CONTEMPLATIVE SCIENCE
Contemplative science is the empirical investigation of the mind and its functions using the skills of highly refined attention, mindfulness, and introspection. The discipline is practiced by contemplative scientists: professional contemplatives who complete years of rigorous meditative training, on a par with the graduate training completed by neuroscientists, psychologists, and physicists, or with the athletic training completed by the world’s Olympians.
This training refines a person’s attention skills to a degree that is now exceedingly rare: advanced practitioners can remain perfectly attentive, without a moment of distraction, for hours on end. This level of attentional acuity — a form of contemplative technology — enables a wide variety of research protocols that are simply impossible without it.
Therefore, contemplative scientists can not only serve as participants in other scientists’ studies but also function as professional colleagues who can propose testable hypotheses, produce empirical data, and make genuine discoveries. First-person data from contemplative can be integrated with third-person data of the various sciences, enabling an unprecedented convergence of evidence.
At the CCR, this form of contemplative-scientific inquiry is focused on two main research topics:
(2) the nature and potentials of genuine well-being.
