We’ve forgotten how to contemplate

Last night, I was listening to Adyashanti’s Process of Self talk on the Waking Up app.

He says that our culture doesn’t really understand contemplation anymore: what it means to sit and contemplate something.

Our cultural view of contemplation is thinking hard on something until the right belief pops out. We hear “know thyself” and immediately latch on to our beliefs, our past and our narratives.

But that’s just ruminating, not contemplating. We think everything has a solution and that the solution takes the form of a propositional belief: facts, rules, theories and beliefs.

But if mere beliefs were the answer, then we’d be swimming in wisdom already. AI would be eliminating swathes of suffering by delivering curated answers to all of our problems.

So what are we missing?

As John Vervaeke points out, propositional knowing is only one aspect of how we know. There is also the procedural knowing in which we understand how to do something, the perspectival knowing which allows us to see the world from many viewpoints and the participatory knowing which is closer to being than seeing.

Contemplation embraces all modes of knowing. The answer granted by contemplation is an insight and intimacy with unfiltered reality.

It includes thought, but also feeling, interoception, intuition, devotion and wonder. It’s a capacity to be quiet and patient, a way of becoming transparent to yourself without attacking what you don’t like the look of. It’s the ability to see cause and effect in real time. To see how “within” and “without” are constantly morphing, without ground or edge.

When we value a fraction of our knowing, we have a limited appreciation of who we are. This, in turn, means we have little understanding of how perception (and people) can transform. We think change means a change in belief, and cling harder and harder to those beliefs as a sole source of identity. This flattens human beings, who are known—and come to be known—through a vastly more mysterious process.

This lack of a clear answer is one reason that contemplation has no place in this culture. Another is that it requires a kind of unknowing. As Adyashanti points out, to know yourself fully, you have to go through a moment of not knowing yourself, equally fully.

Not many people are interested in not knowing.

But contemplation is never far away. It’s only forgotten, and so can be rekindled as a means of waking us up to the wonder of this world, directly and without dogma.