ABSTRACT
If we look up the word “contemplation” in Webster’s, we find that the first
meaning given is simply “to view or consider with continued attention.” Are
we then involved with contemplation everyday? Or does contemplation imply
a special kind of concentration? Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan
Studies at Columbia University and a Tibetan Buddhist, doesn’t see contem-
plation as a rarified activity. It is his perspective that all of us are already
involved in contemplation and that contemplative energy can be focused on
anything. Thurman writes:
Television, modern culture’s peculiar contemplative shrine, supplies
a contemplative trance to millions of people, for hours on end day
after day year in and year out. It is unfortunately a trance in which
sensory dissatisfaction is constantly reinforced, anger and violence
is imprinted, and confusion and the delusion of materialism is
constructed and maintained.1
