Looking at chapter 43 of The Cloud of Unknowing I wondered about the description from the unknown author to ‘see that nothing is at work in your mind or your will but God alone’. The suggestion is to overthrow other knowledge and feelings trampling it deep beneath what the writer has called ‘the cloud of forgetting’. Further thinking is about loathing finding ‘wearisome everything that is at work in your mind and your will accept God alone’. The reason is that whatever separates us from God is not helpful so the idea is to break down all the obstacles that prevent us from being close to God – transparent with God. If it’s possible to push away all the clutter that gets in the way of true contemplation then there may be a glimpse of what has been called ‘naked knowledge and feeling of your own existence’ it seems that that too needs to be destroyed and only then can there be the experience of ‘perfect contemplation’.

I’m not sure what the psychotherapist and analyst would make of that it’s certainly true that we need to clear away obsessional thinking, repetitive dulled ways of being in order to feel fully alive it’s allowing enough space in the psyche to find the true self and within that true self spark of divinity. And of course this is a lifetime’s work.