Mental Discipline: The Contemplative Mind

[Explor­ing Life] We have a deep desire to seek a greater pur­pose in life, yet often feel con­fined by the require­ments of our exist­ing lifestyle. A quick glance at the “Self Help” sec­tion in a book­store reveals an ever-expanding array of pub­li­ca­tions designed to help peo­ple embrace a deeper sense of hap­pi­ness, joy, and con­tent­ment in life. The self-help indus­try is also a mar­ket­ing engine for solu­tions to prob­lem which it has cre­ated. With­out a prob­lem, there is no mar­ket to sell solu­tions to and buy­ing a “solu­tion” feels good, at least tem­porar­ily. How­ever, this is not to say that there is no value to be found in these mate­ri­als. It is to say that the sheer quan­tity of mate­r­ial pub­lished on a rel­a­tively small num­ber of themes serves to cre­ate a sense of con­fu­sion and bewil­der­ment. Who or what are we to believe? The solu­tion to this is to focus on iden­ti­fy­ing the crit­i­cal attrib­utes the essen­tial themes, and pay­ing less atten­tion to the super­fi­cial vari­a­tions. The idea of con­tem­pla­tion is one of those essen­tial themes.

Toward An Under­stand­ing Contemplation

The first task is to cre­ate a work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of con­tem­pla­tion that serves to pro­vide a focal point for the explo­ration of the pow­ers of the mind. I have cho­sen the word con­tem­pla­tion since it broad enough to incor­po­rate ideas such as med­i­ta­tion and mind­ful­ness while includ­ing more com­mon capac­i­ties such as con­cen­tra­tion and atten­tion. Con­tem­pla­tion also lends itself to spir­i­tual or reli­gious dimen­sions, since the aim of con­tem­pla­tion is often directed at a uni­ver­sal divine essence com­mon to all life.

In a dic­tio­nary there are gen­er­ally two com­po­nents that col­lab­o­rate to cre­ate a def­i­n­i­tion of con­tem­pla­tion. The first is a qual­ity of mind often described as focused atten­tion, aware­ness, or con­cen­tra­tion. The sec­ond com­po­nent is dura­tion, that is, con­tem­pla­tion is some­thing that occurs over an extended period of time. What the mind is to focus on and for what pur­pose is not usu­ally described. This places the idea of con­tem­pla­tion into close prox­im­ity with con­cen­tra­tion. Con­cen­tra­tion is a skill that is val­ued in edu­ca­tion as a means to remain focused on com­pre­hend­ing what is being taught. The object of con­cen­tra­tion here is to mas­ter the req­ui­site infor­ma­tion and demon­strate the level of mas­tery through tech­niques of eval­u­a­tion. How­ever, con­tem­pla­tion has a much more exten­sive land­scape of meaning.

Mind­ful­ness, for exam­ple, is a form of con­tem­pla­tion that is focused on devel­op­ing greater pow­ers of atten­tion and aware­ness in order to cre­ate a greater sense of still­ness in thought. An impor­tant aspect of qui­et­ing the mind is to escape habit­ual pat­terns of thought that may be the source of self-imposed forms of stress and anx­i­ety. Con­tem­pla­tion in this sense is a heal­ing art that aims to cul­ti­vate the health of body and mind. Psy­chol­o­gists now use con­tem­pla­tive tech­niques to help patients over­come men­tal and emo­tional suf­fer­ing. Ath­letes make reg­u­lar use of con­tem­pla­tion tech­niques, or what is often referred to as visu­al­iza­tion or men­tal rehearsal, to cul­ti­vate a high level of per­for­mance. Neu­ro­sci­en­tists are link­ing the activ­i­ties of the mind to the cre­ation and degen­er­a­tion of neural path­ways in the brain that are the phys­i­o­log­i­cal basis for thought and emotion.

Con­tem­pla­tion may have a divine quest as the pri­mary aim. The ancient con­tem­pla­tive tra­di­tions are prac­tices designed to evolve the mind in order to attain unity with a divine essence. Med­i­ta­tion is closely asso­ci­ated with the prac­tice of Bud­dhism. The object of med­i­ta­tion is often the embrace of a spe­cific qual­ity such as accep­tance, rev­er­ence, com­pas­sion, beauty, or grat­i­tude. The Yoga Sutras out­line a wide range of con­tem­pla­tive tech­niques that are designed to lead an indi­vid­ual to equa­nim­ity in life. Con­tem­pla­tion is a cre­ative art in which we seek to cul­ti­vate qual­i­ties of mind that lead to a trans­for­ma­tion in our pres­ence. In this sense it is a deeply per­sonal prac­tice in which we focus our aware­ness on a desired qual­ity over an extended period of time in order to seek unity with a uni­ver­sal life-force.

The ancient con­tem­pla­tive tra­di­tions embrace the assump­tion that the brain and mind can access what may be described as a uni­ver­sal con­scious­ness that per­me­ates and imbues all life with energy. Var­i­ous names have been used to describe this includ­ing life-force, the Source, the Tao, the Zero Point field, Nir­vana, and God. When the object of con­tem­pla­tion is often focused on the divine, the prac­tice is con­sid­ered to be a spir­i­tual or reli­gious prac­tice. A com­mon thread across all spir­i­tual con­tem­pla­tive tra­di­tions is to pur­sue expe­ri­ence beyond the con­fines of every­day life by dis­ci­plin­ing the mind to receive this uni­ver­sal life-giving con­scious­ness. When unity is attained, the pre­sump­tion is that our being is trans­formed and fun­da­men­tal insight into the nature of life itself is achieved.

The essen­tial qual­i­ties asso­ci­ated with con­tem­pla­tion would include:

1. A Focused Mind: Improv­ing the oper­a­tion of the mind through the dis­ci­plined devel­op­ment of focus, atten­tion, aware­ness, mind­ful­ness, med­i­ta­tion, or concentration;
2. Resilience: Main­tain­ing a focused and dis­ci­plined over extended peri­ods of time and through­out var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions and circumstances;
3. A Divine Quest: Embrac­ing qual­i­ties of life asso­ci­ated with a uni­ver­sal life-force as expressed in uni­ver­sal qual­i­ties such as rev­er­ence, com­pas­sion, beauty, or gratitude;
4. Equa­nim­ity: Pre­serv­ing a deeply rooted sense of bal­ance in our heart and mind that remains con­stant through­out the inevitable vagaries and vicis­si­tudes of life.

From this we can pro­pose a work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of con­tem­pla­tion: “Con­tem­pla­tion is the dis­ci­plined devel­op­ment of body and mind amidst the con­flu­ence of every­day liv­ing in order to embrace a divine essence result­ing in a deeply rooted pres­ence of equa­nim­ity in life.” The idea of a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice is not lim­ited to spe­cific times we set aside to work on spe­cific tech­niques. A con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice is some­thing we bring into our every­day lives as a con­stant and trusted companion.

The Nature of a Con­tem­pla­tive Practice

We some­times asso­ciate the idea of a prac­tice with a spe­cific period of time we set aside to mas­ter spe­cific kinds of tech­niques and meth­ods. The impor­tance of this is self-evident. If we a learn­ing to play an instru­ment, set­ting aside time to prac­tice is an obvi­ous require­ment for suc­cess. In learn­ing to play an instru­ment, we also ben­e­fit from well defined meth­ods that serve to focus how we prac­tice over time. In a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice, how­ever, these kinds of meth­ods are less promi­nent. The rea­son for this is that in a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice the most essen­tial method or tech­nique is our own indi­vid­ual exper­i­men­ta­tion with our mind. While there are tech­niques and processes we can exper­i­ment with, ulti­mately the learn­ing involved in a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice is unavoid­ably self-directed and the con­tent of that learn­ing can only be our own mind with all its mer­cu­r­ial wan­der­ings and expres­sions. In this sense, the stu­dent is inex­orably the teacher as well as the cur­ricu­lum and instruc­tional designer. There can be no other way; there is no one approach that fits all.

The aims of a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice include:

• the alle­vi­a­tion of suffering;
• the cul­ti­va­tion of supe­rior phys­i­cal or ath­letic skills;
• find­ing a deeper sense of pur­pose in life;
• heal­ing men­tal, emo­tional, and phys­i­o­log­i­cal memories;
• acquir­ing the abil­ity to main­tain equa­nim­ity through­out the con­flu­ence of life;
• the devel­op­ment of per­cep­tual clar­ity; or
• a quest for unity the Divine.

A con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice reverses the processes asso­ci­ated with edu­ca­tion. In edu­ca­tion we are immersed in a pre­de­ter­mined scheme of knowl­edge and skills that we are to acquire well enough in order to grad­u­ate. What that knowl­edge or skill may be is pre­dom­i­nantly imposed on the stu­dent and orig­i­nates in the assump­tion that experts are the best source for deter­min­ing what and how stu­dents should learn.

In a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice, the “sys­tem” of knowl­edge and skills we are deal­ing with are already there and our task is to gain enough aware­ness and under­stand­ing of them so that we may cul­ti­vate growth. We may exper­i­ment with rec­om­mended meth­ods and tech­niques for con­tem­pla­tion, how­ever, it is our own indi­vid­ual per­cep­tion of how those tech­niques sup­port or dis­tract us that mat­ters most. In this sense, the “cur­ricu­lum” and “instruc­tional” design of a con­tem­pla­tive prac­tice is always emer­gent and requires a deep sense of pres­ence in each moment in order to become aware of what is actu­ally hap­pen­ing in our thoughts, moods, and other expres­sions of men­tal energy.