Contemplation in Higher Education

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Contemplation in Higher Education

• Arthur Zajonc
• Amherst College, Physics
• Director, Academic Program
• Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

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ACMHE ConferenceApril 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

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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

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General Practices Support of Student Learning

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

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Eros and Insight Amherst College

• 30 First-year students
• Taught with art historian (Joel Upton)
• Readings, contemplative exercises, journaling and
  papers.
• For a journalists view of the course,
• See http//www.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/04sprin
  g/

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Silence

• Breaking 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
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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.

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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.

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Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
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Open attention

• The Master doesnt seek fulfillment,
• Not seeking, not expecting
• She is present, and can welcome all things.
• Tao Te Ching 15
• Reversal of the will

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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.

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Discovering Relationships
Perceptive knowing

• Value scale
• Musical intervals
• Geometric relationships

Never did any science originate, but by a poetic
perception.
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Sustaining Contradictions

• Physics wave-particle duality
• Math the point at infinity
• Arts in artistic composition
• Social sciences conflict and question of
  identity.
• Cusas exercise and the coincidence of
  opposites.

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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.

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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 Goodalls patient, meditative observations

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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.

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The practice of contemplative inquiry

• Living the question
• Outer description
• Inner description
• Word
• Image
• Contemplation

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Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
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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

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Attention
Formation
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
Every object, well-contemplated, opens a new
organ in us. Goethe
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Concentric Capacities
Mont Sainte-Victoire (1900)

• 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

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Contemplative Inquiry an Epistemology of Love

• Respect
• Delicate
• Intimate
• Participatory
• Vulnerability
• Transformation
• Bildung Education as formation of
  faculties/organs
• Insight Direct perception

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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_spiri
  tuality.html

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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.

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Extending Knowing

• Dianoia, valid inference, Verstand,
  ratiocination,
• Well-developed
• Episteme, direct perception, Vernunft, insight,
  imagination
• Underdeveloped

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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 Mertons essay Learning to Live

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

• Practice friendship
• Deep listening
• Empathic
• Selfless
• Sacred Hospitality
• Receive the whole person
• Share whatever you have
• Widen your circles of affection
• Loving kindness