Collective Practice of Meditation and Phenomenology of Consciousness in War

Abstract

This chapter takes a point of departure in observations about instituting a ‘safe space’ in the ‘Two Months of War’ project that facilitated reflections, meditations, narrativization of experiences and affects, and a communicative engagement with others. It argues that the key conceptual axis of the project was that of (preventing) a traumatic ‘freezing’ through application of practical methods and exercises that helped transform traumatic affects into creative and communicative practices. Drawing on the ideas of Harold Roth and the approaches developed within the Contemplative Studies Program it articulates the theoretical category of a subjective experience of war as a psychosocial processing of the human encounter with violence and atrocity, and shows how it was developed at the level of creative practices of self-expression through meditative engagements, through ‘critical subjectivity’, through attunement to sensorial and affective responses, and through conversation and dialogue.