Jordan Quaglia is Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Cognitive and Affective Science Laboratory, and Research Director of the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University.
Conducted by Adam Liddle, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center and the Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
JCS: Let’s start with our first question: What is contemplation?
JQ: I think there’s a conventional sense or everyday usage of the term, contemplation. But there’s a bit of a disconnect between how contemplation is understood more broadly and how it’s used in contemplative practice. I’m interested in reconciling those two things. I would love it if our use of the term contemplative could be a bridge for people who already understand contemplation in one way, instead of having to explain, oh, there’s this historical reason that contemplative is being used as it is. The broader everyday sense has a lot to do with extended or deep reflection. And there’s typically an emphasis on thinking built into that everyday use. And to reconcile or help bridge that with the narrower sense meant in the material I work on in contemplative practices, there’s a shift of the object that we’re holding in intentional awareness. So, in something like breath focused mindfulness meditation, as one example, contemplative now means that we’re holding in mind a nonconceptual object—or less conceptual object—instead of a conceptual object that involves discursive thinking. But when we broaden contemplation to include the possibility of the intentional holding in mind of both conceptual and nonconceptual contents or objects, then I think it’s broad enough to span both and to bridge those worlds.
What I like about that is the potential for being able to talk about shared, core processes of the mind that are involved in how both sorts of contemplation operate. The kind of contemplation that we might mean in a conventional sense as well as the more narrow, specialized sense may both require similar cognitive processes to be thorough, deep, extended, and sustained. Then, the holding in mind of nonconceptual or less conceptual objects, like my body during Tai chi practice, sensations in my body, or sensations of breathing involve similar cognitive processes as contemplation that involves intentional and sustained thinking.
I’m sure our discussion will evolve here, but there’s for me really provocative questions about what contemplation is for. So, in my work, I’m interested in answering several questions about contemplation. We’ve already answered the what in some sense, being the two sorts of contemplation I just described. So, we could ask, are we talking about it in the conventional sense or the more specialized sense? What object are we focused on? What form of a practice are we doing? Then the how are these different cognitive processes that are going on beneath the surface, under the hood. But it’s the why that is really interesting to me these days. There do seem to be some shared set of outcomes that contemplative practices aim for. And in recent years, I’ve shifted my focus to that question more specifically, and for me, that has revealed insights that I hope are clarifying for the field more broadly.
JCS: I’d like to work up to what the why is for contemplative practice, but first can you elaborate on how contemplative practice works?
JQ: I understand the shared cognitive processes that underlie both sorts of contemplation, contemplation in the conventional sense and in contemplative practices, to involve the core cognitive processes of attention, intention, and awareness. These are typically treated as theoretical primitives in psychological science. In other words, they don’t typically get defined, or when they are defined, they’re somewhat slippery constructs. And so, I think that has held back a full engagement with what differentiates a contemplative mindset from a noncontemplative mindset. We have to get specific about the particular workings of attention, intention, and awareness and really zoom in on those cognitive processes in a granular way to have a sufficient amount of detail to fully understand what is different about the contemplative mind.
First of all, attention, intention, and awareness are somewhat separable cognitive processes that can hang together and typically do go together, but there’s an assumption that has been made in Cognitive Science that they always go together. This has led to, for example, an oversimplification in the dual process models of the mind between, for example, automatic and controlled processing. So, when we make that kind of simple dichotomous distinction between automatic and controlled, we’re making an assumption that attention, intention, and awareness are all hanging together in a more implicit way in automatic processes. And then what differentiates controlled processes is that they involve more explicit and conscious attention, intention, and awareness. You’re lumping attention, intention and awareness into either the automatic bucket or the controlled bucket, but they’re always going together. And I think in order to more fully understand the contemplative, we need to again get specific about the roles of attention, intention, and awareness as separable and how they can diverge from one another in meaningful ways.
As a simple example, if I’m reading a book, I might have the goal of sustaining my attention on the passage that I’m reading. And then, something in the field of my intentions comes to mind and brings about a different goal that I’m interested or invested in and takes me in a different direction. We can conventionally call that mind wandering. And so, now my intention is not playing well with my attention and my awareness. Is that fully an automatic process? Am I now in an automatic process of mind wandering? Or can I engage with that in a more nuanced, controlled way? Can I be awake to my intention as it diverges and wants to take me in a different direction? Can I soften my focus around that and actually listen to that intention and say, “I hear you. I do actually need to get up in a few minutes and make myself lunch,” or something like that. In a way, our mind wandering is an expression of our mind caring for ourselves, and so to relate to it changes its nature and makes it somewhat fuzzier. It’s just one example, but the distinction between automatic and controlled processes becomes fuzzier when we start to talk about things like mindfulness or contemplation.
Discussing these processes in the how of contemplation comes from work I’ve done with my colleague, Dr. Peter Grossenbacher, at Naropa. We call it our contemplative cognition framework, and we outline how these processes can get combined in different ways. Contemplative practices appear invested in this functional integration of attention, intention, and awareness and seem to promote specific ways that this interplay between them becomes more harmonious. So, we might say simply that the noncontemplative mind is one in which attention, intention, and awareness diverge from each other in discordant or polarizing ways and that contemplative practices appear invested in more harmonious relationships between attention, intention, and awareness.
JCS: I love that. If we haven’t already answered the question, let’s move on to the why? What are the motivations for contemplation and the study of contemplation? How do these relate to your work?
JQ: Yeah. So, the contemplative cognition framework would have an answer for this why that has something to do with task general learning. In Cognitive Science, sometimes there’s a distinction made between task general learning and task specific learning, the latter being like learning to play an instrument and getting better at that specific task where learning one skill tends to not transfer to other skill sets. There’s been ample research to show that lots of different types of learning that cognitive scientists were hopeful would be transferable to other tasks end up being mostly task specific—like learning an instrument. They may not even generalize to similar tasks. And so, one theory that’s been put forward not only by myself but others is that contemplative practices may be unique in their emphasis on task general learning, since they target the training of processes like attention, intention, and awareness. It might be this set of cognitive processes that really matters across different task situations and across different domains of life. Therefore, we may be able to say that contemplative practice is more worthwhile than something like learning to play an instrument due to its potential domain general usefulness, the domain generality of the training.
Now, one thing that I don’t love about our contemplative cognition framework is that it’s quite interesting to people within the field, and it inspires interesting conversations, such as between you and I in this moment, but it’s not the most accessible thing to people who are not used to thinking in more nuanced ways about the workings of their mind. Even a cognitive scientist has difficulty thinking in any specificity about the distinction between attention and awareness, for example. So, I have in recent years wondered if there is a why behind contemplative practices that can be a more accessible way to help communicate their value to people like novices or those who have never been turned on to contemplative practices. What’s unique about this kind of activity? Why might you want to spend your time doing this, as opposed to all the other things that you could be spending your time doing like learning, scrolling TikTok, etc.?
Out of that work, which is still ongoing, I’ve identified three outcomes that might fill the role of why. I developed an outcome-based model that I call the tricolor framework that uses the metaphor of the RGB color model. I recently gave a talk about this, and it’s available for people to download and is free online. The tricolor framework speaks to what I believe to be a shared interest in three core outcomes of contemplative practices. The first two outcomes are—and they won’t be too surprising—presence and compassion. The reason that I chose to focus on presence as opposed to, for example, mindfulness has a lot to do with my background in studying mindfulness. It’s a very contentious term now, and I would say it’s a somewhat vague term. It has become, in a way, a broad umbrella term to talk about what tends to connect different contemplative practices with each other, but it lacks specificity. And so, that has afforded the field a nice placeholder for quite some time, because we can use the term mindful in a way that we generally know what we’re referring to when we talk about mindfulness. But, without getting more specific about it, I think the utility of that term as a placeholder has faded over time, and it has become somewhat problematic in ways that detract from its usefulness moving forward.
Presence is about present moment awareness, but it also includes embodied awareness. The second outcome is compassion, and for me, it’s really critical to name that when I say compassion, I mean to include both self-compassion and other oriented compassion at the same time or in combination or in relationship with one another. Contemplative practices, from this perspective, must support both. They can emphasize self-compassion or they can emphasize compassion for others, but they should not harm either of those two principles.
The third outcome, which is a little less common and maybe the most innovative aspect of the tricolor model, is what I call clear seeing. Clear seeing, to put it in simple terms, is perceiving in less biased and more truthful ways. There’s a whole range or continuum to clear seeing, from simple things like improving the clarity of our sensory awareness or paying more attention to embodied sensations and so on, all the way to more existential clarities around, for example, the truth of interdependence. Clear seeing is quite broad in those ways. The aim, then, is to put these three components, presence, compassion, and clear seeing, together in such a way that they overlap. This overlapping is not only having a weak relationship with one another. There’s something I call the central overlap rule, which has to do with the universal set of all three of these components. What that means is that in order to qualify as a contemplative practice, something must, over time, support the development of presence, compassion, and clear seeing in daily life. And if it’s doing harm to any of those three, then it is not a contemplative practice; it does not qualify as a contemplative practice from the point of view this framework.
The tricolor framework helpfully excludes a lot of things that people may be tempted to call their contemplative practice, even though certain questionable things may still be on the fringe. For example, there are certain drug experiences or things that we could talk about that are on that fringe that may or may not meet the criteria. But it also interestingly broadens the set of what qualifies as a contemplative practice in ways that I find helpful and supportive for the field, moving in a more inclusive direction into the future. I think that without a clear definition of what a contemplative practice is, we default back to the traditional contemplative practices in ways that I find potentially exclusivist for the field over time. So, the tricolor framework broadens the set. And as a practitioner, I get excited about it because it invites more things from my life into the fold to be part of my contemplative practice experience.
JCS: I’m really curious, can you give examples of what that looks like for you?
JQ: Yeah. My writing is a good example. I consider my writing, on a good day and as long as I’m writing about decent things, to be a contemplative practice for me in the sense that it tends to support my presence not only in the moment but subsequently. It puts me in touch with ideas and concepts and other people’s ideas and concepts in ways that make me more awake to the suffering of the world and myself and others. And it helps to clarify my mind in different ways that do generalize across my life and in daily living. I think it’s up to each person ultimately to decide, do they want their whole life to fit within the framework of being contemplative? Do I want every single activity that I do to be supporting greater presence, compassion, and clear seeing? For me, at this point in my contemplative path, that is something I’m invested in. And so, continuing to ask myself through this outcome-based lens has been uniquely supportive in ways that I didn’t find always present in other approaches to contemplative practice.
JCS: That’s really wonderful. But let’s go ahead and move on. What else is emerging that you were really kind of keen about?
JQ: What I’m most excited about in the field has to do with that third aspect of clear seeing, which I’ve found has been under emphasized and under studied within the field of Contemplative Science. I’m very excited to focus more specifically on clear seeing moving forward. For the first part of my career, I focused pretty centrally on mindfulness—that’s what I focused on during my doctoral training. Then I came to Naropa, and I got interested in compassion and compassion training and the potential two for one, as Matthieu Ricard says, of when learning compassion, you train both mindfulness and compassion. I saw compassion training, I think as many did, as an antidote to some of the problems of the modern mindfulness movement, such as how the movement had been stripping away its ethical foundations, and so on.
What I’m interested in now is clear seeing, and so increasingly, I’m moving my lab in the direction of studying that. What does the study of clear seeing look like? Well, I have one study out where we used virtual reality to study this aspect. Virtual reality provides a very compelling, illusory experience, creating a strong illusion that you are somewhere else. So, we used it for that purpose by having people experience a virtual reality in which they were 50 stories above the ground, and they were tasked with walking a wooden plank. In the lab, we actually had a wooden plank on the ground so that they would have the sensations of walking that were congruent with what they were seeing through the virtual reality headset. When they got to the end of the plank, we asked them, it’s up to you, but if you would like to, you can step off the plank and subsequently plummet 50 stories to the ground. Although everyone reported being awake to the fact that they were actually just in our lab, walking a couple inches off the ground and being safely monitored, many people did not step off the plank. Many people did not walk that far along the plank, either. And so, this really compelling illusion offers a helpful paradigm for studying clear seeing in a particular way, which is: can we stay awake to the fact that we’re having an illusory experience as we’re having that illusory experience.
For me, that’s really central to the aspect of clear seeing. I partnered with Andrew Holecek, who’s a teacher of lucid dreaming among other things here in Boulder, and I had the good fortune of working with him to bring in teachers like Pema Chödrön to my lab to try out this task. It was great to see different teachers in different lineages and how their lucidity was very present in those situations, but then also nonetheless, to treat their own mind with gentleness in the way that it was still caught up in the illusion.
Another key component of clear seeing is to recognize that the mind is going to fall into different kinds of illusions, so even if we’re awake to the fact that we’re having an illusory experience, such as during a panic attack, knowing, I’m having a panic attack and I’m not actually losing my mind like my mind is telling me, can we nonetheless still care for the part of our mind that is caught in the illusion. That was one lesson for me that really stood out from bringing in those teachers into the lab.
JCS: Yeah, that’s a really beautiful insight that comes from that.
JQ: Thank you. I think that it speaks to the importance of the overlap of the clear seeing principle with compassion in the tricolor model. We could get very strong headed about trying to overcome illusions and seeing through to the true nature of reality. But if we’re doing that in a way that’s self-aggressive, it may no longer be supporting our contemplative development as fully as it could.
JCS: Thanks so much for all this. Let’s wrap up with some books that you like in Contemplative Studies. What would you recommend for people reading in Contemplative Studies?
JQ: Well, since it’s been published, I’ve been having trouble putting down Thomas Metzinger’s new book, The Elephant and the Blind. This is a book where he interviewed people about their experiences of pure consciousness. These people are often contemplatives and meditators. They report experiences of non-duality and pure awareness of different kinds. Metzinger not only includes the specific case studies of people describing these experiences, but he has a goal from the outset of the book that if we want to understand consciousness, then we should do so in a way that is, in its purest form, stripped of all of the contents of consciousness. To do this, we can look at these experiences where people are reporting pure consciousness and what that’s like. It’s this that may provide some clues that help cognitive scientists and others understand what consciousness really is. I highly recommend it; it’s my number one recommendation right now in terms of books in this space. I really can’t put it down, the writing is very clear, and I love the organization of the chapters into different qualities of the mind. One of the things that Thomas Metzinger concludes through this book is that contemplative practices have something really strongly to do with being honest with ourselves. And when I read that, I found a lot of resonance with what I mean by clear seeing.
Another book that I’ve only now picked up, and I’m excited to read but I haven’t started, is Evan Thompson’s new book with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser. It’s called The Blind Spot, and it’s about the role of subjective experience in science and how we can’t get away it. As far as I understand, we can’t avoid, no matter how hard we try, the fact that first-person experience is bound up in the enterprise of science. I find that a very specific critique that provides a helpful antidote to some of the stricter forms of scientific materialism. A third book, recently published by Norman Farb and Zindel Segal, is Better in Every Sense. I’ve only just started reading this book, but it’s a wonderful contribution. It talks about the importance of cultivating greater sensory awareness for mental health and wellbeing and the contemplative perspectives on that, and so on. It seems to be fairly balanced in terms of those different aspects.
JCS: Those all sound super interesting. Thanks so much. This was really wonderful. Thanks for sitting down and talking with us.
JQ: Thank you.
What is Contemplation? is an ongoing series that interviews leading scholars in Contemplative Studies to address this driving question.