkeley, Principles of human knowledge: Three dialogues, London: Penguin, 1988). 40 goodenough and Prehn show how law, long associated with reason and impartiality, is characterized by intuition: Oliver R. Goodenough & Kristin Prehn, ‘A neuroscientific approach to normative judgment in law and justice’, in: O.R. Goodenough & K. Prehn, ‘A neuroscientific approach to normative judgment in law and justice’, in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences 359 (2004), 1709-1726. 41 Bruce Mangan, ‘Sensation’s ghost: The non-sensory “fringe” of consciousness’, in: Psyche 7 (2001) no.18, n/p. 42 Jonathan Haidt, ‘The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment’, in: Psychological Review 108 (2001) no.4, 818. 43 david Comyn, Mac-ġníomarta finn (slioct saltrac caisil): The boyhood deeds of Finn, Dublin: Gill, 1896, 42: ocur cen ní na ainfis itir iarum. The incident is listed as 162.1, p. 61, in Tom Peete Cross’ Motif-index of early Irish literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1952) and as B124.1.1 in Stith Thompson’s Motif-index of folk literature: A classification of

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whatever else the incident is as entertainment, oral tradition, and national literary treasure, the Salmon of Knowledge is an etiology of the cognitive process or perhaps the cognitive faculty. Etymologically, the tale is about cognition: ‘Fionn’ means ‘knower’, and the same root for Fionn’s knowledge (Old Irish fios) is behind not only Fionn’s name, but also Finnéices, the salmon (eo fis), and the thumb by which Fionn begins to ingest the supernatural salmon (ordóg feasa).44 As does all heroic literature, the incident personifies human faculties and traits, reducing complex situations and processes into single figures or actions. We might make a psychological reading of the incident, then, by say- ing that the Salmon of Knowledge is the practice by which the conscious mind, Fionn, can access intuition and other nonconscious modes of cognition.45 At its simplest, the incident registers the universal experience of knowing without knowing how we know. It points to cognition that happens non-discursively. MacKillop points out that salmons have a natural association with inspiration (and I would add intuition) due to the fact that they leap, or progress discontinuously through their ordinary medium, water, just as intuition is knowing discontinuously through the ordinary medium of ratiocination.46 That the Macgníamhartha Finn has been called ‘a repository of seer lore’47 confirms our assertion that the Salmon is a mythopoetic reflexion on contentless, immediate cognition, for second sight is nothing if not quick knowing, wrapped in a religious and cultural tradition. Another popular medieval narrative tradition of instant knowing through ingestion is the Sigurd/Sifrit tradition in Old Icelandic and Middle High Ger- man. Sigurd’s drinking of the dragon’s blood in the Old Icelandic Fáfnismál redounds to him the capacity to understand the speech of the birds, who warn Sigurd of Regin’s intended betrayal. Sigurd acts on this super-naturally-delivered knowledge and slays Regin. As happened to Fionn, Sigurd immediately began to cognize new dimensions of reality upon tasting the animal. Having burned his finger on the roasting heart, Sigurd instinctively puts his finger in his mouth, and ‘As soon as the blood from Fáfnir’s heart touched his tongue, he understood

narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, medieval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest- books and local legends. Vol. 6 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1932). 44 dáithí Ó hÓgáin, Fionn mac Cumhaill: Images of a Gaelic hero, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988, 5, 52, 56. 45 In this reading, Deimne represents the empty mind, for he had no explicit motivation to eat the salmon. It simply happened to him. ‘Emptiness’ is a term of special significance in Bud- dhist and Christian meditative traditions. 46 James MacKillop, Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic myth in English literature, Syracuse, NY: Syra- cuse University Press, 1986. 47 Ó hÓgáin, Fionn mac Cumhaill, 57.

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the speech of the birds’.48 The Salmon of Knowledge and Fáfnir’s blood do for us what heroic literature has always done for humanity, namely, figure forth abstractions, embody mental experiences to facilitate understanding. We may use a folk-psychology hermeneutic to interpret these heroes, and see them as an aspect of cognition or personality. In such a hermeneutic, the mytho-mystical experience of direct knowing is not the property of an elite of religious ascetics, nor of an elite of heroes. Rather it is something universal in literature and in experience, and heroic literary images point toward a possibility. The literary motif of instant knowing lives today. Daniel Keyes’ award win- ning, widely anthologized ‘Flowers for Algernon’ is a modern reflex of the same mytheme, recasting the basic notion of coming into instant knowledge in a way palatable and credible for a modern audience – through technology. The same could be said of Jon Turtletaub’s 1996 film Phenomenon, John Burger’s 2011 Limitless, and Luc Besson’s 2014 Lucy. The transformative agent is whatever the age finds mysterious and powerful; the basic message is the same: there is a fast track to all knowledge; there is a way to know things beyond ordinary means. A recent popular science book by journalist Malcolm Gladwell49 performs the same kind of tale-telling of instant knowing by narrating stories of the lucrative instant-knowing of millionaire investors, art curators, and athletes. The subtitle of Gladwell’s book is The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Of course Gladwell’s book cites psychological research that supports the idea of ‘rapid cognition’, just as I am here, and we may see all of these texts as a continuous tradition of stories about instant knowing.

Mystical Knowing The essential cognitive experience of quick knowing attested in the mystical tradition of medieval Europe is also attested in Eastern traditions. Sudden flashes of enlightenment are called kensho in the Zen tradition. The Taoist tradition is full of stories of spiritual adepts coming suddenly into a realization of transcendent knowledge, such as Ge Hong’s account of spiritual adept Bo He staring a cave wall for three years until there emerged a scripture, which, upon its chant- ing, redounded ‘transcendence’ to Bo He.50 Even transmission from Daoist

48 finnur Jónsson (Ed.), Fáfnismál: Sæmundar-edda, Eddukvæði, Reykjavík 1905, 314: En er hjartblóð Fáfnis kom á tungu hánum, ok skilði hann fugls rödd. This version of the dragon- slaying story with the motif of the acquisition of supernatural knowledge might have genetic relations with the Salmon of Knowledge (Ó hÓgáin, Fionn mac Cumhaill, 59). 49 malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The power of thinking without thinking, New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 2005. 50 robert Ford Campany, To live as long as heaven and earth: A translation and study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 135.

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master to disciple is allegedly non-sensory, as it is passed ‘mind to mind’.51 Chinese culture in general makes recourse to divinatory knowledge, which is a kind of externalized quick knowing.52 The Western, theistic mystical union has been discussed by the mystics themselves, scholars, theologians, philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, and by skeptics. The essence of the mystical union consists in non-sensory53 contentless cognition,54 a collapsing not only of subject and object but of all distinction. It is a non-sensory, nonconscious, non-dualis- tic awareness called ‘union with God’ in the West and ‘enlightenment’ in the East. It has been suggested that mystical experiences are empirically valid for mystics and non-mystics, meriting investigation as any other experiential claim; they are analogous to scientific claims.55 The mystical experience is amenable to scientific study because it occurs under certain predictable conditions.56 And it has been studied. For example, Maslow’s ‘peak experiences’ include what the Western theological tradition calls the mystical experience. In his 1964 book, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, Maslow claimed that peak-experiences are universal (and not essentially religious) and both common and instrumental to the self-actualized, the highest level of Maslow’s pyramid of needs.57

In the language of its own tradition, the Cloud epistemology is a vector in Dio- nysian dark contemplation, which begins with Pseudo-Dionysius and continues through San Juan de la Cruz in the sixteenth century.58 In modern parlance, the

51 Zhiming Zhao, ‘Daoism’, in: H. James Birx (Ed.), Encyclopedia of anthropology. Vol. 2, Thou- sand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006, 665. 52 howard L. Goodman, ‘Chinese mysticism’, in: Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Ed.), New dictionary of the history of ideas. Vol. 4, Detroit: Scribner, 2005, 1543. It is well known that even in 21st-century Taiwan and China, educated people consult fortune tellers and make use of ora- cles at local temples, such as the casting of moon-shaped blocks to evoke the gods’ answers to personal questions. 53 ralph W. Hood Jr., ‘The empirical study of mysticism’, in: B. Spilka & D.N. McIntosh (Eds.), The psychology of religion, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997, 222. 54 This is the phrase Forman uses: Robert K.C. Forman, The problem of pure consciousness: Mysti- cism and philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 55 hood, ‘The empirical study of mysticism’, 229-231. 56 evan Fales, ‘Can science explain mysticism?’, in: Religious Studies 35 (1999) no.2, 213-214. 57 A.H. Maslow, Religions, values, and peak experiences, New York: Viking, 1964. 58 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was a Neo-Platonist of the fifth century whose four surviv- ing works include the earliest apophatic writings of the West. Pseudo-Dionysius was widely influential, and the Cloud-author translated Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology. Apophatic, or negative, theology focuses on the ineffability of the divine both in theory and practice: refraining from formulating concepts about the divine and refraining from visualization, ver- balization, or anything but what is now called mindfulness meditation. See Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology (trans. Clarence Edwin Rolt), Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library/ London: SPCK, 1920 (Web).

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Cloud explains and prescribes mantra meditation for the sake of achieving a kind of integrated cognition, or ‘unknowing’. In the words of a thirteenth-century Scholastic textbook on Dionysian mysticism, the senses must be ‘abandoned’59 because spiritual senses transcend all sensory perception and conceptual thought.60 What is unique about accounts of the mystical experience, compared to other religious discourse, is that such accounts claim to be empirical, which would make the mystical experience first-person data of an ostensible experience of reality. In the following section, I will describe the mystical experience as a kind of cognition. By comparing it to modern empirical studies of cognition and perception, we can show, according to cognitive science, that at least some aspects of direct knowing are part of ordinary cognition. The mystical experience as empirical evidence also allows us to discuss the experience without falling into the debate between theists and atheists, since we are not using the experience to argue for a belief or disbelief in ‘God’. Rather, evidence attests to cognition beyond ratiocination. In Eastern religious traditions, ultimate reality is not con- ceived of in theistic terms, yet alleged experience of transcendent unity, peace, well-being, and transcendent knowing are not unlike mystics’ claims in the West. The hallmarks of the mystical experience are hallmarks of non-sensory experience in general. Coherence is the quintessential characteristic of the mystical experience.61 According to Mangan, coherence is a non-sensory experience.62 Non-sensory experiences, according to Mangan, provide all meaning to sensory content. They endow sensation, meaningless in itself, with the status of perception.63 Even if we assume that mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, which is the position of biological monism, we can still agree with Mangan that non- sensory experiences have no sensory content;64 the mystical experience is also without content according to most definitions. Non-sensory experiences pervade figure and ground. Likewise the mystical experience is of a unity that transcends subject and object. The cloud of unknowing is a metaphor that resembles if not refers to the non-sensory fringes of consciousness; this paradoxical knowing by

59 l. Michael Harrington (Ed. & trans.), A thirteenth-century textbook of mystical theology at the University of Paris: The Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite in Eriugena’s Latin translation with the Scholia translated by Anastasius the Librarian and excerpts from Eirugena’s Periphy- seon, Leuven: Peeters, 2004, 56. 60 Ibid., 46: Omnia sensibilia et intelligibilia…sensu transcendens. 61 walter Terrence Stace, Mysticism and philosophy, Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1987, chapter two; Hood, ‘The empirical study of mysticism’, 225. 62 mangan argues that coherence is non-sensory. He also argues that non-sensory experiences are ‘a basic if neglected, category of conscious contents’ (Mangan, ‘Sensation’s ghost’, n/p). 63 Ibidem. 64 Ibidem.

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unknowing is an awareness of how we are aware. The contemplation that leads to the mystical experience might be called introspection of a non-sensory experience. According to Mangan, non-sensory experiences are common; the experience of rightness and familiarity, everyday experiences, are wholly non-sensory. More- over, non-sensory experiences are not weak; they can be our strongest experiences.65 The capacity to monitor and be consciously aware of one’s non-sensory experiences can be increased with practice.66 This matches the Cloud-author’s assertions that the work of contemplation is arduous, i.e., that it requires diligent practice.67 Non-sensory experiences are also more evident at the periphery than at the focal center of experience. Hence, ‘God’, as the ground of being in Chris- tian metaphysics, is equated with the very forceful non-sensory experience of unity and coherence that is the mystical union. ‘The fringe creates a non-sensory feeling of imminence which implies the existence of far more than consciousness actually presents at a given moment. Much more detailed information is poten- tially accessible to consciousness than is in fact actually in consciousness’.68 The Christian concept of the ungraspable nature of divinity resembles a property of non-sensory experience in general. William James, considered a founding father of cognitive studies and non-sensory research, wrote that trying to focus on a non-sensory experience seems to obliterate it.69 It is well known that a sustained focus in meditation is an advanced achievement (called, for example, ‘tranquil abiding’ in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition). A sense of peace or unity achieved in meditation is ephemeral and flees one’s active pursuit. According to Mangan, the non-sensory fringe of consciousness remains at the edge of consciousness because it serves a retrieval function in the way a menu bar does in a computer screen.70 Mangan’s analogy is useful in pointing out the simultaneous presence and absence of the Cloud experience. In the Catholic language of the Cloud- author, we could say that an omnipresent God would be equally available to all but known by only a few.71

65 Ibidem. 66 Ibidem. 67 Cloud of unknowing, chapters 25-26. 68 mangan, ‘Sensation’s ghost’. 69 James quoted in Mangan, ‘Sensation’s ghost’. 70 mangan, ‘Sensation’s ghost’. 71 Perhaps the most famous of all apophatic mystics of the Western tradition, Eckhart of Hoch- heim wrote that God (reality) is equally near (accessible) to all, and that cognizing this fact makes the benefits of this reality practical (changes consciousness). His analogy for our latent ability is often quoted: a king who does not know he is a king is no king at all. See Eckhart von Hochheim, Meister Eckhart: Predigten. Vol. 2 (ed. Niklaus Largier), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993, sermon 68.

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Excursus on Science and Religion The aim of these comments on mystical knowing is neither to euhemerize ‘God’ as mind nor to apotheosize mind as ‘God’ but simply to dignify this medieval text with enough evidential and ethnographic status to read it as something other than ‘superstition’.72 If our approach is genuinely interdisciplinary, we can ask if the claims of both science and religion might refer to something in human experience prior to both of these epistemologies. Studies on the parietal lobe’s role in creating the universal experience of subjectivity, or ‘self-other’,73 suggest that the deepest epistemological givens such as the ‘ordinary’ or ‘common’ sense of self is constructed, which resembles the claims of mystics in all traditions that reality lies beyond our ordinary conceptions. Thus the Cloud-author’s intention to instruct readers in a practice for experiencing an aspect of reality can be true without affirming Christian theism and without reduction of his truth claim to physical monism. The relationship between science and religion (or Religious Studies, for that matter) is a continuing dialogue. Basic notions of self and reality – questions of epistemology and ontology – are usually the doorway through which most dis- cussants have to pass before getting to their topic. Some scholars, such as Stuart Clark writing on magic and witchcraft, claim ontological neutrality regarding the object of their study,74 a claim which contradicts basic ideas held by scholars working from the perspectives of Postmodernism, constructivism, feminisms concerned with somatic reality, to name just a few. Is there such a thing as ontological neutrality? To assume that one can study any object without seeing it through one’s own ontological lens is a positivist notion which I think few working in the humanities would openly accept. Religion is a paradigmatic case for the anthropological problem of reconciling emic and etic perspectives, namely, can one understand any social phenomenon from the outside? Ferrer and Sherman have edited a volume of essays on religious studies that propound a ‘participatory knowing’ of religion. Their ‘multidimensional, integrated cognition’ means to move past the ‘“Cartesian-Kantian temper” that considers religious worlds to be either “objective” (…) realities that are cognitively inaccessible (…) or artifacts of “subjective” imagination and cultural-linguistic

72 This close association of ‘God’ and Mind is not uncommon in religious discourse, and continues today. We have cited immaterialism in Berkeley; there are others, including modern American churches such as Religious Science/Science of Mind (which has exerted widespread influence in popular culture through self-help authors such as Louise Hay), all of whom also associate normally inaccessible parts of mind with ‘God’. 73 cited in Kaplan, ‘Grasping at ontological straws’, 243, 249. 74 Stuart Clark, ‘One-tier history’, in: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft 5 (2010) no.1, 86.

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fabrication’.75 Ferrer and Sherman embrace the inevitable effect the observer has on the object of study as ‘enactive understanding’76 which takes into account ‘nonlinguistic variables’ including contemplative experiences.77 Ferrer and Sher- man consider their epistemology merely a clarification of trends in various disciplines. What they offer to the present study of the Cloud is the recognition that the Cloud cannot be understood without some accounting of our perspective. It is for this reason that the so-called cognitive revolution seems a natural perspective from which to understand the Cloud, since cognitive science, as we have seen, insists that the reality we reason and feel is shaped by our reasoning and feeling faculties. So how are we to understand the Cloud if our lived, embodied experience has some bearing on its meaning, if there is more to meaning than the critical study of texts as disembodied representations understood by a disembodied, objective intellect (us)? We do not have to ‘go esoteric’ to answer this question. The experience the Cloud-author describes is related to trance and to dissociation, both of which are universal experiences. Everyone has experienced dissociation and trance. The fact that these words connote pathology and separatism betrays a prejudice in academic study adopted from mainline theology.78 Writing on altered states of consciousness in the Methodist Church, Ann Taves explains: The capacity to dissociate, like ‘the capacity to experience altered states of consciousness[,] is a psychobiological capacity of the species, and thus universal’, although like other human abilities not necessarily one which is evenly distrib- uted throughout the population or over the life span of the individual (…) all of us know what it is to dissociate.79 Taves then goes on to explain that culture determines how ‘this psychobiological capacity’ is used, interpreted, and institutionalized.80 In the case of the Cloud, there has not been (to my knowledge) any scholarship criticizing the essential findings of the author, though other mystical writings, such as those of Teresa de Jesús, have been attributed to pathology. The famous scholar of shamanism, Mircea Eliade, said something similar of ecstasty, calling it a human universal in his famous book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.81 It is not a religious

75 ferrer & Sherman, ‘Introduction’, in: The participatory turn, 35. 76 Ibid, 34. 77 Ibid., 2. 78 Ann Taves, ‘Knowing through the body: Dissociative religious experience in the African- and British-American Methodist traditions’, in: The Journal of Religion 73 (1993) no.2, 219. 79 Taves, ‘Knowing through the body’, 201. 80 Ibid., 201. 81 originally published in French (1951). First English edition in 1964 (Princeton University Press).

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tenet to assert that the mystical experience is a dissociative experience to which we all, in theory, have equal access, and that this experience is a cognition of something or that said cognition is useful. Scholars of the Cloud are generally sympathetic to its stated purposes, but cannot evaluate the self-stated purpose of the text. This is so because even these sympathetic scholars are in tacit acceptance of certain propositions which cannot assume the truth claims of religion. Outside of theology, a Western discipline which assumes belief in a supreme person (theism) and at least two planes of reality (dualism), the Cloud reads wrong. For example, Young, a scholar of Medi- eval Studies, a discipline with no official religious affiliation, uses ideas of Fou- cault to write about the sense of self in the Cloud. This ‘reading against the grain’ misunderstand the text insofar as constructing a sense of self is not the ostensible purpose of the Cloud. Nor was the text literary, nor was it postmodern, though it has been treated for its representation of clouds, the meteorlogical phenomenon, and as a proto-postmodern text.82 While these approaches are not invalid, they do not consider the central claim of the text, namely, that there is an experience of unity which one can have with proper training. We need not assume either religion or the falsity of religion to consider the Cloud a useful investigation of a human faculty. ‘Non-believers’ now have beneficial somatic experiences while practicing yoga and qi gong without observing or even knowing the religious origins of these two practices. Google and the US military now teach mindfulness because it enhances productivity and focus.83 Clearly, elements of our society have found use value in cognitive experiences formerly under the domain of religion. Whether or not the mystical experience is religious is itself a matter of culture. In an article on ‘experiences deemed religious’, Taves argues that experiences are neither inherently religious nor inherently pathological, though traditional religious and scientific approaches to ‘religious experiences’ favor these positions due to their presuppositions.84

Subliminal Knowing The two central tropes for the cognitive experience of which the Cloud-author writes are unknowing and darkness, which he calls a cloud.85 In the metaphor, the darkness and the cloud of unknowing stand between the object of cognition (‘God’) and oneself. As we have seen, the ontological debate between religious writers and critics of metaphysics can be superseded (for the sake of enquiry) by

82 Pokorn, ‘The language and discourse of The Cloud of Unknowing’; Taylor, ‘The Cloud texts and some aspects of modern theory’. 83 caitlin Kelly, ‘Ok, Google, take a breath’, in: New York Times 28 April 2012 (Web). 84 Taves, ‘Ascription’, 133. 85 The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 3, p.17.

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considering the empirical data of researchers on cognition, by taking the mystical union as an extreme and practiced form of ordinary consciousness. We have seen that the mystical experience resembles non-sensory cognitive experiences, which are always present in our consciousness and which are the part of our consciousness which creates meaning.86 Cognitive psychologists consider it a well established fact that we perceive things without knowing that we perceive them, that we process these nonconcious perceptions without knowing it, and that these nonconscious perceptions influence our thought, behavior and affect.87 That we perceive, cognize, and feel nonconsciously results in a changed, less privileged model of conscious awareness. For example, what is the role of conscious awareness since it has been suggested experimentally that subliminal perception can have a greater effect than supraliminal or conscious perception?88 Empirical data from research by neurologists and cognitive psychologists are very suggestive, and point toward epistemologies and ontologies more like that of the Cloud-author than the current common sense model or even the reason-oriented model implicit in much humanities research (i.e., that conscious thought and deliberate reflection lead cognition). Two provocative experiments showed that test subjects retroactively justified decisions made on the strength of subliminal and unproven stimuli. That is, subjects justified their subliminally-induced prejudice by well-reasoned, totally unfounded arguments. The first experiment consisted of two parts. Students were exposed to images for 4 milliseconds, including photographs of potential job candidates labeled with the word ‘good’. In the second part of the experiment, students chose a job candidate and were then asked to justify their choice. Results indicate the primary motivation for the choice of one candidate over another was the subliminal exposure to that candidate’s photo labeled ‘good’. Most interesting was that the explanations for the choice were invented after the fact.89 The second experiment induced a sense of disgust through post-hypnotic suggestion, which influenced behavior and post-hoc rationalizations for that behavior even when test subjects recalled the

86 mangan, ‘Sensation’s ghost’. 87 robert F. Bornstein, ‘Perception without awareness: Retrospect and prospect’, in: Robert F. Bornstein & Thane S. Pittman (Eds.), Perception without awareness: Cognitive, clinical and social perspectives, New York: Guilford, 1992, 4; Joseph M. Masling, ‘What does it all mean?’, in: Ibid., 260; Thane S. Pittman, ‘Perception without awareness in the stream of behavior: Processes that produce and limit nonconscious biasing effects’, in: Ibid., 277; John F. Kihlstrom, ‘The psychological unconscious and the self’, in: G.R. Bock & J. Marsh (Eds.), Experimental and theoretical studies of consciousness, Chichester: Wiley, 1993, 147-156. 88 Pittman, ‘Perception without awareness’, 279. 89 Ibid., 290-292.

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suggestion.90 Thus, cognition beyond conscious awareness not only exists but shapes conscious awareness.

Unknowing: a Fourteenth-Century Theory of Non-Local, Non-Physical Cognition Having established a context by surveying quick knowing in myth, mysticism, and cognitive science, we can now look more closely at the text itself. The Cloud-author’s Dionysian tradition counsels abandonment of the senses, evident in this passage: ‘And therefore work hard in this nothing and this nowhere, and leave behind your outward, physical senses, for I tell you truly that this exercise cannot be understood by them’.91 The leaving of the ‘outward wits’, or senses, is Platonic in the sense that reality is ideal (eidetic), not material. The author’s insistence on ‘goostly bemenyng’, or spiritual meaning, is the fourteenth-century theological expression that correlates to some extent with what some scientists today call ‘extended mind’ or ‘non-local mind’.92 The Cloud-author writes that the ‘perfection’ of this spiritual work should be distinguished from both movement and place. It should ‘rather be called a sudden change and not a continuous stirring. Time, place, and body should be abandoned in spiritual activity’.93 The experience of timelessness in the mystical union, the knowing of everything at once, might be explained as a tapping into, by patient self-observation, the normally inaccessible central system which organizes the sense organs. As non- sensory, reality may be cognized without time, or so goes the Cloud-author’s claim. According to the Cloud-author, truths in mind are realized as soon as they are desired: ‘whoever has a true desire to be in heaven, then at that moment he is in heaven spiritually’.94 The author’s exposition of time and space is consistent with his notion that the mind contains all other faculties: reason, will, imagination and sensation (‘sensualitie’, ch. 63). If sensation is contained in the mind, then is the author arguing as did Berkeley four centuries later that the phenomenal world is in the mind?

90 See Thalia Wheatley & Jonathan Haidt, ‘Hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more severe’, in: Psychological Science 16 (2005) no.10, 780-784. 91 ch. 70, p.124: ‘& Therfore trauayle fast in this nought & this noughwhere, & leue thin outward bodely wittes; for I tele thee trewly that this werk may not be conceyuid by hem’. 92 See Peter Henningsen & Laurence J. Kirkmayer. ‘Mind beyond the net: Implications of cognitive neuroscience for cultural psychology’, in: Transcultural Psychology 37 (2000) no.4, 467- 494, for a partial overview. Rupert Sheldrake is known for his non-mainstream theory of extended mind: see The sense of being stared at and other aspects of extended mind, New York: Crown, 2003. 93 ch. 59, p.111: ‘raþer be clepid a sodeyn changing þen any steedly sterying. For tyme, stede, & body, þees þre schuld be fogeten in alle goostly worching’. 94 ch. 60, p.112: ‘who-so had a trewe desire for to be at heuyn, þen þat same tyme he were in heuen goostly’.

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Though Christianity is usually associated with matter-spirit dualism, the mystical union in the Christian tradition argues implicitly for monism since unity is one of the hallmarks of the mystical union, whether it is idealist as in the Cloud or some other monism, for the union claims to be a revelation of the deeper relation of things. The currently-accepted notion, represented in neurotheology, is monistic materialism, assuming that all reality is a kind of virtual reality happening in the brain.95 The Cloud-author’s argument is implicit in that he does not openly declare that matter is unreal as do other immaterialists, but the negative valence of all things material in his treatise shows that non-physical substance is primary in his ontology. According to the Cloud-author, the body and the physical world are outside the soul and beneath it in kind.96 In the Cloud, soul is non-physical so wiþouten, and other deictics, do not refer to the disposition of bodies in space. Perhaps the most intriguing teaching of the text is that foundational linguistic and cognitive structures, such as ‘up’ and ‘down’ betray a limited field of cognition based on bodily sensation. The Cloud author would presumably agree with Lakoff and Johnson’s theses about the embodied nature of thought, and add that there is a cognition beyond the embodied cognition of the senses. The contemplative is to avoid conceiving bodily that which is said spiritually.97 This hermeneutic is the key to understanding the apparent contradiction in the author’s notion that the five mightes (faculties) are soul-faculties, yet the body is outside of the soul. If everything in the phenomenal world is in the soul except the body and the world, what does that mean? By the Cloud-author’s reading instructions we read that the physical world is separate from mind, and that all experience takes place in mind. The Cloud-author’s program of spiritual reading is more than an interpre- tive practice. It implies a profoundly different worldview in which the physical world serves to convey metaphysical meanings: ‘All the revelations seen by anyone in this life also have spiritual meanings’.98 The author further clarifies that the physical sign would be unnecessary were the message’s recipient spiritually perceptive enough to grasp the spiritual meaning unmediated.99 The

95 max Velmans, ‘Dualism, reductionism and reflexive monism’, in: M. Velmans & S. Schneider (Eds.), The Blackwell compansion to consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, 356; M.A. Pers- inger, K. Saroka, S.A Koren & L.S. St-Pierre, ‘The electromagnetic induction of mystical and altered states within the laboratory’, in: Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research 7 (2010) no.1, 808. 96 Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 62, p.114. 97 ch. 51, p.94. 98 ch. 58, p.107: ‘Alle þe reuelacions þat euer sawe any man here in bodily licnes in þis liif, þei haue goostly bemenynges’. 99 Ibidem.

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reason why the Cloud draws continual comparisons to Buddhist texts is because the author’s implies the delusory nature of ordinary perception and because of the mantra meditation-like method of Christian contemplation he espouses.100 It is well known that in Buddhist tradition, embodiment itself is an attribute of delusory perception, or karma. Just as the Buddhist concept śūnyatā implies the simultaneous existence of formlessness and experience as individual form, so the Cloud-author writes that we are both here as bodies and in heaven as souls (ch. 60). His metaphysical reading program constitutes a spiritual practice more than mere exegesis, and it would seem to reach beyond cultural difference, since it deals with our faculties themselves. Hence the text garners comments such as, ‘Our mystic’s contemplative purposes have led him to a considerably more radical approach than that of our modernist [Rudolph Bultmann]’.101 In sum, as a self-proclaimed expert in self-observed cognitive processes, the author posits the discontinuous, non-physical nature of mind by denying its physicality, temporality, and spatiality, which he achieves by forgoing language, reason, and will (he makes it quite clear that God is the source of desire for God). The Cloud-author claims that bodily experience is not reality, and this naturally contradicts mainstream modern science in every way. However, neurological research into the mystical experience has not been able to reduce the mystical experience to physical phenomena,102 though this has been tried mostly through contrast imaging studies of the brain of people undergoing intuitive and mystical experiences in the work of scientists like Persinger (see articles cited in bibliography).103 Newberg and Iverson’s model of ‘the relationship between mental states and body physiology’, based on a review of imaging and research, suggests that meditation alters the sense of self, associated with the parietal lobe

100 See Will, ‘The role of passivity’, and Robert Aitken, ‘“The Cloud of Unknowing” [sic] and the “Mumokan”: Christian and Buddhist meditation methods’, in: Buddhist-Christian Studies 1 (1987), 87-91, for views criticizing Christian-Buddhist comparisons and stating them, respectively. Christian-Buddhist Studies has published at least half a dozen articles about the Cloud and Zen. 101 Paul R. Rovang, ‘Demythologizing metaphor in the Cloud of Unknowing’, in: Mystics Quar- terly 18 (1992) no.4, 136-137. 102 David Fontanta, ‘Mystical experience’, in: Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (Eds.), The Black- well companion to consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, 170; Hageman et al., ‘The neurobiology of trance and mediumship in Brazil’, 87, 105. 103 Michael A. Persinger et al., ‘Neurotheology and its convergence with neuroquantology’, in: NeuroQuantology 8 (2010) no.4, 432-443; Persinger et al., ‘The electromagnetic induction of mystical and altered states within the laboratory’; M.A. Persinger, ‘Religious and mystical experiences as artifacts of temporal lobe function: A general hypothesis’, in: Perceptual Motor Skills 57 (1983), 1255-1262.

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of the brain.104 Even if it assumes a materialist worldview, Newberg and Iverson’s model does not really make any ontological claims that explain away the Cloud’s idealist model of reality. Assertions such as ‘meditation appears to begin by activating the prefrontal and cingulated cortex associated with the will…’105 do not address the question of causality, material or ideal. If ‘meditation’ causes changes in brain function, who or what causes meditation, or the brain? Most importantly, both intuition and unknowing are claimed to be practical. The Cloud-author makes it clear that if you contemplate you will know how to be moderate in all other things (ch. 32). Contemplation is to be exercised to the extreme though all other activities in moderation (ch. 41) because contemplation accesses parts of mind that solve everything else, i.e., allows one to know all things.106 Research into mystical experiences also shows that the experience changes those who have it, such that ‘no one is left untouched’.107 Mythological narratives about coming into all knowledge allude to the transformative, conse- quential nature of the mystical experience. In the case of Deimne, his name change refers to a change of nature. Change of name as change of nature is well known in biblical narrative, viz. Abram-Abraham, Jacob-Israel, Saul-Paul, all of whom are transformed after their direct experience with Yahweh and, in the case of Saul, Jesus.

Perception As with the concept of consciousness, there is not a consensus about what perception is, although dominant models come and go. As we have seen, modern cognitive science provides much useful information for interpreting the Cloud, including ideas about how perception works. One idea currently debated in cognitive science is the notion that the senses are modular, which is to say that each sense is an independent system whose functioning is ‘obligatory’ (i.e., it cannot be turned off) and whose workings are inaccessible to consciousness.108 ‘Obligatory’ also means that we continue to perceive falsely even after we become

104 A.B. Newberg & J. Iverson, ‘The neural basis of the complex mental task of meditation: neurotransmitter and neurochemical considerations’, in: Medical Hypotheses 61 (2003) no.2, 285-286. 105 Ibid., 284. 106 Later writers in the Dionysian tradition thematize the instant knowing of all things even more so than the Cloud-author; for example, Juan de la Cruz’ Coplas que hizo en una alta ecstasis de contemplación. 107 Antoon Geels, ‘Altered consciousness in religion’, in: Etzel Cardeña & Michael Winkelman (Eds.), Altering consciousness: Multidisciplinary perspectives, Santa Barbara: CA: Praeger, 2011, 255-276. 108 Ken Nakayama, ‘Modularity in perception, its relation to cognition and knowledge’, in: E. Bruce Goldstein (Ed.), Blackwell handbook of perception, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 739.

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aware of the falsity of our perception. Common examples include linear vection and Müller-Lyer illusion. For this reason, mystics have always counseled distrust of the senses. The way sense data coalesce into a coherent whole is unknown, and some would say, unknowable.109 The nature and even the existence of ‘unity of consciousness’ remains debated110 and of course is a continuing theme in the West at least since David Hume. Some studies have cast doubt on the rational- ity111 and conscious choice112 that supposedly characterize decision-making. Probably no one working in the field of cognitive science would support a model of perception by which an objective reality is simply and accurately reg- istered by receptive sense organs, yet this notion persists: in a recent study of the senses in medieval England, the author writes, ‘The senses are receptors’.113 Recent theories of vision characterize it as active and constructed.114 According to cognitive scientists, the senses create meaning in ways not less complex than those processes we call ‘reading’. Such assertions about perception as a passive registering of a given outside world are simply not supported by research in perception. For example, attention is required for conscious perception,115 and our intention to verbalize or any kind of stress can block perception.116 The dependence of perception of reality on attention, intention, stress and other factors is especially significant for the Cloud, since the contemplative process might be said to be the refusal to pay attention to anything but attention itself. Contemplation takes as its only subject the central system which underlies perceptual modules. Thus the Cloud-author writes that cognition of God is not through bodily things(ch. 47), which is to say, devoid of sensory content.

109 Fodor cited in Nakayama, ‘Modularity in perception’, 746. 110 Anthony J. Marcel, ‘Slippage in the unity of consciousness’, in: Experimental and theoretical studies of consciousness, 168. 111 Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, ‘Choices, values, and frames’, in: American Psychologist 39 (1984) no.4, 341-350; Goodenough & Prehn, ‘A neuroscientific approach’. 112 Benjamin Libet et al., ‘Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act’, in: Brain 106 (1983) no.3, 623-642. 113 C.M. Woolgar, The senses in late medieval England, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, 2. 114 See James T. Enns, The thinking eye, the seeing brain: Explorations in visual cognition, New York: Norton, 2004, chapter 1, where he reviews his notion of vision, and lists chief charac- teristics of vision which defy common sense or even popular science. See Thagard, Mind, 96-97. 115 Ronald A. Rensink, J. Kevin O’Regan & James J. Clark., ‘To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes’, in: Psychological Science 8 (1997) no.5, 368-373; Daniel J. Simons & Daniel T. Levin, ‘Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction’, in: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5 (1998) no.4, 644-649. 116 Marcel, ‘Slippage in the unity of consciousness’.

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A Larger View of Cognition Though the idea of immediate, non-sensory knowing contradicts much of our painstaking academic training and work, in fairness, we must ask whether our resistance to this idea results from a tacit acceptance of Locke’s empiricism. Psychological research indicates that we use several cognitive processes in daily living, including intuition and reason, which are not necessarily opposed. The quick-knowing we have surveyed above in myth- and mystography is simply an extreme case of an everyday faculty. Our everyday mental faculties include intuition and other mental operations that are ‘quick, effortless, and generally quite accurate’.117 The Social Intuitionist model suggests that objective reasoning can be an illusion created after the immediate knowing of an intuition.118 In such a case reasoning is more like a ‘lawyer defending a client than a scientist seeking truth’.119 Some researchers go so far as to suggest that real motivations for behavior are not accessible in conscious awareness, and that parts of the brain make up post-hoc reasons.120 ‘Now we know (again) that most cognition occurs auto- matically and outside of consciousness and that most people cannot tell us how they really reached a judgment’.121 Bargh and Chartrand address lay resistance to the idea that ‘most of people’s everyday life’122 is not determined by conscious reasoning or even by factors deliberately chosen but by automated processes. Thus the idea of a ‘cloud of unknowing’ is not necessarily divorced from everyday experience. The nebulous quality refers metaphorically to our usual una- wareness of automated behaviors. The Cloud-author makes it clear that the nature of unknowing is effortless and fast, as we know non-sensory, intuitive, autonomic cognitive processes to be. This unmediated knowing comes as ‘sudden awareness and uncaused feelings’123 learned of God, not man; these contemplatives get intuitions from doing the exercise in contemplation.124 When the Cloud-author writes that ‘it is God alone that stirs the will and desire’,125 we are reminded of the research we have

117 Haidt, ‘The emotional dog and its rational tail’, 822. 118 Ibid., 822; see also the results of Norman R.F. Maier, ‘Reasoning in humans: II. The solution of a problem and its appearance in consciousness’, in: Journal of Comparative Psychology 12 (1931), 181-194. 119 Haidt, ‘The emotional dog and its rational tail’, 820. 120 Gazzainga cited in Haidt, ‘The emotional dog’, 822; see Sam Harris on the ‘illusion of free will’ in his Free will, New York: Free Press, 2012, 5. 121 Bargh and Chartrand and Nisbett and Wilson cited in Haidt, ‘The emotional dog’, 830. 122 John A. Bargh & Tanya L. Chartrand, ‘The unbearable automaticity of being’, in: American Psychologist 54 (1999) no.7, 462. 123 Ch. 36, p.73: ‘sodein conseites & blind felynges’. 124 Ch. 37, p.72: ‘þis werk risen sodenly wiþ-outyn any menes’. 125 Ch. 34, p.70: ‘it is only God þat steriþ þi wyl þi desire’.

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cited which diminishes the traditional master role of will and reason in the Western worldview. The Cloud is an emic description of a cognitive training process. It is a self- reported experiment and a resulting theory of cognition. The Cloud-author claims that this ‘work’ may be understood by experience, or ‘profe’, and only partially by his words.126 The Cloud-author urges the reader to prove the verac- ity of his writing through experience (ch. 42), and urges the reader to be careful about sharing the book with those not interested in experiencing his method of contemplation, which shows the empirical character of contemplation in the mind of the Cloud-author. It is not too much to say that the prismatic view created by academic disciplines makes pre-modern religious discourse look val- ueless as empirical data, but self-observation is a valid experimental modality in studies of consciousness and cognition. The Cloud attests to the fact that certain people developed a practical expertise in cognitive development through certain uncommon religious practices. Though self-report is subjective, some researchers of mind do not draw so strong a distinction between objective and subjective. Max Velmans’ ‘Changing Places’ thought experiment ‘proves’, with some irony, that there is no objectivity in the way that Anselm proved the existence of God.127 According to the Cloud-author, the way to this unmediated knowledge is through a series of techniques (ch. 33) that do not depend on piety or saintliness (ch. 34). It is not obvious that the mystical experience does not depend on piety but rather practice. This is also the genius of the text, because much research on cognition implies that non-conscious cognition is inaccessible to conscious prob- ing, which means that the mystical union cannot be earned through religiosity. The Cloud-author writes, ‘There is another technique; test it if you choose’128 is a call to an empirical process, and the mystical experience itself is a mode of perception worthy of examination, as we have written above. The Cloud-author also makes it clear that his method is a series of techniques leading into normally inaccessible realms of cognition, including his melting water technique, in which the author explains another technique (‘sleight’) for cognition of the ineffable (ch. 32). The author explains that God [the object of cognition] is enclosed in a cloud of unknowing [a non-sensory field]. The melting water technique is when one yields to God as one would yield to an enemy on a battlefield, one will ‘melt al to watre’.129 Thus the author uses two metaphors to explain how to access this contentless cognition. One ceases ordinary cognitive means and then

126 Ch. 34, p.71. 127 Max Velmans, Understanding consciousness, London: Routledge, 2000, 175. 128 Ch. 32, p.66: ‘Anoþer sleight þer is; proue þou if þou wilt’. 129 Ch. 32, p.67.

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sensory experience ‘melts’ or gives way to non-sensory cognition. Contemplation is a movement in consciousness; it involves consciousness of ‘the fringe’. One’s capacity for contemplation is the same as contemplation itself (‘The ability to do this work [of contemplation] is inseparable from the work itself’)130 and ability expands according to one’s desire. It is paradoxical that one is motivated to this work ‘by God alone’, yet one’s capacity is expanded by one’s desire. The metaphorical, religious language of the Cloud an operational map of cognitive faculties. The essence of this map we have outlined: a ‘dart of desire’ impels an affective experience of unity and coherence. In chapter eleven of the Book of Privy Counsel, our author makes it clear that it is God that does the work in contemplation and that the contemplative’s only task is to remain receptive. The paradoxical nature of the teaching causes great misunderstanding in readers and scholars who would see ‘God’ as an anthropomorphic agent on whom the contemplative must dote in hopes of enough ingratiation so that ‘God’ somehow bestows the mystical experience.

3. From Either/Or to Neither/Nor

To say that the first premises of science are unexamined is not to doubt the utility of the scientific method or the value of all scientific disciplines. To say that the first premises of science are unexamined is simply to observe what many humanities and social science disciplines use as their premise, namely, that there are a variety of ontologies besides physical monism. With regard to the mystical experience, most debate aligns along the division created by atheistic and theistic worldviews. For example, Fales and Gellman, both philosophers, have written in defense of purely biological and metaphysical cause of the mystical experience, respectively. The most compelling challenge to taking the mystical experience as valuable is from frontal lobe stimulation studies, such as those performed by self-styled ‘neurotheologian’ Michael A. Persinger, who attributes the mystical experience to microseizures within the temporal lobe;131 Persinger attributes the qualities of a sentient divinity to the structure of the brain’s right hemisphere;132 and he has induced an experience with qualities of the mystical experience through electromagnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe.133 Persinger’s work has drawn controversy, including a failed attempt to replicate the results, which led the

130 Ch. 34, p.70: ‘Þe abilnes to þis werk is onyd to þe selue werk’. 131 M.A. Persinger, ‘Religious and mystical experiences as artifacts of temporal lobe function’. 132 Persinger et al., ‘Neurotheology and its convergence with neuroquantology’, 434. 133 Persinger et al., ‘The electromagnetic induction’.

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replicators to hypothesize that suggestibility was the operative mechanism in Persinger’s results.134 Persinger’s first premise is that all experience including the mystical experience is caused by brain function and brain structure.135 The idea that human experience is a by-product of matter is an extreme ontological assumption which requires logical as well as experimental justification. As a speculative illustration, what if the brain were a receiver, a kind of television set? In that case, Persinger’s so-called ‘God spot’ (part of the temporal lobe) would no more cause religious experience than an on-off button causes a television program. I have only seen my conjecture echoed in one place, in research psy- chiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz’ You Are Not Your Brain. Schwartz writes that the brain ‘receives information (…) and the processes that information in an automatic and rote way’136 and that the mind ‘sculpts’ the brain.137 First premise is important because it delimits subsequent thinking. The very coining of the term ‘neurotheology’ should open Persinger’s first premise to the same rigors of logic that attain to any theological argument. Moreover, there are assertions about the nature of the brain which do not presuppose biological monism: ‘the brain is a control structure appears as an equal partner in the interplay of many factors, inside and outside the body’.138 Eisenberg’s thesis that the brain is socially constructed, that social and emotional experiences create physical changes in the brain,139 illustrates something we all know from experience, that mental activity affects the body (for example, stress), which in itself poses a challenge to the idea that human experience is an epiphenomenon of a physical organ. We must dignify our medieval text by examining the premises about the nature of thought and mind upon which modern textual criticism must ultimately depend in order to elucidate a fascinating claim that ‘nowhere bodily is everywhere spiritually’.140 In my experience, most of these premises are derived from mid-twentieth century positivism. It is an incontrovertible truth that there is no agreement about first cause, and that logically tenable arguments are made in support of all manner of first premises.

134 See P. Granqvist et al., ‘Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields’, in: Neuroscience Letters 379 (2005) no.1, 1-6. 135 Persinger et al., ‘Neurotheology’, 432. 136 Jeffrey M. Schwartz & Rebecca Gladding, You are not your brain: The 4-step solution for changing bad habits, ending unhealthy thinking and taking control of your life, New York: Penguin, 2011, 22. 137 Ibid., 23. 138 Henningsen & Kirkmayer, ‘Mind beyond the net’, 470. 139 L. Eisenberg, ‘The social construction of the human brain’, in: American Journal of Psychiatry 153 (1995), 1563-1575. 140 Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 68, p.121: ‘For whi nogh-where bodily is euerywhere goostly’.

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4. Conclusion in Spirit, Not Flesh

In the field of literary science, reading is a primary metaphor employed for epistemology: the world is a text or a system of signs. Everything beyond the physical, including the fourteenth-century Christian God, is a question of reading. Current metaphysics is formulated as a by-product of the inherent recur- sion of speech and writing (Derrida, Luhmann, Wittgenstein). But essentially, we are stuck on a problem of belief: do we read assuming final meaning or do we read assuming indeterminacy? The Cloud-author mitigates against misunderstanding the non-physical nature of reality by instructing his readers in ‘goostly’ interpretation throughout his text. Can we assume that the myths of Europe require anagogical interpretation? Can we assume that our myths in academia, including our myths about the conscious control of our lives, could be re-interpreted in ‘goostly’ form? The fifteenth-century Carthusian commen- tator on the Cloud Richard Methley called the Cloud-exercise forma ascensionis ignote (‘way of non-intellectual ascension’).141 Methley practiced non-conceptual meditation seventy-five minutes a day in four sessions. Non-intellectual knowing is antithetical to our academic identity. Prima facie we have no function in a non-intellectual pursuit. Unknowing is, to borrow from the Cloud, nowhere academically.142 However, we cannot really know what we do not know until we have appropriated that unknown thing unto ourselves.143 This is precisely what the ingestion of supernatural flesh, the religious experience, and empirical evidence provide.

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