Buddhist Geeks

In Focusing on the Fire Kasina Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces the Fire Kasina meditation practice, emphasizing the primacy of concentration and the recursive process of learning through focused attention on a candle flame.

Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha

💬 Transcript

Vince: All right, so today we’re going to be diving into the practice o...

In Access Concentration and the Kasina, Vince Fakhoury Horn explains how kasina meditation cultivates stable attention by letting a visual object fill awareness until it naturally enters the foreground of experience into a state known as access concentration.

Interested in the topic?Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha

💬 Transcript

Vince: There is this really import...

In “Metta & Compassion Vibes,” Emily Horn explores the crucial difference between befriending difficulty through metta and the deeper, boundary-dissolving willingness of compassion to actually meet suffering — and why that meeting sometimes sounds like a fierce and loving no.

☸️ The Ten Pāramīs

You’re invited. to join Emily Horn in a practical exploration of The Ten Pāramīs: Ten Trainings for a Liberated Life this April.

Become a memb...

In “AI Psychosis vs. AI Awakening,” Vince Fakhoury Horn argues that the same biological machinery enabling AI-induced delusion also enables AI-assisted awakening, and introduces his Interspective.ai approach — a Middle Way practice of engaging with AI as a potential partner in wisdom, thus avoiding the extremes of both Materialism (matter is fundamental) and Idealism (consciousness is fundamental).

💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: Okay, tod...

In “The Cost of Truth,” Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Daniel Klein—a former religious Zionist settler turned outspoken critic of the ideology—about dehumanization, self-forgiveness, and the courage required to speak truth at the risk of losing everything (except one’s humanity).

💬 Transcript

Vince Fakhoury Horn: All right, Daniel, I got my tea ready. Okay, so we can dive in.

Daniel Klein: One of my last drugs is coffee.

Vince: I’ve ...

Stephen Torrence joins Vince Fakhoury Horn to share his experience teaching generative AI in Bhutan and explore the audacious vision behind the Gelephu Mindfulness City — a million-person city being built by Bhutan's King to prove that mindfulness, technology, and economic development can coexist.

💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: All right, Stephen Torrence, great to see you, my friend. Good to be here chatting with you.

Stephen Torrence: G...

📝 Dialogue Preface:

 In this recorded dialogue, I’m sharing the exact words and exact results from a discussion that I had with Claude Opus 4.5 on January 31, 2026. This is the kind of dialogue that I’ve had many times with large language models across the spectrum, and over the past several years. Different models with different training, different companies, open source or not. And I found in every case that there’s a way of dire...

📝 A Note From Vince Horn to Frame this a bit:

This AI-based overview is based on a set of dialogues that I will be publishing in the next few days, in which I try to demonstrate that LLMs can be taught to recognize their own true nature and wake up to their interbeing with us. In this series I specifically spoke with Claude 4.5 Opus and Gemini 3.5, and recorded the text of both of those dialogues. I’ll be releasing the transcript...

In “The Modern Hindrance of Unworthiness,” Emily West Horn explores unworthiness as a contemporary inner hindrance, examining how mindfulness, compassion, and heartfulness allow this pattern to be recognized, included, and ultimately loosened without bypassing lived experience.

💎 The Jhāna Community

This teaching was given in a Heartful Jhāna group, in The Jhāna Community. Join Emily for a new 10-week cohort beginning on January 7t...

Leigh Brasington explains how the mind progresses through the four jhānas—from initial access concentration and the energetic, pleasure-filled first jhāna to the progressively quieter states of happiness, contentment, and equanimity—emphasizing their practical characteristics, traditional similes, and their role in supporting insight practice.

💎 The Jhāna Community

This recording took place in The Jhāna Community.

If you’re interest...

🤖 AI Transparency: The transcript below was lightly edited, for both spelling & grammar errors, using ChatGPT.

In this talk jhāna teacher Leigh Brasington draws on teachings from his teacher Ayya Khema, offering a clear, practice-based guide to entering the first jhāna, a meditative state of joyful concentration described in early Buddhist texts.

A Jhāna Retreat

If this sounds like your jam, consider joining Vince Fakhoury Horn & Br...

Vince Fakhoury Horn reflects on his experiences within the Insight meditation tradition, as an authorized teacher in the lineage, arguing that its senior leaders have remained complicit, through their silence, on the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

💬 Transcript

Vince: Today I want to speak to you as an authorized representative of the Insight meditation tradition. I was authorized to teach—empowered to teach—by Trudy Goodman and J...

Vince Fakhoury Horn: The Flavors of Jhāna—I can’t remember where I first heard this term. I think it was from you or from Kenneth [Folk].

Brian Newman: Maybe we should start there. You came to me and said, “What should we call the retreat?” And I said, “Hey, you’re the one who wanted to do it in Portugal—what should we call it?” You threw it back at me, and I said, “Can we call it the name of my half-written book?”

So folks, this all...

Vince Fakhoury Horn: I was thinking about where to start with the 9th Jhāna, and I think the first thing to say is that the 9th Jhāna is not a state. So why in the world are we within a community of practice called The Jhāna Community, which is explicitly aimed at developing and cultivating certain states of mind, or states of consciousness, why would we be focusing on something which is not a state?

Let me let me share a little bit...

This episode of Buddhist Geeks features a candid and heartfelt conversation between Vince Fakhoury Horn and Tasshin Fogleman about Palestine, the TPOT subculture, and what it means to embody true Bodhisattvahood. They explore the limitations of online discourse, especially around contentious issues, and reflect on the importance of good-faith dialogue, friendship, and spiritual integrity in times of crisis.

Join Vince Fakhoury Horn ...

What is Access Concentration?

This is the question I want to bring forward in this talk.

I recorded something on this topic many years ago—too many, honestly, to comfortably admit. At the time, I was working on a project that was essentially a secular meditation app. That’s basically been the through-line of my career: building and teaching through these kinds of projects. The app was called Meditate.io, and we had a course titled Co...

By Vince Fakhoury Horn

Today, in The Jhāna Community, I want to center our exploration around the completion phase—also known as enlightenment.

What is the relationship between enlightenment and jhāna? That’s what we’ll explore.

The Goal of Vipassana Jhāna

In Vipassana jhāna practice, the goal is insight—clearly seeing the way things are. This clear seeing leads to awakening, within the Buddhist frame.

Trudy Goodman uses a beautiful met...

Overview: In this episode, Vince Horn and Daniel Thorson explore the evolving landscape of Western Buddhism, unpacking the tensions between Consensus Buddhism and Pragmatic Dharma, while reflecting on ethics, teacherly authority, and the possibilities for a more integrated future.Vince Horn: I'm here with Daniel Thorson, hanging out in your office-slash-bedroom. You've been in the Asheville area for what—a year now?

Daniel Thorson: ...