LABORATORY OF SECULAR MEDITATION AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECT OF INFORMAL EDUCATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31392/cult.alm.2024.2.19Keywords:
Contemplative Studies, Laboratory of Meditation, Laboratory of Mind, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of mind.Abstract
The article discusses the informal education project Laboratory of Secular Meditation, founded in 2017 with the aim of theoretical and practical research of contemplative methods of Buddhism in a secular context. At the beginning, the main task was to prepare a series of lectures on Buddhist philosophy for a wide audience outside the academic environment. Later, there were changes in approaches and the work was focused on the development of secular meditation techniques that could help people without a professional philosophical education to better understand the main concepts, theories and approaches in the study of human mind. The key principles of the project are an interdisciplinary approach, reliance on non-confessional meditation practices, participation of seminar participants in the intersubjective creation of meanings, an emphasis on critical subjectivity and embodied cognition. An important role in learning, in particular, the secular method of meditation, is played by interaction in the environment that is created during classes. In addition to the actual meditation methodology and the initial course, the project was also dedicated to the translation of texts important in the field of contemplative studies and the philosophy of meditation. These are the texts of well-known thinkers, philosophers and scientists who are engaged in the research of meditative practices in a secular context and their application in formal and informal education. Thus, the Secular Meditation Laboratory is a project within which was made an attempt to create a kind of philosophical experimental laboratory for consciousness research, preparation of lecture materials, contemplative methods for teaching a wide audience outside of institutional education, translations of key texts into Ukrainian, etc. Subsequently, the methods of the Laboratory were applied in the projects “War Diaries”, “Embodied Perception”, “Laboratory in Development” etc.
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