The shift from meditation to contemplation entails, in effect, a different manner of knowing God. Saint John of the Cross writes in The Ascent of a “loving knowledge”, a “general loving knowledge” (AMC 2.14.2), a knowledge “where nothing is understood particularly and in which they like to rest” (AMC 2.14.4), “an act of general, loving, peaceful, and tranquil knowledge” (AMC 2.14.2). The stress is on a loving knowledge. The more spiritual and penetrating this loving knowledge, and the more interior it is to the soul, the more the soul does not perceive it in any clear manner, even as it is a loving knowledge. “The purer, simpler, and more perfect the general knowledge is, the darker it seems to be and the less the intellect perceives” (AMC 2.14.8). Perhaps we may question how it can be a knowledge if it is unperceived. The reply would be that it is a knowledge by love, a knowledge by means of an inclination drawing the soul. If it is not perceived or felt initially, the reason is the delicacy of this inclination and the strong sense of incapacity due to the ligature of the faculties. But in time this knowledge is felt, as it were, if a soul is receptive. It is felt as a simple inclination to love in the inner quiet of prayer. The desire to love is what is given to the soul in this knowledge, the awareness of a longing within the hidden depths of the soul to love God.  –‘Saint John of the Cross: Master of Contemplation’ written by Father Donald Haggerty