Written as instruction for a young contemplative, The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that God cannot be reached by thought. Between the seeker and God lies a “cloud of unknowing”; beneath the seeker lies a “cloud of forgetting” where everything else must be left.
The practice the author proposes — resting in attention, returning to a one-syllable word when thought intrudes — is essentially Centering Prayer six centuries avant la lettre. Thomas Keating’s modern recovery of this method brought the Cloud back into wide circulation.