Heart Openings: The use of micro-phenomenology in the study of religious and contemplative experience of love and associated states

Meditation as practiced in Buddhist traditions and contemporary Micro-phenomenology are two methods for the empirical investigation of lived experience. Even if their goals are different (respectively soteriological and pragmatic), both practices start from a disturbing observation: our lived experience, which is what is most intimate and closest to us, escapes us. We do not see it as it is, we need training and apprenticeship to learn to recognize what, nevertheless, is there. Both practices offer various "skillful means" to elicit this recognition, to unveil what is hidden. However, surprisingly, neither of these, offer much by way of precise procedural descriptions of the veiling and unveiling processes. From written and oral meditation teachings on the one hand, and microphenomenological interviews applied to meditative experience and to the interviews themselves on the other, we tried to collect procedural descriptions of the veiling micro-gestures, of the unveiling micro-gestures, that is, the gestures through which veils dissipate, and to compare the devices used by meditation and by microphenomenology to elicit this unveiling. I will present the most salient aspects of this study.

In the Dzogchen traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, relinquishing effort is a central instruction when it comes to practices oriented toward discovering the nature of one’s own mind. What do meditation practitioners do, how do they respond and what do they experience as they seek to engage in this normative ideal of effortlessness? What, if any, phenomenological experience is reportable from states of consciousness said to transcend language and the subject-object structure of ordinary experience. This last is an open question. Nevertheless, micro-phenomenology produces fine-grained descriptions of microgestures of attention and embodied experience, offering rich nuance to the growing body of (neuro-) scientific research on nondual practices. Based on repeated interviews with twelve experienced practitioners and with teachers of Dzogchen, this study explores the edge of awareness - what happens just before and/or just after moments or stretches of contemplative deepening in the direction of nonduality. Taking a close look at these may help unpack the process, phenomenology and practices towards effortless meditation. That is the focus of this paper.

This paper focuses on micro-phenomenological interviews I collected in the United States and Nepal. The discussions in then address two points: 1. interview structures of practitioners and 2. how culture affects their perceptions, as disclosed in the interviews. In order to elicit specific experiences, the interview process uses prompts like “bring your teacher to mind,” or “recall a moment when you felt love for your teacher.” Questions I consider are: Can interviews across cultures be compared? What cautions or considerations apply, for example, in optimally understanding a Nepal/Tibetan cultural experience of tsewa (tenderness, intimacy) when compared with responses of an American participant? These micro-phenomenological interviews focus on very short moments of experience; another type of interview is the lifestory interview which provide additional background on how interviewees made meaning from the prompts. My interviewees are from different cultural and language backgrounds, and therefore my paper asks how to analyze data across language and cultural boundaries. A working hypothesis is that at least some micro-experiences may not be limited to particular cultural or language contexts.

Based on a film and fieldwork project with Sufis in Egypt, I reflect on how microphenomenological interviews and audio-visual media can be combined to describe religious experience. Micro-phenomenology provides a powerful tool to identify subtle and often unrecognized structures of lived experience. The interviewer helps the interviewee evoke a concrete experience by recounting the experience with the words of the interviewee, and then asking simple questions that allow the interviewee to retrieve further dimensions of the experience. The medium of film, as developed in the discipline of visual and multimodal anthropology, provides complimentary opportunities for enabling micro-level analyses of the verbal, bodily, and emotional interactions between research participants, researchers, and the environments in which particular kinds of experience emerge. By using film excerpts from everyday situations, ritual practices, and interviews as the basis for reflection and feedback, I suggest how a research project can be established as a joint collaboration between research participants and researchers. Furthermore, film can be used to communicate and assess the structures of lived experience that can be revealed through micro-phenomenology.