Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love

"To call Upton's book 'original' or 'creative' is to understate the case. I regard his approach as extraordinary; [it's] unlike anything I have seen during my forty years of engagement with these issues."
―Parker Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach

Contemplative Beholding: A Way of Life and Love is not a treatise on the history of art, though it will enhance one's historical knowledge; nor does it present an argument toward a particular theory of art. Instead, through guided engagement with over 500 photographs and works of art of various mediums, Joel Upton offers a training in beholding.To behold is to see, yes, but in an enhanced way, better and more deeply. This way of beholding applies, ultimately, to much more than art: to life itself, and its source, which is love.

A note on format: Because of the sheer number of images referred to in the text of Contemplative Beholding, images that are meant to be seen (beheld) in the course of reading, inserting them in the printed book proved impossible. We are grateful to Amherst College for hosting the book's companion website, <contemplativebeholding.org>, which features all of the images, arranged by chapter, in gentle, user-friendly galleries. In addition, the book itself has been bound with a special "lay-flat" spine, to aid in the unique process of reading called for with this text and its companion website.

Arthur Zajonc, Ph.D., is the Andrew Mellon professor of physics and interdisciplinary studies at Amherst College and is currently the director of the Academic Program of the Center for Contemplative Mind, an organization of 1500 academics supporting the appropriate inclusion of contemplative practice in higher education. Dr. Zajonc is the former General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, a cofounder of the Kira Institute, past President of the Lindisfarne Association, and a senior program director at the Fetzer Institute. He has served as scientific coordinator and editor for several dialogues with the Dalai Lama: The New Physics and Cosmology, held in 1997 and published in 2004, and “The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life” (2002, unpublished). He was also moderator for the 2003 MIT dialogue, published as The Dalai Lama at MIT (2006). Dr. Zajonc is the authorCatching the Light (1993, 1995), coauthor of The Quantum Challenge (2nd ed. 2005), and coeditor of Goethe's Way of Science (1998).