Through its distinctive research and degree programs, the Bhaktivedanta Institute (B.I.) is in the forefront of the newly emerging scientific field of Consciousness Studies. In 1990, the Institute conducted in San Francisco, the First International Conference on the Study of Consciousness within Science, in which fourteen major research scientists including three Nobel Laureates presented papers. Following that, the institute conducted the world’s only colloquium on science and consciousness in the San Francisco Bay Area that ran for over a decade.
As a logical culmination of these activities, the Bhaktivedanta Institute started in 1997 in Mumbai, the world’s first full-fledged M.S./Ph.D. programs in “Consciousness Studies”, in collaboration with the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, one of India’s premiere technological universities. See sample Call for Admissions poster here.
Since 2017, due to the University Grants Commission (UGC) Policy on off-campus programs concerning deemed universities, we have suspended our off-campus Masters program in CSt indefinitely. We expect to restart this program in future.
Persons aspiring to enter the Ph.D. program in consciousness studies (CSt) at Bhaktivedanta Institute must note that our program is not a study of consciousness directly. This program is based on the Institute’s own research initiative within the new field of consciousness studies. It is a rigorous scientific study of matter while taking into account the presence of consciousness in the lived world. Thus, the program will conform to the widely accepted standards and practices of scientific research pertaining to study of matter, even while encouraging creative scientific ideas.
To learn more about the Institute’s distinct approach to consciousness studies, contact the director.
There are other approaches within the field of consciousness studies, which can be subsumed under the following broad categories.
- Stay within the limits of current empirical science and account for the phenomenon of consciousness;
- Envisage that the study of consciousness requires a radically new approach within science.
- Argue that consciousness, being a quintessentially subjective phenomenon, cannot be studied within a empirical science that is committed to the third-person perspective.
The students admitted into the Ph.D. program will study all of these approaches in appropriate courses.
