Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 31 Carmen Ramírez-Hurtado, Victoria Cavia-Naya 2 Approaching the Meaning of Contemplation: Steering Away from McMindfulness We have undoubtedly borne witness, recently, to a contemplative turn, a challenge that is beginning to influence many aspects of our lives. Therefore, we will try to clarify what we understand by contemplation as an essential aspect of human nature. Typical practice emphasizes that contemplation should be cultivated in everyday life. Besides, it plays a significant role in various religious and philosophical traditions. We differentiate contemplation as an end from contemplative practices as a tool and warn of the danger of separating these practices from the original unified form. 2.1 Contemplation in Centuries-Old Traditions Before continuing and being fully aware of the complexity of defining terms, it is useful to clarify what we are referring to with each of them. We understand contemplation as one of the most genuine and cross-cutting ways of life, and since we started this paper with a quote from a mystic poet, mysticism as the path of those who delve deeper into spiritual contemplation, radically in the end reaching true illumination [2]. Nonetheless, defining contemplation would be the object of not another study but several, given the complexity of the term and the many approximations that have been made, both across various disciplines and from diverse cultural approaches. Throughout our study, we will outline what we understand here by contemplation in its relationship with music and singing. As stated above, we will use the methodology of the history of ideas. But it is worthwhile, even in an approximate way, to establish first what we mean by contemplation in general. It seems clear that contemplation is part of spirituality (or spiritualities); that is, it is present in all traditions as a specific part of spirituality. Considering its Latin etymology, it refers to that gazing at “the real” that is composed of amazement and admiration and, at the same time, simultaneity and contemporaneity, association, and union with the divinity (see Lat. cum and templum, understood as the “transcendent” and “sacred”). It is a form of apprehension of the real, characterized by the simplicity of the act, an intuition that rests on the known object (Borriello 2002, 458). From the great religious traditions, especially the so-called religions of the book, successful and sublime contemplation is identified with mysticism – although there are considerable nuances that would be too lengthy to detail here. Since our approach starts from the religious tradition of Christianity, we will treat it consequently, that is, sometimes we will use mysticism as a synonym for contemplation. On the other hand, we also find vast and centuries-old contemplative trends with oriental roots, such as Buddhism, Zen, yoga. It seems that they have attained a convergence with the West in recent times; but they have coincided form their origins; it could hardly be otherwise, given the unity of their projection. Nor can we forget that, although Christianity is particularly identified with the West, its roots are in the Middle East. Ergas and Todd (2015, 164) pose an interesting question, which could shed light on the convergences between East and West: A fair question would be whether there is need to ‘import’ practices from East Asia, rather than turn to a rich contemplative tradition found in the Greek, Roman, Hellenistic, and Christian schools of thought. It is true that one would have to go back to the ancient origins of Western philosophy, to the pre-modern conception of a philosophy as a way of life; but it is also true that ancient vision of life has not completely disappeared, rather that traces of it have remained in the Western tradition over the centuries. As Steel (2012, 46) nicely summarizes: The ancient sense of ‘contemplation’ refers to a direct or non-linear form of knowing; that is to say, it involves not the separation but rather the union of knower with what is known in the act of ‘seeing’ [note: theoria]. Not through the discursiveness of the ratio, but in the immediate apprehension of the intellectus does the loving gaze of contemplation unify seer with what is seen. This is the closest approximation to the concept of contemplation that we are handling here: a holistic convergence between East and West, both theoretical and practical, from the Christian tradition but without forgetting its aspiration of totality and worldview, which therefore cannot be circumscribed to a single geographical area or specific tradition.
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