Contemplation in Higher Education

Arthur ZajoncAmherst College, Physics

Director, Academic ProgramCenter for Contemplative Mind in Society

ACMHE Conference:April 24-26 at Amherst College Diana Chapman Walsh, past Pres.

Wellesley David Levy, Mindfulness and Technology 60 papers, panels, posters by members Contemplative practice sessions

Contemplative Pedagogy Supports and develops the inner resources

of the student. Offers a complementary modality of

engagement with texts, natural phenomena, the arts, other cultures,…

Can be deepen to a means of inquiry and insight.

Is practiced by an increasing number of professors, student life councilors and others in the academy.

Research on meditation

General Practices Support of Student Learning

• Establishing equanimity• Schooling of attention• Cultivation of empathy• Discovering relationships• Sustaining contradictions

Eros and Insight Amherst College

30 First-year students Taught with art historian (Joel

Upton) Readings, contemplative exercises,

journaling and papers. For a journalist’s view of the course,See

http://www.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/04spring/

SilenceBreaking the silenceof an ancient ponda frog jumped into the watera deep resonance.

…only one in a hundred millions [is awake] to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. Thoreau

Attention Single-pointed concentration.

Breath Natural object Thought Images

Purpose is to break reactive, associative thinking, and to bring clarity, freedom, sustained focus to observation and thought.

“Attentional blink” research shows improved attention.

Empathy & the “Afterimage” Four-part bell sound exercise

Focused Attention: Sound the bell Resounding the bell sound in memory

Open Awareness: Release -- “letting go” “Letting come” – The afterimage or “nimita”

(ref. Buddhaghosha, Path of Purity, 10 kasinas)

Every outside has an inside.

Cognitive Breathing

Focused Attention Open Awareness

Gravity and Grace: Simone Weil

Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes the void.

Discovering Relationships

Value scale Musical intervals Geometric relationships

Perceptive knowing

“Never did any science originate, but by a poetic perception.”

Sustaining Contradictions Physics: wave-particle duality Math: the “point at infinity” Arts: in artistic composition Social sciences: conflict and question of

“identity.” Cusa’s exercise and “the coincidence of

opposites.”

Rilke advice to a young poet...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Disciplinary applicationsof Contemplation Arts:

Lectio divina and poetry & literature Learning to “see” a painting, to “hear” music Contemplative movement…

Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: first-person research methods concerning

mental states/emotions… (Wallace,Varela & Thompson)

Ecology Barbara McClintock “feeling for the organism” Jane Goodall’s patient, meditative observations

Contemplative Inquiry Allows one to enter into the other empathetically,

be it a poem, nature, another person, or an idea. Instead of objectification, one skillfully subjectifies

the world. Barbara McClintock Creative insight requires such intimate

engagement. Logical inference and induction alone are insufficient for discovery & creation.

Contemplative engagement becomes contemplative inquiry which leads to insight or contemplative knowing.

The practice of contemplative inquiry

Living the questionOuter descriptionInner descriptionWord ImageContemplation

Cognitive Breathing

Focused Attention Open Awareness

An Complementary Epistemology

“There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age.”“Every object well-contemplated opens a new organ in us.”

Goethe

Attention

Formation

“Every object, well-contemplated, opens a new organ in us.” Goethe

Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where

and what it sees. Emerson

Concentric Capacities

“Get to the heart of what is before you… In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric through looking and working.”

Cézanne in a letter to Emile Bernard

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1900)

Contemplative Inquiry: an Epistemology of Love

Respect Delicate Intimate Participatory Vulnerability Transformation Bildung – Education as formation of

faculties/”organs” Insight – Direct perception

Parker Palmer: The Violence of our Knowledge “Every way of knowing is a way of living, every

epistemology becomes an ethic.” “This mythology of objectivism is more about

control over the world, or over each other, more a mythology of power than a real epistemology that reflects how real knowing proceeds.”

“We are driven to unethical acts by an epistemology that has fundamentally deformed our relation to each other and our relation to the world.“http://www.21learn.org/arch/articles/palmer_spirituality.html

Ancient Greek Education Ancient integrative education: Greek

philosophy was “a course of training which would make them simultaneously contemplatives and men of actions – since knowledge and virtue imply each other.” Pierre Hadot in What is Ancient Philosophy.

Ancient transformative education: Simplicius asked, “What place shall the philosopher occupy in the city? That of a sculptor of men.”

Extending KnowingDianoia, valid inference,

Verstand, ratiocination, …Well-developed

Episteme, direct perception, Vernunft, insight, imaginationUnderdeveloped

The True Fruits of Education “Thus the fruit of education, whether in

the university or in the monastery was the activation of that innermost center, that apex or spark which is a freedom beyond freedom, an identity beyond essence, a self beyond all ego, a being beyond the created realm, and a consciousness that transcends all division, all separation.” From Thomas Merton’s essay “Learning to

Live”

In light of the current crisis, what can we do, how can we help?

Practice friendship1. Deep listening

Empathic Selfless

2. Sacred Hospitality Receive the whole person Share whatever you have

3. Widen your circles of affection Loving kindness