Knowledge is for the well-being of all beings.
These poignant words, with which Laura Candiotto concludes the interview kindly granted to MindScience Academy, resonate with the power of a motto. She describes knowledge as embodied practice, not abstract, conducted in participatory modes. In the past as well as today, in both the East and the West, students, teachers, masters, and disciples have together engaged in this. Knowledge, according to Laura Candiotto, occurs "in the midst" of interaction, encounter, and dialogue, which is fundamental because it allows for the enactment of transformation between the knowing subject and the knowledge produced.
She further delves into the details of this transformation that leads the subject beyond—or rather, to something more than knowledge: wisdom, which in turn carries with it ethics, thus ethical action, which is the expression of the qualities of knowledge.
She then recalls how the described aspects are well represented in the contemporary perspective of enactivist epistemology, developed in the 1990s by Francisco Varela, along with Evan Thomson and Eleanor Rosch. Varela, together with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, founded the Mind&Life Institute, which develops precisely the enactivist perspective at an academic level and beyond, of which Laura Candiotto is also a part (Mind&Life Europe).
These poignant words, with which Laura Candiotto concludes the interview kindly granted to MindScience Academy, resonate with the power of a motto. She describes knowledge as embodied practice, not abstract, conducted in participatory modes. In the past as well as today, in both the East and the West, students, teachers, masters, and disciples have together engaged in this. Knowledge, according to Laura Candiotto, occurs "in the midst" of interaction, encounter, and dialogue, which is fundamental because it allows for the enactment of transformation between the knowing subject and the knowledge produced.
She further delves into the details of this transformation that leads the subject beyond—or rather, to something more than knowledge: wisdom, which in turn carries with it ethics, thus ethical action, which is the expression of the qualities of knowledge.
She then recalls how the described aspects are well represented in the contemporary perspective of enactivist epistemology, developed in the 1990s by Francisco Varela, along with Evan Thomson and Eleanor Rosch. Varela, together with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, founded the Mind&Life Institute, which develops precisely the enactivist perspective at an academic level and beyond, of which Laura Candiotto is also a part (Mind&Life Europe).
