What is Contemplation?: An Interview with Claire Petitmengin

Conducted by Erin Burke, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia and a Research Assistant at the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: What does contemplation mean to you? 

CP: I would first say I don’t use this word very often—contemplation. 

JCS: That’s interesting—do you prefer a different word? 

CP: Meditation. Contemplation—I don’t know why, but it’s not a word I use very often. But I like it—it’s broader than meditation. I understand contemplation as a learning experience. It consists, for me, in learning to see what is—what is closest to us, but that we usually don’t see. It’s learning to see what is invisible under our eyes. 

JCS: And how do you understand contemplative practices? 

CP: They aim at helping us become aware of what we experience or recognize it. I understand contemplative practices through the surprising observation that a large part of our experience escapes us and that it is a source of suffering. This ignorance, avidyā in Sanskrit, is the main source of suffering. How is it possible that we don’t see what we experience? It’s so close that we don’t see it. And contemplative practices seem to agree on the fact that it is absorption or tension, the tension of our attention on objects or contents of experience, that prevents us from seeing and recognizing it. This absorption into objects or content conceals experience itself—what we experience here and now. 

For example, I am very interested in auditory experience. When a sound occurs, our immediate reaction usually consists in trying to identify what produces the sound. For example, I immediately recognize the sound as the song of a blackbird in the plum tree in my garden. But this focus on the source of the sound, the blackbird, creates a distance, a separation, between the source of the sound, there, and me, here. And moreover, this focalization on the source conceals my experience of the sound itself, which becomes transparent, or invisible. We don’t pay attention to it usually. An image of the bird immediately hides, or masks, the auditory experience—but not only the auditory experience, the whole felt experience of the sound. It becomes invisible to me. Do you agree? 

JCS: Yes…for example, if I hear someone talking, I immediately think—oh, that’s my friend, Sarah. And then I start thinking about things I’ve done with Sarah or what Sarah looks like, and then that unique experience of hearing the voice is just gone—I miss the experience itself while my mind has already gone somewhere else.

CP: And the special quality of her voice at that time and the feelings that are elicited in the moment…

JCS: Yes, if I feel nice, or scared…that is also immediately covered over with thought.

CP: Yes. But what I am emphasizing now is that even before your mind begins to wander, the tension toward the source of the sound causes you to miss the experience. In this context, most contemplative practices seem to aim at eliciting a release of the tension on objects, a release of the absorption in objects that conceal experience, in order to discover what is there. The tension of the practitioner on the object or content of the experience conceals the experience itself. I think most meditative practices, at least those I know, aim to release that tension. In fact, it’s a movement of attention that we have to learn. Our attention is focused on objects, and we have to learn to release that tension or grasping at objects.

JCS: And how does contemplation intersect with your research? 

Francisco Varela was one of the first scientists to advocate that it is impossible to progress in the understanding of the mind by using neuroscience only. He said that creating rigorous methods to study lived experience was indispensable.

CP: Contemplation intersects with my research in two main ways. On the one hand, I’ve been participating for 30 years now in the development of a method used to become aware of experience, called micro-phenomenology. It is a method which has similarities with contemplative practices. It was created at the instigation of Francisco Varela, who was my PhD advisor. He was a biologist, a neuroscientist, and a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. He was a disciple of Chögyam Trungpa and Tulku Urgyen after Trungpa passed away. 

Francisco Varela was one of the first scientists to advocate that it is impossible to progress in the understanding of the mind by using neuroscience only. He said that creating rigorous methods to study lived experience was indispensable. It was a groundbreaking idea at the time because science, as you know, is built on the exclusion of lived experience. The scientific approach consists in trying to study any phenomenon, for example emotion, through what is measurable—for example, the rhythm of the heart, the movement of the eyes, the variations of bodily temperature, and, of course, the activity of the brain. But it was not considered scientific to ask a person who experiences an emotion: “What do you experience?”. There were many reasons for this, but it would take us too far away from the topic to explain them. But this led us to develop a method based on interviewing, which helps the interviewee become aware of unrecognized parts of an experience and provide a very fine-grained description of them. 

To give you an idea, one second of an experience takes one hour to describe. So, this interview method provides very precise descriptions that, afterwards, can be analyzed with a specific method of analysis in order to highlight the structure of the described experiences and possible regularities between them. This interview method can be applied to many types of experiences, as long as it is possible to identify a precise moment of experience to explore. For example, I would produce a sound, and we would do an interview on your experience of listening to that sound. I would ask you questions such as: when you listened to the sound, what happened first? This method thus relies on the exploration of a specific experience situated in space and time, which helps the interviewee abandon preconceptions about what the experience is in general. By exploring one specific experience, with the help of precise and non-inductive questions, you can really become aware of what happened to you. This method has been applied to many types of experiences, from listening to a sound to encountering a piece of artwork; from the emergence of mathematical ideas to the memorization of musical scores; from the experience of epileptic seizures to the experience of pain; from the experience of surprise to the experience of giving birth. This method makes it possible to explore many experiences that were not possible to describe easily before, and thus opens many new fields of investigation. And this method has some common points with contemplative practice, because in both cases the goal is to help the person become aware of their experience by releasing a tension focused on objects. 

On the other hand, the micro-phenomenological method can be applied directly to contemplative experience itself. Doing interviews with meditation practitioners on specific moments of their practice helps the interviewer and the practitioner herself to understand better what she does or stops doing when she practices—and thus to refine her practice, because she becomes more aware of what she does. This helps refine the micro-gestures that she does when she practices. For example, what does she do exactly as a meditation practitioner, when she focuses her attention on her breathing? It seems to be obvious, but in fact, it’s not so obvious. You can spend one hour describing this gesture: “I focus my attention on my breathing.” And what is it to become aware that your attention has drifted? What happens in that moment? And what do you do to let go of the thought that has distracted you? It’s a very specific micro-gesture to let it go. And what do you do to refocus your attention on your breathing? What do you do to open your attention when you say, “I open my attention”? What is it, actually, to open your attention? And what is it to release the tension on an object? 

Micro-phenomenology is a sort of contemplative practice, I would say. I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but it has a dimension of contemplation. It can be used as a contemplative practice in itself, but it is also very complementary to contemplative practice. 

JCS: It also reminds me a bit of the Buddhist practice of insight meditation in which one might ask different kinds of questions about experience, attempting to identify exactly what is happening.

CP: The micro-phenomenological interview uses very simple questions. It helps the practitioner to stabilize attention on very subtle gestures, become aware of what is done, and then put words to it, which is not so easy. And we can also explore in this way the effects of these micro-gestures on what we could call “the experiential space” of the practitioner. For example, what is the effect of releasing tension on the source of a sound? The focus of attention on the source of the sound creates a separation between the source of the sound, there, and me, here—so a specific space with a separation between outside and inside. And releasing that tension has an effect on this experiential space. When we explored this through micro-phenomenological interviews, we discovered that the gesture of releasing has the effect of softening the separation between outside and inside. The boundary between the two becomes more permeable. It’s this type of thing that micro-phenomenology can really explore very precisely: the tensions, the effect of the tensions and of their release, and the effect on lived space. 

The most interesting investigations for me are on very simple experiences, such as listening to a sound or touching an object. By exploring these very simple experiences, a huge understanding can emerge. Francisco Varela used to say this to me—you don’t have to study very complex, psychedelic experiences. The secret is in the simplest experiences. 

We discovered that the gesture of releasing has the effect of softening the separation between outside and inside. The boundary between the two becomes more permeable.

JCS: What excites you about future directions in the field?

CP: First, what excites me the most is that it is now possible to study lived experience in the academic world, which was not possible before. It opens many possible research directions that were forbidden. You can decide to do a PhD on the experience of thinking, of joy, of love. It was not possible a few years ago to do research on such experiences. There were many objections—”oh, no, it won’t be reliable.” And a few years ago, it was not possible to study the experience of contemplation. What you could do, what was authorized, was to study the neural correlates of meditation, or the measurable effects of meditative practices. Eventually you could study the experience itself to confirm the neuro-scientific findings, but it was very difficult to study the lived experience of contemplation-as-such as an interesting object of research. 

JCS: And do you think that was in part because people would say personal experience is not observable? That we can never know what another person is really feeling?

CP: Yes. This objection, this criticism was given about any experience—you cannot know what another person is living, it cannot be described. For contemplative experience the resistance was even stronger. However, for thirty years now, we have been working to lift the ban on lived experience. We have developed and refined methods for producing and sharing descriptions of experiences and detecting common structures. And thanks to these methods, we are now obtaining very interesting and useful results. 

The hope that through the development of first-person research we can have an impact in the educational, therapeutic, and clinical domains.

I would like to mention Christian Suhr’s project. He obtained a large grant to study the experience of heart opening, or love, in different contemplative traditions—Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. It seems that the experience of opening the heart, or love, is very central in these three traditions. The project tries using micro-phenomenological interviews—as well as film, because he’s an anthropologist and filmmaker—to explore the subjective experience of heart opening in the three traditions and compare them to see if there is a common kernel. This would have important consequences, given the current societal context. There are differences at certain levels, but the core experience seems to be very similar. And even if they find differences, it would be interesting to study them, not at the level of dogmas and rituals, but at the level of the very essence of these practices. For me, it is a very promising research avenue to be able to do that. 

What is also exciting, and which I find very important, is how the disconnection from experience seems to be the main source of suffering. The fact that first-person research and contemplative research is being integrated into scientific investigation seems to be a big hope in that respect—the hope that through the development of first-person research we can have an impact in the educational, therapeutic, and clinical domains. This will probably help students or patients have more contact with their experience than before, and this gives hope for our society. 

JCS: That is amazing. And do you have favorite books you would recommend about contemplation or meditation? 

CP: It is a little difficult for me to answer the question because I don’t read many books on meditation, except books that are not very easy to read, such as books by Longchenpa. But I remember that I did read the books of Chögyam Trungpa. I think they are really excellent books on contemplative practice. He was Francisco Varela’s teacher. All his books are very interesting, and you can read them several times at different moments—and each time you will have a new understanding of them. I think he speaks to many types of practitioners at different stages of their practice. So Crazy Wisdom, The Path is the Goal, Transcending Madness, Meditation in Action, and Entering the Tibetan Buddhist Path, just to mention a few of them. I read them in French—I had to find the English titles!

JCS: Thanks so much for chatting with us.