What is the Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology?
Most Western scientific approaches to contemplative disciplines investigate meditation from an external (behavioural, neurological) third-person point of view. Phenomenology, a philosophical discipline created by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), provides a genuine alternative. Indeed, this discipline aims at describing verbally the major invariant features and structures of lived experience from the perspective of the subject herself. The project of the Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology is to cultivate and describe the experience that unfolds during the practice of meditation from a first-person perspective.
A major tool for doing this is the micro-phenomenological interview method. In a micro-phenomenological interview, subjects are encouraged to retrieve neglected and half-forgotten aspects of their own lived experience by way of stimulating yet neutral questions. A major difference between this kind of inquiry and standard scientific approaches is that it does not take meditation as an object of study, not even a mental object of study. Instead, it relies on striking similarities between essential aspects of phenomenology and the very principle of meditation. Thus, studying meditation is no longer separate from its practice; and the act of studying meditation with a phenomenological approach can be taken as one more skillful means for improving its practice.
The precondition of phenomenology consists in suspending all beliefs about the things we experience, and instead, delving into unfabricated and uninterpreted experience. It implies the self-transformation of phenomenologists, just as much as the contemplative disciplines imply the self-transformation of practitioners. Furthermore, applying the micro-phenomenological interview method to meditation helps meditators to become mindful of their own lived processes. The outcome of a micro-phenomenological study is thus similar to that of the so-called “analytic meditation” (Vipasyana in Sanskrit, Vipassana in Pali), and contributes to enhancing the focus and accuracy of the latter.
ICP workshops
ICP 2017
The first workshop in contemplative phenomenology, supported and sponsored by Mind and Life Europe, took place in June 2017 at a lovely farm close to Nemours, south of Paris, France. Its topic was the experience of the present moment. It gathered 30 participants, philosophers, psychotherapists, cognitive scientists, and medical doctors.
Each day three activities were practiced: a whole morning of meditation focused on the attention to the present moment; an afternoon of inquiry into these experiences of meditation, using the micro-phenomenological interview method; and an evening of advanced teachings on the experience of time and the present moment based on Western and Buddhist phenomenologies, from Husserl to Vasubandhu. One central question under discussion was: are past and future real, apart from their being referred to in the present?
ICP 2019
The topic of this workshop was “The Phenomenological Epochè as Practice, and the Practice of Meditation“. It explored the common ground of both phenomenology and meditative practice: the suspension of verbal and perceptive judgment, the suspension of conceptual superimpositions on lived experience, a form of letting go. The act of suspension was called epochè in ancient Greek philosophy and in phenomenology; and it was called nirodha in Brahmanic and Buddhist India. Nirodha is a Sanskrit word that was used in Patanjali’s Yogasutras and in the third noble truth of Buddhism to mean “cessation”.
Each day, three activities were practiced: a whole morning of meditation; an afternoon of inquiry into these experiences of meditation, using the micro-phenomenological interview method; and an evening of advanced teachings on the experience of epochè based on Western and Buddhist phenomenologies, from Husserl to Shantarakshita. This meeting included about 30 skilled participants. Its aim was to establish a database of interviews about the experience of “cessation”. This is one of the main differences between objective and phenomenological approaches of meditation: in the first case, a workshop is meant to present results of laboratory research, whereas in the second case, the laboratory is the workshop itself.
ENCECON-ICP 2022
In 2022, Mind & Life Europe organised the first-ever joint ENCECON-ICP workshop at the Domaine de Fréchet – les PEP 59 in Le Reposoir, France.
The workshop focused on “Embodied experience of intersubjectivity: exploring the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’“. The goal of the workshop was to explore how phenomenology and microphenomenology may be deployed to inform and benefit neuroscientific research. Participants engaged in a co-emergent, collaborative effort to reach greater clarity about the affordances and obstacles to the realisation of a contemplative science of mind and life, exploring intersubjectivity through contemplative practices, microphenomenological interviews and analysis, small-group work, and dialogue and partnership with each other, drawing on insights and perspectives from phenomenology and the cognitive sciences.
The workshop was an example of the work that is necessary to strengthen the gentle bridges of which Francisco Varela spoke during the first Mind and Life Dialogue between scientists, philosophers, and contemplatives. This workshop sought to build on the mutual respect, openness, creativity, and curiosity that has characterised some of our previous MLE gatherings.
The topic of this workshop was: “Becoming Aware and Micro-phenomenology: Process, Practice, Outcomes“. Twenty-one years after the publication of the book On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing, by Depraz, Varela and Vermersch, the workshop aimed to bring together qualified practitioners of micro-phenomenology to share research and – in dialogue with a select group of people from constitutive fields including philosophy and contemplative studies – revisit key questions and explore what has been learned, collectively, about processes of becoming aware and the role and potentials of micro-phenomenology. The meeting also helped to set a course for future explorations, based on presentations by participants of their research, as well as more synthetic discussions and experimentation.
The ICP 2024 workshop featured the cutting-edge work of nearly 40 researchers and scholars in the micro-phenomenology community, coming from 5 different continents and over 20 countries. Across the 24 presentations and 15 posters that were on the line-up this year, we heard about an unheralded variety of research initiatives using phenomenology and micro-phenomenology as their guiding framework, celebrating the many insights born of this approach and discussing together the many challenges researchers face in this domain (whether methodological, ethical, or institutional).
