Contemplative education, mindfulness and compassion: A silent revolution in a changing world

Abstract

The dominant mode of knowledge in contemporary societies, informed by instrumental rationality, has generated serious problems on a global scale. We are increasingly aware that it is necessary and urgent to inflect this trend, changing and educating according to different paradigms and epistemologies. In this article, we intend to substantiate the importance of contemplative knowledge in education, as well as draw attention to its profoundly transforming role in the broader spheres of society and the world. To this end, we denounce anthropocentrism and acceleration, characteristic of today's society, we highlight contemplative science, as a rehabilitator of knowledge from ancient traditions, and its unique contribution to better understanding and valuing the experiential knowledge of immersion in direct experience and, furthermore, for the construction of humanized societies that respect ecosystems. The understanding of self-regulatory metacognitive processes and modes of existential awareness that training in mindfulness and compassion make possible, which are profoundly emancipatory and questioner of the sense of self and reality, are also addressed. We end by underlining how education, rehabilitating the peculiar construct of attention, must play a fundamental role in radically reconfiguring the ways in which we think about our place and agency in the interdependent world of which we are a part.