I invite you to suppress that penetrating and subtle thought and cover it with a thick cloud of forgetfulness ... Because love can reach God in this life, but not knowledge. Anonymous English. XIV. The cloud of not knowing

… Whoever, wounded by love like the heliotrope, decides to start the path of ascent towards Helios, must purify his/her being, abandon what is familiar, detaching himself/herself from everything known, in order to become free and light. It is not an easy starting phase of the trip, since inertias and habits have been motivating our actions for a long time. Teresa de Ávila said that this phase of the journey was like watering the garden of the soul by drawing the water from the well with one's own hands. It is a meticulous beginning of the journey towards the Mystery, and the progress is made very slowly.

Surely, many travelers have felt lost, overwhelmed at the prospect of the long way to go. In order to guide these adventurers, an anonymous monk wrote in the s. XIV a text called "The cloud of not knowing." This little guide is a kind of compass for any spiritual walker who, through the symbol of “the cloud” and “the gloom”, encourages detachment and invites to move towards the divine through love.

It is enough to imagine a luminous cloud around us to have the opportunity to ignore everything we thought we knew, to abandon everything we knew and immerse ourselves in that frictionless vaporousness. Our vision would not be able to focus anything, and in this immersion in the cloud, the imaginal absence would cleanse the retina of everything seen and known ...