Contemplative Pedagogy:
Principles, Design & Practice
Arthur Zajonc
President, Mind & Life Institute
Emeritus Physics, Amherst College
Summer 2012
Contemplative Pedagogy:
An Overview
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Contemporary situation
The structure of a contemplative curriculum
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Rationale and design principles
General practices that support learning.
Integration of contemplation into the disciplines.
Enlarging our view of knowing: contemplative
inquiry and insight
Where do you suppose this is?
Harvard Business School
Meeting 3 of Working Group on Contemplative
Dimensions of Leadership and Leadership Education
My Center organized a mini-retreat
May 2011 Jon Kabat Zinn
Jon with Diana Chapman Walsh,
President Emerita of Wellesley
College
Meeting 2 at the Sackler
Art Museum, Harvard
Daniel Goleman, Metta
McGarvey, Jerome
Murphy, Saki Santorelli.
Back row seated: Otto
Scharmer, Grady
McGonagill, William
Torbert, Deborah Ancona,
Rebecca Henderson.
Standing, left to right:
Ronald Heifetz, Ray
Williams, Arthur Zajonc,
Janice Marturano, Tamar
Miller, Jon Kabat Zinn,
Mirabai Bush, Elinor
Pierce
Google’s Search Inside Yourself
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Center for
Contemplative Mind
in Society
Mindfulness-based
Emotional Intelligence
Developed at HQ and
now offered
worldwide.
The situation today…
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More that 158 Contemplative Practice Fellows
teaching individual courses and initiating
programs. (See Barbara Craig report)
Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher
Education, www.acmhe.edu with 800 members.
Conferences:
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Amherst, Columbia, UMass, Wellesley, AACU,…
Association for Contemplative Mind
in Higher Education
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Conferences
Summer session
Retreats
Fellowships
E-newsletter
Webinars
Social Networking
Online resources
ACMHE Conference:
September 21-23 at Amherst College
“Contemplative Approaches in the Diverse
Academic Community: Inquiry, Connection,
Creativity, and Insight
Contemplative Retreat for Educators
October 18-21 at the Garrison Institute
 About 40 academics who seek to deepen
their practice in the company of others
 Mindfulness, metta, contemplative inquiry,
silence…
 Mirabai Bush, Paul
Wapner
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Day of Mindfulness at
Amherst College
Rationale for a Contemplative Pedagogy
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Supports and develops attention, emotional
balance… of benefit to students, faculty, staff.
Can become a mode of inquiry leading to
insight.
Cultivation of empathy, altruism and compassion
(Stanford’s CCARE research program)
Offers a valuable, complementary, experiential
modality of engagement with texts, natural
phenomena, the arts, other cultures,…
Early research supports CP (More needed!)
Research
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Research talk by Willoughby Britton on
“Schools, clinics and monasteries: promises
and perils of contemplative training”
Bibliography handout on research.
One revealing example…
Pascual-Leone (1996) Harvard
Average cortical output maps for the finger flexors of the
trained hand in subjects undergoing daily physical versus
mental practice of the 5-finger exercise. Note the similarity in
output maps with either form of practice.
Uses of Contemplation in Higher
Education
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General Practices in Support of Student
Learning
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Cultivation of Equanimity and Attention
Cultivate Emotional Balance and Empathic Connection
Sustaining Complexity and Contradiction
Contemplative Practices and the Disciplines
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Each discipline is developing its own particular set of
practices that are of special value. (See CMind reports on
Arts and Philosophy/Psychology/Religion mtgs.)
Course Design Principles
Context: who are you teaching, what is the course
content?
Intention: what are the pedagogical aims?
Practice: give rationale for selection, clear
instruction, opportunity for questions, gently lead.
Process the practice:
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Journaling
Talk in pairs
Class conversation
Beholding
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Jodie Ziegler, Holy
Cross
Joel Upton, Amherst
Amy Cheng, SUNY
New Paltz
Deep Listening
“Come home to your heart and listen deeply for others who look for you there.” MR O’Reilly
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U Houston, Psychology,
Contemplative Practice in
Psychotherapy, Linda Bell,
listening from viewpoint of
therapist and client.
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U St Thomas, English, Mary
Rose O’Reilly, Contemplative
Spirituality of Environmental
Writing. Listening with deep
openhearted attention
instead of looking for flaw in
the argument.
Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness:
Economics, Amherst College
“The course will also include
opportunities for students to examine
their own consumption decisions and
assumptions about the attainment of
happiness.” i.e. contemplative
exercises.
Daniel Barbezat
Contemplative Reading
Lectio Divina
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Colgate, Religion, Georgia
Frank: first and second
readings, 5 days apart, with
writing
Georgetown, Philosophy,
Dante, Francis Ambrosio.
Contemplative reading and
sharing of short essays on
hunger and food
Gertrude Hughes,
Wesleyan, Poetry and
contemplation
Contemplative Writing
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UNC, English, Reading, ReEnvisioning, and Writing
Women's Lives. (Used
freewriting, silence). Jane
Danielowitz
Gurleen Grewal, U of So
Florida, Transformations in
Consciousness (Women’s
Studies)
Mary Rose O’Reilly
Writing through the tears…
The contemplative arts
Ed Sarath
Yin Mei
Eros and Insight –
Amherst College
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28 First-year students
Taught with art historian (Joel
Upton)
Readings, contemplative
exercises, journaling and papers.
For a journalist’s view of the
course,
http://www.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/04s
pring/
Silence
Breaking the silence
of an ancient pond
a frog jumped into the water
a 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
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Single-pointed concentration.
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Breath
Natural object [paper clip]
Thought
Images
Purpose is to break reactive, associative
thinking, and to bring clarity, freedom,
sustained focus to observation and thought.
Empathy & the “Afterimage”
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Four-part bell sound exercise
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Focused Attention:
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Open Attention:
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Sound the bell
Resounding the bell sound in memory
Release -- “letting go”
“Letting come” – The afterimage or “nimita”
(ref. Buddhaghosha, Path of Purity, 10 kasinas)
Applicable to other sense experiences
Every outside has an inside.
Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Attention
Open attention
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment,
Not seeking, not expecting
She is present, and can welcome all things.”
Tao Te Ching 15
Reversal of the will
Discovering Relationships
Perceptive knowing
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Value scale
Musical intervals
Geometric relationships
Sustaining Contradictions
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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.”
Contemplative Inquiry
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Logical inference and induction alone are insufficient
for discovery & creation
One enters 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 intimate engagement.
Contemplative engagement becomes contemplative
inquiry which leads to insight or contemplative
knowing.
The practice of contemplative inquiry
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Living the concepts
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Key concepts in a field are made real by living
them contemplatively. Examples.
Living the questions
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Outer phenomenology
Inner phenomenology
Word and image
Posing the question
Contemplative Inquiry
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Outer Phenomenology
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Inner Phenomenology
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Inner experience, feelings, mood,…
Words: a poetic line
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Behavior, speech, posture…
E.g. “Yearning for meaning, a shadow arises.”
Simple Image
Parker Palmer: The Violence of our
Knowledge
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“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
From Contemplative Practice to Contemplative
Inquiry: an Epistemology of Love
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Respect
Delicate
Intimate
Participatory
Vulnerability
Transformation
Bildung – Education as formation of
faculties/”organs”
Insight – Direct perception
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
Ancient Greek Education
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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.
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Ancient transformative education: Simplicius
asked, “What place shall the philosopher
occupy in the city? That of a sculptor of men.”
Erwin Schrödinger: Mind and Matter
At every step, on every day of our life, something of
the shape that we possessed until then has to
change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced
by something new. The resistance of our primitive
will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the
existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we
ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and
conquered at the same time – it is a true continued
‘self-conquering’ (Selbstüberwindung).
Extending Knowing
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Valid inference, dianoia, Verstand,
ratiocination, …
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Well-developed
Direct perception, episteme,
Vernunft, insight, imagination
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Underdeveloped
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
Attention
Formation
Imagination,
is a
very high sort of seeing,
which
does
“Every
object,
well-contemplated,
opens
a new
not come by organ
study, but
by the
intellect being where
in us.”
Goethe
and what it sees. Emerson
Cognitive Breathing &
the Lemniscate of Attention
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment,
Not seeking, not expecting
She is present, and can welcome all things.” Tao Te Ching
Connections to the Western Tradition
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Pierre Hadot:
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What is Ancient Philosophy?
Philosophy as a Way of Life.
Brian Stock:
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“The Contemplative Life and the Teaching of the
Humanities,” on Cmind academic website.
Book: After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and
the Text
Vimeo: "Foundations of European Contemplative
Traditions in Humanities and Medicine“ at Brown
The True Fruits of Education
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“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”