RESEARCH
A complete picture of reality must include the mind.
To realize the full potential of contemplative science, our Research program views professional 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
Peer-Reviewed Research Articles
Research Tools and Methods
Advocacy
Publications that discuss methods of contemplative science and report on data from the CCR’s studies, including evaluations of the CCR’s contemplative educational offerings.
Designed to yield maximally reliable, reproducible, and intersubjectively verifiable data derived from contemplatives’ experiences and insights, as well as methods for integrating such first-person data with measurements from third-person methods in science.
Encouraging a spirit of expansiveness and curiosity in empirical discovery, to challenge dogma and to explore the nature of consciousness and human flourishing, and establish a role for professional contemplatives in science.
Scientists have shed a bright light on innumerable aspects of the objective, physical world, but have, for the most part, left us in the dark regarding the subjective world of the mind. Moreover, the nature of consciousness remains a mystery to science.
We believe it is possible to demonstrate that our sixth mode of experience — mental perception — is a valid avenue of empirical inquiry and thus a legitimate part of science.
As the scope of science expands to encompass all of reality — including both the objective and subjective domains — scientists need new methods to study mental phenomena not just indirectly, via neural correlates (MRI & EEG) and behavioral expressions (Behavioral Psychology), but also directly, via first-person subjective inquiry (Professional Contemplation).
Professional Contemplatives, 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 flourishing.
