Thanks for coming out on this bright sunny day where spring is visited us temporarily once again. Nice to see spring coming, although in February gets me a little worried. My name is Hal Roth I direct the contemplative studies, initiative and concentration here at Brown. And let me say how many of you are new to contemplative studies? Okay, is that enough justification for going into the explanation? What? Yes, yes. So, we are one of the newest concentrations of brown. 

And we study contemplative experience across cultures and across time, from scientific, humanistic and artistic perspectives. We also teach contemplative practices in a very particular way, in a classroom setting, in which students not only approach studying contemplative practices from the added distance perspective of a third person observer, which is what we do in many of our classes in university. But in particular, we emphasize what we call a critical first person perspective. 

So that is we learn the techniques that we would learn. In a contemplative practice center, we learn the cognitive frameworks in which those practices are embedded. But we also subject those frameworks to the kinds of criticisms that one does not ordinarily do in a contemplative practice center.

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