Cultivating Conative Balance

Presented by The Contemplary and the Positive Psychology Interest Group

All of us want to be happy and we all want the freedom to pursue our desires. But since time immemorial, human beings have been grappling with the fact that not all of our desires will help us flourish. We are all familiar with the experience of being torn by conflicting desires, or of succumbing to desires which we know to be misguided. This raises some important questions. Are we in control of our desires, or are our desires in control of us? Is there anything we can do to cultivate wholesome desires, and free ourselves from harmful ones? How can we exercise greater choice around which desires we pursue?

In this lecture, Dr Alan Wallace will explore the notion of ‘conative intelligence,’ or desiring wisely. Drawing from years of contemplative practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well as deep scholarly erudition, Dr Wallace contends that it is in fact possible to cultivate conative intelligence. By combining the scientific rigour of modern psychology with the introspective methods of enquiry found in Buddhist psychology, Dr Wallace proposes a new model for approaching human flourishing and the ethical life.

 

 

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Dr Alan Wallace

Alan Wallace began his studies of Tibetan Buddhism, language, and culture in 1970 at the University of Göttingen and then continued his studies over the next fourteen years in India, Switzerland, and the United States. During most of that time he trained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H.H. the Dalai Lama, for whom he has often served as interpreter. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1987, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he went on to earn his Ph.D. in religious studies at Stanford University in 1995. He then taught for four years in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and is now the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He has edited, translated, authored, and contributed to more than forty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and Buddhism, including Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity, and Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness.