Diversity Discussion

Pluralism is the future, and it is the present. The following documents a discussion between seven members of Naropa's faculty and administration, each of whom teaches a core seminar or regularly engages in the ongoing dialogue about contemplative education.

Participants include:

Benally: What might be one of the most urgent diversity related issues of our time that concerns you the most?

Canty: Well, I have thoughts about that and, initially, I would say on a global and local reality, it is the dogmatism we see in both our nation and in different nations across the world, both in our individual paradigms and our cultural paradigms. And I think that by not really having the extended lens of engaging multiple perspectives, we get really narrowed and we don't know how to work with difference and we keep perpetuating wars and oppression and intolerance.

Giles: I could add to that. For me, one of the most pressing issues is what seems to be a very enduring tendency to dehumanize out groups and how that is related to genocide, how that is related to the ease with which we go to war. I mean 'we' in the collective, human sense. It seems like, as we learn lessons from the past having to do with certain groups, we become hypersensitive to those types of groups and it seems very hard for us to apply those lessons to new situations.
We learned lessons from the holocaust, and we seem to have forgotten them with regard to the Darfur crisis.

Catbagan: What I hear you both saying, and what I think I would like to underscore is the idea the question asks for: the issues of our time. And the issues of our time seem to be the issues that we've had over time, and that's what concerns me, that, as you said Jessica, we don't seem to be able to learn. And so we can look at that globally, and then take it locally, and then we can take it to our campus and say, "how does that play out?" I always want to ask that question: How does that play out in our community? How does it play out on our campus? How does it play out in our hearts?                      

Simmer-Brown: I suppose one of the things that concerns me too is that there are the lessons from the past but, as time goes on, the world is a smaller and smaller place. In America, there is much greater diversity than there was before 1965, and so we need those lessons from the past more than ever, and we need to apply them more fully in our world. When we look at the level of diversity that we experience in our daily situation, we understand that this is happening everywhere in the world—the migrations of peoples, the clashing of governments that previously had very little to do with each other. We really see that at Naropa because of the diversity of students who are interested in our kind of education. We have a chance to really address that right here in our daily life.

Bye: I agree that while issues of diversity are obviously not exclusive to our time, the consciousness of these issues does seem to be on the rise nationally and internationally, and the subject of social inequity and injustice seems to be entering the public discourse more broadly. And there's the sense that it could expand quite quickly now because of the world getting smaller. We seem to be recognizing culturally that, to some degree, our survival depends upon addressing these issues and being willing to examine the limitations of one's personal, cultural, and inter-personal perspectives. Naropa, because of its contemplative orientation that encourages such examination, would seem to offer a good site for deepening that discourse, and beyond that for some of the actual work of engagement with other and difference.

Benally: Philosophically and practically, why does Naropa University bring together diversity and contemplative education? And the follow-up question is how do the Contemplative Practice and Diversity Seminars help students prepare for civic engagement?

Giles: Contemplative practice, to me, is a lot about developing tools of self reflection and self awareness and developing skills of clear seeing. And when we begin to see ourselves in our minds clearly, the idea of a conceptual mind becomes very clear. We start to see minds as things that form categories, minds as things that that carve the world into bits and pieces, that compartmentalize all kinds of different things—chairs and frogs, white people and black people—and this is what human minds do. And so part of contemplative practice, to me, is the constant checking in with our tendency to carve the social world into these bits. And sometimes we've very aware when we carve the world into white and black, that's very much on our radar. But what's less on our radar is how frequently we carve the world into people who go to CU and people who go to Naropa or people who vote Republican and people who vote Democratic and, regardless of how liberated from the shackles we think we are, it creeps up on you without even realizing it has started. And in order to be able to engage the world in a meaningful way, we have to develop some understanding of what these concepts mean and how they influence the way we interact with others, perceive ourselves, the kinds of templates for behavior we use when engaging with some category of people versus another. So, in terms of civic engagement, when we teach the Civic Engagement course, there's a lot of sense, often, of we are going to help them—them being an out-group of which we are not members and, therefore, we engage with our own humanity in a different way than we engage with their humanity. And so fundamentally checking in with one's self to be aware of that tendency to form in-groups and out-groups is really important if we're going to go down to the homeless shelter, if we're going to go into an elementary school, if we're going to work in hospice care, to develop some understanding of where us and them starts to dissolve a little bit, to get back to that idea that compassion means suffering with, which is different than looking at something as "other."

Simmer-Brown: A lot of people think of contemplative practice as a way to retreat from the world, but at Naropa we understand contemplative practice as a way to more fully engage. It seems to me that the contemplative practice seminars and the diversity seminars are working in tandem to make sure that our motivation for contemplative practice is about being able to benefit the world more fully. From contemplative practice, we constantly test our ability to open by connecting with "other," and we do it every single day. Often in Boulder, "other" is someone who looks just like us. It's extremely important, especially in Boulder, for us to extend further and to really work with these two seminar groups in tandem. It’s important to make sure we are really fully opening, opening, opening rather than closing down and creating a nice little cocoon of some kind of "peaceful mind" that ignores the troubles of the world.

Catbagan: And I think where those two courses work in tandem, at least in my mind—I'm thinking about an article that was in the Shambhala Sun, I think it was this summer, I think it was Jack Cornfield writing about contemplative psychology, and he talked about understanding peoples' suffering. Sometimes we have students who come in and say, "Suffering is suffering." It's something that they've heard but that they don't fully understand and, so, in the diversity seminars, because we look at issues that people don't really like to look at—racism, classism and those issues that are concerned, to a large degree, with the suffering that people in the United States have—and I think because we do that with a contemplative bent that says we're going to do this with empathy and think about empathy, as opposed to sympathy, which is what you're talking about, Jessica, in terms of in-groups and out-groups, and then we're going to look at ourselves and reflect on "what is my bias? How have I thought about this in the past? How could I think about it differently?" And then we send them off to the cushion and they can think about it by themselves. But I think that is where I see the two courses really hold each other up.

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