We live more fulfilling lives when we are motivated to make positive contributions to society. The Center’s programs are designed to help us redirect our creative energies into enlightened actions that renew personal motivation and sustain our communities and societies.
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Ethics Initiative
As an interdisciplinary think tank on ethical responsibility in science, engineering, business, and public policy, The Center organizes public conferences and private roundtable discussions designed to catalyze innovative systems thinking on complex, global challenges facing humanity. Videos of many of The Center’s public programs are available here.
The Center develops innovative curricula for teaching ethics, avoiding prescriptive approaches and using hands-on activities to stimulate reflection and life-transforming personal growth. Our first program began with weekend workshops for MIT undergraduate and graduate students, whose immediate, enthusiastic response revealed an untapped hunger to explore questions of meaningful life purpose and their role as future leaders with huge potential impact in the world.
Transformative Leadership
Target: University Students & Executives / USA, India, Mexico, Indonesia
In a program created with MIT Sloan School and adopted at other leading business and management schools, students explore how to align professional values with their deep personal values and develop reflective thinking skills for ethical leadership.
Compassionate Young Leaders
Target: High School Students (Ages 15-17) / USA and India
The Center is running programs for high school students, exploring how compassionate leadership can be taught to youth, and pairing schools in the USA and India to build global community.
Enlightened Leadership: Organizational and Executive Ethics
Target: Corporation Executives and Governments / Global
The Center has designed ethical leadership training modules for delivery in corporate and other institutional settings, addressing unique challenges ranging from systemic corruption to the particular needs of CEOs.
Ethics Training
Target: Undergraduate and Graduate Students/ Specialized professionals / USA and India
The Center develops training curricula tailored to the ethical challenges of specialized professional fields, including scientists, researchers, and police officers.
The Center offers fellowships to individuals dedicated to extending the reach of science and technology to serve humanity’s greatest needs with sustainable, ethical commitment.
Some of Our New Initiatives:
Young Peace Leaders
A joint initiative of The Dalai Lama Center at MIT and WGBH
Young Peace Leaders (YPL) is an innovative, trans-media initiative designed to promote personal transformation and cross-cultural understanding among 10-14 year-olds around the world. By teaching awareness, compassion, and right action, the project will promote character development and global citizenship through the cultivation of inner values. YPL participants will also see how their personal transformation can lead to them take part in global transformation.
The video game at the center of the YPL initiative is unlike any other, modeling and encouraging compassionate action between players and across cultures. In the game, players help an ancient race of beings from another planet by using the power of personal interconnection. Students who work cooperatively, with classmates and with other young people around the world, are rewarded. In place of the usual warfare model used in most games—where single players battle each other to win the game, and use varying amounts of violence to succeed—YPL offers a vibrant and engaging gaming environment that encourages positive action and cooperative thinking.
Vocal Vibrations
A collaboration between the MIT Media Lab, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT and Le Laboratoire (Paris)
Vocal Vibrations is a voice and body experiment that will explore the relationship between human physiology and resonant vibrations. Human health famously influences the voice. This project explores the hypothesis that the voice – by focusing internally augmented, and externally applied, vibrations – can influence mental and physical health through observable physicochemical phenomena in the body and in ways consonant with - and extrapolating from – a range of contemplative practices.
Composer/inventor/professor Tod Machover of the MIT Media Lab, working with graduate students Elly Jessop and Rebecca Kleinberger, MIT scientists, and Tenzin Priyadarshi, founder & director of the Dalai Lama Center at MIT, is designing a vocal art installation where visitors enter private environments, kinds of grottos, with specially designed acoustical properties that allow each person to meditate around vibrations generated by their own voice and then distributed within and throughout their own bodies. Natural physiological vibrations elicited by voice will be accented within these grottos via visual, acoustic, physical and other stimuli. Visitors will move from one grotto installation to the next while passing through an environment where collective voice experiments will occasionally take place to explore vibrational resonance such as may occur in group singing or chanting. Vocal Vibrations, which builds around currently researched relationships between self-voice vibrations and cellular, tissue, and body health, will open to the public at Le Lebaoratoire in Paris in fall 2013, and then travel to the new Laboratoire in Cambridge Massachusetts (Lab Cambridge) following its opening in 2014, and after this to other international sites.
Science, Monks, and Technology
Click here to view the program brochure.