The Essence of Freedom Through Education
Most people who try meditation never really learn how to use it. Tarpa teaches you how.
Tarpa is a free, secular educational nonprofit that teaches meditation as scientific method — a rigorous, learnable approach to investigating your own experience, understanding what drives it, and developing the clarity and skill to change it. No religious beliefs, fees, or prerequisites required.
What Tarpa's Offers
The contemplative traditions of Buddhism developed, over 2,500 years, a sophisticated science of mind — precise techniques for observing experience, identifying its patterns, and testing what actually produces change. That knowledge has historically been locked behind religious institutions or diluted into generic wellness programs. Tarpa makes it available to everyone, in a rigorous secular framework that integrates Buddhist contemplative science with Western philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
The result is an education in which students don't just learn about meditation — they learn to use it as a precision instrument for investigating their own experience, reaching their own conclusions, and building something genuinely new in their lives.
The Palace of Learning
Tarpa's online curriculum — the Palace of Learning — is a free, progressive course in meditation theory and practice drawn from Dr. Seton's courses at Dartmouth College and extended into a multi-stage framework that a single academic term cannot accommodate. Students move through five floors, each building on the previous, at their own pace with no deadlines or requirements.
For those seeking the full educational experience, each floor connects to a guided retreat at Tarpa's Vermont cabins — the distraction-free laboratory environment where students move from studying the methodology to investigating it across the full range of daily experience, with direct instructor guidance throughout.
Meet the Instructor
Dr. Gregory Seton is a Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College with a DPhil in Buddhist Studies from Oxford University. He has taught Buddhist meditation theory and practice at Dartmouth since 2016, and brings 35 years of personal contemplative study to Tarpa's curriculum. What he offers is the combination that makes this curriculum distinctive: the analytical precision of rigorous scholarship, the methodological depth of serious long-term practice, and the commitment to making genuine investigation possible for any learner regardless of background. Full Credentials
The Palace of Learning, a progressive course in meditation theory and practice
Ready to Begin?
Browse Our Curriculum – Explore the Palace of Learning, free and open to all
Educational Approach – How Tarpa's scientific method framework works
Free Enrollment – No prerequisites, no commitments, no fees
About Our Retreat Cabins – Immersive study and practice with direct instruction
FAQs – Common questions answered