A catalyst for human flourishing

How to understand the mind and cultivate the heart

Every day, we support vital work that transforms our scientific understanding of the human mind and its capacity to develop positive mental states. We believe that when contemplative wisdom and practices are fully integrated into modern day science it has the power to act as a catalyst for human and societal flourishing. This is the promise of what we call contemplative science.

The main message, to me, is the importance for human beings to learn how to become experts on their own mind. -- Francisco J. Varela

Together with the world’s leading scientists, contemplative scholars, and healthcare, educational and management practitioners, we create an open and interdisciplinary dialogue between modern sciences and contemplative practices and share our findings with the world.

MLE Initiative: Education

We foster an "Education of the Heart" with our Community of Contemplative Education (CCE).

Click here to learn more about the status quo of research in this field.

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ESRI 2020

European Summer Research Institute

The next ESRI will be held this summer (August 9-15, 2020) at Schloss Buchenau, Germany. The application period will open soon.

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Community of Contemplative Education

The Community of Contemplative Education (CCE) was initiated by Mind & Life Europe with the goal of creating a sustainable and vibrant community of the leading pioneers and experts to enhance collective learning and implementation around contemplative education in Europe to cultivate human flourishing through education.

There is a great deal of excellent work on contemplative and mindfulness based approaches happening out there across Europe, in schools, universities, and the community, supported by change makers and even politicians in some countries, but it is at present scattered and incoherent without enough interchange and mutual learning. Learn more about it on our CCE website.

Contemplative Science Symposium 2019

The Contemplative Science Symposium themed "Beyond Confines - Integrating Society, Consciousness and Society" took place in October 2019 in Fürstenfeldbruck (near Munich, Germany).

Mind & Life Europe brought together diverse knowledge traditions and disciplines in order to strengthen the growing community of contemplative scientists and practitioners. In this pan-European symposium, new audiences and changemakers were encouraged to personally engage in the evolving issues, learn from thought leaders and apply an interdisciplinary perspective to their environment. Groundbreaking research and cutting-edge approaches were be raised and discussed within and in-between the following fields: politics, education, nutrition, neuro- and cognitive science, philosophy and economics.

Click here to learn more about the Contemplative Science Symposium 2019.

Second Workshop: Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology

Thursday , 23.05.2019 , 09:47
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Second Workshop: Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology

 

© Prisca Bauer, MD, Ph.D. Below is a short account of the 5-day workshop on contemplative phenomenology (May 13-17, 2019), organised by Mind & Life Europe’s Initiative for Contemplative Phenomenology (ICP). Day 1: Getting to Know Each Other and the Epoché What happens when forty-two people from different walks of life (including a documentary maker) spend a week together in an idyllic French farmhouse? It sounds like a reality TV show, but luckily it is not. What we all have in common is an interest in meditation and/or philosophy and we ...
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From Enactive to Enlightened AI

Tuesday , 05.03.2019 , 14:48
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From Enactive to Enlightened AI

 

© Elena Antonova, Ph.D. (Association Member, Mind & Life Europe) The Embodied Mind, a book co-authored by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleonor Rosch, directly engaged with the field of Artifical Intelligence (AI) and robotics by critiquing a cognitive representationalist model of the mind and presenting an embodied and enactive approach as an alternative. It led to the emergence of the new kind of AI robotics, with the embodied enactive robots learning from the experiences of their interaction with the environment and/or humans, ...
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Understanding the World

Friday , 25.05.2018 , 20:36
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Understanding the World

 

In early May, Mind & Life Europe Board and Association members Elena Antonova, Amy Cohen Varela and Charles-Antoine Janssen attended as observers the second in a series of dialogues entitled ‘Fundamental knowledge: Dialogue between Russian and Buddhist Scholars’ in Dharamsala, India, at the behest of the Dalai Lama. This meeting gathered Russian philosophers and scientists from the fields of neuroscience, genetics and physics with Buddhist scholars under the title “Understanding the World”. The first meeting in this budding series was ...
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