1. Contemplative Pedagogy: Principles, Design & Practice
11/29/2018
Contemplative Pedagogy: Principles, Design & Practice
Arthur Zajonc
President, Mind & Life Institute
Emeritus Physics, Amherst College
Summer 2012
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

2. Contemplative Pedagogy: An Overview
11/29/2018
Contemplative Pedagogy: An Overview
Contemporary situation
The structure of a contemplative curriculum
Rationale and design principles
General practices that support learning.
Integration of contemplation into the disciplines.
Enlarging our view of knowing: contemplative inquiry and insight
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

3. Where do you suppose this is?

4. Harvard Business School Meeting 3 of Working Group on Contemplative Dimensions of Leadership and Leadership Education
Jon with Diana Chapman Walsh, President Emerita of Wellesley College
My Center organized a mini-retreat May 2011 Jon Kabat Zinn

5. Meeting 2 at the Sackler Art Museum, Harvard
Daniel Goleman, Metta McGarvey, Jerome Murphy, Saki Santorelli. Back row seated: Otto Scharmer, Grady McGonagill, William Torbert, Deborah Ancona, Rebecca Henderson. Standing, left to right: Ronald Heifetz, Ray Williams, Arthur Zajonc, Janice Marturano, Tamar Miller, Jon Kabat Zinn, Mirabai Bush, Elinor Pierce

6. Google’s Search Inside Yourself
Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Mindfulness-based Emotional Intelligence
Developed at HQ and now offered worldwide.

7. 11/29/2018
The situation today…
More that 158 Contemplative Practice Fellows teaching individual courses and initiating programs. (See Barbara Craig report)
Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, with 800 members.
Conferences:
Amherst, Columbia, UMass, Wellesley, AACU,…
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

8. Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education
Conferences
Summer session
Retreats
Fellowships
E-newsletter
Webinars
Social Networking
Online resources

9. ACMHE Conference: September at Amherst College “Contemplative Approaches in the Diverse Academic Community: Inquiry, Connection, Creativity, and Insight

10. Contemplative Retreat for Educators
October at the Garrison Institute
About 40 academics who seek to deepen their practice in the company of others
Mindfulness, metta, contemplative inquiry, silence…
Mirabai Bush, Paul
Wapner
Day of Mindfulness at Amherst College

11. Rationale for a Contemplative Pedagogy
Supports and develops attention, emotional balance… of benefit to students, faculty, staff.
Can become a mode of inquiry leading to insight.
Cultivation of empathy, altruism and compassion (Stanford’s CCARE research program)
Offers a valuable, complementary, experiential modality of engagement with texts, natural phenomena, the arts, other cultures,…
Early research supports CP (More needed!)

12. 11/29/2018
Research
Research talk by Willoughby Britton on “Schools, clinics and monasteries: promises and perils of contemplative training”
Bibliography handout on research.
One revealing example…
HERI Longitudinal study went back to 14,000 students at 136 colleges and universities. First studied in fall of 2004 and then again three years later.
Quote from study press release Dec 07.
While attendance at religious services declines, college students nationwide show significant
growth in a wide spectrum of spiritual and ethical considerations during their first three years of
college, according to a UCLA study, the first longitudinal research project of its kind.
Compared to when they were entering freshmen, college juniors are more likely to be engaged in
a spiritual quest, are more caring, and show higher levels of equanimity and an ecumenical
worldview. While 41.2 percent of freshmen in 2004 reported they considered developing a
meaningful philosophy of life “very important” or “essential,” just three years later in 2007 a
55.4 percent majority of those same students agreed. Additionally, “attaining inner harmony”
was reported as “very important” or “essential” by 48.7 percent when they were freshmen in
2004, and jumped to 62.6 percent by 2007.
“Many students are emerging from the collegiate experience with a desire to find spiritual
meaning and perspective in their everyday lives,” said UCLA Emeritus Professor Alexander W.
Astin, Co-Principal Investigator for the project. “The data suggest that college is influencing
students in positive ways that will better prepare them for leadership roles in our global society.”
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

13. Pascual-Leone (1996) Harvard
Average cortical output maps for the finger flexors of the trained hand in subjects undergoing daily physical versus mental practice of the 5-finger exercise. Note the similarity in output maps with either form of practice.

14. Uses of Contemplation in Higher Education
General Practices in Support of Student Learning
Cultivation of Equanimity and Attention
Cultivate Emotional Balance and Empathic Connection
Sustaining Complexity and Contradiction
Contemplative Practices and the Disciplines
Each discipline is developing its own particular set of practices that are of special value. (See CMind reports on Arts and Philosophy/Psychology/Religion mtgs.)

15. Course Design Principles
Context: who are you teaching, what is the course content?
Intention: what are the pedagogical aims?
Practice: give rationale for selection, clear instruction, opportunity for questions, gently lead.
Process the practice:
Journaling
Talk in pairs
Class conversation

16. Beholding Jodie Ziegler, Holy Cross Joel Upton, Amherst
11/29/2018
Beholding
Jodie Ziegler, Holy Cross
Joel Upton, Amherst
Amy Cheng, SUNY New Paltz
Behonding, Joanna asks her students to look at two paintings from the Renaissance and an abstract modern work. Week after week, looking at the same painting, she asks them to tell her what they see; they aren’t allowed to read critiques, listen to the docents, or use any other secondary source. Each week, they report something new. She noted that her students think they’ll see everything after a short time, but thirteen weeks later they are still discovering new elements, still asking questions. These exercises teach her students about the process of seeing
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

17. Deep Listening “Come home to your heart and listen deeply for others who look for you there.” MR O’Reilly
U Houston, Psychology, Contemplative Practice in Psychotherapy, Linda Bell, listening from viewpoint of therapist and client.
U St Thomas, English, Mary Rose O’Reilly, Contemplative Spirituality of Environmental Writing. Listening with deep openhearted attention instead of looking for flaw in the argument.

18. Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness: Economics, Amherst College
“The course will also include opportunities for students to examine their own consumption decisions and assumptions about the attainment of happiness.” i.e. contemplative exercises.
Daniel Barbezat

19. Contemplative Reading Lectio Divina
11/29/2018
Contemplative Reading Lectio Divina
Colgate, Religion, Georgia Frank: first and second readings, 5 days apart, with writing
Georgetown, Philosophy, Dante, Francis Ambrosio. Contemplative reading and sharing of short essays on hunger and food
Gertrude Hughes, Wesleyan, Poetry and contemplation
Brian stock
Green group
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

20. Contemplative Writing
11/29/2018
Contemplative Writing
UNC, English, Reading, Re-Envisioning, and Writing Women's Lives. (Used freewriting, silence). Jane Danielowitz
Gurleen Grewal, U of So Florida, Transformations in Consciousness (Women’s Studies)
Mary Rose O’Reilly
Writing through the tears…
Grewal developed her course “Transformations in Consciousness.” The course begins with a deconstruction of the very notion, deeply embedded in Western culture, of ourselves as separate, egoic identities. meditation and freewriting give them the chance to deconstruct these notions of self from the inside out. Through meditation and freewriting, they learn how to observe the ways in which their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations participate in this division between self and other, and they learn how to begin to heal those divisions by developing a more expansive sense of self, one in which students find themselves, in Grewal’s words, “answerable to their identities,” but not “limited to them.”
In a class on contemplation and environmental writing at the University of St. Thomas, a student in the class committed suicide during the semester, and the others needed to grieve. The professor, Fellow Mary Rose O’Reilly, was grateful that it had happened in her contemplative class, which created space for what was needed. “As I write this, tears again. We cried all the time in class, made a rule, Cry and keep talking. Cry and keep writing. We called it crying practice. And I learned that the single most important thing a contemplatively centered classroom teaches the teacher is not a pedagogical recipe but pedagogical flexibility.”
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

21. The contemplative arts
Ed Sarath
Yin Mei

22. Eros and Insight – Amherst College
11/29/2018
Eros and Insight – Amherst College
28 First-year students
Taught with art historian (Joel Upton)
Readings, contemplative exercises, journaling and papers.
For a journalist’s view of the course,
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

23. 11/29/2018
Silence
Breaking the silence of an ancient pond a frog jumped into the water a deep resonance.
The importance of becoming awake. We use Thoreau, Simone Weil..
Thoreau wrote of the morning, “Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, instead of factory bells ….The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”[i]
[i] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p. ??
First exercise: Characterize the experience of being silent.
…only one in a hundred millions [is awake] to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. Thoreau
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

24. Attention Single-pointed concentration.
11/29/2018
Attention
Single-pointed concentration.
Breath
Natural object [paper clip]
Thought
Images
Purpose is to break reactive, associative thinking, and to bring clarity, freedom, sustained focus to observation and thought.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

25. Empathy & the “Afterimage”
11/29/2018
Empathy & the “Afterimage”
Four-part bell sound exercise
Focused Attention:
Sound the bell
Resounding the bell sound in memory
Open Attention:
Release -- “letting go”
“Letting come” – The afterimage or “nimita” (ref. Buddhaghosha, Path of Purity, 10 kasinas)
Applicable to other sense experiences
Every outside has an inside.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

26. Cognitive Breathing
Focused Attention
Open Attention

27. Open attention “The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment,
11/29/2018
Open attention
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment,
Not seeking, not expecting
She is present, and can welcome all things.”
Tao Te Ching 15
Reversal of the will
In his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot addresses his soul, calling it to heel, requiring that it wait without hope or desire.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter
where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace
itself which makes this void.[i]
Simone Weil
[i] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Nebraska: Bison Books, 1997) Reprint ed., Transl. by Arthur Wills, p. ??.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

28. Discovering Relationships
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Discovering Relationships
Perceptive knowing
Perceiving relationships directly. In contrast to logical deduction or inductive inference. Emerson: “never did any science originate, but by a poetic perception.” and “We see what we animate, we animate what we see.” Ontological standing of relationships as real experiences (William James and modern science)
Value scale
Musical intervals
Geometric relationships
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

29. Sustaining Contradictions
11/29/2018
Sustaining Contradictions
Physics: wave-particle duality
Math: the “point at infinity”
Arts: in artistic composition
Social sciences: conflict and question of “identity.”
Cusa’s exercise and “the coincidence of opposites.”
Schumacher quote…through all our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled… How can one reconcile the demands of freedom the discipline in education? Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended – the power of love… Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

30. Contemplative Inquiry
Logical inference and induction alone are insufficient for discovery & creation
One enters into the other empathetically, be it a poem, nature, another person, or an idea.
Instead of objectification, one skillfully subjectifies the world. Barbara McClintock
Creative insight requires intimate engagement.
Contemplative engagement becomes contemplative inquiry which leads to insight or contemplative knowing.

31. The practice of contemplative inquiry
11/29/2018
The practice of contemplative inquiry
Living the concepts
Key concepts in a field are made real by living them contemplatively. Examples.
Living the questions
Outer phenomenology
Inner phenomenology
Word and image
Posing the question
Rilke:
...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

32. Contemplative Inquiry
Outer Phenomenology
Behavior, speech, posture…
Inner Phenomenology
Inner experience, feelings, mood,…
Words: a poetic line
E.g. “Yearning for meaning, a shadow arises.”
Simple Image

33. Parker Palmer: The Violence of our Knowledge
“Every way of knowing is a way of living, every epistemology becomes an ethic.”
“This mythology of objectivism is more about control over the world, or over each other, more a mythology of power than a real epistemology that reflects how real knowing proceeds.”
“We are driven to unethical acts by an epistemology that has fundamentally deformed our relation to each other and our relation to the world.“

34. 11/29/2018
From Contemplative Practice to Contemplative Inquiry: an Epistemology of Love
Respect
Delicate
Intimate
Participatory
Vulnerability
Transformation
Bildung – Education as formation of faculties/”organs”
Insight – Direct perception
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

35. An Complementary Epistemology
11/29/2018
An Complementary Epistemology
“There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age.”
“Every object well-contemplated opens a new organ in us.”
Goethe
The importance of developing contemplative practice into a cogent way of knowing and as transformative education.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

36. Ancient Greek Education
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Ancient Greek Education
Ancient integrative education: Greek philosophy was “a course of training which would make them simultaneously contemplatives and men of actions – since knowledge and virtue imply each other.” Pierre Hadot in What is Ancient Philosophy.
Ancient transformative education: Simplicius asked, “What place shall the philosopher occupy in the city? That of a sculptor of men.”
Asian tradition is very extensive, but also the west.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

37. Erwin Schrödinger: Mind and Matter
At every step, on every day of our life, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time – it is a true continued ‘self-conquering’ (Selbstüberwindung).

38. Extending Knowing Valid inference, dianoia, Verstand, ratiocination, …
11/29/2018
Extending Knowing
Valid inference, dianoia, Verstand, ratiocination, …
Well-developed
Direct perception, episteme, Vernunft, insight, imagination
Underdeveloped
Howard Gardner speaks of multiple intelligences. We have emphasized one to the exclusion of all others, what the Greeks called dianoia, what the Buddhists call valid inference, what I call ratiocination. But the ancient traditions East and West also recognized a second and, to their mind, more fundamental faculty for knowing called episteme or direct perception. Dianoia and episteme have different connotations in Platonic philosophy. Likewise for valid inference and direct perception in Buddhist philosophy, or Verstand and Vernunft in Kant.
Ratiocination is well-schooled. How do we get more of the other?
- Need to know the appropriate place and limitations of rational analysis and model building.
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

39. Concentric Capacities
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Concentric Capacities
Mont Sainte-Victoire (1900)
“Get to the heart of what is before you… In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric through looking and working.” Cézanne in a letter to Emile Bernard
Bildung.
Becoming concentric.
Rilke trying to see a Cezanne painting, “Ah, now I have the eye and can see it.”
Arthur Zajonc, Contemplative Pedagogy 2005

40. “Every object, well-contemplated, opens a new organ in us.” Goethe
Attention
Formation
“Every object, well-contemplated, opens a new organ in us.” Goethe
Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees. Emerson

41. Cognitive Breathing & the Lemniscate of Attention
Focused Attention
Open Awareness
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment,
Not seeking, not expecting
She is present, and can welcome all things.” Tao Te Ching

42. Connections to the Western Tradition
Pierre Hadot:
What is Ancient Philosophy?
Philosophy as a Way of Life.
Brian Stock:
“The Contemplative Life and the Teaching of the Humanities,” on Cmind academic website.
Book: After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text
Vimeo: "Foundations of European Contemplative Traditions in Humanities and Medicine“ at Brown

43. The True Fruits of Education
“Thus the fruit of education, whether in the university or in the monastery was the activation of that innermost center, that apex or spark which is a freedom beyond freedom, an identity beyond essence, a self beyond all ego, a being beyond the created realm, and a consciousness that transcends all division, all separation.” From Thomas Merton’s essay “Learning to Live”