Research
A complete picture of reality must include the mind.
To realize the full potential of contemplative science, our Research program views contemplatives not as mere participants in other scientists’ studies but as true colleagues — co-investigators — who can produce empirical evidence and make genuine discoveries.
CCR Research Program Outputs
Research Projects
Empirical studies and theoretical scholarship yield peer-reviewed publications that advance the methodology of contemplative science, report on collected data, and examine the effects of contemplative training and educational curricula. This work uses a conceptual framework that challenges dogma by questioning physicalist assumptions, yielding research designs that take phenomenology seriously and eschew the ethnocentrism and cultural particularism that have previously caused contemplatives to be either subordinated in, or completely excluded from, scientific research.
Research Tools & Methods
Research tools, including digital applications, and research methods designed to yield maximally reliable, reproducible, and intersubjectively verifiable data derived from meditators’ experiences and insights. These include methods that integrate first-person data with typical forms of measurements from third-person methods in science.
Research Expansion
Establishing career paths for professional contemplatives in science entails cultivating a thriving contemplative research community with its own tools, methods, code of ethics, and scholarly communication.
Expanding the Scope of Science
Scientists have shed a bright light on innumerable aspects of the physical domain, but have, for the most part, left us in the dark regarding the domain of the mind.
The CCR investigates the potential of mental perception as a valid avenue of empirical inquiry.
As the scope of science expands to encompass all of reality — including both the physical and perceptual — scientists need new methods to study mental phenomena not just indirectly, via neural correlates and behavioral expressions, but also directly, via rigorous, first-person inquiry conducted by contemplatives and contemplatives-in-training.
The Telescope of the Mind
Contemplatives-in-training, a cohort of whom are collaborators with the CCR, are highly trained experts who develop contemplative technology through rigorous, replicable methods that use refined attention, mindfulness, and introspection to study consciousness directly. Contemplative methods are to the contemplative scientist what the telescope is for the astronomer, or the microscope for the biologist: a refined mode of observation.
The rigors of scientific methodologies can apply to observations from internal inquiry, in a manner informed by time-tested methods from contemplative traditions and contemporary psychology in combination with cutting-edge scientific methodologies, to yield a deeper understanding of consciousness and genuine well-being.
Related Resources
