Conducted by Erin Burke, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia and a Research Assistant at the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: What is contemplation? 

TL: So, the word “contemplation” can be narrowly or broadly construed. I tend to construe it somewhat broadly to include those practices in which people attend to their inner worlds. And there are two dominant orientations in those practices of attending. One of them is what we would broadly describe as meditation—or in the American context, Zen-style meditation, or in the Christian context, apophatic prayer, where people seek to diminish the contents of their minds, to diminish the use of imagination, to diminish their thoughts, and to simply be, to reach into nothingness.

The other is a style I would think of as more of a Mahayana style of meditation or an imagination-rich practice, or in the Christian tradition, a kataphatic practice where people are choosing to fill their inner awareness with vividly imagined ideas, thoughts, stories, daydreams, images, and mandalas—all different kinds of things. Both of those are practices of redirecting attention away from everyday practices. Meditation is often harder for people to do—more people find it meaningless, although probably for those who can accomplish it, it is also possibly more powerful. But both forms of contemplation redirect your attention from the everyday.

…practices in which people attend to their inner worlds.

JCS: That’s very interesting. And how is this vision of contemplation relevant to your research or contemplation in general?

TL: An important strand of my research is trying to understand how things become real to people, particularly things that are invisible or have to be imagined. My work shows that these practices do shape or affect the way in which what is imagined comes to be experienced as being real or present. And so, much of my work has been on that kataphatic style of contemplation. One of my puzzles is why and how contemplative practice changes people’s experience. My work finds that contemplative practice or prayer practice does seem to increase the number of spiritual presence events people experience: voices, visions, senses of a presence. Practice increases the frequency of those experiences and increases the kinds of experiences people have. I’m curious about why that happens. I have some views about the mechanism of contemplative practice, although that tends to be a level of research that’s not the domain of my expertise, but that’s why it’s relevant. I noticed many years ago that practice changed experience, and I became curious about how that happened and why. 

JCS: In your experience with the people that you’re talking to, are these extraordinary experiences a desired outcome, or are they just a symptom of the contemplative practice that they’re doing?

Both forms of contemplation redirect your attention from the everyday.

TL: When people are working with a practice in which they seek to interact with a being, often they are hoping to have evidence of the interaction. I have worked in depth with three groups of people who used the practices in order to experience their being. One is charismatic Christians who are seeking to experience God. Another is magicians who are seeking to experience contacts and spirits and the gods of antiquity. And the other are tulpamancers, who deliberately set out to create a being to become a kind of friend and head-companion. All of them are trying to know or come to understand these others. It’s a complicated question as to both what people are experiencing and what they take those experiences to mean.

Of course, there’s this famous comment that if you are doing Zen-style meditation, if you see the Buddha along the road, kill him. And this may mean that the imagination is a distraction. But in the worlds where I have been spending time, people typically aren’t, unless they are ill, having experiences without some relationship with the imagined form they’re seeking to connect to. It can be a little complicated, but the Christians can sometimes encounter demons, tulpamancers sometimes create extra tulpas by accident, and the magicians are living in a vivid world and sometimes there are accidental sequelae of that. But even demons also reaffirm your sense of the realness of the gods or God.

JCS: Yeah. What’s lingering in my mind is the question of control. There’s the desired things you might want to experience, but there’s also these experiences you don’t know what to do with or aren’t necessarily pleasant, right?

TL: Yeah. And so, one of the things that I’ve seen is, let’s say Thai Buddhists, who live in a world teeming with spirits. They don’t want to encounter all of those spirits. They can have an encounter that is not welcome. It can be a sign of an imperfectly controlled mind.

JCS: That’s fascinating. So, what excites you about the future of Contemplative Studies, in your work or the work of others?

TL: Well, I am really intrigued about this issue of training: how it works, and if training is one thing or many. Obviously, in some senses, it’s many. But I’m intrigued in particular by the power of kataphatic practice. I think much of our research has been done around apophatic practices. And so, I am eager to learn more about the kataphatic practice specifically.

I am intrigued by the fact that there’s growing recognition that practice is often but not always good for people. So particularly, the more intensive apophatic meditative practices sometimes do backfire. In vipassana meditation, which is very intense, people sometimes have psychotic experiences. To understand that more deeply is very, very interesting. What I really mean is that I think we’ve moved past the evangelistic phase for research on contemplative experience, and people are now beginning to get a broader sense of what practices might actually involve.

An important strand of my research is trying to understand how things become real to people, particularly things that are invisible or have to be imagined.

JCS: Do you see moving past that stage of evangelism as just recently happening?

TL: I think so. I have begun to engage seriously with meditation researchers relatively recently, but my sense has been that until recently, meditation was understood as entirely good. There was this piece that came out in Harper’s by David Kortava called “Lost in Thought” about some of the risks of intense meditation. My own experience at Mind and Life is that there’s this discovery of the intersection of the social and the political, and that’s been interesting. There was a phase when studies of contemplation had a hammer and everything seemed like a nail. My sense now is that there’s a broader awareness of the range of contemplation practices and that there’s a richer array of the kinds of contemplation Contemplative Studies is interested in. As I read the literature and talk to people, I see that many people accept that mindfulness is not the same as meditation in many ways; I see that many people understand that there are many forms of meditation. And now there have been more anthropological studies on cultural differences between kinds of mindfulness in different parts of the world.

JCS: Can I ask, because you mentioned the tulpamancers wouldn’t say what they were doing is contemplation, do you think that’s just a product of their own culture that it’s not been described by them as contemplation? Or do you think if you posed that categorization to them, they would resist that for some reason?

TL: Tulpamancers, first of all, do not see what they are doing as a spiritual practice but a pragmatic practice that produces a being with whom they can interact. Most tulpamancers begin the practice without metaphysical commitments. The language of the practice tends to be focused on getting somebody to talk to. The practice is instrumental. The idea that you are doing something that’s akin to spiritual discipline is certainly recognized, but it’s not really the way people would use the term. Somebody came across my book, When God Talks Back, maybe in 2012, and posted an entry on one of the Reddit sites that said: “best thing on tulpamancy ever written, just ignore the God stuff.”

 I think we’ve moved past the evangelistic phase for research on contemplative experience, and people are now beginning to get a broader sense of what practices might actually involve.

JCS: I ask because even the way you defined contemplation doesn’t necessarily have to be a spiritual practice—and that’s sometimes the way it gets billed to people in the West too. Moving on, what are some of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies or that you feel like would speak to people who are interested in Contemplative Studies?

TL: One of my favorite books is Stephen Beyer’s The Cult of Tara. It’s just an amazing book. It’s so detailed. It’s hard to read every word of that book because it is encyclopedic. I love the sense that you need to describe everything, and that there’s so much. Sometimes, particularly when I tried to put my toe into the stream of something like deity yoga, the books are so intentional that you lose track of the fact that there’s a human doing the practice, and you don’t with his.

There’s another book that I really love that is quite idiosyncratic—it’s Alan Richardson’s Dancers to the Gods. It is about three magicians decades ago, and it’s their magical log. Alan Richardson was the biographer of someone called Dion Fortune, who was an English occultist priestess and magician, an initiate to the Western Mysteries. Her inner circle would do these very intense imaginative practices. And you can see in this book what I have seen among some of the people I spend time with: a group of people will enter into a shared space of imagination—that sounds like it’s a value judgment but it’s not meant to be—a space in which there are things that have to be represented in the mind, and they talk as if they are all in that space together. They’re able to do that in part because they know each other so well and they’ve spent so much time together. And it’s as if they’re talking and each one picks up a piece of the story and carries it further along. Were someone else to come in, it’d clear to an observer that they must be having somewhat different experiences. But in some sense, they’re also having the same experience. The book gives enough detail so that, as in the Beyer book, you can begin to understand exactly what they did in the practice and what they seem to have experienced.

JCS: Wow, that’s one I want to pick up for sure.

A group of people will enter into a shared space of imagination… a space in which there are things that have to be represented in the mind, and they talk as if they are all in that space together.

TL: I think it’s very cool. You know, it’s published by one of these idiosyncratic presses. As a description of the experience, it’s really interesting. I distinguish between what I think of as more theological description, in which people think they are telling you what they experienced but really they are sharing an abstract theology, and descriptions that are more ethnographic, or phenomenological, in which people telling you what they’re actually experiencing. The Richardson book is definitely the latter. I find that kind of material fascinating.

JCS: Yeah, those are great suggestions. Definitely new ones that I haven’t heard before, so thank you for that. Well, thanks so much for talking with me!

TL: Thank you for taking the time.