Historian of religions University of Sydney
I’m Flavio A. Geisshuesler, the Khyentse Macready Senior Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. I study meditation in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and the history of the study of religion, and I have turned that work toward a question our own time asks with new urgency: what the long history of religion can tell us about life with artificial intelligence. I pursue it in research and teaching, and in books and talks for audiences beyond the university.
Flavio on ABC Radio National
Flavio joined James Carleton and Michael Muthukrishna on God Forbid to discuss AI and religious imagination: the beliefs, promises and fears shaping our technological future.
The AI Apocalypse: Human salvation or human extinction?
01Research
Both grow from the same question: how people draw on religious and contemplative resources when the world they rely on begins to shift.
Monograph in preparation
Meditation as a Cultural Technology of Crisis, Vision, and Agency
Contemporary culture mostly treats meditation as a technique for calm. This book argues that Buddhist meditation is something larger: an active, world-engaging tradition through which communities have met crisis, cultivated vision, and acted in the world.
About the projectCurrent project
Authority, Mediation, and the Human
Public debate about AI swings between promises of salvation and warnings of doom. This project reads both as one apocalyptic story and traces the older religious grammars at work inside it, from creation and revelation to judgment and the question of non-human persons.
About the project02Publications
Public scholarship
The first volume of the Technopsychology Trilogy, written for readers beyond the university, on what leaders must still judge for themselves when machines produce convincing answers.
Book details (opens in a new tab)
A study of the Skullward Leap, a sky-gazing technique of the Great Perfection, which argues that the practice preserves traces of an older Tibetan world of sky and vitality, reworked over centuries inside Buddhism.
Read free (opens in a new tab)
A study of the Italian historian of religions and his thinking on crisis, apocalypse, and rebirth.
Read free (opens in a new tab)“Erratic Intelligence offers penetrating insight into where we are and what happens next if we continue to embrace efficiency as our goal.”
“Before you read anything else about AI, read this. It may change your life.”
“For all the dilemmas and uncertainty ahead, he gives us a path forward and a reason to believe in something better.”
03Talks
My heart is pumping, and I’m quite nervous. My mind is jumping around like a monkey from one branch to the next on a tree. Zipper, meditation, presentation, cappuccino, pizza. Always go to the pizza at the end. This is my mind.
I am trained as a historian of Indo-Tibetan religions, which means that I study very old texts that are written in Sanskrit and in Tibetan languages. And meditation has become one of our main means in our society to deal with stress. How meditation, or mindfulness meditation, works is by focusing one’s attention on an object, such as the natural flow of our breath. In a way, what meditation does is it disattends to these discursive thoughts that keep running through our minds, and it disrupts this identification with the monkey mind. We slow down, we get present-centered, and the monkey, in a way, relaxes. And so we can do this together right now, just for one second maybe. All of us just close our eyes, take a deep breath, and just feel our bodies in this very moment.
Now, this kind of felt good to me. I’m here to introduce a new paradigm of meditation research. These practices are usually marked by a very open, spacious, and kind of unstructured approach to reality. Here, we find meditators, like here, sitting on top of mountains, on the slopes of mountains, and they gaze into the blue skies for extended periods of time. And what happens is that as they do this, they start to perceive certain things. Visions start to come up quite naturally and automatically. And so I call these practices participant-spontaneous forms of meditation, because it’s as if by looking at reality in an unstructured way, reality itself grips us, or it manifests to us in an automatic way, and we start to appreciate things that we haven’t seen before.
This, too, can be done right now, right here. I mean, all of us can just let our gazes kind of fly across the panorama of this room, and you’ll see stuff you haven’t seen before. In a way, I believe that these types of techniques and this endless possibility and potential for vision is deeply connected to our passions. Passions, too, cannot be created. We’re usually gripped by our interests. And so in a way, me standing here today is the result of me following my monkey mind and becoming a speaker in front of you, sharing my knowledge with you guys.
I come to the second set of techniques. They usually consist out of two stages. In a first stage, the meditators visualize themselves and they identify with a deity. They do this over and over again, taking on the various characteristics of the god, like here, for example, in this mandala. And then in a second stage, they take on this identity, they embody it, and they act it out, and they perform various physical practices. And so these techniques I define as predictive-executive forms of meditation, because here we’re no longer participating in this kind of natural unfolding of reality, but much rather we’re setting ourselves up to take on a specific identity, we apply it, and then we test it in reality.
And so in a way, this too can be related to my experience standing in front of you right now. I remember when I first started out lecturing, I had a course of 140 students at the University of Virginia before I even finished a PhD, and I was so nervous that I kind of crafted myself this Flavio lecturer personality, and I was like, “Fact one, fact two, fact three.” It was like a reading, or a speaking Wikipedia entry. There was hardly any presence in that, the poor students. But it was over time, as I was practicing and repeating and kind of getting comfortable with this persona that I’ve crafted, that I was able to integrate form and freedom, structure and spontaneity, this public persona and the more intimate sense of self, which I hope is flowing through this talk today.
Research lecture, Azrieli Fellows Program, 2022. On the experimental and disruptive side of meditation and what it means for meditation research.
Watch the full lecture (21 min) on YouTube (opens in a new tab)So you can say, “Hey, this is horrible. We need to stop this. I will never, ever use AI. I’m throwing away my phone.” As soon as you turn on your phone, you’re using AI, right? People underestimate the pervasiveness of this technology.
But the point is, you have people who say, “Let’s return to the human”: restore presence, authorship, embodiment, slow reading, ethical judgment. I mean, this is my world, right? I am the humanities guy. I have two PhDs in the humanities. If you go on LinkedIn today, you have a lot of people that say, “Ah, the humanities, they will save us,” right?
But the secret is, and nobody talks about this, and nobody wants to talk about this, because the only thing that they’re not critical of is, in a way, their own thinking: the humanities, with the anti-foundationalist turn since the ’50s, ’60s, what is the French theory in France, has destroyed any sort of clear human value. Any sort of humanistic anchor that might have been there has been destroyed. And in many ways, if you read Barthes or Foucault, or you read Derrida, and it starts with Saussure, if you read these people, you can see how AI is having a field day with it. It is a dream.
If reality is completely detached from the text, and the text is just floating on top, and it’s authorless in a way, what is AI doing? It’s like, “Oh yeah, this is my world. Let’s go.” Right? This is a collaboration. Nobody’s talking about it, but the humanities are very much involved in this process, and they are not the solution to this problem. Believe me.
On screen, the film names the steps of the argument: the limits of refusal; the promise of a “return to the human”; a critique from within; the humanistic anchor; the intellectual lineage of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure; text without an author; and the consequence: the humanities are involved in the process they seek to resist.
Minds and Intelligences Research Centre, Macquarie University, May 2026 1 min 26 s
04University of Sydney
I teach Classical Tibetan, Sanskrit, and the history of Buddhist thought and practice, always starting from the sources. Since arriving at Sydney in 2024, I have designed three new units of study, and I welcome research students in Tibetan and Buddhist studies, the history of religions, and religion and technology.
Teaching and supervision05Repertoire
I have studied more than a dozen modern and classical languages, using them in different ways across research, teaching, and daily life. Moving between them has taught me to ask whether a familiar idea (mind, freedom, authority) means the same thing in another setting.
The repertoire below distinguishes fluent use, close reading for research, and languages I am still learning.
23 languages, 17 modern and 6 classical. Hover over a language or tap it to see its English name, my level, and whether it is modern or classical.
Six of these are languages I live in. The rest are working languages that keep doors open: to people, places, and archives.
06Beyond the university
A faster answer is useful. It does not settle what we should do, or what we need to keep learning. As we change our tools, how are we changing ourselves? That question has left the seminar room, and I take it beyond the university in three ways.
Film 2:56 An animated portrait
A short animated portrait: from the study of Buddhist meditation to business school, and the question both worlds now face. 2 min 56 s.
Meet Flavio Geisshuesler, a university professor and a global authority on the study of Buddhist meditations across India, Tibet, and the Himalayas. With dual PhDs in the history of religions, Flavio’s expertise spans teaching on four continents, highlighting a profound understanding of psychophysical practices that invigorate, engage, and connect.
Unlike the solitary and passive methods often found in the West, Flavio’s focus is on meditation as a dynamic interplay of aesthetics, vigor, and social integration. A dedicated practitioner and certified teacher, he has studied with revered yogis and masters worldwide.
Flavio’s academic journey transcends traditional boundaries, integrating philosophy, linguistics, cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. This interdisciplinary blend empowers him to draw surprising parallels and forge connections across various knowledge domains.
As a prolific author and speaker, Flavio champions meditation as a transformative “technology of change,” designed to help individuals balance the paradox between stability and growth, enhancing personal and professional development.
Then he did something unusual for a scholar of his standing. He went to business school. An Executive MBA from HEC Paris. Coaching training at INSEAD. Executive education at the London School of Economics. A second language for his work: the language of organizations, decisions, and change.
Today he works in both worlds at once. Because both, he argues, now face the same question. AI is built to predict. And anything predictable can now be produced faster, cheaper, and without us.
What remains ours when intelligence is everywhere? Not output. Not information. What remains is deeper: attention, judgment, experience, responsibility, and the courage to depart from the pattern. None of it can be installed. It has to be formed, in people, over time.
And how human beings are formed is the question Flavio has studied his entire career. Erratic Intelligence, the first book in his Technopsychology Trilogy, is a field guide to the capacities that become more valuable, not less, as machines improve.
He takes the argument into boardrooms, universities, and leadership teams. On four continents. In four languages. Because AI can produce the answer. It cannot produce the person who can answer for it.
Invite Flavio to speak.
On screen: an animated portrait in line drawings, with key words as captions: the three business-school credentials (Executive MBA, HEC Paris; Executive Coaching Certificate, INSEAD; Executive education, London School of Economics), the four languages (English, German, French, Italian) and the cover of Erratic Intelligence. At the end: Invite Flavio to speak, flaviogeisshuesler.com.
Erratic Intelligence: Leadership in the Age of AI opens the Technopsychology Trilogy, which asks how technology shapes the people who use it, and how we can shape that relationship deliberately. The first volume argues for the capacity to question a familiar direction, risk a different one, and remain answerable for the choice.
The book (opens in a new tab)I speak at universities, conferences, and leadership meetings about AI and what the history of religions knows about it, from my keynote The Straight Line Is Free to a lecture on why our stories about AI sound so apocalyptic.
SpeakingThrough a small advisory practice, Erratic Intelligence, I work one-to-one with a few leaders on consequential decisions.
Erratic Intelligence (opens in a new tab)This independent work is separate from my university role.
07Contact
For research collaboration, doctoral supervision, and academic lectures, please write to flavio.geisshuesler@sydney.edu.au. For talks and other invitations, write to contact@flaviogeisshuesler.com.
University of Sydney profile (opens in a new tab)ORCID (opens in a new tab)LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)
