What I mean by a contemplative tradition is a tradition that belongs to a community which assumes that there is more to reality than can be grasped with the five senses. It assumes that there is an unseen world, which permeates but also extends beyond the sensible world to an ultimate reality, or world, which no one created. Important life questions and their solutions – such as: how to find meaning and purpose, how to live well, how to reduce one's own and others' suffering – are discovered in our relation to this ultimate, unseen and uncreated world, and in its relation to us. Access to this unseen world depends on genuine dialogue between persons. The substance of a contemplative tradition is thus its way of training persons to become wise, which is to say, its way of creating the conversational conditions necessary for persons to become capable of perceiving and exploring this unseen world, so that they may discover important life questions and their solutions.

A contemplative tradition as such – its body of teachings – become like an inner temple within which and out of which a contemplative practitioner lives his or her life in community. The quality of a given person's contemplative life thus depends greatly on how well this inner temple is formed, maintained, and developed, for it comes to define and regulate his or her subjective world and way of life, just as it does for the contemplative community as a whole. The word “contemplative” thus does not mean “inactive.” How we choose to act and to not act matters immensely in contemplative life. But the realm of action is internally regulated in light of the tradition in which the contemplative person's mind has been trained. This is what it means to live contemplatively. Those wishing to live a contemplative life must thus engage in an initial and ongoing dialogical process in which they are formed within the particular contemplative tradition and that tradition is formed within them.

In contrast to a contemplative tradition, a “conventional” tradition is less concerned about being in dialogue with the subtle foundations of being human – such as a person's subjectivity, point of view, framework of meaning, or “inner temple” – and more focused on how persons speak, look, and otherwise behave. Its training program thus requires not so much conditions of a dialogue, in which there is genuine mutual influence, but rather of a monologue, in which the intent is to persuade the listener.

As I understand it, Christianity is a contemplative tradition in the above sense. I also think that it really cannot be adequately translated in conventional terms, and that attempts to do so have tended to be ultimately unhelpful and unsatisfying.

What do you think?