Heart of Flesh: Meditation, Psychology, Growth, and Self-Transcendence / Miguel Farias
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
What happens when an ancient discipline built to remake the self in the context of a way of life and normative map gets sold back to us as lifehacking for stress relief and optimization?
Experimental psychologist Miguel Farias, co-author of *The Buddha Pill* and founding director of the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab at Coventry University, has spent two decades studying what meditation actually does to people, and what modern appropriation has forgotten about ancient tradition.
“The possibilities of self-deception are endless. … The mind is clever, so you have to move beyond that level of cleverness.”
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Farias returns to the oldest question in the contemplative traditions: What is this self, and how might it change? He moves from the Delphic command to “know thyself,” through the charioteer of Plato and the Katha Upanishad, to Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle and the delights of prayer that arrive as gift rather than achievement. Along the way he argues that modern meditation, including much Western Buddhist practice, rests on a naive confidence that we can do this alone, when nearly every tradition insists on the opposite: you need guides, community, and a map, because our capacity to fool ourselves runs deep.
Together they discuss why insight alone rarely changes anyone, the difference between change and transformation, how cognitive psychology misread Pascal’s reasons of the heart, and the paradox of rigorous self-mastery practiced in order to let go. They also take up the question of Freud’s lasting relevance, mindfulness as a placating opiate rather than a rupture of conformity, why hours of daily meditation can coexist with selfishness, suffering as fuel for transformation rather than something merely to soothe, Francis of Assisi’s gratitude for Sister Death, and what a seeker without a tradition’s map can do when meditation stirs up more than expected. The conversation closes on Ezekiel’s promise of a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone, a week spent caring for the sick at Lourdes, and the claim that sudden awakenings come more often from encounters with other people than from sitting alone.
Episode Highlights
- ”Here you do indeed have a major difference between all these spiritual traditions and modern meditation, including Western Buddhist meditation, which is very new in the sense that it has this exceedingly naive idea that you can do this by yourself.” - ”No, no, no, no, do not trust yourself. That’s actually a major thing. You need other people… the possibilities of self-deception are endless.” - ”You can meditate for 23 hours a day and have all these wonderful, blissful experiences. And then for the one hour that you’re not meditating, you can be the most selfish bastard on earth.” - ”The mind is clever, so you have to move beyond that level of cleverness. And in many, many ways, what’s the best thing that meditation is doing for many people today is to help them learn how to unlearn many of the stupid things we have learned.” - ”You exert this astonishing level of control so that you can entirely let go of it.” - ”Now I tell my colleagues who do mindfulness, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. There’s a deep wisdom in this.” - ”What these traditions… are talking about is really the transformational possibility of suffering. How suffering can be a tool, can be an energy, can be an oil, fuel for something deep.” - ”If you start moving across too many wells, because you’re thirsty and you’re looking for water, if you move from well to well… and as you just sip from it, you may end up dying of thirst.” - ”Most tales we have of sudden enlightenment are not the outcome of meditation, they’re the outcome of encounters with others.” - ”What matters is that your heart is pure. It is a heart of flesh. It is a heart that allows light in. It is not a heart of stone.”
About Miguel Farias Miguel Farias is an experimental psychologist, associate professor, and found
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