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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 * * * In his Four ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Contemplation in Higher Education


1
Contemplation in Higher Education
  • Arthur Zajonc
  • Amherst College, Physics
  • Director, Academic Program
  • Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

2
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

3
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

4
General Practices Support of Student Learning
  • Establishing equanimity
  • Schooling of attention
  • Cultivation of empathy
  • Discovering relationships
  • Sustaining contradictions

5
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/

6
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
7
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.

8
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.

9
Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
10
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

11
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.

12
Discovering Relationships
Perceptive knowing
  • Value scale
  • Musical intervals
  • Geometric relationships

Never did any science originate, but by a poetic
perception.
13
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.

14
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.

15
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

16
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.

17
The practice of contemplative inquiry
  • Living the question
  • Outer description
  • Inner description
  • Word
  • Image
  • Contemplation

18
Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
19
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

20
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
21
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

22
Contemplative Inquiry an Epistemology of Love
  • Respect
  • Delicate
  • Intimate
  • Participatory
  • Vulnerability
  • Transformation
  • Bildung Education as formation of
    faculties/organs
  • Insight Direct perception

23
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

24
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.

25
Extending Knowing
  • Dianoia, valid inference, Verstand,
    ratiocination,
  • Well-developed
  • Episteme, direct perception, Vernunft, insight,
    imagination
  • Underdeveloped

26
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

27
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28
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
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