Inner and Outer Care: Planetary and Meditative Pathways
October 13, 2025 (Monday)
Symposium
In an era of accelerating technology and escalating climate crisis, humanity confronts two interconnected emergencies. The AI-driven digital economy, with its relentless focus on speed and productivity, not only rewires our cognitive and emotional lives but also reconfigures our relationship with our physical surroundings and the more-than-human world. This digital "worlding" mirrors the very logic that fuels ecological collapse—instrumentalizing life, fragmenting relations, and deepening our alienation from both inner and outer realities.
The symposium “Inner and Outer Care: Planetary and Meditative Pathways” seeks to convene scholars from diverse disciplines to explore avenues of response to this existential impasse. Planetary pathways call for renewed ethical, ecological, and political commitments to rebuild fractured relations with our planet. In parallel, meditative pathways cultivate inner capacities of attention and care, enabling us to resist digital alienation and reweave more aesthetic, meditative, compassionate forms of life. Taken together, these pathways affirm that the spiritual and the material, the inner and the outer, are inseparable dimensions of care, essential for envisioning a more sustainable future.
SPEAKERS:
Hannes BERGTHALLER
National Taiwan Normal University
Mental Health, Ecological Integrity, and the Attention Economy: A Systems-Theoretical Perspective
Chia-ju CHANG
Brooklyn College, CUNY
The CARE Curriculum: Inner and Outer Pathways for Personal and Planetary Transformation
Li-hsin HSU
National Chengchi University
Romantic Reverie as Ecological Imagination
Casper Bruun JENSEN
Chulalongkorn University
Planetary Care and an Ecology of World Models
Pei-ying LIN
National Chengchi University
Green Care and Buddhist Healing: An Experimental Forest Retreat
LU Shuyuan
Huanghe Science and Technology College & Ecological Culture Research Center
Seeking Purity within the Xuanlan Leads to Purity in the World: A Cosmological Interpretation of Contemplation and Meditation (*Presentation in Mandarin)
TENG Wei-jen
Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts
Cognition, Emotion, and Care in Buddhist Meditation
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