Title: Contemplation in Higher Education
1Contemplation in Higher Education
- Arthur Zajonc
- Amherst College, Physics
- Director, Academic Program
- Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
2ACMHE 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
3Contemplative 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
4General Practices Support of Student Learning
- Establishing equanimity
- Schooling of attention
- Cultivation of empathy
- Discovering relationships
- Sustaining contradictions
5Eros 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
7Attention
- 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.
8Empathy 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.
9Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
10Open 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
11Gravity 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.
12Discovering Relationships
Perceptive knowing
- Value scale
- Musical intervals
- Geometric relationships
Never did any science originate, but by a poetic
perception.
13Sustaining 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.
14Rilke 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.
15Disciplinary 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
16Contemplative 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.
17The practice of contemplative inquiry
- Living the question
- Outer description
- Inner description
- Word
- Image
- Contemplation
18Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
19An 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
20Attention
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
21Concentric 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
22Contemplative Inquiry an Epistemology of Love
- Respect
- Delicate
- Intimate
- Participatory
- Vulnerability
- Transformation
- Bildung Education as formation of
faculties/organs - Insight Direct perception
23Parker 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
24Ancient 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.
25Extending Knowing
- Dianoia, valid inference, Verstand,
ratiocination, - Well-developed
- Episteme, direct perception, Vernunft, insight,
imagination - Underdeveloped
26The 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(No Transcript)
28In 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