Religion in Contemplative Studies

Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2018 Religion in Contemplative Studies Daniel J. Moseson Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Moseson, Daniel J., "Religion in Contemplative Studies" (2018). Dissertations - ALL. 865. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/865 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract: This project is about the new field of contemplative studies, a field that seeks to use “contemplative” practices, derived mostly (though not entirely) from religious traditions in academic settings, prominently including college pedagogy. First, this project seeks to understand how contemplative studies advocates persuade others (and themselves) that what they are doing is not “religion;” that is, how do they define "religion" in order to situate their own work as non-religious academic inquiry? Second, in the course of my textual and ethnographic research on contemplative studies, it has become apparent that this field adds to the growing rebuttal of religious studies critiques of mind-centered “spiritualities.” In contrast to analyses of “spirituality” as a consumerist conceit, such as Carrette and King’s Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (2004), many contemplative studies advocates are working to orient the field toward the use of contemplative practices to promote critical thinking, empathy, and activism. In this project, I analyze contemplative studies texts, my experiences at contemplative studies events, and my interviews with advocates to describe these two trends and try to put them in historical context. RELIGION IN CONTEMPLATIVE STUDIES by Daniel Joseph Moseson B.A. Montclair State University, 2009 M.A. Syracuse University, 2011 M. Phil. Syracuse University, 2014 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion Syracuse University May 2018 Copyright 2018 Daniel Joseph Moseson All Rights Reserved Table of Contents: 1 Introduction 48 Descriptive Chapter 1: Use of the Concept of “Religion” 90 Descriptive Chapter 2: Social Justice Advocacy 119 Historical Precedents: The Rhetoric of Religious Experience 206 Academic and Other Norms in Contemplative Studies’ Predecessors and Present 233 Epilogue iv Introduction: Scene 1: Northampton, Massachusetts On a warm August night in 2015, a group of college professors and graduate students gathers in a library reading room at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Most are avid practitioners of meditation and other “contemplative practices.” They sit around the periphery in a communal rectangle. A lone participant- observer scans the room. In spite of the all-too-common stereotypes of “spiritual seekers”, not a pair of yoga pants is in sight. Any kale has been checked at the door. Crystals have been silenced or turned off. Instead, an intense and deadly serious discussion is underway. The occasion is a halfway point check-in session at the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education’s annual Summer Seminar for Contemplative Pedagogy. Titled “Challenges for Contemplative Pedagogy,” the session has no explicit agenda other than recapping the challenges encountered since Sunday evening. The diverse audience of meditators, yogis, dancers, musicians, and counselors, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, secularists, and those combining two or more of these does have an agenda, and they are not feeling shy. They want to talk about race. The audience is majority white, but the energy in the room comes from women academics of color. The facilitator, Dan Barbezat of the nonprofit Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, opens by arguing that contemplative practices are powerful ways of engaging with the world, rather than merely detaching from it. An African-American professor from Baltimore argues that contemplative practice is important for managing anger, time, and the limits of individual capacity in social justice struggles. A professor of English at 1 a prominent historically Black college urges the group to “investigate for ourselves through contemplative practice… what is our fear around? Who might that [be], why, and what might it be, deep down, that we’re afraid of?" A professor of Italian commits to talk about “the sexism embedded in the language, and the racism embedded in the culture.” “I don’t feel good about myself if I’m not making a positive change,” she says. A young scholar-activist from urban Texas implores the group to take self-care seriously, to cultivate mindfulness to “keep us from falling into the abusive patterns that we stand up against each and every day,” to prevent “intimate violence among activists." She asks the group to “commit to love ourselves, to give better to everyone else.” The speakers are eloquent, erudite, pragmatic, and passionate. The participant- observer, a white man from New Jersey, feels himself becoming a participant, full stop. Detachment does not do justice to the issues being raised. In less lucid moments he realizes that nothing in his training has quite prepared him for this, that he never expected such passionate criticism and commitment from the “spiritual but not religious” crowd, and that it’s fascinating data.1 The English professor who spoke earlier encourages the group to “be courageous and move through fear, because these are thick and difficult times.” Scene 2: San Diego, California In a vast outdoor pavilion, under a kind of hardened tent, abutting the harbor, a 1 It surprised me because though I knew that some members of the “spiritual but not religious” lineage engaged in activism, I had little knowledge (at the time) that this was still occurring or that present manifestations centrally involved people of color. 2 prominent neuroscientist takes the stage. A world-renowned and mass-paperback- published researcher on meditation and the emotional brain, he addresses an audience of several hundred conference-goers from a range of scientific, humanistic, and professional disciplines. It is the early evening of November 10th, 2016. Less than 48 hours have elapsed since Donald Trump won the presidency. The neuroscientist correctly gauges the mood in the room and finds it in sync with his own. “I woke up yesterday with a fire in my belly,” he says. He rededicates himself to using his scientific vocation to further the cultivation of compassion and empathy in the face of anger and alienation no one could have guessed at one week before. In updating the audience on the state of his work and on the field of mediation research more broadly, he makes an even more surprising statement indicative, perhaps, of the field’s own epochal shift. He acknowledges that many in this field have encountered (and/or made) claims to experiences beyond the bounds of what science typically considers possible. They involve extraordinary states of consciousness and encounters with supernatural forces. Instead of dismissing these claims, as many researchers would, he argues that when such claims come from people “whose sanity is robust,” they should be taken seriously. From such a prestigious podium, the statement is not just remarkable. It could be programmatic. Scene 3. San Diego, CA. The same hangar-sized tent, with an equally large audience, two days later. An African-American law professor, widely published on torts and civil rights law, delivers a mid-day keynote titled “Moving Together from Colorblindness to 3 ColorInsight: Contemplative Enquiry, Research, and Practice in the Work of Transformative Justice.” She speaks of the value of meditation and other contemplative practices for unpacking the role whiteness and white privilege play in shaping academic spaces and the production of knowledge: “It’s time, well past time actually… that we just stop doing that, that we recognize the value of the particular lives that we have lived, that our students have lived... the richness of that as a source and an inspiration and a sense of purpose, but also the blind spots that come with the fact that we’ve only lived one life… this is why we need each other. Haven’t we just learned that in this election cycle, at least in part, that we live in bubbles, that we live in worlds where we can really reinforce our particular point of view... and we’re shocked to see that there are entirely different worlds out there that we are disconnected from. We have been blinded from the experiences of so many different types of people. So it’s not just about race. It’s about class, it’s about sex orientation, immigration status, it’s about region…” “I’m just going to, with love, say yes, we do! But we’re going to do it together…. we don’t do things alone.” These three scenes, taken from gatherings of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and the Mind and Life Institute, fall under the new academic field of "contemplative studies.” Contemplative studies is an interdisciplinary field that promotes the use of “contemplative practices” (often derived from “religions”) in settings from education, to therapy, to business management, to scientific research, and (recently and prominently) political advocacy. It trades on the claim that introducing such “contemplative practices” in each of these settings will enable better focused attention, more emotional

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