“No doubt, when you begin this practice your undisciplined faculties, finding no meat to feed upon, will angrily taunt you to abandon it. They will demand that you take up something more worthwhile, which means, of course, something more suited to them. For you are now engaged in a work so far beyond their accustomed activities that they think you are wasting your time. But their dissatisfaction, inasmuch as it arises from this, is actually a good sign, since it proves that you have gone on to something of greater value. So I am delighted. And why not? For nothing I can do, and no exercise of my physical or spiritual faculties can bring me so near to God and so far from the world, as this naked, quiet awareness of my blind being and my joyful gift to God.”—Privy Counsel, Ch. 3
Again, I am just quoting the opening to this chapter in its entirety. Here this medieval author writes with clarity and insight and using vocabulary I’ve come to expect from contemporary meditation teachers and spiritual masters.
Anyone who has ever endeavored to meditate will recognize what he is describing here immediately. The faculties of mind and body react with great hostility to the stillness and silence of contemplation. The mind longs to be fed a rich diet of sensory stimulation and discursive, self-reifying thought. But meditative prayer denies the mind this supper, because the soul knows on some deep, existential level, that it will not satisfy its longing.
Many teachers counsel their meditation students not to be alarmed by the torture the mind experiences when meditation begins. At first you think you’re going crazy or that you have lost ground spiritually when these hostile, negative thoughts begin to rush through the mind. The author of the Cloud says not to worry about this. It is a natural response, and an indication that we’ve gotten down to the real business of prayer, which is the real business of living.
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