Conducted by Devin Zuckerman, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center and Guest Editor of JCS Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology.
JCS: So, the first question in this series is what is contemplation? I’m curious, what is contemplation for you?
AM: Like many others, I suppose I’d begin by hemming and hawing, saying that the word has a complex semantic field and that it has its own interesting genealogy in different religious traditions. Contemplation is an interesting term of art precisely because it is so marshy and complicated; it’s both opaque and capacious. In my work, though, I understand contemplation to be the act or process of coming to attention, of a particular type of reflective consideration. It can refer to a set of practices or skills that are trained upon various prompts—the prompt can be the self, which entails the interior realm but also the physical body; it can be one’s ritual deeds or actions; or it can be the world around us, whether the cosmos as a whole or specific beings or parts of a landscape. These practices of thoughtfulness and attention can also be focused upon a text or some other type of cultural artifact: visual art, written words, music, and so forth.
At the same time, I understand the work of contemplation—or contemplative work—to be about stretching or developing the moral imagination, expanding the thresholds of what is possible and coming to see and to realize that the world-as-it-is is not the world-as-it-must-be. That’s true of the self as well since our own horizons can be vastly expanded through reflection. It’s true also of the text or other prompts to attention, whose meaning and significance is determined in part by our own encounter with them and our interpretive activity. In a certain sense, contemplation is this sustained, attentive envisioning of what is, and what could be.
In a certain sense, contemplation is this sustained, attentive envisioning of what is, and what could be.
JCS: Thank you. That’s a wonderful answer. I’m curious, given that response, how does contemplation manifest in your work, in your current research, or your work in the world?
AM: I love that question. I was initially trained as a scholar of Jewish mysticism, and I spent a lot of my time, both as a graduate student and in the first years of my time as a faculty instructor, thinking about the contemplative dimensions of Jewish religious thought. And that’s still an important part of the work that I do. But to a certain degree that type of historical writing now plays second fiddle to more constructive engagement with environmental ethics and religious responses to the climate crisis—including the work of Contemplative Ecology, which, as a scholarly discipline and as a set of skills or practices or modes of thinking, I approach as locally adapted subspecies of Contemplative Studies. Contemplative Ecology has to do with rethinking—and thus transforming—our place within the world, within the oikos or divine “house” in which we find ourselves.
Much of my work grapples with how religious texts and practices can help us expand regulatory paradigms or reconsider the laws and socio-economic structures that shape our world. The book that I’m writing right now about Judaism, Ecology, and Environmental Ethics has a significant chapter on Contemplative Ecology. But it’s funny: the deeper I go into this project, the more I think that contemplation is key to the other chapters. The book begins with the idea that we must come to attention to the fact that the tragedies of heart and mind that have led us to the contemporary moment, arguing that the climate crisis requires us to do what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble.”
This is a very difficult thing for people to do, and it’s not just a mental exercise. It’s a contemplative practice, an imperative to sustain our attention upon the vastness of the devastation. This type of sensitivity also opens the possibilities of coordination and responses grounded in kinship, reciprocity, and compassion rather than in terror-stricken fear of change. Kyle Whyte calls this type of mindset an “epistemology of coordination” rather than one of “crisis.” Contemplative Studies have become so much of what I do because, following in footsteps of scholars like Mary Evelyn Tucker, I consider global environmental change from extreme weather events to pollution and loss of biodiversity to be external manifestations of a profound spiritual and cultural malaise. We can’t find our way forward without dealing deeply with the contemplative traditions and exploring the alternatives or imaginaries that they afford us.
JCS: That’s beautiful. I’m thinking about what you said about the affordances of contemplative practice in the world and contemplation as informing moral imagination—the world as it is versus the world as it could be. So, I want to ask you a meta-question about the future of the study of contemplation and not only academically but in the wider world. Where are Contemplative Studies going? And what is exciting for you about the future of contemplation and the future of the study of contemplation?
This work of establishing roots allows one to become entangled within a certain body of knowledge… All who take part in these conversations have something to contribute. Thus, we build wisdom through the dynamic, improvisational art of collaboration.
AM: Another great question. What’s particularly exciting to me about Contemplative Studies is that it offers what the Zohar calls milin hadatin atikin—”new-old words,” or new-old possibilities. Contemplative Studies is our way of referring to a range of phenomena that have been thought about in rigorous ways for thousands of years, but as an interdisciplinary scholarly field it is also quite new at the same time. It has emerged from the humanities, to a certain degree, but Contemplative Studies is also rooted in the Contemplative Sciences (which is both a social and natural science). Many years ago, the field of Cognitive Studies gave way to the empirically dominated Cognitive Science, but it feels like the opposite is happening with Contemplative Studies: what began as scientific discipline has now taken root and is flowering in the world of the humanities in a really exciting way.
The interdisciplinarity of contemplative studies is an element that I find interesting and compelling. It strikes me as a very valuable tool in thinking about how we address not only the many and manifold real world environmental, social, economic issues but also the increasing balkanization and splintering of fields of knowledge that beleaguers higher education in our days. This is an old story, going back to Immanuel Kant’s declaration that the modern university ought to be run as a factory in which knowledge is defined by divided specializations and realms of expertise. Each discipline guards over its own little fiefdom while making enormous claims about its central importance. This isn’t good for people, and it’s certainly not good for the world. Mark C. Taylor’s call for the formation of “emergent zones” of inquiry to complement existing departments is one alternative organizing principle that could be applied to contemporary universities. The old departmental model can be useful for aggregating faculty and training students, but it also has tremendous blinders and biases that are manifest both explicitly and implicitly in its structures.
Taylor’s emergent zones would take up questions, problems, and complex fields as their point of departure, rather than definitive commitments to Religious Studies, History, Psychology, Law, and so forth. Contemplative Studies, in its broadest definition, ought to have at its table both practitioners and scholars; perhaps we might even say that it should include scholar-practitioners, or practitioner-scholars. It can draw together folks from an enormous range of disciplines, from anthropologists, neuroscientists, and biologists to historians, philosophers, and scholars of religion and literature.
When it comes to climate issues or other problems in which there are acute moral concerns and real-life, applied problems, we can’t afford to stay within our silos, even as we emphasize the necessity—and here I’ll use a different metaphor—of becoming extremely well rooted in a particular tradition. This work of establishing roots allows one to become entangled within a certain body of knowledge, but there is also a rhizomatic dimension—stretching horizontally, we acknowledge that none of us have all the answers. All who take part in these conversations have something to contribute. Thus, we build wisdom through the dynamic, improvisational art of collaboration. It’s a very different way of understanding what graduate school can be, and of what flourishing—of eudaemonia—within the academic world can look like.
JCS: I love the switch from the industrialized metaphor of the factory to a metaphor of an organic and emergent system for knowledge formation and organization in the rhizomatic root systems. You’re clearly using the natural world as a thinking partner, what else has been inspiring or productive in your work?
AM: I love thinking with trees. In fact, I do my best thinking around them, thinking with them as thought-partners and teachers. Of course, there are books that have deeply informed my own understanding of Contemplative Studies. As a grad student, I remember reading Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, some of the great Christian monastics and contemplatives. In their works I found a vocabulary that is rarely expressed in Jewish sources because Jewish mystics, by and large, neither wrote in the first-person nor composed prescriptive contemplative directions akin to those of, say, Ignatius of Loyola. Since coming to Stanford, I’ve had the chance to engage in daily conversation with my colleagues in Buddhist Studies, and I’ve learned a great deal about the rich descriptions and vocabulary of contemplative practice found in those sources.
I’ve been guided by discussions with the noted anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and her writings. She’s explored contemplative issues in her books Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft and When God Talks Back, the latter exploring how Evangelical Christians in America talk to God and whether or not God speaks to them in return. Her more recent book, How God Becomes Real, was enormously instructive for my thinking on the way that Jewish rituals can serve as embodied contemplative prompts.
There’s also Douglas Christie’s magnificent book, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, one of those rare books in which I dog-eared or highlighted nearly every page. Christie’s work has been foundational for my thinking on the convergence of mysticism, contemplative studies, and environmental ethics. His book, moreover, is a sterling example of how to interpret a religious tradition with extraordinary empathy, intelligence, and sensitivity. Christie’s stakes as the author and his interest in contemporary problems is abundantly clear, but this amplifies rather than occludes the work’s scholarly depth and insight.
Back to thinking with trees before they’re turned into books: James Bridle’s new work, called Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, reveals how cramped definitions of artificial intelligence, i.e. like-human or unlike-human, will doom us either to recreate our own pathways of mind or to live in fear of their emulation—either way, we’re constricted. On the other hand, if we expand our definition of what counts as intelligence, we are immediately greeted by a nearly infinite range of possibilities rooted in the biodiversity that surrounds us. Rather than projecting our modes of thinking upon the natural world, we could observe and extrapolate new ways of thinking from our companion species.
Bridle highlights the fact that, once computer scientists and engineers realized the potential importance of neural networks for artificial intelligence, they also began to discover that the forests expressed their own type of interconnected botanical or vegetative intelligence. What if we were to look at the forest first, thinking with it, and then reshape our technology in its image? What if our modes of inquiry—and our world-building tools or technologies—were enriched by listening to and learning from the plants and animals around us? The possibilities are endless and endlessly exciting. Bookstores are more likely to showcase Bridle’s book in a section devoted to works on technology or science, but it holds deep implications for Contemplative Studies. That’s another demonstration of the necessity of reading broadly and with an eye to interdisciplinarity.
I’m transformed by that moment precisely because I allow the tree to lay claim to my heart.
Now, let’s continue just a bit with this metaphor. I’m going to return to my own little allotment, to my own little planter, considering how the vantage point of Contemplative Studies offers—or affords— a way to read canonical texts in light of our contemporary moment. When I go back to the Zohar, I find a 13th century book filled with descriptions of mystics who roam the countryside and experience God’s presence as they encounter trees, rivers, and mountains. Contemplative Studies, and Contemplative Ecology in particular, encourages me to consider how the protagonists of this high medieval work are transformed by their engagement with the natural world and to ask how I, the reader, might allow myself to be reshaped by an encounter with a living tree. This is a moment of encounter, described by Martin Buber as an “I-Thou” experience of dialogue, relationship, and reciprocity. Rather than just seeing the tree’s externality and taxonomic forms, and rather than allowing it to recede behind some façade of essential “treeness,” I encounter this particular form of life and all of its specificity. I’m transformed by that moment precisely because I allow the tree to lay claim to my heart. In a sense, that brings us back to where we started, to the question of how we encounter and reread the texts of our tradition or our scholarly fields. As human beings, we open ourselves not only to working upon the world but, perhaps more importantly, to allowing the world to work on us.
JCS: Beautiful. Thank you so much for this conversation.
AM: Thank you so much.
