The beyond within

Full-contact living is a contemplative, first-personal attitude that is centred around practice—the repeated return to what matters.

You could call it introspective, a way of “going within”, but I hope to show that contemplation is something much bigger than this, a profound understanding of reality that comes about by turning towards the limited self perspective, and seeing its edges feather out into something more mysterious, yet directly knowable.

In this sense, contemplation is just another way of attuning to reality. Not to find the propositional truths we often attribute to the external world, but to acclimate to the murkier, more ambiguous truths of our interiority.

We cultivate intimacy and authenticity not to strengthen personal will or achieve more. We come closer and closer until the convenient fictions we weave through language start to disintegrate.

Full Contact Living extends this further by proposing that one of the most powerful responses to a shallow culture is to recognise a radical depth in yourself: to drill down to a sacred understanding, to cast personal anchors down to the Good, the True and the Beautiful in your own experience, and face outwards from this place.