Paul Dennison

Paul Dennison originally trained as a research physicist in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge UK, in the 1960s, followed by six years teaching and research at Adelaide University, Australia, including a period as visiting professor and Leverhulme fellow at Nagoya University and the Toyohashi Research Institute, Japan, advising on interplanetary radio-astronomy. It was in Cambridge in the early 1960s that he became interested in meditation, which in 1973 following his return to the UK led to establishing the Samatha Trust of which he was one of the founding trustees. In 1974 he left academic work and reinvented himself as a goldsmith and gem dealer, including early research into heat-treating gemstones in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In 1991 that phase of life in turn ended, and most of 1992 was spent as a Buddhist monk in a rural Thai temple. Returning to London in 1993, he retrained first as a psychotherapist and then as a Jungian analyst, eventually working in a central London hospital as a Consultant Psychotherapist with a special interest in early emotional trauma and personality disorders. He currently works as a psychotherapist and analyst in private practice. From 2012 he developed an independent neuroscience research project to explore consciousness and perception in relation to Buddhist jhāna meditation. The ground-breaking results were published in the leading neuroscience journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in 2019, and are an important background to his writings, alongside his unique experience in the almost lost esoteric meditation practices of the ancient Yogāvacara traditions of Southeast Asia.