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The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual guide to contemplation from an anonymous English monk of the 14th century. It has inspired spiritual teachers from St. John of the Cross in the 16th century to such contemporary teachers of prayer as Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating.
The author explains that ordinary thoughts and earthly concepts must be buried beneath a "cloud of forgetting" while our love must rise toward a God hidden in the "cloud of unknowing."

Also included here is the author's other principal work, The Book of Privy Counseling—a short and moving text on the way to enlightenment through a total loss of self and consciousness only of the divine.