Speaker

Dr Miguel Farias specialises in the psychobiological study of meditation and other spiritual practices. He has been a lecturer in Experimental Psychology at Oxford University and currently leads the Brain, Belief, & Behaviour Lab at Coventry University, where he is an associate professor. He has recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Meditation.

Chair

David Leech

Abstract

Various criticisms have been voiced against the mindfulness movement, such as its lack of moral grounding and alliance with neoliberal ideas (e.g. Purser’s McMindfulness), its radical departure from traditional Buddhism through a secular reinvention of Buddha (Lopes Jr’s The Scientific Buddha), or even its misuse of the concept of sati as bare awareness (Sharf’s Is mindfulness Buddhist (and why it matters)). Here, I would like to focus on the New Age roots of the mindfulness movement and explore the possibility that, under the guise of a wellbeing therapeutic technique with religious roots, it meets the criteria for what the modern father of perennialism, René Guénon, called ‘inverted spirituality’, i.e. a movement that presents itself as spiritual and benign while promoting the opposite of self-transcendence and noetic insight.