Home
The Rationale
Core Faculty
Courses
Concentration
Readings

The Contemplative Studies Initiative is a group of Brown faculty with diverse academic specializations who are united around a common interest in the study of contemplative states of mind. We are currently working to establish a Center for Contemplative Studies to coordinate students’ academic and personal study in this area and, eventually, a new undergraduate concentration at Brown to study the underlying philosophy, psychology, and phenomenology of human contemplative experience. In both the Center and the proposed concentration we will focus on many of the ways that human beings have found, across cultures and across time, to concentrate, broaden and deepen conscious awareness as the gateway to cultivating their full potential and to leading more meaningful and fulfilling lives. We will study what this group of experiences entails and how to critically appraise them, how to identify them in literature and the arts, how to experience them ourselves, and how to apply them to our daily lives.

The proposed concentration would bridge the humanities, the sciences, and the creative arts in an effort to identify the varieties of contemplative experiences, to find meaningful scientific explanations for them, to cultivate first-hand knowledge of them, and to critically assess their nature and significance. It would thus result in a comprehensive understanding of the newly emerging field of the study of higher forms of consciousness.