The Cloud of Unknowing is a book of contemplation which helps Christians to attain union with God through single-minded contemplation. The book serve as a guide for Christian spirituality and it cover important topics on contemplation, unknowing and union with God. The unknowing serve as a core element of the method of contemplation itself, which is supposed to unify man with God. The Cloud of Unknowing can guide a Christian to understand the Yoga Sutras with respect to mystical union as the ultimate, mystical union as the highest good and the process of union.
The cloud considers unification of mystical union as the ultimate basis of all that exist. In the cloud God serve as the ultimate basis of all that exist. By understanding this basis, it helps understand the concept of Brahman as the ultimate reality from which everything comes from and which all is ultimately composed in the yoga sutras. The cloud of unknowing stresses the otherness of God and the division between God and man and this helps understand
Mystical union is the best and happiest state of affairs taught in the Cloud and contemplation serves as the best means to ensuring that one acts in such a way, therefore contemplation is the source of highest good because of the way it aligns with one’s action towards others with the will of God, not simply because it helps one to become unified with God. In yoga sutras mystical is the ultimate goodness, once it is attained there are no barriers to the union. It is the ultimate happiness because one has no thoughts, desires, or memories at all and hence one can neither be unhappy in desiring that which one does not have, or in fearing to lose that which one does not have.
The cloud of unknowing advocates utterance of the word once in full contemplation as a means of inducing God to assist the mystic in attaining his union and this correlate with the repetition of mantra in yoga sutras. Yoga sutras advocate repetition of the word as a means of...