Current events in contemplative practice

Five Minutes a Day is an initiative of the Academy of Inner Science, under the leadership of Thomas Hübl, contextualizing current events for contemplative practice.

by Stefan Haefliger, from the Medium.com blog

5 Minutes a Day is an experiment in contemplative practice building on current events. Shockingly, it seems that despite years of education, personal development, spiritual practice, and lived compassion many of us remain incapable of dealing with the world as it is.

To be fair, both parts of this last sentence are flawed. Dealing with the world around us is hardly a matter of all in or all out. We deal with our immediate environment first, we care for our next of kin and we make a living despite numerous challenges and obstacles. Plus, the world is not what it seems but partly how we enact it. What registers as a shock is not how others perceive the news but that so many of us actively disengage and close themselves off completely, often half consciously, from current events and politics. The justifications are numerous: the world is inhumane and horrible, others are bad and evil, the media is only out to shock, manipulate and paralyze, the world abroad is not my world, I don’t have time to read the papers, TV makes us stupid, social media is for geeks, I’m in harmony now.

The ambition of 5 Minutes a Day is twofold: to open the curtain and look beyond the harmony and to soften or expand the colors of our perception to include our entire being, including emotions, thoughts, physical reactions. For this, we re-contextualize news items one by one. Websites can be loaded, TV programs irritating, newspapers full of ads and other distractions of modern capitalism. We’re starting with a clean slate, a white and simple website that holds one item and one picture, a reference, and a set of tentative instructions on how to open ourselves to the painful and often cruel reality out there.

Reality is not just out there and what is perceived as cruel lies in the eyes of the beholder like so many quick judgements of what is. Reality is out there but its meaning is contested. Many of us are quick to blame the media, their ambition to sell by shock and to capitalize on misery. That’s often a fair criticism. And yet, their business is trading facts for attention. This may lead some astray but most journalists are sincere and committed to portraying the world to the best of their knowledge and practice. We should not forget that information technology equips us all with sensing devices that span the globe. And sensing is not as innocent as it seems.

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This is where we get to the world as it is. Ian Hacking, a philosopher of science, wrote a famous book in 1983 entitled “Representing and Intervening” to describe the scientific practices of producing facts. Generalizing beyond the scientist, we all choose to represent and interpret our observations and we intervene whenever we perceive. Looking is an act of creation as is listening, feeling, smelling, sensing. We can interact with each other and see what others see, we can challenge each others’ interpretations and we can engage with the world. In order to do this, however, we need to look, open up, take in, probe and question. The creative process shapes how the world looks like, within us and around us. Only by probing which facts are relevant and why, what they mean and for who can we begin to build a world in which we want to live. Still, we may be disrupted, irritated, we’re not in charge and our creative power may seem negligible compared to the misery we perceive.

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Nevertheless, 5 Minutes a Day can empower us to shed paralysis and move with the light of our perception. We are where we are, with influence or without, shaping the immediate environment around us and triggering waves of awareness and responsibility for the world. That’s a humble goal yet a relevant one.

Stefan Haefliger is one of the editors of 5 Minutes a Day (#5MaD). For comments and feedback tweet to @HAEFLIGER