Monks in real life

A group of 20 Penn students spent their spring semester “being surrounded by noise [while] trying to be silent.”

College freshman Rachel Eisenberg was one of these students who became “monks in real life” for professor Justin McDaniel’s “Living Deliberately” course.

Living as a monk while surrounded by university life “added a lot to the experience,” Eisenberg said. “[It was] enlightening to be in the world but not be a part of it.”

“I wanted to create a course where students would be forced to create that space and reflect,” McDaniel said.

Eisenberg found that this course allowed her and her classmates to make this space and reflect and “retreat into ourselves,” she said.

“I just wanted to live a life that I felt was authentic, and I thought it was a good way to start,” College sophomore Aelita Parker said. She felt that this course was particularly well suited for college students.

Parker said that before the course she felt “like a robot” attending classes, interacting with friends and getting from point A to point B.

In order to change the typical student world view, McDaniel’s course combined lectures on monastic history and application of some monastic traditions through special regulations, called precepts.

“Instead of completing assignments, they were forced to think about it,” McDaniel said.

***

In his office, McDaniel has a stack of small black journals as high as his desk.

One of the required precepts for the students was to journal hourly. Students turned in multiple journals over the semester and each journal held 150 pages.

“I was amazed at the amount of writing and depth of insight,” he admitted, gesturing to the stack.

Journaling gave students an excuse to reflect, McDaniel said. He said the normal complaint from college students is, “I read so much in college, I learn so much in college that I never have time to reflect.”

Eisenberg enjoyed being forced to write out all her ideas, including those for assignments for other classes. By writing and often re-writing drafts of a paper, Eisenberg found that she was able to focus her thoughts more.

Other precepts included waking up at 5 a.m. without an alarm clock, eating unprocessed food and abstaining from technology.

All these regulations, McDaniel explained, were put in place to help build awareness.

In their journals, students were encouraged to build awareness by taking note of the world around them. One student, McDaniel explained, counted the number of windows in Harrison College House. Eisenberg took note of the way she ate, carefully thinking about each bite and action.

“Basic awareness — that’s how awareness starts,” McDaniel said. “It’s a type of meditation.”

“My idea was just to create awareness and create the space,” he added. “What they did with that space I could not predict.”

***

For 28 days, Eisenberg, Parker and their classmates were silent.

“That complete code of silence really helped them … let their thoughts cultivate without stopping them and trying to communicate them,” McDaniel said. In their journals, many students described how silence helped them reevaluate their relationships to their selves and to others.

Although Parker originally found the silence alienating, she found it easy to unlearn speech.

“All we really want is to feel connected to people,” she said, which many people seek through conversation. But for Parker, small talk has the opposite effect. “It makes me feel cheap,” she admitted.

For those 28 days of silence, Parker was able to reflect and think about her relationships. During that time, she worked on “knowing exactly who I am and being able to accept it,” she said.

“It brought a clarity to your own thought,” explained Hannah Feldman, a sophomore in the College and student in the class.

When the month was over at the beginning of April and the students were allowed to speak once more, Eisenberg and Parker realized not speaking for a month was not the hardest part; instead, coming back to a world of conversations — during Fling — was overwhelming and made them feel “bombarded.”

McDaniel noted that “some students almost got addicted to the quiet.”

For Eisenberg, communication was “a lot more valuable” when she had to find different modes of interaction, from slipping notes under her friends’ doors to writing letters by hand and mailing them.

“Because they spent [one month] listening instead of speaking … they really listened, some of them for the first time,” McDaniel said. “We come and speak at each other” in a University setting, he added, and occasionally it’s good to really listen to each other.

“What happened in this course [was that] students got to listen,” McDaniel said. By listening to their peers, students were exposed to fellow students who were often fundamentally different from themselves, according to McDaniel, as the course included students from all four undergraduate school and included majors such as linguistics, criminology and religious studies.

McDaniel did not allow students to “go into their little hives” or typical clique groups. Instead, all of these diverse students came together.

***

“I was not a morning person,” Feldman said. For her, waking up at 5 a.m. without an alarm clock did not originally sound appealing.

But she said the experience “alters your sense of what is late and what is early.”

“Some days,” she said, “you wake up at six and get really mad [at yourself.]”

But in the end, Feldman explained that the course changed her viewpoint.

Waking and sleeping with the sun felt right to Parker because it got rid of unhealthy excesses. Each day she had five to six extra hours to spend just thinking and experiencing the world.

Parker used this extra time to consider everything she had taken for granted. For one afternoon, she thought about the construction workers who made her room and considered how important their craftsmanship was for her safety.

“We get so used to using our time to complete tasks that we fill it up with killing time,” McDaniel said. Sometimes, he explained, it is better to do nothing and focus inward.

***

Parker is already jealous thinking about students who will be taking this class in the future. Even though introspective people may find the course easier, she said, it is important that others consider taking the course.

“The people that will never even consider taking [Living Deliberately] are the ones who [should],” she said.

McDaniel is not the type to offer a multiple-choice final exam. In the end, he believes that students should have focused on learning about themselves and not necessarily the lecture material.

“The course was really about them — it wasn’t really about me or the subject matter,” he said. “I learned a great deal, and hopefully they learned a little.”

For Eisenberg, the course helped her “to be present … experience every moment [and find] true natural happiness.”

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