Tucked away in a Nucleus classroom on the second floor, a neuroscience professor and a group of earnest, curious people have created a beloved new Thursday tradition. Sitting together with the lights dimmed, they each take an hour out of their hectic schedules to share a meditative moment. Every week, the speaker is different, the attendees change and the meditation takes on a different form. But over the past two years, this Mind Lunch has taken on a steady life of its own, transforming a traditional classroom into a place of quiet reflection and lively discussion.
On Thursday, March 5, students and faculty gathered in the Nucleus Science Center for the weekly Mind Lunch series.
This week, Venerable Dr. Nicholas Thanissaro — a Buddhist monk in the Dhammakaya tradition — led a discussion titled “Meditation in the Age of AI” on how Large Language Models (LLMs) may help or hinder our pursuits for contemplative knowledge.
Thanissaro, originally from the U.K., was first introduced to Buddhism while at university in Manchester. After joining a Buddhist society there, one of the guest speakers urged him to move to Thailand, where he studied Buddhism and the Thai language. After eight years, he became a monk.
Now, he has been practicing and teaching meditation for over 30 years.
The Mind Lunches first began at the 5Cs after a chance-encounter between Department of Natural Sciences Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Gautam Agarwal and Thanissaro. In the spring of 2023, while co-teaching the course “Mind, Brains and Programs,” Agarwal described finding himself mentally adrift.
“It was a really, really hard time in my life,” Agarwal said. “It made me realize just how little control one can have over one’s mental experience. I would say [it] was from that point of desperation that I got really curious about the resources around me.”
After exhausting other avenues of support, Agarwal began attending services at the monastery that Thanissaro belongs to, the Dhammakaya Meditation Center in Azusa.
What he found through conversations with Thanissaro was something often left out of professional settings. He felt that although these types of conversations were absent from institutional spaces, the value that they brought into his life was so rich that he wanted to share it with the 5C community.
“[We don’t support or even discuss] the number of students and staff, and faculty for that matter, that are struggling with mental health issues, and feel depersonalized in their experience,” Agarwal said. “I started realizing, possibly, there’s a group of people here who also are thirsty for these conversations.”
Mind Lunch became a way to bring students and faculty alike together for a moment of peaceful reflection in the midst of bustling academic schedules.
Agarwal encourages students and community members to bring their lunch to his Nucleus classroom; there is often an even balance of regulars and first-time attendees. Usually, the speaker begins with a brief introduction before leading a meditative practice, followed by a Q&A and discussion.
Over the past two years, the program has grown in scope and size. Each week, Agarwal invites a speaker from a different spiritual tradition or background to discuss what mindfulness means to them, or a related topic of their choice.
Over the two years, Thanissaro has spoken at the event around once a month — he continues to return because he believes in Agarwal’s vision for the space and hopes to share Buddhism with students in a way that feels approachable.
This Mind Lunch focused on a topic that remains pertinent to many of us on college campuses: how humbling it can feel to think and create in the burgeoning age of artificial intelligence. Thanissaro described how, even as a lifelong teacher and instructor, AI’s ability to easily create meditation guides, synthesize and translate texts initially brought him anxiety.
Anyone who has struggled over the perfect word for an idea, or the right thesis for a long essay can attest to the fact that sitting with a question without finding an instant resolution can be a rewarding process. However, in an era marked by rapid, auto-generated summaries available at the click of a button, this almost meditative practice of lingering on an unknown seems countercultural.
“You realize you also have to change when you thought you would get pretty much fossilized in your ways,” Thanissaro said. “At a certain age, you probably start believing that you don’t need to change anymore.”
Thanissaro spoke to this sentiment, responding to comments from attendees who feel that the advent of AI has brought up existential fears.
“You realize you also have to change when you thought you would get pretty much fossilized in your ways,” Thanissaro said. “At a certain age, you probably start believing that you don’t need to change anymore. If you’re going to keep doing things or producing stuff in the world — whether there are things you write or whatever — [you’re] going to have to change.”
Thanissaro offered attendees an alternative perspective with the intention of alleviating some of this anxiety. In his school of thought, he explained, there are three levels of knowing — only one of which has been touched by LLMs. At the first layer, there is our perception of the external world; the second deals with our processing of that information into language; the third is the knowledge within a deeper part of our mind.
While AI comfortably operates within the second realm, the level of language and information processing that LLMs famously excel at, the third level cannot be articulated through language alone. He referred to this third level as “the consciousness,” as it is more of a visualization or a feeling reached through meditation or deep thought.
The rise of AI, Thanissaro explained, compels us to access this third level more intentionally.
“AI is just words, basically a huge database of words,” Thanissaro said. “[It has] this cold, clinical sort of know-it-all approach to life. Have you ever met an AI that admits it doesn’t know something?”
Although Thanissaro acknowledged AI can be used as a tool, he also exposed AI’s limitations in a way that felt palpable for attendees. It can be difficult to resist becoming swept up in the mysterious but saturated conversations surrounding the capacities of AI.
After witnessing this accelerated academic environment, alumnus Theo Perlin PZ ‘25 now faces the same issues and conversations as he enters the workforce.
“Now that I’m in the workforce and expected to output a lot, I definitely find myself reflecting on things and internalizing information a little bit less,” he said. “[But] I generally tend to fall on the side of ‘I want to take things in and internalize them and hopefully make something that feels a bit more mine.’”
Agarwal has noticed the lingering conversations that flow from these lunches and into student life on campuses.
“I don’t know how and why and where people take what’s going on in this room, except that I start seeing these little islands around campus,” Agarwal said. “These kinds of dominoes that ricochet and these like weird self-looping ways are the closest to a sense of intentionality.”
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