Descriptive Evocation: A Theory of Agnostic Contemplative Practice

Introduction

Contemporary contemplative practice faces a fundamental tension. Traditional approaches often carry metaphysical commitments that limit their accessibility in pluralistic contexts, while purely secular adaptations risk losing the transformative depth that makes contemplative practice meaningful. This essay outlines a theoretical framework called Descriptive Evocation (DE) that offers a middle way—enabling profound contemplative experience while remaining agnostic about ultimate metaphysical questions.

Drawing selectively from John Dewey's aesthetics and Martin Heidegger's concepts of receptive openness, while incorporating insights from Buddhist contemplative traditions, DE provides a coherent account of how contemplative practice can function across diverse worldviews without sacrificing either accessibility or depth.

The Core Framework

Descriptive Evocation operates through four distinguishing characteristics that together create what we term an "aesthetic mode of receptivity."

Language Features: DE employs non-directive, suggestive language rather than instructional commands. It uses underspecified imagery that invites co-creation between guide and practitioner, maintains strict metaphysical agnosticism, and draws on natural metaphors from shared human experience rather than culturally specific symbols.

Treatment of Experience: Rather than hierarchizing states or demanding transformation of difficult experiences, DE allows simultaneous presence of contrasting qualities—stability and change, peace and turbulence, clarity and confusion. It values difficult experiences without requiring their resolution, avoids progress narratives, and maintains openness without seeking predetermined outcomes.

Mode of Engagement: DE shifts emphasis from visualization to embodiment, enabling direct experience rather than abstract understanding. It creates space for individual interpretation while providing sufficient structure for meaningful practice, allowing internalization without external dependence.

Relationship to Practice: Perhaps most importantly, DE works across belief systems precisely because it remains metaphysically agnostic. It guides without imposing outcomes, acknowledges both active and receptive aspects of contemplative engagement, and enables deep practice without requiring doctrinal commitments.

Philosophical Foundations

The theoretical foundation of DE draws selectively from pragmatist and phenomenological traditions while avoiding their limitations.

From Dewey's aesthetics, DE adopts the continuity of experience as a fundamental category, recognizing that aesthetic, religious, and everyday experience form an integrated whole. It embraces Dewey's critique of many dualistic separations while affirming that profound experience doesn't require metaphysical commitments. The emphasis on qualitative immediacy and transactional organism-environment interaction provides grounding for contemplative practice in ordinary experience.

However, DE diverges from Dewey's naturalist commitments, particularly his hierarchical rejection of "supernatural" categories as outmoded in works like A Common Faith. While Dewey maintained a strong natural/supernatural binary that privileges naturalist explanations, DE maintains genuine agnosticism about such ultimate questions. Since Dewey's own concept of "nature" proves remarkably indeterminate—including, as he admits, the diverse cultures of the world—DE treats cultural and religious systems as worthy of exploration rather than debunking. This Malunkyaputtan approach allows DE to learn from traditions that employ "supernatural" language without either adopting or rejecting their metaphysical claims.

DE also modifies Dewey's approach to growth and development. Rather than rejecting growth entirely, DE distinguishes between VALUES and GOALS. Values function like the North Star—always orienting but never reached as final destinations—while goals emerge contextually in service of these ongoing commitments. This allows for non-teleological development: one might set a goal of becoming less reactive in service of the value of peace, understanding this as a recursive process of exploration, learning, and creative response rather than linear progress toward a fixed endpoint. This approach, influenced by theorists like Stephen Hayes in ACT therapy, preserves Dewey's growth orientation while avoiding his problematic emphasis on definite "ends-in-view."

From Heidegger's later philosophy, DE appropriates the concept of "will not to will"—active receptivity rather than passive non-intervention. It employs his understanding of language as disclosure rather than representation, embracing productive ambiguity over forced clarity. The notion of "clearing" or "opening" that allows phenomena to show themselves provides a phenomenological foundation for contemplative receptivity.

Yet DE carefully avoids Heidegger's metaphysical commitments about "truth of being," his later period's obscurantism, and the historical baggage of his political associations. Instead, it maintains pragmatist commitments to democratic values and practical wisdom.

The Malunkyaputtan Principle

Central to DE's philosophical coherence is what we call the Malunkyaputtan Principle, derived from the Buddha's dialogue with the monk Malunkyaputta. When pressed for definitive answers to metaphysical questions, the Buddha responded with the parable of a man struck by a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows who shot the arrow, from what direction, and why. "You would die," the Buddha observed, "with all those questions unanswered."

This principle establishes that the urgency of lived suffering—impermanence, loss, existential uncertainty—creates a natural prioritization of practical wisdom over metaphysical certainty. DE embodies this principle by maintaining silence on ultimate questions while enabling profound engagement with the existential conditions that motivate contemplative practice.

Virtue Development Through Aesthetic Receptivity

Unlike approaches that impose external moral frameworks, DE cultivates virtue organically through what we term "aesthetic receptivity." This mode naturally develops qualities that correspond closely to established contemplative virtues: non-judging awareness, patience with process, beginner's mind, trust in experience, non-striving engagement, acceptance of what is, letting go of predetermined outcomes, gratitude for present conditions, and generosity toward oneself and others.

These virtues emerge not through moral instruction but through repeated engagement with the kind of receptive attention that DE practices cultivate. The aesthetic dimension is crucial—like aesthetic experience generally, contemplative practice in the DE mode involves a quality of attention that is both engaged and non-grasping, focused yet open to surprise.

Distinguishing Features in the Contemporary Field

DE differs significantly from other current approaches to contemplative practice and theory:

Against Traditional Sectarian Approaches: While respecting traditional wisdom, DE doesn't require assent to particular cosmologies, anthropologies, or soteriological frameworks. A Christian, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic can engage DE practices with equal authenticity.

Against Purely Secular Reductions: Unlike approaches that strip contemplative practice of all transcendent dimensions, DE preserves openness to whatever emerges in contemplative experience—including states that practitioners might interpret as spiritual, mystical, or transcendent—without requiring particular interpretations. Drawing from Charles Taylor's analysis in A Secular Age, DE avoids both reductive secularism that dismisses the significance of transcendent experience and naive religiosity that demands particular metaphysical commitments. It navigates what Taylor calls the "nova effect" of worldview proliferation by maintaining genuine openness rather than privileging either naturalist or supernaturalist explanations.

Against Instrumentalized Mindfulness: While acknowledging therapeutic benefits, DE resists reducing contemplative practice to a technology for predetermined outcomes. It maintains the intrinsic value of contemplative experience rather than treating it merely as a means to stress reduction, performance enhancement, or other external goals.

Against Progress-Oriented Frameworks: DE carefully distinguishes between teleological progress models and value-oriented development. While rejecting developmental hierarchies that promise linear advancement through contemplative "stages," DE allows for growth understood as ongoing exploration in service of orienting values. These values—such as peace, compassion, or wisdom—function like the North Star, providing direction without constituting final destinations. Goals may emerge contextually (such as becoming less reactive in service of peace) but are understood as part of a recursive process of learning and creative response rather than steps toward predetermined endpoints.

Evidence and Applications

Empirical support for DE principles appears in the cross-cultural effectiveness of practices developed by figures like Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose MBSR protocols demonstrate DE characteristics while working successfully across diverse populations. Similarly, Richard Miller's iRest Yoga Nidra shows how practitioners with different metaphysical commitments can engage the same contemplative protocols with equivalent benefit.

Analysis of actual contemplative scripts reveals how effective guides naturally employ DE language patterns—using metaphors from shared human experience (mountains, lakes, rivers), maintaining ambiguity that allows individual meaning-making, and avoiding directive language that presupposes particular outcomes or interpretations.

Strengths for Pluralistic Contexts

DE's primary strength lies in addressing the central challenge facing contemplative practice in pluralistic societies: how to maintain transformative depth while remaining accessible across worldviews. Traditional approaches often require conversion to particular belief systems, while secularized versions risk losing the qualities that make contemplative practice distinctively valuable.

DE preserves what is essential—the cultivation of a particular quality of receptive attention that enables profound engagement with immediate experience—while remaining genuinely agnostic about ultimate metaphysical questions. This makes it particularly suitable for educational institutions, healthcare settings, interfaith contexts, and other pluralistic environments where contemplative practice might offer significant benefits but traditional sectarian approaches would be inappropriate or inaccessible.

Conclusion

Descriptive Evocation represents neither a new contemplative technique nor a syncretic combination of existing traditions. Rather, it provides a theoretical framework for understanding how contemplative practice can function independently of particular metaphysical commitments while retaining its transformative potential.

By maintaining Malunkyaputtan agnosticism about ultimate questions while enabling profound engagement with immediate experience, DE offers a coherent account of how contemplative practice might serve diverse populations without compromising either accessibility or depth. In an increasingly pluralistic world where contemplative wisdom is urgently needed but traditional sectarian boundaries often impede its transmission, DE provides a thoughtful middle way that honors both the integrity of contemplative traditions and the legitimate needs of contemporary practitioners.