Contemplation and Democratic Values

Contemplative practice takes many forms--from short periods of silence to intensive monastic retreats, from contemplative prayer to the meditative arts and physical practices like yoga. In all its forms, contemplative practice can contribute positively to healing, stress reduction, pain management, disease prevention, conflict resolution, and deeper understanding. The benefits of contemplative practice are becoming increasingly known through academic research and anecdotal experience.

By deepening insight, wisdom, and compassion, contemplation can significantly enhance many aspects of life, ranging from the quality and value of one's work to one's relationships with others to one's overall sense of well-being, as well as a sense of connection to the larger whole. Contemplation also may help us reduce the frenzied pace of our lives, find new ways of approaching intractable social problems, and lead to more humane behavior on the planet.

"Dying people have come to us for spiritual support and counseling in relation to their experience of alienation and loneliness, their inability to accept their deaths, their fear of pain and loss of control in the dying process, their fear of hospitals, and their fear of being abandoned," said Joan Halifax, the director of the Project on Being with Dying. "This program is an endeavor to build a community of inquiry, contemplation, and action around this profound spiritual and biological experience."

Other Foundation programs in which contemplative practice has played an important role are the Jewish life and environment programs. Metivta: A Center for Jewish Meditation and the National Center for Jewish Healing, two organizations the Foundation helped establish, are reintroducing the Jewish community to its rich traditions of meditation and ritual in everyday life and at times of illness and crisis. In the environment program, we have supported retreats that use contemplative practice to renew the spirit and deepen the commitment and understanding of activists exhausted by the urgency of the struggle.

These efforts at promoting contemplation across our program areas led the Foundation to create a special interprogram initiative to explore the importance of contemplative practice through academic inquiry and public education. During 1995, the Foundation sponsored a series of meetings of the Working Group on the Contemplative Mind in Society to explore ways in which contemplation can contribute to social change. Out of these meetings came the Project on the Contemplative Mind in Society, a collaborative program of the Cummings Foundation and the Fetzer Institute. Among the project's goals for 1996 are a program of fellowships to promote the study in universities of contemplative practice in a range of fields, and a series of focus groups of people engaged in contemplative practice to discuss the common experience and develop an appropriate language for describing it.

The working group, which will advise the Project on the Contemplative Mind, held its fifth meeting in May 1995 at the Fetzer Institute's Seasons Retreat Center in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The meeting was itself a unique model of contemplative practice. The periodic use of contemplative techniques enabled participants to transcend their usual, comfortable perspectives and view issues with a fresh mind. The techniques included silence and stillness, the mindfulness bell, contemplative music and poetry, nature walks, and walking meditation. The mindfulness bell, for example, was sounded at random moments, allowing participants to breathe in and out three times before resuming speech, changing the pace and the experience of time in the meeting.

At this meeting, the working group discussed the common misconception that meditation results in self-absorption, disconnecting one from the concerns of the outside world. In actuality, contemplative practice can place one more fully in the world by cultivating a calm, clear awareness of whatever is happening in the present moment.

An important question, one which the participants at the Kalamazoo meeting debated at length, is whether the practice of contemplation is a pathway to democratic values. Does meditation produce people who believe in and defend fairness, equality, diversity? It was pointed out that meditation is rarely taught without context. Buddhist meditation teachings, for example, are accompanied by talks on the moral issues of right speech, right conduct, right purpose. To achieve social change, meditation needs to be integrated within an appropriate educational process. Contemplation alone does not guarantee democratic values.

The Practice of Democratic Values

As we approach the 21st Century, American society faces fundamental difficulties both at the core of our democracy and at the heart of the ecological and economic systems needed to sustain life on the planet.

Despite some important progress, long-range environmental trends continue to worsen. Income disparities have grown throughout the century. Real wages have not increased for most Americans for two decades. The quality of life for millions, particularly in the schools and neighborhoods of our inner cities, continues to decline. At the same time, citizen apathy and cynicism are on the rise, and there is a society-wide decline in personal responsibility. Even elected officials agree that the democratic process is fundamentally corrupted by negative and distorted campaign advertising, mudslinging, and the disproportionate influence of monied interests.

Above all, we seem to have lost the essence of democracy--the capacity to talk to one another about what is really going on and what to do about it. We lack hope for our future and a vision for where we as a people want to go in the new century.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation believes in the importance of creating a national environment for civil discourse, in which committed people of diverse backgrounds and interests who share common core values can join together to discuss practical strategies for rebuilding American society. The interprogram area's democratic values intitiative seeks to support the search for common ground among diverse groups within the Foundation's program interests; to understand the religious and political movements on the right; and to encourage efforts to develop a fair and pluralistic vision of democracy.

In 1995, the Foundation supported a number of groups working to understand and oppose threats to democratic values as well as to find ways of appealing to a broader segment of the American public in support of such values. The leadership development institute of the American Library Association, for example, trained librarians and education professionals how to defend against censorship attempts and build support for freedom of expression in their communities.

The Coalition for Human Dignity, another grantee, attempted to counter the radical right in the Pacific Northwest with coalition-building activities that include the dissemination of information on the militia movement. A Certain Trumpet, a new program of the Advocacy Institute, helped academics, policy makers, and advocates from such fields as the arts, environment, and health develop arguments and language that articulate the importance of a progressive vision of democracy.

To develop a fair and pluralistic vision of democracy for the 21st century, the Foundation is taking a leadership role in encouraging an honest rethinking of fundamental issues such as health care, the future of jobs, the environment, and the devolution of governance responsibility to states and localities.

If there is to be a renewal of serious and positive change in America, it will clearly require a very substantial period of development--and a new way of talking and thinking and acting together. To do what is necessary to re-establish democratic values, many different kinds of people and institutions must ultimately be involved, and, of course, significant resources must be devoted to the effort. We have hope for the future, but it is tempered by a prudent understanding of the difficulties of the present period, and of the inevitably contingent nature of all social change.