DrFlavio Geisshuesler

Flavio Geisshuesler is the Khyentse-Macready Senior Lecturer in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Sydney. His research examines how contemplative and religious systems transform perception, embodiment, and selfhood. He combines the historical and textual study of Tibetan Buddhism with comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

His primary area of expertise is Dzogchen (rdzogs chen, “Great Perfection”), a major contemplative tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Working with classical Tibetan sources and research in Himalayan contemplative settings, he approaches meditation as a practice embedded in ritual systems, historical narratives, institutions, and social and environmental worlds.

His open-access monograph, Tibetan Sky-Gazing Meditation and the Pre-History of Great Perfection Buddhism: The Skullward Leap Technique and the Quest for Vitality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024; supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation), argues that key motifs of the visionary practice thod rgal emerged from indigenous Tibetan and Inner Asian religious formations before being reworked within Buddhist contemplative systems. The book reconstructs this long process of transformation from the seventh through the fourteenth centuries. His related research examines Nyingma history, sky-gazing, visionary experience, and the role of trauma, attachment, and dissociation in narratives of religious formation.

A second strand of his work investigates meditation as a historically and culturally organised form of experience. His “7E Model of the Human Mind” extends the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended framework by emphasising the emotional, evolved, and exoconscious dimensions of cognition. His chapter “Direct Transcendence” examines meditation through the theory of intentional transformative experience. These projects challenge approaches that treat meditation as a decontextualised technique and instead ask how practices, stories, institutions, bodies, and environments shape contemplative experience.

Flavio also works on Ernesto de Martino and the Italian school of the history of religions. His monograph The Life and Work of Ernesto de Martino: Italian Perspectives on Apocalypse and Rebirth in the Modern Study of Religion (Brill, 2021) is the first comprehensive English-language study of de Martino. His related articles examine the “crisis of presence,” the relationship between religion and parapsychology, and de Martino’s engagements with twentieth-century science and continental philosophy.

His current book project, Beyond Calm, reconsiders meditation as a cultural technology. Drawing on Tibetan sources, the cognitive and psychological sciences, and the history of religions, it challenges the reduction of meditation to relaxation or stress management. The project examines traditions in which contemplative practice uses crisis, vision, mortality, and instability as conditions of transformation rather than problems simply to be eliminated.

At Sydney, Flavio teaches Tibetan, Sanskrit, Buddhist studies, tantra, meditation, and the comparative study of religion. He welcomes enquiries from prospective research students and collaborators interested in Dzogchen, Tibetan contemplative traditions, pre-Buddhist and Inner Asian religion, contemplative studies, cognitive science of religion, and Ernesto de Martino and the modern history of religions.

Across these projects, his central question is how individuals and cultures transform disruption into meaning.