The project of mapping the brain is making great progress in our time, butmapping the mind, in contrast, is still in its infancy. All people have an inner life, but the systematic exploration of this terrain, in a manner that can be useful to the scientific investigation of consciousness, is not well developed. Buddhists have …
Continue reading “Master Lecture – A Buddhist Contribution to Neurophenomenology”
The Classical Daoist tradition in China, known through its two famous “mystical” works, the Daodejing («The Way and its Potency») and the Zhuangzi («Teachings of Master Zhuang”), provides specific advice about forms of contemplative practice that develop qualities of selfless and impartial cognition thus enabling accurate perceptions, judgments and spontaneous intuitions to be made about …
Continue reading “Master Lecture – Science, Daoism, and Scholarly Subjectivity”
Science, Daoism, and Scholarly Subjectivity
Contemplation in Contexts: Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Across the Boundaries of the Humanities and Sciences
Contemplation in Contexts: Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Across the Boundaries of the Humanities and Sciences This talk explores a central challenge in contemplative sciences: the roles of so-called “contexts” in contemplation and the possibility of consilience between the humanities and sciences in contemplative research. It will focus on a specific contemplative tradition, namely Tibetan Buddhist practices, …
The exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness can have a potentially deep impact on our understanding of ourselves and the world. These states, however, are difficult to bring into a scientific discourse due to issues connected to their properties of reproducibility and ineffability. But these obstacles do not pose impossible challenges. Recently, there has been …
Continue reading “Concurrent Session 2 – Exploring Sleep Paralysis”
Deep feeling for life characterizes monks, healers, and scholars. However, the current context of higher education in the United States leaves behind the quest for meaning in favor of corporate cost cutting and employment-focused endeavors by which we are judged. This panel of scholars seeks to share the ongoing process of creating a master’s degree …
In this paper, I argue that results from contemplative neuroscience can help resolve a dispute between Husserl and Gurwitsch regarding whether attention is endogenous or exogenous. The empirical results indicate that attention is endogenous, i.e., that we are subjectively aware — and to a certain extent in control — of the direction of our attention. …
I argue for a contemporary academic theological discipline of Buddhist empirical practical theology, wherein qualitative and quantitative contemplative research of the lived experience of Buddhist religion is systematically conducted from within the historical, cultural, and social contexts of religious practice. After briefly reviewing certain philosophical issues with respect to a specifically Buddhist practical theology, I …
In light of a growing interest in contemplative practices such as meditation, the emerging field of contemplative science has been challenged to describe and objectively measure how these practices affect health and well-being. We recently proposed that equanimity could serve as a measurable outcome of contemplative practices, both in basic science investigations and in clinical …
