Studies in Spirituality 26, 217-248. doi: 10.2143/SIS.26.0.3180809 © 2016 by Studies in Spirituality. All rights reserved. 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). 99213_SIS_26_09_McGlynn.indd 217 7/12/16 15:15 218 mICHAEL mCgLYNN 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 spir- itual 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 con- temporary 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 experi- ence, 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 inher- ently 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. 99213_SIS_26_09_McGlynn.indd 218 7/12/16 15:15 THE SALmON OF KNOWLEDgE 219 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 reli- gious’, in: Religion 38 (2005), 126. 7 Richard J. Davidson et al., ‘Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindful- ness 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. 99213_SIS_26_09_McGlynn.indd 219 7/12/16 15:15 220 mICHAEL mCgLYNN 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 ‘interdiscipli- nary 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 con- tradictory, 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