Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing interest in economic and psychological studies of happiness through the concept of “subjective well-being.” Contemplative studies can also be situated within this history, insofar as it is indebted to mindfulness studies, Buddhist modernism, and thus the twin goals of minimizing suffering and enhancing well-being. Contemplative …
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Contemplative Science Research and The Psychology of Confucian Virtue Ethics
Although the study of ethics in the Western academy has been dominatedfor the past several hundred years by two rationalist models, deontology andutilitarianism, there has been a resurgence of interest, especially in the past decade, in more embodied, practice-based approaches such as virtue ethics. In this talk, I will review evidence from various branches of …
A Buddhist Contribution to Neurophenomenology
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 …
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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 …
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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”
