Values and Mission

MindScience Academy (MSA)

It is a project initiated by the Lama Tzong Khapa Institute on the impetus and encouragement received from His Holiness the Dalai Lama during his visit to Pomaia in 2014.

Its goal is to encourage and further promote dialogue between western sciences' findings and the precious body of knowledge found, across over 2500 years, in the buddhist traditions. A multidisciplinary approach aiming to develop human potential, with particular focus on inner qualities such as wisdom and compassion.

In this conversational perspective, MindScience Academy collaborates with scholarly circles, organizations and individual researchers to bring forth information, develop learning paths and support scientific inquiry. MindScience Academy aspires to create, beyond its digital platform's boundaries, active dialogue and sharing in a communal endeavor to value the perspectival richness of many stakeholders. It is less about confronting western scientific discourse with buddhist traditions for one to interpret the other than it is out experimenting. Quoting Roy Wagner: "every understanting of another culture is an experiment with one's own", some kind of transformative involvement.

Thus, the weight and authority of both science's findings and buddhist traditions, with their bodies of work, pour into the other and partake to common disclosure grounds, towards benchmarking and possible transformations. Since 2023, we act as scouting parties, archive and junction, publishing learning material, scientific research and influential thought, ultimately documenting this choral ensemble online for everyone to consult. At this project's core lays the urgent need to harbor human connection in the vicinity of contemplative research; to multiply and experiment, to put into mutual relation.

The essential marking we adopted as a logo recalls the shape of a bridge, as a link between East and West. As is often the case, a symbol's value expresses itself in the plurality of meanings it can host; this token can also be seen as the Buddha's lid while in deep contemplation. This very plurality of views, open to new possible connections, is capable of grasping the very crucial element within our pursuit.

The name, MindScience Academy, is intended as a mirror image of the term neuroscience and its context-sensitive achievements; a similar and yet singularly distinct picture. Whereas neuroscience's profile spontaneously addresses empirical observation, measuring the given data or the supposed process underlying mental events; mindscience turns its gaze to the possibility of knowledge inherent to first person, introspective experience, and its tracks and methodologies now in the service of a newfound interdisciplinarity. The term Academy leads us back to the intention of making this platform, within and beyond its digital boundaries, an open, stimulating, inclusive context, sensitive to the sprawling of knowledge across different, apparently autonomous, fields. Without the pretention of comparison, it is exciting to think about other models of thinking, such as mystical thought, Plato's academia or the eclectic nature of renaissance thinkers, furthering itself from the differences between scientific and philosophical inquiry, towards a overarching narrative.

Values ​​and Mission

MindScience Academy (MSA)

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Values and Mission