This paper session considers the role of affect—of embodied felt sense—in grounding and sustaining contemplative transformation. Together, our three papers explore instances where affect (embodied felt sense) plays a constitutive role in a process of knowing, and each offers some comparative and theoretical mediation to try to make sense of this affective process as a basic human reality, one that has been taken up diversely by diverse contemplative traditions. Our aim is to theologize about this basic human reality comparatively, considering what further insights about our respective contemplative traditions can emerge collaboratively. Our papers take up contemplative instructions from historical Tibetan and Christian practices, considering them phenomenologically with an eye towards how the contemplative process unfolds by attuning to and habituating certain basic affects.
This paper is an auto-ethnographic account of cultivating compassion through embodied ascetic Tibetan Buddhist practices performed during a fasting retreat called nyungne. It is an account from experiences during fieldwork at Tekcholing Nunnery in Boudhanath, Nepal 2023, where I gathered interviews and experiences of care, compassion, love, and confidence to understand how these moments are felt and experienced. This auto-ethnography contributes to the comparative conversation on embodied theology by showing how an ascetic contemplative practice may rely upon the physical body and circumvent rational, conceptual ideas gained from cultural, philosophical, or doctrine. In this way, we can see how other practitioners may also rely upon their own embodied knowledge in lieu of more conceptual knowledge acquisition.
This paper engages the 14th century anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, particularly his “Letter of Privy Counseling,” and explores the role of affectivity in Christian contemplative practice in comparative perspective. While contextualizing the Cloud author within the “affective Dionysian” tradition of medieval mysticism and outlining the doctrinal and devotional elements of the practice he commends, the paper draws upon phenomenological resources to highlight the role of affectivity (or “auto-affection”) in grounding and sustaining contemplative transformation. Using phenomenology as a bridge, the paper sketches key points of comparison with Tibetan Buddhist practice traditions, particularly where the role of basic affect is concerned. The work of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, John Welwood, and John Makransky are especially informative of this move.
This paper develops for comparative theological work an understanding of the role played by affect in contemplative insight. It works out the role of affective “sensing,” or intimating, in the unfolding of contemplative insight, the way cultivating and remaining in a specific basic affect creates the conditions under which sudden contemplative insight can occur. It does so by examining instructions in the “preliminary practices” (sngon ’gro) of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition Dzogchen (rdzogs chen, “Great Completeness”). Dzogchen’s preliminary practices self-consciously cultivate intensive affective states, using them to evoke recognition of rig pa (“awareness”)—the simple, primordial, unconditioned ground of awareness. I suggest that, for Dzogchen commentators, there is a specific but utterly simple affect which uniquely intimates rig pa’s qualities: a felt sense of total safety released into expanse. I use Eugene Gendlin’s account of how implicit meanings are present to us as affects to understand this facet of Dzogchen.