Practice in Still Life 5: Mind, Memory, Consciousness
What Watches Reason? An Introduction to Middle English Mysticism and the Handbook Tradition
Mind is not reason. Mind contains reason. To see this, consider what happens when you think: there is the content of the thought, and there is the awareness of having that thought. This content might be verbal, calculating, or imagistic, but in every case it appears within a field of awareness that itself is none of these things.
Reasoning—from the Latin ratio, meaning calculation or reckoning—moves step by step through concepts, connecting them in discursive chains that unfold through time, yet these sequential operations unfold within a spaciousness that passively witnesses their progression. Reason is in this sense an activity of linking premises to conclusions through the medium of language and symbol, while the awareness that comprehends these connections is itself neither premise nor conclusion.
This distinction between thinking and the awareness of thinking shows us that the deeper nature of mind is an encompassing and generative presence from which reasoning emerges, a more original apprehension that precedes and makes possible this kind of analysis.
But we have largely forgotten this distinction today.
We have grown to understand mind primarily through metaphors of computation and information processing, treating it mainly as an instrument of reason and analysis.
When we reduce mind in these ways, we become blind to the consciousness that makes this reasoning possible, and we lose access to ways of being and thinking that disclose human and world alike differently, including in their contemplative and theological dimensions.
The traditions that emphasize this contrast are often overlooked in modern cognitive approaches to epistemology, which tend to focus on reason’s analytical, calculating role, often seeing it as the whole of what thinking is and does.
On one level, this debate about capacities marks an epistemological and anthropological argument about human knowing and in what it consists. But on another, perhaps more significant one, it also marks a difference of another kind: one that takes into account the fact that human beings are in a crucial sense open-ended in a way transformable through practice, and are so in a way that changes the very nature of our epistemic relation to the world at large.
Transformation Through Practice
Indeed, integral to these contemplative and theological traditions are preparatory practices: spiritual exercises such as prayer and renunciation that quiet the rational mind and cultivate a simpler and more basic perception of one’s own being, a perspective from which contemplation is more likely to arise and then over time transform ourselves as knowing and perceiving persons through its arising.
To be sure, the more reduced sense of mind-as-reason also involves preparatory exercises, but these exercises tend to work on reason through reason—that is, they stay on the level of discursive calculation, refining it, training it, testing it, without breaking through into the domain of contemplative exercise.
Such practices are often foreclosed in the modern mind as avenues by which we might come to know the nature of knowing itself in a different way, and it may be the case that the epistemological image rendered in the absence of these practices is limited at best and harmful at worst.
By exploring these practices, we can come to see that understanding the distinction between mind and reason requires something more than intellectual analysis, conceptual argument, or epistemological definition; it demands attention to the practical disciplines that may open the door to these other ways of seeing and being altogether, ways that transform how we understand human and world alike.
To raise the point again, the practice traditions suggest that what is epistemically available to human beings isn’t a fixed or set thing, as a more univocal and modern perspective may suggest. It is instead an open-ended and directable agency available to cultivation and transformation.
The contemplative traditions have long recognized these distinctions, offering sophisticated ways of understanding how mind encompasses but transcends reason.
These accounts appear in different forms across history—in Aristotle’s distinction between dianoia (discursive reasoning) and noēsis (contemplative thinking), in Augustine’s separation of cogitare (thinking) from nosse (mind), and again in the Middle English distinction between reson (reason) and mynd (mind or consciousness).
I want to explore these conceptions through Middle English mysticism, particularly as expressed in The Cloud of Unknowing, while drawing connections to these earlier philosophical traditions. My aim is to open up this wider space of contemplative understanding so that we might approach our own philosophical practices differently and perhaps even recover some older ones. There are resources in these traditions, texts, and concepts for understanding consciousness in a unique light, resources that are sometimes lost in our modern appropriation of these terms and concepts.
More often than not, they are lost altogether.
The Middle English Perspective
The Cloud Author’s understanding of this distinction emerges through a key Middle English term: mynd. Middle English, the form of English spoken and written between circa 1100 and 1500 AD, stands between Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Early Modern English. It was a regional and vernacular language characterized by variation and improvisation, at once strange and familiar to modern readers—like a next-door world leaning into our own.
The words on the page look almost readable, sharing shapes and patterns with our modern English, yet their spellings shift and flow in unfamiliar ways. We can almost understand them, but their strangeness reminds us they come from a distinctly different time and way of thinking. This proximity and distance is particularly evident in the word mynd, which scholars have translated variously as “mind,” “memory,” and “consciousness.”
The depth of mynd’s meaning becomes clear in Chapter 63 of The Cloud of Unknowing, where the author offers this description:
“Mynde is soche a mighte in itself, that properly to speke and in maner it worcheth not itself. . . . And on none other wise it is seide that the mynde worcheth, bot yif soche a comprehencion be a werke.”1
Modern translators have rendered this passage in illuminating ways that highlight different aspects of mynd’s meaning. Let us look at a few examples.
“Consciousness in itself is a faculty of such a kind that, so to speak, it has no proper activity of its own. . . . and it cannot be said to be active unless that containing is an activity.”
“Memory is such a power in itself, that properly to speak and in manner, it worketh not itself. . . . unless such a comprehension be a work.”
“The mind is such a miraculous power that any proper description of it must include this point: In a way, it really does no work. It comprehends and contains the powers of reason, will, imagination, and sensuality, as well as their works. But it cannot be said to do any work itself, unless you consider this comprehension an activity.”2
We see in these excerpts that mynd is translated variously as consciousness, memory, and mind. Each choice gives the translation a different weight, and while we have no direct correspondence for mynd, consciousness may be the best choice for several reasons.
First, like mynd, consciousness suggests a containing awareness rather than an active faculty. When we speak of consciousness, we point to that within which experiences occur rather than to any particular mental operation. Second, consciousness captures mynd’s dual aspect of awareness and retention—we are conscious both of what is present to us now and what we carry forward in memory.
Third, the etymology of consciousness—“knowing or perceiving within oneself, sensible inwardly, aware”—echoes mynd’s function of comprehending or gathering within itself. While “mind” might seem more straightforward, its modern connotations of mental activity and rational thought miss mynd’s essential quality of passive receptivity. Likewise, “memory” captures the retaining aspect but loses the broader sense of present awareness.
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What the Cloud Author means by mynd is more subtle.
It comprehends (unites, gathers, perceives) the thinking process, but it is not the activity of thinking itself. Moreover, “consciousness” uniquely conveys the passive receptivity that the Cloud Author attributes to mynd, a quality essential for the contemplative’s ability to rest in awareness without actively engaging the faculties of reason or imagination. For these reasons, “consciousness” seems the most appropriate translation to use.
On this view, mynd (mind) is not reson (reason) or thinking. As the Cloud Author says, mynd “has no proper activity of its own,” but “contains and embraces within itself” the other faculties of the soul, including reason, will, imagination, and sense-perception, as well as “the objects on which they work.”
Mynd is in this sense a passive ground the other faculties work from. This understanding of mynd directly shapes the Cloud Author’s approach to contemplative prayer. Because mynd encompasses but transcends the active faculties, contemplative practice begins not with developing new mental abilities but with recognizing this already-present containing awareness.
The work of contemplation—if we can call it work—is to rest in mynd’s natural capacity to hold experience without grasping at it. This is why the Cloud Author emphasizes letting go rather than acquiring. The contemplative does not need to achieve a special state but rather needs to recognize and abide in mynd’s innate receptivity to divine presence. It is this kind of passive but encompassing awareness to which contemplation points.
Importantly, mynd also emerges from and points toward a deep tradition of contemplative practice. The Cloud Author’s understanding reflects this tradition of philosophical sophistication and practical wisdom, participating in a broader medieval project of teaching contemplation through written guidance and spiritual direction. To understand how this concept developed and was taught to others, we should examine its origins in the distinctive literary tradition of medieval spiritual writing.
The Handbook Tradition
Among these works, The Cloud of Unknowing stands out for its adept treatment of mynd and its practical approach to guiding readers toward contemplative experience.
We have already begun this examination through the Cloud Author’s treatment of mynd, but this text—a masterwork of fourteenth century Middle English Christian mysticism—has much more to tell us about the nature of contemplative practice in general as well. The text is both philosophical, drawing from traditions of Neoplatonism, and religious, taking as a primary influence the fifth century Theologia Mystica of Dionysius the Areopagite.
Dionysius himself had integrated Platonic concepts of transcendence with Christian mystical theology, creating a contemplative approach that would influence medieval spirituality for centuries.
This lineage of Christian contemplative prayer aims at direct union with God through a practice of loving attention that transcends ordinary modes of knowing, while still acknowledging the preparatory role of affirmative practices. For the Christian contemplative tradition, this union is made possible through Christ, who serves as both model and mediator of divine-human communion, as His incarnation opens the way for human participation in divine life.
In this tradition, contemplative prayer is not primarily about thinking about God or even speaking to God, but rather about a stillness in which the soul opens itself to divine presence beyond concepts and images.
While we do not know who the writer is, the learnedness suggests a person of training, perhaps a priest or a theologian, and certainly an adept contemplative. More than philosophy or religion as doctrine, though, The Cloud is a guidebook for spiritual direction whose orientation is that of contemplative prayer and apophasis (the theological method of describing God by negation or what God is not, rather than by direct affirmation). This is a practical manual.
The Cloud Author is joined by other theologians, mystics, and solitaries of this period, including Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. These writers are the Middle English mystics, though scholars of the period will tell you that this naming is an anachronism unknown to the people of thirteenth and fourteenth century England.3 The modern nomenclature aside, the group is distinct in its wedding of scholarship with contemplation and practical communication.
The texts are written in the style Bernard McGinn calls the handbook tradition.4 That is, they belong to a group of how-to texts often written in the vernacular (i.e., not in Latin, but in Middle English, in this case) that include practical instructions (for contemplative prayer, in this text), guidance on how to navigate those practices (discretion in their use and misuse), and philosophical and theological context (in the form of excerpts or summaries) of relevant preceding ideas (from scripture, theology, and philosophy).
The style is often teacher-to-student, written as spiritual direction. Though these texts have a practical style, it would be too much to say that these were simply popularizations of more complex intellectual works. They do presuppose a history of study and practice. It’s just that their overall tone and vernacular language, along with their practical orientation, made them more accessible. Evelyn Underhill in the introduction to her translation, describes the Cloud Author’s style this way:
What, then, were his special characteristics? Whence came the fresh colour which he gave to the old Platonic theory of mystical experience? First, I think, from the combination of high spiritual gifts with a vivid sense of humour, keen powers of observation, a robust common-sense: a balance of qualities not indeed rare amongst the mystics, but here presented to us in an extreme form. In his eager gazing on divinity this contemplative never loses touch with humanity, never forgets the sovereign purpose of his writings; which is not a declaration of the spiritual favours he has received, but a helping of his fellow-men to share them. Next, he has a great simplicity of outlook, which enables him to present the result of his highest experiences and intuitions in the most direct and homely language. So actual, and so much a part of his normal existence, are his apprehensions of spiritual reality, that he can give them to us in the plain words of daily life: and thus he is one of the most realistic of mystical writers. . . . A skilled theologian, quoting St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and using with ease the language of scholasticism, he is able, on the other hand, to express the deepest speculations of mystical philosophy without resorting to academic terminology.5
Here summed up, then, are the Cloud Author’s unique traits: influences from Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas (and centrally, Dionysius the Areopagite, not mentioned here), the synthesis of scholarship and contemplation, a practical and common-sense bent mixed with learned terminology, but with the avoidance of jargon. This style is no doubt part of why the book is still widely read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Saying and Unsaying
The handbook tradition’s combination of practical instruction and philosophical depth is particularly evident in how The Cloud of Unknowing approaches contemplative prayer. Written in the form of a letter to a younger contemplative, the text guides its reader toward direct experience of the divine through a practice of letting go of all thoughts, images, and concepts. In practical terms, this means grounding oneself in scriptural reading and liturgical prayer before sitting in silence.
The contemplative practice itself involves allowing thoughts to arise without following them, using a single short word like “God” or “Love” to draw attention back when it wanders. Eventually even this word falls away into simple, loving attention. The text uses language to guide the reader beyond language, employing a vocabulary that it ultimately aims to transcend. This radical simplicity seeks an encounter with the God who exceeds all human understanding and representation.
And here lies the deeper tension we’ve been exploring, namely, that reading, studying, and praying remain important preparatory acts for this ultimate letting go. It is through their negation that “the soul is made one with God,” in the Cloud Author’s language, so that “we come to rest in a more fundamental experience of being alive,” as David Collins has written about so eloquently.6
There is a practical and epistemological sense to this approach.
Our intellectual knowing breaks down at a certain transcendent altitude, but our loving devotion keeps going. This primacy of love is not incidental to Christian contemplation but essential to it. For the Christian contemplative tradition, God is not merely an object of knowledge but is Love itself—both the source and the goal of contemplative practice. This understanding transforms the nature of contemplative attention.
The aim is not simply to know God but to participate in divine love. While the emphasis is on the apophatic divestment of sense, word, and image (the “unsaying” of all three), there is a kataphatic (“saying”) dimension here insofar as all three play some role in preparing the ground for the darkness of contemplative silence that goes before and continues beyond them.
For the Cloud Author, then, while we may speak of a dialectic of saying and unsaying, it is this contemplative silence that ultimately breaks the dialectical mode in reverent loving affection that exceeds intellectual delineation, as a kind of loving–attending. This placing of loving over intellectual knowing reflects the Christian understanding of God’s nature and humanity’s relationship to it.
Thought and Contemplation
This practical approach to contemplation is exemplified in the Cloud Author’s treatment of saying and unsaying, which in turn rests on a profound understanding of mynd as the ground of contemplative experience.
Having explored how the Cloud Author teaches contemplative practice through both practical instruction and the interplay of saying and unsaying, I want to return now to a deeper examination of mynd itself. This concept takes on particular significance when understood within these practices.
The handbook style—along with the author’s instructions to explore and investigate these practices and their results for oneself—makes the contemplative ascent of the text available to phenomenological exploration, as a demonstration more than an argument, even though these Middle English authors did not use the more recent language of phenomenology. However, the handbook style, with its practical instructions for exploring contemplative experience, offers what we might indeed call a phenomenology—a systematic investigation of consciousness and experience.
These medieval authors developed sophisticated approaches for observing and describing states of consciousness, different modes of experience, and the relationship between thinking and the ground from which it emerges. Though they were not doing phenomenology in the modern philosophical sense, they were engaging in systematic contemplative investigation, complete with methods, vocabularies, and frameworks for understanding what they found.
The language used opens out into an implicit investigation of the Middle English soul, a soul that finds similar descriptions in Augustine but also in Aristotle and Plato (hence the Dionysian integration of Christian and Platonic apophaticism). In Augustine, this distinction shows up in the Latin nosse (mind) and cogitare (thinking).
As with the Cloud Author’s distinction between mynd (mind) and reson (reason), nosse and cogitare share something of a figure–ground relation. Nosse is holistic, passive, and encompassing. Cogitare is linear, active, and directed. This same pattern appears in an even earlier form in Aristotle’s On the Soul, where he distinguishes between noēsis and dianoia. In his translation of Aristotle, Joe Sachs brings forth this relationship with remarkable clarity, and his account is particularly illuminating for understanding the relationship between contemplative and discursive modes of thought.
In this context, Sachs discusses what he calls the “twofoldness” of discursive and contemplative thinking. In this image we find several noteworthy characteristics of noēsis and dianoia—that noēsis is thinking that considers things as “indivisible and whole” as opposed to dianoia, which thinks things in a linear fashion “step-by-step” and part by part. The contemplative thinking of noēsis is more like a resting repose than the active motion of dianoia. In this view, noēsis stands in relation to dianoia as its foundation, the means by which dianoia’s operations are framed and contextualized, offering sense and meaning to its ruminations. I quote Sachs in full in these points:
What is this intellect that is so difficult to locate? It is that which thinks things as indivisible and whole, as distinct from thinking them step-by-step in time (430a 26), so that its thinking is more like rest than motion (407a 32-33). This contemplative thinking (noēsis) of the intellect (nous) thus stands opposed to thinking things through (dianoia), but it also stands beneath the act of thinking things through and makes it possible. Every judgment is an external combination of a separated subject and predicate in our discursive thinking, but is simultaneously held together as a unity by the intellect (430b 5-6). That is why Aristotle says that the contemplative intellect is that by means of which the soul thinks things through and understands (429a23). Its thinking is the foundation upon which all other thinking proceeds, just as having our feet on the ground is one of the conditions of our walking. Exclusively discursive thinking that could separate and combine, but could never contemplate anything whole, would be an empty algebra, a formalism that could not be applied to anything. In human thinking, at any rate, the activities of reasoning and contemplation are rarely disentangled.7
In simpler terms, Sachs suggests that contemplative thinking (noēsis) provides the holistic awareness that gives meaning to our step-by-step reasoning (dianoia), much like how mynd contains and transcends reson in the Cloud Author’s framework.
Today we tend to think of mind as thinking and thinking as reasoning. But as we’ve seen through these historical distinctions—mynd and reson, nosse and cogitare, noēsis and dianoia—mind contains reason rather than being identical to it. Throughout these traditions, we find contemplative awareness emerging as the primary structure that both holds and transcends discursive thought.
The Cloud Author’s mynd, like Augustine’s nosse and Aristotle’s noēsis, describes a faculty that does not work but rather comprehends—a passive ground from which active thinking emerges and within which it operates. This understanding appears with remarkable consistency across traditions, despite their different philosophical and theological frameworks.
Moreover, this contemplative dimension is not something we need to achieve or create—it is always already present as the very ground of our thinking.
We are simply more or less attuned to it, more or less able to recognize and inhabit this encompassing awareness.
What these traditions offer is not so much a method for generating contemplative experience as a way of acknowledging and deepening what is already there. In an age that understands mind primarily through metaphors of computation and information processing, we have largely forgotten this more primary dimension of consciousness.
While we treat mind mainly as an instrument of reason and analysis, these contemplative traditions remind us of its deeper nature: as that which contains and transcends reason itself.
In this sense, traditions of contemplative prayer offer not only pathways into transformative mystical experiences of God and the divine but also into different states of being and thinking that disclose this world in different ways, ways that our current culture needs but often underplays or dismisses altogether.
The handbook tradition offers us a way to relate to these practices and disseminate them—in a new vernacular—once again.
But do not take my word for it. Instead, follow the Cloud Author and go and look for yourself.
This chapter is an excerpt from Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures, by A.E. Robbert, out now in Kindle, paperback, and ebook formats. Consider buying a copy today. All proceeds go towards supporting the research and writing you find here at The Base Camp.
The Cloud of Unknowing (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), ed. Patrick J. Gallacher.
All three quotations translate the same passage from Chapter 63 of The Cloud of Unknowing. In order, the translations are from A. C. Spearing (London: Penguin Classics, 2001); Evelyn Underhill (Milton Keynes: Ingram, 2020); and Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boulder: Shambhala, 2009).
See for example Nicholas Watson, “The Middle English Mystics,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 539–565.
Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Handbooks of the Late Middle Ages,” Acta Theologica 42, suppl. 33 (2022), 73–88.
The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. Evelyn Underhill (Milton Keynes: Ingram, 2020), 3.
David Collins, “The Contemplative’s Conscience: An Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings,” The Side View, October 4, 2018.
Joe Sachs, “Introduction,” in On the Soul and On Memory and Recollection (Chelsea: Green Lion Press, 2004), 32.
An interesting essay with much to consider.
Perhaps the contemplative experience of "mynd" is what the poet TS Eliot called "the still point of the turning world." We rest at the still point, calm, wordless, free of images and thoughts, while "there the dance is."
A day is always better when something inspires me to re-read TS Eliot's The Four Quartets.
Interesting essay! Thanks for featuring my photo