Symposiums

A Symposium on Contemplative Technologies was held by the Contemplative Sciences Center and its Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab (CIRCL) on October 9 and 10. The symposium was a public event exploring meditative, artistic, and interactive tools — including historical practices, immersive installations, sonic environments, and Virtual Reality — designed to guide attention, deepen perception, and evoke embodied insight. View video of all of the symposium panels and more. Learn more

Across the multi-millennial discourse on contemplative practices within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, there is a pervasive tension that persists between practices that apply effort and those that are effortless. Recently this has emerged as an important framework for interdisciplinary engagement about enhanced cognitive performance. While presented as a binary in classical accounts—as if effort is a fixed and static quantity that is present or absent—it is better understood as a descriptive framework for a spectrum of contemplative dynamics that unfold during meditative experiences, and which can be intentionally enacted, or fostered, by different contemplative techniques. These practices are performed in ongoing and dynamic shifts across a spectrum of intensities of effort. This symposium furthered transdisciplinary research collaborations to advance a collective understanding of the underlying dynamics of contemplative practices by bringing together leading specialists for an exploration of these practices in light of contemporary philosophical inquiry and psychological research on effort and effortless, self-emergent experiences. Learn more