Beyond the Known: Expanding Epistemic Horizons Through Contemplative Inquiry

BEYOND THE KNOWN

Expanding Epistemic Horizons Through Contemplative Inquiry

Mario E. Martinez, PsyD

The Epistemic Value of Theological Models in the Inquiry of Wisdom

This webinar explores contemplative models as methods for expanding the conditions under which we allow ourselves to know.

Theological traditions have developed sophisticated practices for approaching forms of knowing that may not emerge through deliberate reasoning alone. Rather than asking whether their theological explanations are true or false, we will explore their epistemic value as methods of inquiry.

St. Teresa of Ávila’s Prayer of Quiet provides a compelling point of departure. In 16th-century contemplative language, Teresa described changes in will, thoughts, and emotions. Modern neuropsychology allows us to revisit these experiential domains through agency, cognition, and affect.

The Neuropsychology of Contemplative Inquiry

The method begins by suspending the ordinary effort to produce an answer.

Agency is quieted. The need to control, predict, solve, or design what should emerge is temporarily suspended.

Cognitions, sensations, and emotions are observed without interference. Rather than automatically accepting them as answers, they can be recognized as potential noise within the inquiry.

The objective is not to eliminate thought or emotion, but to reduce their habitual authority over what can be perceived and known.

This creates conditions for unselfing: a temporary loosening of autobiographical narratives, expectations, and self-referential processes that ordinarily organize experience.

Other deep contemplative methods—and, through very different mechanisms, therapeutic psychedelic states—raise a related neuropsychological question:

What can become knowable when the ordinary self temporarily relinquishes its role as the designer of what should be known?

An Inquiry Open to All

This is an exploration, not an exercise in proselytizing.

Scientists, theologians, clinicians, contemplatives, atheists, agnostics, and people of all religious traditions—or none—are equally welcome.

We will not attempt to establish where wisdom comes from. We will explore how we know, what expands the conditions for knowing, and how we attribute the source of what becomes known.

What emerges may be understood as inner wisdom, intuition, insight, divine guidance, neuropsychological integration, or another personally meaningful source.

The object of inquiry is knowing. The attribution of its source remains personal.

Methods Participants Will Explore

• Accessing biocognitive registries of inner wisdom — recognizing knowledge expressed through cognition, affect, sensation, memory, and embodied experience.

• Sharpening contemplative inquiry — asking questions that invite discovery rather than confirm existing beliefs.

• Suspending agency — relinquishing the need to manufacture or control an answer.

• Identifying epistemic noise — observing thoughts, emotions, sensations, expectations, and cultural assumptions without automatically granting them explanatory authority.

• Practicing noninterference — allowing what emerges to be encountered before interpretation organizes it.

• Exploring unselfing — loosening habitual self-reference to make unfamiliar possibilities available to awareness.

• Separating emergence from attribution — distinguishing what becomes known from the explanation of where it came from.

• Expanding epistemic horizons — exploring contemplative ways of knowing without requiring a prescribed theological or secular worldview.

The Invitation

You do not have to agree on the source of wisdom to explore the conditions that allow wisdom to emerge.

Because of the limited spaces for these live sessions, registrations are non-refundable. Sessions are not recorded or offered for replay in order to preserve the privacy, presence, and confidentiality of the dialogue.