The Contemplative Spirit

On Contemplative Psychology

This paper is a revised version of a seminal paper, written as early as 1986, that introduces the concept of contemplative psychology as a psychology that is an intrinsic part of the contemplative traditions of most world religions. It refers to the psychological insights and methods that are—often implicitly—present in the spiritual traditions themselves. The paper delineates this psychology a...

Varieties of Contemplative Practice.

ThearticlebyKokandSinger1 appearing in this issueof JAMA Psychiatry presents a novel training program to enhance perceived social connectedness through the use of dyadic contemplative practice. While scientific research on meditation and other contemplative practices has burgeoned over the past decade,2 this research has focused on a small subset of practices and, in particular, on the cultivat...

Neurophenomenology and Contemplative Experience

Introduction Scientific investigation of the mind, known since the nineteen-seventies as 'cognitive science', is an interdisciplinary field of research comprising psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind. The presence of philosophy in this list is telling. Cognitive science, although institutionally well established, is not a theor...

Contemplative Media Studies

The psychological and socio-economic implications of digital technologies call for scholarship that engages questions about the nature of human consciousness, the construction of the self and the ethics of technical development. In this article, I outline a framework for an approach called contemplative media studies. This approach incorporates several different scholarly threads, namely: via c...

Recollecting the Spirit of Jihad