The authentic Spiritual Life can best be portrayed as a journey from the darkness encased in phenomena to Light, and then from that light to darkness. It’s a major alteration from a light which is darkness to a Luminous Light which is hidden in darkness. The mind needs to shut itself off and turn to that Luminous Wonder that is a host to invisible realities that the Mystic Mind alone can discharge.
The universality of [authentic, inclusion mine] experience is regained only when, as a result of the mystical practice, the mind (manas) is reversed (parāvṛtta); once the mind ceases its activity, the subject reaches the state of “uniformity” (samatā), where no part of experience is privileged any longer, considered as having a special “personal” status. (Ovidiu Cristian Nedu, ibid, pg. 26)
This supernal darkening of the sensate mind is like a cloud of unknowing in which the spirit-soul accustoms itself to a form of nakedness completely devoid of all emotional and intellectual baggage. St. Gregory of Nyssa described it as such:
The revelation of God to the great Moses began with light as its medium, but afterwards God spoke to him through the medium of a cloud, and when he had become more lifted up and more perfect, he saw God in darkness. What we learn from this is something like the following: the first withdrawal from false and erroneous notions about God takes the form of a transition from darkness to light. More attentive apprehension of hidden realities, which leads the soul to the invisible realm by way of what appears, is like a cloud that casts a shadow on everything that appears but yet induces and accustoms the soul to look upon what is hidden. But the soul that has made its way through these stages to higher things, having left behind whatever is accessible to human nature, enters within the innermost shrine of the knowledge of God and is entirely seized about by the divine darkness; and in this darkness, since everything that appears and is comprehended has been left outside, only the invisible and the incomprehensible remain for the soul’s contemplation—and in them God is, just as the Word says concerning the Lawgiver: “Moses entered into the darkness where God was” (Exod 20:21). [Homilies on the Song of Songs, pg. 340-341)
The emphasis here is on that soul’s contemplation. Contemplation is the best doorway to the gnosis of the spiritual life in the Unborn. It is here one is fully aware and experiences right-action to all of life’s affairs. It is the vivifying Realization that our beingness proceeds from an imageless and Transcendent-Absolute Source. And wonder of wonders this contemplative awareness is minus a phenomenal “vision” because it now knows and discerns without seeing and knows The-All through that process of UN-knowing. Ergo, the aspiring adept needs to enter that Cloud around the Summit of the Unborn Mind in hopes of undergoing Its fragrance and meeting Its Living Presence.