Abstract

The proposed ineffability of subjective experience has meant that it is frequently absent in educational discourse, where the emphasis is on objective and rational acquisition of knowledge. This prevailing conception of knowledge leaves the pre-predicative foundations of learning neglected, which this thesis challenges by foregrounding the subjective contemplative experience of its ‘co-researchers’ (i.e. ‘participants’). In doing this, it reveals a subjective interrelational realm, intersecting and being intersected by the objective that grounds learning through contemplation. This project, sited in the holistic approach of contemplative education, critically examines the co-researchers’ experience of this realm. Its interdisciplinary phenomenological approach and methods provided access to the co-researchers’ contemplative interior experience. The rich data resulting from these methods revealed their development of feeling languages and maps, which they used to navigate their inner landscapes. Recognising the importance of these metaphorical languages led to the central findings of this thesis. Despite the co-researchers’ struggle at times to define their contemplative experience, what they reported is suggestive of a contemplative synaesthesia, or their experience of gestalts of affective, somatic, cognitive and transcendent modes of being. I have termed the process that I believe underpins these gestalts, the feeling nexus. Further I suggest that the feeling nexus resides in an elemental ground-of-being, and that contemplative engagement with both provides a sense of integration that founds the positive outcomes of contemplative education. This project’s exploration of the feeling nexus starts with a phenomenological and Yogic examination of an interrelational or ecological body, made permeable by the interspersion of its contexts. Its interrelational nature provides access to the feeling nexus, while contemplative experience of it frequently initiates a trajectory through contemplation where new meaning arises through pre-predictive, somatic and cognitive phases of meaning making. This study’s translation of the co-researchers’ experience in each of these stages is a unique approach that traces their creation of new meaning through contemplation. It offers a schema of learning through feelings for contemplative pedagogy, and a conception of subjective contemplative experience that contributes to an ontology of consciousness, which is currently missing from contemplative education theory