Conducted by Adam Liddle, Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: Let’s dive right in. For you, what is contemplation?

SK: I’m embarrassed to admit that until fairly recently I had kind of shied away from the word “contemplation.” Which may not be my fault entirely! If you look at the history of the usage of the word, there’s this curious dip in “contemplation.” In the mid- to late 19th century, it falls out of fashion a little bit. And then recently it resurfaces. On the one hand, it has this long, really involved history, going all the way back to the beginnings of Greek thought and philosophy. But then it can also be used to pick up on increasingly new trends in scholarship and institutional forms. Thus, it’s got this backward-looking trajectory and focused, forward-looking possibilities, which make it very exciting, and very hard for me to get a grip on. 

Let me tell you how I use the word or what I hear when I hear the word used. I hear the word three-dimensionally, every single dimension of which makes it preferable to “mysticism,” “trance,” or any of the other words that we’ve been using in Religious Studies—or at least as we were using these words when I was first picking them up. To contemplate, in some sense, is to experience or to see in a particular way along three dimensions: affordance, experientialization, and possibility.

So, first, the ways in which experiences are at issue in contemplation seem to me to involve the experiential affordances of skill-based practices. Second, we may consider such experiences in terms of mechanisms of generating perceptual presence, the experientialization of cognitive content—what is the link, to put it with premodern Indian epistemologists, between hallucination, imagination, memory, habituation, repetition, and meditation? 

It’s got this backward-looking trajectory and focused, forward-looking possibilities, which make it very exciting, and very hard for me to get a grip on. 

The third dimension involved in my thinking of contemplation is possibility. I think of contemplation as the pursuit and exploration of modes of experience available to us. Beyond the kind of sensory motor coupling of organism and world that we have in sensation, what other modes of experience are open to us? These are maybe regions, or modalities of experience, that we can bring into being that make it possible for us to have more than is available through just sensation. The history of Buddhism presents the history of what is at stake in meditation in this way: one, that there are possibilities for experience beyond the sensory motor coupling of beings, and two, the nature and existence of these have an impact for our evaluation of nature and the meaning of the sensory states we have available to us. That’s the big picture: the intentional exploration of possibility and value with transformative, experiential stakes.

JCS: Beautiful, beautiful answer. I love the different modes and registers of thinking about contemplation and how they are tied to historical traditions. I’m curious what the relationship between these modes or registers of contemplation are. Are they tiered in a certain way? Are they connected, or is it just different traditions using different kinds of contemplation?

SK: This involves a long, long conversation. But here’s an example of how they could be linked up. We can think of these states, or experiential possibilities, only being available to us after we have put in certain kinds of work. (Others, favoring such considerations as grace or unplanned visionary experiences, may disagree.) We can talk about the conditions under which such experiences are available to us at all and disagree about that; we can go on to consider not only the availability of experiences to us but also how they are to be rightly experienced, with reference to the kinds of skill-based criteria necessary to maintain these experiences. To bring about an experience in the right way, first of all, may require various sorts of skills, as might maintaining the experience, all of which can be assessed in various sorts of ways. And then think of the philosophical conversations to come about the salience and meaning of experiences so had. 

Let’s say that certain kinds of changes in human practice or institutions make available new sorts of experiences. What does that mean for the epistemic weight of the experience? Do we now have access to something more true, more real than we had access before, or do we just have access to more? Does it mean that we ourselves are changing with changes in techniques and descriptions of experiences? (I think so.) Does change always mean “for the better”? (No.) Articulating contemplation using the three dimensions allows me to keep a grip on the contested, normative nature of every contemplative project, even internal to a tradition. Or, better yet, a tradition (like Buddhism) is partly constituted as a history of competing norms in connection with affordances, experientialization, and spaces of possibility.   

But here’s a big-picture view of why the three dimensions matter to me. There’s a way in which “contemplation,” from a disciplinary perspective, is now considered an avant-garde subject. Yet it’s almost the oldest subject in philosophy. Thinking, using the tools of argument and analysis, claim and counterclaim, statement and entailment, is one of the oldest contemplative techniques. But what the Greeks think is that thought pursued in certain ways allows the soul to uncouple from the body. For the early Buddhists, modes of attentive practice when fed by ethical training allow one to uncouple our attention from sensory stimulus to inhabit the world differently.

To contemplate, in some sense, is to experience or to see in a particular way along three dimensions: affordance, experientialization, and possibility.

Consider the big picture: the normatively directed transformation of the beings we are, to adapt and generalize Buddhaghosa’s definition of exercises of concentrated attention. Consider that ancient practitioners through philosophical exercises from argumentation to attentional training—the “practice of truth,” to adapt Clement of Alexandria—endeavored to become like or to live as the gods (as the ancient Greeks and ancient Indians sometimes put it), or to become invisible to death (as an ancient Indian Buddhist verse has it). These sorts of inflated, mythical, poetic claims find their resonance in truth, in the phenomenological fact that we have modes of experience that exceed what custom or the narrowest specification of our natures seems to suggest, that we can bring these about, and disagree most vehemently about all of it, with historical as well as experiential consequences. (I mean thereby no ontological difference, merely one of scale.)

JCS: That’s a really rich definition there, really poignant. I’d love to just dive more in, then, to your particular work, because you have this great vantage on what contemplation can look like and how it is built across traditions here and in connection with philosophical traditions as well. Where are you seeing this in your own work?

SK: Well, that’s really kind. In my work I am now interested in the minds we not only have but also the minds we make. Another way to put this: by “minds” I mean something more general than the modes of sentience we currently allow ourselves to enact and inhabit. And the mechanisms for change are more general than meditation or training or attention exercises. So, one might use imaginative literature, or performance, or arguments to sculpt attention or to change the architecture of mind. The Buddhist tradition, which I study, involves such a rich history of attention, of different norms and techniques, so much so, in fact, that the richness borders on an incoherence. Along with the history of Indian philosophy more broadly, with which it was so long in conversation, it makes for an unparalleled contemplative archive. 

My interest is not only with change in ways of being minded but also with the nature of that change, and the direction of change. What kinds of minds, what kind of way of being in the world, are we bringing into being through our exercises, whether counting our breaths, observing the dynamics of thought, counteracting emotions through argument, or analyzing the units of experience in certain deliberate ways? How does one evaluate not only the aptness of techniques but also the goodness, or desirability, of the results? 

I am now interested in the minds we not only have but also the minds we make.

I’m also finding what’s at stake in contemplative exercises more widely. What is happening when one reads a book, when we are possessed by a poem? What kinds of experiences are being made available to us when we dream, when we remember our dreams, when we remember waking up in a dream? (These are, in a way, ordinary experiences: my daughter just reported this happening.) How different are these, really: being taught by a migraine to see smaller scales of visual events; observing the breath at the tip of one’s nose? Or moving from one mood into another, or moving from fatigue to feeling energetic? Exploring the parallels in transitions between global states of consciousness of various kinds is another part of the project. Imagine taking to heart the idea that what’s happening to you when you’re entering a work of art is similar to what happens when you dream. And then maybe imagine a work of art that does that to you, but also works on you in that state to help you see things one could not otherwise. I think the history of Indian Buddhist philosophy, and the history of literature in Sanskrit, involves just such experiments.

JCS: We’re also really curious what you are excited about in the future of this field. Contemplation has this long past to it, and we’ve been kind of digging through that, but also it has this great potential and possibility.

SK: I don’t think of myself as a member of any longue-durée Contemplative Studies project or as part of a discipline by that name. I think of myself as a friend. I’m listening, and I’d like to learn from the community. But here are the ways in which I’m excited about the future. For me, my overarching commitment is this: I don’t think that any one discipline or current area of human study is, as currently constituted, capable of taking the full measure of our human experience in the past. Nor yet do they prepare us for what is to come. The ways in which we’ve begun to diagnose blind spots in our histories of human learning and experience are real, but they’re not going to be solved from within any one discipline. What I find very exciting about Contemplative Studies is that it’s an intrinsically interdisciplinary project, not just within the humanities, but going beyond to facilitate conversations in a wild, unruly, open-frontiers kind of way, which I find really exciting. 

I think that we need more conversation, more wide-ranging experimental collaborations. And I think what excites me about Contemplative Studies is that it is an adventure in which people can be brought together. You can tell me, or history will tell us, whether this is, in fact, happening, or if we’re somehow re-perpetuating silos. But I think there’s a potential for bringing together things in very surprising ways. There is no way of predicting the value of the serendipitous, the surprises in conversations with real people, in real time, on topics one cannot foresee holding one’s attention. One never knows: given the right circumstances, one may always start to see things in an entirely different way, right? 

I think that we need more conversation, more wide-ranging experimental collaborations. And I think what excites me about Contemplative Studies is that it is an adventure in which people can be brought together.

JCS: Yeah, that’s a really inspiring call to action for the field. I love it! You say you are not within the field of Contemplative Studies necessarily, though very engaged and interested in it. What are some of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies at large? This is kind of an emerging field, and so I think a lot of books can be considered part of Contemplative Studies that are not tagged as such.

SK: Well, this is the hardest question for me to answer because it goes to your very generous invitation to think of works that are not tagged as Contemplative Studies. I’ll tell you about the work I’ve been thinking about all along, and which students consistently tell me that they love. It’s David Shulman’s More than Real, an attempt to write a history of imagination and truth, in South Asia, with particular attention to South India. It tells a sweeping tale, from the Vedic period all the way to the early modern, a story of a way of looking at the world on which the affordances of the imagination put us in touch with something, to use Shulman’s magisterial phrase, more-than-real. In South Asia we find evidence of a tension. On the one hand, there is a concern with attuning ourselves to what there is. But then there’s another way of thinking about what it means to be a being, one based not on what we are, but what we may aspire to be, guided by what can we bring into being.

Such a story can also help us see our own world better. If one allows oneself to think of contemplation as broadly as we have, then everything we do as humans touches on it. There’s a way in which our ability to engage in any task, mental or physical, already involves the basics of contemplative skills; a truth long recognized in many contemplative traditions. Washing dishes, playing a game, losing oneself in a work of fiction, catching oneself letting one’s mind wander. There is a sense in which I am now interested not so much in works on contemplation as I am in circumstances, environments, works of art and fiction, structures, really, which enact or induce varieties of contemplative experience in us. (To take examples at random: consider Big Sur, or Scavenger’s Reign.) I’ve spent a lot of time with traditions that take attention sculpting to be a thing requiring mental actions. But it is also happening outside, or perhaps I should say, between us, all the time.

JCS: I love the ways that aesthetic works evoke contemplative practice and experience and are actively reflective about that process.

SK: It’s not just about the content the scholar may pick up on in their work; it’s also about the kind of contemplative experiences we are fostering in our writing. That duality is important to me. I think the only thing I’ll add is to say that we have to create institutional resources for scholars to feel safe and have the opportunity to experiment, because financial security and livelihoods are tied up to disciplinarity and certain modes of writing come with practical benefits, but also experiential costs, and vice versa. Even as we worry about truth (and traditional epistemic goods), we should ask about the ecologies we create and the varieties of cognitive experience we sustain. 

JCS: And it’s something that Contemplative Studies can help do, right? The way that contemplation can add to academia at large. This is a great conversation, thanks so much for joining me.