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Request for Proposals: Toward A Science of Awakening (Closed)
The Opportunity
As more powerful and precise instruments of study have become available over time, humanity has invested in mapping every corner of our shared, external world. Yet the landscape of our inner world, of consciousness itself, remains mostly uncharted. The Consciousness Foundation(CoFo) intends to draw the map.
Across spiritual traditions, deliberate contemplative practices are often understood to create enduring and fundamental transformations of conscious experience, including shifts in perception, self-concept, motivation, morality, and interpersonal relationships. Specialized language exists across traditions to describe the transformative waypoints and endpoints of practice and devotion, for example the terms “stream entry,” and “enlightenment” (Buddhism), theosis and forms of “union with God” (Christianity), fana and baqua (Sufism), and concepts such as devekut in Judiasm.
For centuries, the patterned tools of scientific investigation have been held separately from the nebulous notion of spiritual fulfillment, with these states regarded as poetic, ineffable, and outside the realm of scientific investigation. While a fundamentally irreplaceable aspect of the awakening process is likely to remain in the experiential and ineffable realm of the sacred, in parallel, some application of systematic, technical, and rigorous approaches have been built into spiritual practices themselves since before the Copernican revolution. Ngondro practices in Vajrayana Buddhism, the rosary in Christianity, whirling in Sufism are all examples of spiritual technologies that were arrived at following long periods of cultural hypothesis testing about what is and is not effective, and iterating based on experiential reports.
At the Consciousness Foundation, we believe that the stable, trait-level changes in experience that cluster under the broad term of “awakening” are tractable to science, ready to be investigated, and hold the potential for enormous positive individual and societal change. As a starting point, we offer the following definition: An integrated awakening experience results in a persistent and fundamental change in moment-to-moment experience, especially of the sense of self, that correlates with perceptual and psychological changes and results in reduced suffering, greater well being, and greater freedom.
Why Now?
Currently, the field of Contemplative Science is a small but thriving multidisciplinary academic domain composed of neuroscientists, psychologists, phenomenologists, and others. Within Contemplative Science there are many researchers who have had concrete experience with the trait-level transformative changes that cluster under the term “awakening” or awakening-type experiences, who are capable of applying the rigorous tools of scientific inquiry to the domain of awakening, and who have the desire to do so, however, they are currently unable to conduct awakening research due to both funding and professional constraints - awakening research is not currently a tenure-track career option nor is it a funding priority for traditional research funders.
We believe that creating a thorough, scientifically informed understanding of the process of awakening is the first step in a cascade leading to powerful individual and cultural change.
Our Approach
At The Consciousness Foundation, we take a “speed of wisdom” approach, ensuring that the consciousness tools arriving in culture have been examined and validated by the scientific process. To that end, we are allocating the majority of program funds to academic field-building: seeding a collegial and rigorous Science of Awakening across institutions. We believe that the process by which scientific inquiry takes place is as important as the outcome, and that the beginning of the Awakening Science field will be reflected in its history.
To that end, we are creating an unusual, cohort-based funding program, where our research grantees will not work in isolation, but instead be encouraged to collaborate and share information with one another at meetings and gatherings that we facilitate. We are actively seeking input and feedback from the research community at every stage of the field building process, particularly, co-creating a priority roadmap for the field with the research community itself.
In 2026, we will:
- Award $1.5M in Science of Awakening project grants and facilitate collaboration between the cohort of grantees.
- Convene researchers in order to co-create a Science of Awakening position paper and field-consensus research roadmap.
- Publish an accessible “state of the field” report for all curious readers - subscribe to our newsletter to receive the report when it’s available.