Contemplation Is An Unmediated Encounter With Reality

Contemplation is essential to addressing the ecological crisis. Unfortunately, contemplation is not very well understood. Contemplation is not meditation, it is not mindfulness, and it is not prayer, at least not if we want to understand contemplation as an essential part of addressing the ecological crisis at its root. At its heart, contemplation is an unmediated encounter with reality. Reality is the whole of what actually is. Contemplation is an encounter with the whole of everything, an unfathomable encounter with reality.

So what’s that about? Is that even possible? Because that is the opposite of how we live our lives. We do not go through the day encountering reality. We each have a mental framework, a way of understanding the world, that we developed as infants and children. The framework is our fundamental understanding of how the world works, and how to get what we need. It developed in a specific familial and cultural and physical context. We learned how to function in a particular world and we carry those habits with us throughout our lives, every day, imposing that framework, that worldview, onto the world that we encounter, taking everything we experience and massaging it into the frame that we developed when we were very young. That frame, that worldview, is all we know.

In order to have an unmediated encounter with reality, we absolutely, unequivocally have to break that frame, which for most people is a terrifying prospect. The frame forms the bulwark of our identity. Contemplation is therefore a direct challenge to our sense of who we are.

And that’s only half the battle. We also have to contend with our sensory experience. We normally think of our senses as our windows on the world, but they are also veils that obscure the world. Even though our senses are expressions of our contact with the world, and in many ways have more integrity than our mental interpretations of them, they are also filters that screen out most of what is happening and feed into our brains only a small portion of the tiny fraction of the world that we encounter. Over millions of years, evolutionary experience has determined what we need to know in order to survive and has sculpted our senses to limit our experience to that which we need to know. The universe is incomprehensibly large. If we were aware of everything that we encounter, we could never process that much information and make sense out of it. So our senses have been sculpted by experience to give this organism what it needs to survive, and only what it needs to survive. We are not experiencing reality; we are experiencing a filtered version of reality that helps us move around, find food, find mates and create communities of common interest and mutual support.

So our mental frameworks and our raw sensory experiences are massively filtering reality. We can never experience and know what is real. And yet, contemplation is an unmediated encounter with reality. Contemplation at its heart means absolutely, unequivocally abandoning our sensory experiences and the frameworks that we use to interpret and manage our sensory experience—at least for a moment—so reality can touch us.

That is why contemplation is often referred to as the via negativa, the way of negation. In order for reality to reach us, we have to lose hold of all sensory experience and all of the mental frameworks that we use to filter, to judge, to deny, to manage, to understand, to manipulate our experiences. Reality is what is left when the entire package of our beliefs and experiences is set aside.

Then, and only then, we can return to our sensory experience, and return to our mental frameworks—which we cannot live without—with an understanding of how they operate, how they limit us, what role they play. We can return to them wholeheartedly without being ruled by them, humbled by the immensity of the living world and the inadequacy of our understanding. The critical event in negating our experience and our beliefs is the unraveling of the mentally-constructed sense of being a separate self. When belief and experience fall away in favor of reality, the self falls away as well, and that sense of being a separate self is what is driving the ecological crisis. As long as we feel that we are separate selves, our needs are infinite; we are forever attempting to bridge that gap between “me” and the rest of the world. We are forever searching for fulfillment, and unfortunately these days mostly we attempt to find fulfillment in purchases and in conflict. Yes, we are “fulfilled” by conflict. As long as we identify with our mind-constructed selves, we need conflict in our lives in order to feel alive. There can be no “me” without the “other,” so we create others with whom we are in conflict or competition in order to shore up the sense of being a separate self.  Conflict reinforces our sense of self, but it never satisfies our need to connect with reality.

The ecological crisis—in which we fill every space with ourselves and eradicate the living, non-human world—will never be resolved as long as we think we are separate selves attempting to find fulfillment. When we encounter reality, which is completely beyond our capacity to experience or understand, and we see that the separate self is an illusion created by our own minds, then we can return to our sensory experience and our limited mental frameworks, knowing what they are and what they aren’t, knowing what they can do and what they can’t, knowing where we belong and where we do not, fully appreciating the multiplicity and diversity and wonder of life, and knowing the limits within which we must live in order for life itself to thrive.

The via negativa is hard to embrace, because it allows no compromise; it leaves no room for the separate self and the mind’s self-serving rationalizations.  Reality is what it is and doesn’t care what we think about it.  We align with reality or we perish. If we try to hold on to even one sliver of our personal untruths, we will not be touched by the real and will remain in conflict with it. But the flip side of the via negativa is an absolutely inclusive via positiva. We are everything, but we can never know what that means until we set aside everything we think we are and everything we think the world is, and everything our senses tell us, and allow reality to speak for itself, in its own tongue, in its own time, in its own, incomprehensible way. And that is the heart of contemplation: letting wild reality speak of its wholeness, despite our inability to comprehend what we are being told, and being utterly changed by the encounter.

One thought on “Contemplation Is An Unmediated Encounter With Reality”

  1. I have quietly followed your blog and musings and think that you have articulated, here, perhaps one of the best accounts in brief as to what the depth of contemplation really is. The best shorthand distinction is absolutely that it is NOT thinking. But you are beautifully eloquent here in noting also how our natural senses are not constitutive of the contemplative experience of reality so wholeness. This post transcends your earlier fine post the shadowed Thomas Merton. The MLK Jr. Post was absolutely vital for pairing with this one on the unmediated encounter. This encounter is exactly what our postmodern human society is so afraid of admitting as still possible, still believable, still the life of life. If I had a hat on I’d take it off in tribute to the sheer humility that permeates this description of what our contemplative lives are all about. Stay on this line and keep going deep. Beauty lives here. The natural world simply lives this inside out. I hear trees applauding what you’ve said, in gratefulness.

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