Expert Voices
In the Al era, a central challenge is leveraging its benefits while mitigating risks such as manipulation, replacement, and cognitive decline from overreliance. Meditation, as an ancient practice, has regained scholarly attention, with experts across disciplines agreeing on its potential to enhance human wisdom and psychological resilience.
Our meditation research draws on China's profound cultural heritage and employs modern science to validate its benefits for humanity,embodying cultural confidence while fostering respectful cross-cultural exchange and mutual contribution.
——Professor Donghong Cui
It's very interesting, I've never been to an event with meditation in it, and the scope of the research is incredibly broad. I've never been in a room with so many different types of researchers. It's great. It is my hope that events of this kind will be carried forward and held again.
——Professor Elliott Ash
Most people who are in the paradigm of thinking as a means to solution are very strongly attached to it. To the extent that they are obsessed with it. AI is nothing more than a technology expansion of composed thinking: just go through everything, you will find the best solution by probability. And meditation is entirely different. True meditation will let you get rid of this obsession with thinking.
——Marc Jose Reinhardt
Proceedings of the Forum
The forum brought together meditation teachers, sociologists, psychiatrists, and AI researchers from Australia, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, the United States, and across Africa, in alphabetical order.
The programme featured keynote speeches, research presentations, meditation practices, a tea ceremony and roundtable dialogues. It opened with a brief silent entry, symbolising the need to turn inward amid accelerating technological change.
Speakers included Elliott Ash, Director of the Institute for Economic Research at ETH Zurich; Enrico Somma, from Liechtenstein—the UN sponsor of the World Meditation Day proposal—and Fei Yu, representatives of the World
Meditation Foundation. Together, they emphasized the global significance of the initiative and urged academics, industry leaders, and the public to address the psychological and social impacts of AI.
