JCS: What is contemplation?
MS: Before responding to that, I’d like to give a little context as editor in chief of the journal about why we’re doing this series.
One reason is to push against the idea that contemplation is something singular or monolithic. We can hear the word “contemplation” as a noun and think that it’s a thing. To counteract this, we thought to invite multiple voices into a chorus that unveils and discloses contemplation from myriad perspectives—different cultural perspectives, different disciplinary perspectives. That’s really important to understand: it’s not singular.
Many of the persons whom we’ve invited into the conversation throughout the year have been scholars with a humanistic core, though their disciplinary expertise is diverse. And they have some grounding in contemplation as a kind of human reference point—a point that has been transferred and transmitted across generations.
So, I hope as a journal we can invite a kind of conversation, an elicitation if you will, about contemplation. This conversation takes contemplation to be a fundamental human capacity. It’s not only something that we do; it’s something that we have within us, a capacity that we can activate.
We thought to invite multiple voices into a chorus that unveils and discloses contemplation from myriad perspectives—different cultural perspectives, different disciplinary perspectives. That’s really important to understand: it’s not singular.
I think contemplation may, in fact, be a necessary capacity for humans to be whole. It encompasses and can actualize a need to be whole. Contemplation is the intentional gestures and artful practices that have been devised over thousands of years—grounded in the contemplative human heritage—from across the globe, designed to meet this need. And, again, the experiences of contemplation are not singular. There’s not one single contemplative experience; it’s always plural.
When I think about what contemplation is, I think about it being twofold: on the one hand, techniques and practices, and on the other, experiences. Many kinds of techniques and technologies have been devised by humans to actualize a contemplative life. And there are multiple experiences that can emerge from contemplative practices.
By practices, I mean intentional techniques devised to cultivate contemplative life skills. Such practices cultivate persons in worlds in which they are embedded—social, cultural, ecological, and otherwise—through intentional procuring of objects to sustain imaginal, attentional, affective, somatic dimensions of the person. Persons are however entangled in social collectives and ecologies that transform symbiotically with others.
Experiences emerge from the performance of these practices; however, contemplative experiences can also emerge through setting the right conditions for emergence. This involves conducive environmental and social conditions in addition to the right mindsets and orientations. This approach of foregrounding experiences prioritizes a kind of dynamic unfolding of emergence, rather than an intentional technique that you apply. This is less effortful, more open and spontaneous. Such curation of conditions works for the contemplative naive as well as more adept practitioners.
A person who becomes immersed within a contemplative life considers practices and experiences in unison, and designs their life around how practices and experiences oscillate or loop into each other. A practitioner considers how to intentionally cultivate the self, mind, body, relationships, world-seeing, while at the same time considering how to curate settings conducive to new kinds of experiences, to challenge oneself, to elicit wonder. With such experiences, the gesture is then to loop back into how to cultivate these experiences intentionally. And so it goes in a spiral.
JCS: Thank you. How is contemplation relevant to your current research?
MS: Here at the University of Virginia, we have the Contemplative Sciences Center where we have been given the opportunity to stand up a new lab that investigates contemplation as a basic human act. We’re interested in understanding how contemplation fundamentally works—particularly with different populations and under different conditions. What are the underlying operable principles, mechanisms, processes? How does the suite of diverse contemplative practices transform and enhance lives? What are the kinds of experiences that emerge?
When I think about what contemplation is, I think about it being twofold: on the one hand, techniques and practices, and on the other, experiences.
The lab is called CIRCL, Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab. “Co-lab” here means a collaboratory. The lab brings together expertise from multiple disciplines to experiment with different practices, curate experiences, and incubate methods for exploring contemplation. We want specialists from the humanities, social sciences, cognitive sciences, arts, and technology to think together through different lenses to understand contemplation more deeply, to transform persons and communities. The idea is that studying contemplation demands multiple perspectives, given that it’s such a complex human performance. It’s a kind of kaleidoscopic project.
We think about contemplative research through three overlapping domains. First, the mind, which is a catchphrase for subjectivity, lived experience, consciousness, cognition, perception—what we might call the inner life. The second overlapping domain is the body. The body means the human organism, which includes the brain, but refers to the whole organism: the heart, lungs, senses through which the body knows itself and situates itself in a world. And the third overlapping domain is worlds. These are social worlds, ecological worlds, cultural worlds, political worlds, and many other worlds. Even on a mountain in a cave at 20,000 feet in the mountains of the Himalayas, we live in worlds. We are always embedded in worlds.
So, we study minds, bodies, and worlds. And we think about these three overlapping domains as an inextricable whole with contemplation at its intersections. These correspond with different disciplines and methods.
For instance, we have one study that we’re standing up in the CIRCL that studies an overlooked dynamic in contemplative research, which is the effect of contexts on practitioners. In the study, we’re teaching participants the same contemplative practice across natural, semi-urban, simulated, and artificially controlled environments. We’re interested in how the practices affect them in particular environments. Is it different to practice next to a lake rather than on a hilltop with an unobstructed sky? Is it different to practice in the forest or garden rather than in a room without windows? Is it different to practice in a room that simulates the sounds of nature as opposed to being in a garden? This research design is inspired by a 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist meditation manual that we are studying experimentally.
The other main track that’s currently in the lab is immersive technologies. This goes back to what I mentioned earlier about curating experiences. We’re very interested in how technologies—immersive and transformative technologies—can elicit contemplative experiences, particularly among young adults and people new to contemplative practices.
We have a sound and light immersion room here in the Contemplative Commons at the University of Virginia where the lab is housed. It’s called the Conservatory, a room with 3D high-definition immersive sonic and full spectrum luminous technologies.
We study minds, bodies, and worlds. And we think about these three overlapping domains as an inextricable whole with contemplation at its intersections.
We’re also working with virtual reality technologies. We’re looking at how virtual simulations can serve as a kind of training wheels for new practitioners. Our studies investigate if such simulations can help elicit experiences—what we might call “openings”—that give people a felt sense of experiences they can have if they intentionally practice.
This VR research extends into a partnership with the Paller Sleep Lab at Northwestern University where we are studying dream yoga. We look at expert dreamers who have been trained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of dream yoga, which is a tradition of lucid dreaming in which dreamers perform discrete tasks in the dream world while lucid.
These are some of the driving questions that animate our work at the CIRCL lab. They require a collaborative approach. They require bringing many disciplines to the table to look at important questions together.
JCS: What excites you about future directions in the study of contemplation?
MS: Certainly there were early studies in the ’60s and ’70s, and a handful of studies in the ’80s and ’90s, but the field of contemplative research really took off at the turn of the millennium.
Over the past 25 years, I’d say there have been about three discrete phases. The first phase was a kind of excitement around the neuroscience of meditation. That happened in the early 2000s—particularly around the finding of neuroplasticity among advanced meditators. That, coupled with clinical interventions that incorporated mindfulness, really became the first wave of contemplative research. The first wave gave new credibility to the study of meditation and contemplative practices writ large.
The second wave extended contemplative practices further into the clinical realm, looking at stress, anxiety, sleep, insomnia, depression, and so forth. It also extended mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy into education, both in K–12 and higher education. That happened over the last, let’s say, 15 years or so. It was an extension of contemplative practices into secular domains of society, particularly the clinical and educational.
Now I think we are in a third wave, where we have a significant literature in the sciences, we have a significant literature in education, and we have a significant clinical literature. As a field, we are now recognizing a need to take seriously some of the lessons learned over the past 25 years. I think those lessons have been threefold.
One, we have discovered that interdisciplinarity matters. To understand contemplative practices, we need studies that involve humanists, scientists, and practitioners. The more disciplinary expertise we can bring to any given research project, the more multifaceted an understanding we will have. The complexity of the human performance of contemplation requires that.
The second lesson is that to access practitioners and practitioner communities, we need greater extension. As researchers, we need to do more fieldwork; we need to mobilize what we’re doing. We need to go into the field and work with practitioners in Africa, Asia, Latin America. We need to act as ethnographers and with ethnographers to do the kind of fieldwork that is going to look at adept practitioners embedded in different cultural settings. There’s fascinating work happening in Psychological Anthropology doing this work around the mind, though not necessarily around contemplative practices. I think that is exactly the kind of research that we as contemplative, interdisciplinary research teams can model. That’s the next phase: the future of contemplative research is fieldwork. Interdisciplinary, collaborative fieldwork. From the first part of my career, where I worked in Asia for several decades building teams and networks across the Tibetan plateau, I learned how intensive that work is. It requires a broad infrastructure that needs to be set up very intentionally. For the field to advance, I think that’s what we need.
The third lesson is that we need to take the first-person experience seriously. Particularly since Francisco Varela—who started, along with the Dalai Lama, the Mind & Life Institute—there has been discussion around neurophenomenology and its methods. The neuro part we are learning about through neuroscience, and yet the phenomenological part has taken a while to figure out. At the beginning, there weren’t the methods required to take first-person experience seriously. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty—these great European phenomenologists from the last century—didn’t give us a method. They explicated a philosophy about the primacy of experience, but without a methodology—without a kind of discrete, technical, rigorous approach to eliciting descriptive experiences—we didn’t have the means to explore the first-person perspective. Over the last 20 plus years, several methodologies have emerged and are continually being refined. Now we have more discrete phenomenological methods.
That’s something we’re deeply invested in at the CIRCL lab. It’s also something I think that the field, more generally, is starting to appreciate. It’s imperative to take first-person experience seriously, and there are discrete methodologies to do that. These methods—experiential sampling and microphenomenology among them—enhance and influence the way we do phenomenological work.
So, I think those are the three: interdisciplinarity, fieldwork, and first-person inquiry.
We have discovered that interdisciplinarity matters. To understand contemplative practices, we need studies that involve humanists, scientists, and practitioners.
JCS: Great. Well, our last question today is: What are your favorite books in Contemplative Studies?
MS: I think that as a field of Contemplative Studies, we don’t self-identify as having a singular literary corpus. Instead, we borrow from multiple disciplines. My own background is in Religious Studies and Buddhist Studies, more specifically. We can learn a lot from historical contemplative traditions and books by scholars of Religious Studies on contemplative and meditative traditions.
Three classic works that I think are foundational to thinking in Contemplative Studies are The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1842–1910), Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault by Pierre Hadot (1922–2010). These books laid the groundwork for much of the methodological and philosophical thinking within the field.
More recent influential books include The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch; and Evan Thompson’s Waking, Dreaming, Being. The Embodied Mind is a classic, and I think in some ways stands the test of time.
Recent scholarship on Buddhist meditation that is top of mind includes Chan before Chan and The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation by Eric Greene on early meditation texts in China, Esoteric Theravada by Kate Crosby that unveils a little-known meditative tradition in Southeast Asia, and Mind Seeing Mind by Roger Jackson that details the history of Mahāmudrā meditation within one tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.
Books on my desk to read are The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger on first-person reports of pure experience in meditation, and The Sound of Vultures’ Wings, which is about the multivalent contemplative practice of chöd in Tibet.
JCS: Thanks so much!
MS: Thank you.