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Working Class Dharma Jul 22, 2026

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Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Mushim Patricia Ikeda about working class dharma—from growing up as "the minority of Greensburg, Ohio" in a third-generation Japanese American family, to training in penniless Korean Zen temples where renovating the building was the practice. Along the way: bliss bunnies, samadhi junkies, mutual aid networks, and why affordability may be the grassroots issue of 2026.💬 TranscriptVince Horn: Okay. So yeah, I think it was really the beginning of this year — I was teaching a retreat in Portugal with a friend. It’s our annual Pragmatic Dharma retreat. And while I was there, I had picked up recently this book called Emergent Dharma, by Dr. Sharon Suh, and I scrolled through the chapters, and I looked, and I went straight to yours, and I read it.That was the first thing I read, and I just loved hearing about your story. For me, some of the coolest part about the Dharma is hearing people’s, like, stories and their biographies and, like, their real lived experience of the Dharma, and I just felt that in your story in the chapter there — you’re talking about how you were raised, and your family, and where you came from, and how you started engaging with Buddhism, and just the whole story there, that I’ve heard now more of since I’ve gotten to know you better over this year.And really, I was just hoping we could talk about, you know, your story in part here, because the theme is working class Dharma. And when we last spoke, we decided that was a good kind of place to focus some of the conversation. But a lot of it is about your experience, really.Like, what does it mean to live in the, quote-unquote, working class in the modern world, and to also be a Dharma practitioner? And how different is that in a heritage Asian ethnic tradition than in a white convert tradition, which is more how Emily and I have come up? I think that’s an interesting conversation too, because now we’re talking about class and ethnicity — two different dimensions that are often interwoven, or braided.So anyway, could you share a bit about your story, Mushim? I know you come out of the Zen tradition, both in Japan and Korea, but how did you get into this? Was it a family tradition, or is it something that you came back to explore — like, the roots of your family’s tradition — later?Mushim Ikeda: Yeah, thank you so much, Vince. So I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954, and I am, by our system — meaning Japanese Americans, by our system — a third-generation Japanese American. We count the first generation to be the immigrants, so those were my grandparents on both sides, and they’re the Issei — “ichi,” meaning one.My parents were the Nisei, meaning they were both born in the United States, and they were the Nisei — “ni,” two. Three is “san,” so I am Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, by how we count. I was born in Cleveland, grew up in Ohio, because that’s where my father’s work took him. And we grew up very working class.In Cleveland, when I was born, my father sold Wear-Ever pots and pans from door to door, and then he got a job inspecting fruit and vegetables — perishables that were being shipped on the railroads — working for an independent company called the RPIA, Railroad Perishable Inspection Agency.And that took us down to the rural area between Akron and Canton, going a little bit toward the middle of Ohio, south of Cleveland. And most of my classmates in the public schools that I attended — I would say the majority of them were children of people from West Virginia who came north to Akron, then the tire capital of the world.Goodyear, Firestone, Seiberling — they were all there, along with Quaker Oats, which produced a very interesting smell when the wind wafted from Akron our way, with a mixture of burning rubber and toasted oats. That was the smell of my childhood. And the air pollution was incredible, producing magnificent sunsets. And that’s where I grew up. So my classmates were children of the tire factory workers for the most part, as well as some were children of the remnants of the dairy farms, the cow pastures in that area that were gradually turning into suburban housing tract lands and so forth.That was my childhood. We were in an all-white community, except for us. One of my teachers used to call our family “the minority of Greensburg, Ohio.” And at home, we had a very strong sense of who we were. We were Japanese American. We were not Japanese. We were certainly not white or middle-class Americans.We were working-class Japanese Americans. And little by little, my parents wanted us to go to college. They rose into the lower middle class, then vaguely towards the middle middle class. However, I realized as I’ve grown older that I was raised — so, this is to just be completely fair: I was formed by my parents, and I do have a prejudice, and their prejudice was against what they perceived as upper-class privileged people, which in this case meant mostly white Americans who would look down upon their fellow white Americans who had come up from West Virginia and worked in the tire factories, and certainly looked down upon us, since we were not privileged white Americans.So there we see, like, race, ethnicity, class, as always, are completely interwoven. And I freely admit I was raised to not be entitled and superior, and my parents would say snotty — like, in their words — a rich kid.Vince Horn: It seems like, immediately hearing you, the way you’re describing that, that sounds like a good thing. Mushim Ikeda: I hope so.Vince Horn: And I mean, there’s a clearly good dimension to what you’re describing that I so appreciate. I guess I’m relating to this — the way you described it, almost like there’s, like, a spectrum of experience here, where you’re talking about the white West Virginian expats who are coming over to Ohio. In terms of the sort of hierarchy of sort of caste, I guess, for lack of a better term.Mushim Ikeda: It is caste.Vince Horn: Yes. You have this sort of racialized caste system. And it seems like I can relate to what you’re saying from where I was formed, in this formation, you know.And it’s like, oh, I can see growing up with a Palestinian family, and I can see the racialized part of that, and the opportunities that were lost there, and the economic opportunities, and the bootstraps attitude — like, you gotta help yourself if you want any help; like, no one’s gonna help you.Like, all of those things were very formative. But at the same time, you know, my grandfather did well with that attitude, and he had resources. And I knew, like, I was never gonna be homeless, you know? And that was something — I had friends that didn’t have that same level of security. You know, to know that they had someone — that, you know, even if your parents, your single mom, couldn’t earn any money or got sick or something, you had people that could take care of you.That’s a huge level of security not everyone has. So I guess I’m relating to it from there — of, like, oh yeah, the further you’re down in the caste system, the less support you have, and the more, in a sense, it’s like up to you to kind of, like, hard-knuckle it through really adverse conditions that, you know, are imposed.Mushim Ikeda: Very much so. And of course, to state the obvious, we have the legacy in the United States of the World War II incarceration into internment and concentration camps of the Japanese immigrants and their children, the Japanese-American citizens.Vince Horn: Right. How did that specifically impact your family system?Mushim Ikeda: The way it impacted my family was that my mother grew up in Hawaii, on Oahu, near Pearl Harbor, and there actually is a family story, which is true — we have evidence. The attack was in the morning, and my mom’s mom, my maternal grandma, who was a Shin Buddhist practitioner —her husband, my grandpa, was a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner. They had a mixed Buddhist marriage. So the family lore is that in the Pearl Harbor attack, Grandma was sitting on the toilet, and a giant shell, a bullet, came whizzing into the bathroom and went through the side of the porcelain enamel bathtub, and she came out screaming at the top of her lungs.Vince Horn: Oh, my gosh.Mushim Ikeda: And the family still has that unexploded ordnance. So she grew up in Hawaii, and there was no need to put the Japanese immigrants and their children into camps, because the island was a camp. What were you gonna do? Swim away? Everyone was under surveillance. Their homes were searched for illegal shortwave radios and enemy weapons.And so the joke, again, in my mother’s family, was that the FBI came, searched the house, and the kitchen was full of large knives — for cooking, of course — but they decided to confiscate my grandfather Sawada’s pocket knife as an enemy weapon.Vince Horn: Wow.Mushim Ikeda: I know. So they were like, “Ah, this is just completely stupid and asinine. Here we are.” And it was the community leaders in Hawaii — Buddhist priests, any kind of community leaders — who were arrested and taken to the continent for the concentration camps. But they were all under surveillance. So that was my mother. She was used to being under surveillance.However, they had food. And they stayed in their homes, under surveillance. And then my dad grew up on a farm in Indiana — the Ikeda Brothers Farm in Indiana — and there were too few Japanese immigrants and their children in Indiana and the Midwest, for the most part, to bother with. I think most of the deportations happened from California,and from areas with larger populations. That having been said, of course they were aware — my father’s people were aware of what was going on. And he always said that he had a memorable moment in his life when he was drafted into the Army in World War II. He said, “I opened up the letter” — he said, “I got the mail outside the farmhouse.I opened up the letter, and it said, ‘Greetings from your president.’” You now have to report for duty to the United States Army — to the same government that could have seized their property and sent the entire family off into a camp. That irony was not lost on him. And so both my parents, in some ways, were very model minority.They both worked hard. My mother became a pharmacist. And they worked hard. They wanted to send us all to college. They always taught us to behave well in school. They passed on a love of learning, particularly science. And from the outside, we did look like the model minority. But looking back, on the inside, both my parents had so much very clear, thought-out, and thoughtful points of resistance, of education.And their basic message to us was, number one, “Don’t act like privileged rich kids who are idiots,” and number two, “Never forget who you are, and don’t try to pretend you’re white, because you are not.”Vince Horn: Hmm. Yeah, that is a resistance, in terms of holding on to their culture and being like, “I’m not going to,” yeah, integrate in that way. Yeah.Mushim Ikeda: Mm-hmm, and they were very confident. It’s not like they made a big deal of it; it’s just the way we lived. For instance, bath time in the evening: we didn’t have a Japanese ofuro bathtub. However, we would draw a tub full of hot water, and then the family would take baths in order of seniority.Vince Horn: Okay, like age?Mushim Ikeda: Yes.Vince Horn: Yeah, got it. Got it. Makes sense. They gotta have some ordering principle.Mushim Ikeda: Really, really tough on the youngest child in the family.Vince Horn: That’s for sure. That is for sure. A side note, Mushim — just a kind of interesting side point before I ask you another question here. I learned only, yeah, 10 years ago or so, that the county that I grew up in, that my family moved to in North Carolina, was where the German Americans were interned, in a little town called Hot Springs. And I had no idea of the history of that growing up here until much later.Mushim Ikeda: Yes. I didn’t know it was in that area; however, you’re jogging my memory.Vince Horn: Yeah. So that’s in the county that I grew up in. For sure, it’s a beautiful place — but nowhere is beautiful to be interned. I’m curious — I know, hearing about your history too, that you’ve spent a lot of time in monastic communities, and obviously one of the things that’s well known about a monastic community is that it’s typically operating on almost nothing, except for the generosity of a small community that’s supporting it, perhaps, if you’re lucky.And, like, the people in the community are usually building everything — unless they have a bunch of wealthy donors, in which case they can hire people to do that for them. And it sounds like you have not been in those kind of communities where you had a lot of wealthy donors.Mushim Ikeda: Completely the opposite.Vince Horn: Mm-hmm.Mushim Ikeda: Yes. And to go back and pick up a strand of a question from you I think I didn’t answer: I did not grow up in a Buddhist household in Ohio, because my father’s family didn’t espouse any particular religion that I knew of. And for my mother’s family in Hawaii, all of the Buddhist temples had been shut down — plus the after-school Japanese language schools that she and her siblings went to, they’d all been shut down as soon as, of course, World War II, Pearl Harbor, the attack on Pearl Harbor.And so my mother came to Indiana, met my father, we raised a family in Ohio. She came from a Buddhist household but didn’t grow up as a Buddhist, so to speak — as a practicing Buddhist — whereas her siblings who remained in Hawaii did. They all went to Buddhist temples, and they were Buddhist.So there was a certain rift there. However, when I, quote-unquote, “discovered Buddhism” later on, as a college student and afterward, it felt very familiar to me, and that’s because so much of it was passed down in our family in terms of values.Vince Horn: Right. That’s something I’ve noticed as a Dharma teacher — like, when I’ve worked with folks who come up in Asian cultures, some of them, they’re new to the practice, but they’re not new, because they sort of were inculturated with a lot of the values, and it sort of shows, actually.Mushim Ikeda: Yes. And so again, class comes in, because I went to college on scholarship. I went to graduate school — I received aid there and did a TA and that kind of thing.I just never had much money, and went into an existential crisis in my late 20s. I happened to be in Ann Arbor, Michigan after finishing graduate school in poetry writing at the University of Iowa, and discovered — I think it was the only Zen Buddhist temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was interested in Zen from reading I had done.The only Zen Buddhist temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I think, at that time, was Korean Zen — which I had never heard of. Zen is a Japanese word. And they called themselves, and do call themselves, Zen Buddhist Temple of Ann Arbor. However, when I actually went, they were proudly of the Korean Zen lineage. And after learning to practice meditation there, getting to know that just-beginning, scrappy, tiny little community that moved into a two-story house on a main thoroughfare in Ann Arbor and pulled the down payment together — and then the teacher, who lived in Toronto, a Korean Zen monk, his method was to get together the down payment. So it was usually not from one wealthy donor, but might be from some people who did have inheritance or something like that.But anyway, bring that together. In the case of our temple in Toronto, it was the Korean-Canadian community, the immigrant community — they pooled their money. And so his method was: put a down payment onto a big enough, totally devastated house or dwelling that was nevertheless okay enough to legally inhabit, and then begin to do renovations while living and practicing in it, and while holding services for the general public, who would then come, and would often stay as volunteers to help with cleaning, construction, and w…

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Modern Buddhisms Jul 09, 2026

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In “The Fourth Turning of the Wheel,” Vince Horn traces the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma from early Buddhism to Tibetan Vajrayana, then argues we’re living through new turnings right now—the modern, postmodern, and metamodern waves of Buddhist practice—and asks what it takes to hold them all.Get access to the full Modern Buddhisms training cohort by joining the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha.💬 TranscriptVince: So Modern Buddhisms — this title’s really in part inspired by my time at Naropa University. I should just say that up front, because being there for about four years or so in the mid-aughts really influenced me as a Dharma practitioner and then later as a teacher. When I started teaching, of course, my view had already been really molded and shaped in the halls of Naropa, you could say.Naropa was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who’s quite both famous and infamous for his influence on American Dharma. When I was a student at Naropa, one of the core offerings in the Religious Studies department, which is where I spent most of my time and where I got my degree, was called the First Turning, the Second Turning, and the Third Turning — the Turnings.There was a class on each one of them. I took the First Turning with Judith Simmer-Brown, who was an acharya, a teacher in that lineage, and a professor at Naropa. And it was cool to really learn in an in-depth way over six, seven months — a college class, you’re writing papers and reading a stack of books — in more depth about the tradition that I was in love with.And seeing it from the point of view, in this case, of this Tibetan model called the Three Turnings. As I said, Chogyam Trungpa was Tibetan, so this model was influential and informed a lot of the curriculum at Naropa. The Tibetan model of the Three Turnings emerges later in the evolution and history of Buddhism.So to talk about modern Buddhisms, we of course have to talk about historical Buddhisms too. We can’t just skip to the modern era — unless we’re being really hyper-modern, then we would. Then we’d be like, “Oh, yeah, it all began today. Here we are.” No. We’re going to actually kind of try to trace this back a little bit.And of course, this is such a huge area, with so much history and so many people involved, and I’m going to totally do it injustice by compressing things and making big, broad points and claims. So I just want to kind of apologize for that upfront. It’s kind of one of the things you unfortunately have to do to talk about a topic that’s so broad and make any sense at all, I think.So I’m going to try to make some sense without shredding apart reality here too badly. The way I understand it, and understood it then at Naropa, is that early Buddhism starts with the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Northern India, Nepal — modern-day Nepal. And there’s a particular kind of flavor to that early Buddhist philosophy, even as it starts to become diversified into many different schools.There were, like, 17 schools of early Buddhism intact at one point in India, just kind of all competing for meme share. And what we have now that’s kind of extant, that’s currently evolved from there, is just one of those 17 schools that came through: the Theravada school of early Buddhism.They called it the Path of the Elders, which is where most of my teachers had trained, in that lineage. This becomes known as early Buddhism, or what the Tibetans would later call the first turning of the wheel — the First Turning dharma. And why is it called the first turning? Because this is when the Buddha first taught his unique approach — what we call Buddhism now.And the wheel represents the teachings that the Buddha gave, the core of the teachings, which are the Noble Eightfold Path, sometimes compressed down to or simplified as the three trainings, the Threefold Training. The Threefold Training in what? In Ethics or Morality or Virtue, in Concentration, Meditation, and in Insight, Wisdom.These are the things that the Buddha taught, and this is the unique collection of trainings that made it Buddish. This is how you know the Buddish pattern, when you see these eight represented as the Threefold Training and this sort of unique constellation and specific ways of looking at things.In the Eightfold Path, we have two in particular that are quite important here, which are Right Intention and Right View. This is how we see and do the thing. This is how we’re seeing and doing it.So in early Buddhism there’s a particular view and intention that goes along with that view. The intention is to put an end to suffering. And the view is that it’s possible. Suffering does exist, but it’s possible to experience a cessation of suffering. The end of dukkha.And there’s a path that you follow to do that called the Eightfold Path. This is the view of early Buddhism.You’re stuck in samsara and there is freedom. It’s called nirvana. You can get out. You can have an experience of freedom. Later Buddhists don’t disagree on this point — they just disagree, I would say, on how far to extend it and how much to fall in love with our concepts about what’s happening here.The Second Turning — I remember at the very end of the First Turning course I took with Judith Simmer-Brown at Naropa, she basically delivered the big rug pull after learning all these models, the Four Noble Truths and the 12 Links of Codependent Origination — I mean, model after model after model.We’re just learning and reading texts and learning. And at the end she says, “In the next course, the second turning, they’re going to come through” — and just kind of point. And we read The Heart Sutra, and she’s like, “They’re going to point out that the problem with this whole edifice of early Buddhism is that people fell in love with their concepts and wanted to try to explain everything.”That’s what the Abhidhamma ends up becoming — this attempt to describe how everything is related. We’re going to describe and map the entire world of interdependent phenomena and describe everything in detail. And there was something about that that was problematic, which was the freezing or the reifying of that, and it said, no.Basically, like, no. This is not the move. And it negated that in a way that was meant to de-reify that tendency to kind of build mental sandcastles and to believe that our thoughts are the things that are real. And early Buddhism has this built in, in a way, because the early Buddhists say, “Here’s the right view. This is the way you need to understand things.”And that is an understanding of early Buddhism. You want to download this view and understand things this way. Practice in a way that you see that this is true — the three characteristics of experience. You want to see impermanence, see selflessness, see all this stuff.But the problem there is you’re taking the view quite seriously. It’s like, this is the right view. If you get too attached to your view — in the Second Turning, there’s a recognition that this becomes problematic, and we can describe this as emptiness: to let go of your fixed views.To realize, oh, this is more open and fluid. So the second turning emerges. It’s described in terms of non-duality of samsara and nirvana and the emptiness of views — of not believing there’s some thing over there called nirvana that’s separate from this experience of samsara. Cosmological dualism. Oh, no, that’s a problem.If that’s really true, we’ve got a problem here. The Second Turning releases the problem by pointing out that the problem is fixed dualistic thinking. Ah. Okay. Now we’re in the realm of non-duality. The view here shifts from the three characteristics in the First Turning — the Second Turning is about Emptiness and Interdependence. Compassion is just as important as wisdom in the second turning. I remember Shinzen Young explaining this in a way that really struck me. He said, “In the Second Turning, in Mahayana Zen, compassion has equal precedent — it’s equally important to wisdom.”In the first turning, wisdom was still kind of more important. It’s like an absolute teaching, and then you have the relative brahmavihāras, and there’s this sort of ranking where wisdom is kind of the highest. Here, it’s like, no, these are two dimensions of the same realization, or the same awakening. Bodhicitta. One awakening heart-mind. So, to me, this is like a correction. This is an evolution, right? And this is how it’s kind of explained in later Buddhism. This is an evolution of the tradition. What’s so interesting about the Third Turning teachings in Tibetan Buddhism to me is that they understand their own tradition as having what we would now call evolved.They didn’t use that word, evolve, and maybe they have a different understanding of it than I do. But it’s so interesting to me that they see the revolutions of the turnings. I love John Vervaeke — he’s a scholar and a cognitive behavioral therapist and psychologist at the University of Toronto.He says, “Evolution is revolution with change.” That’s the way he defines evolution. Well, the turnings are just this revolving wheel of people understanding Buddhism in new ways, in different ways over time, over a thousand plus years, two thousand plus years. The three turnings model in a sense is the tradition’s first understanding of itself as an evolutionary development.It’s something that’s evolved over time, and you can kind of look back — and what do they do in the three trainings? They say they’re all important. They don’t just reject them. In some sense you could say the Second Turning is a rejection of the First Turning, right? Or it’s a negation of it. You can understand that.Of course, when you negate something, you affirm it. That’s also important to understand, right? I always think about being a college-age atheist, which I was a little bit. I’ve seen other people that are more atheist than me. But you become like a militant atheist, right?You’re like, “I am anti-God,” and you make your identity about being anti-God and hang out with a bunch of people that talk about being anti-God, and you read a bunch of books by people that are talking about how God doesn’t exist, and it’s like your whole life is built around God. And likewise, this is how I understand the Second Turning.It wasn’t that they were negating in any sense that they’re trying to get rid of it — it was more just sort of pointing out the holding on to. To do that, you have to point out the actual specifics: no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end of suffering, no path to the end of suffering.In the Heart Sutra, they repeat all the models. All the lists are there. It’s not like the Buddhist lists get evaporated and we don’t remember what they are because they got rid of them. No, this is an affirmation through negation in the Second Turning. The Third Turning includes all of it intentionally in this sort of larger Buddha matrix of teachings.And in a sense it holds the whole collection of teachings. That’s why it’s such a complex tradition in a lot of ways, the Vajrayana, because there’s so much that it’s holding in its library of esoteric teachings, including ones that are emerging and still coming from beyond, in terms of the Terma tradition.So they’re still uncovering new Dharma teachings that are somehow timeless, by the way. So this evolution is a timeless evolution from the point of view of the Third Turning. Now we’re going to move, finally, to the topic at hand, which is modern Buddhism. So what happens when we enter into the, quote-unquote, Western Enlightenment period?Quote-unquote, modernity. There’s a big, huge change of thinking in the Western world by Western Enlightenment thinkers. These books, of course, are being printed, and people are reading them, so that’s why this is spreading so quickly — because we’re sitting on top of the Gutenberg innovation already here, and there’s increased literacy.Thanks, by the way, back to Egypt and Palestine — the Palestinians, my ancestors — for the innovation of the phonetic alphabet, which allows language to be communicated and carried much easier by people that don’t have to learn, like, a million hieroglyphs. Anyway, here we are in the modern world with all of these supportive technologies and infrastructure that’s kind of built toward connecting the whole of the world — of course, through colonialism primarily, through one group gaining this sort of incredible advantage in terms of certain technologies and geographies and things like that, histories of empire, resources.That’s one part of the view, of course. There’s the looking at the Western Enlightenment as a noble thing, and there’s looking at it as a terrible thing. I’m going to try to hold both views here at once. This is a hard thing to do. But I do see truth in both.And what I will say here is that I think we are ourselves going through different turnings now of the wheel of Dharma since the beginning of modernity, since this move toward increased globalization, which has pushed these traditions into contact with each other like has never happened before, even though it was happening before.The way I think of it is like we’re in an atom crasher, in a way. Since modernity, all these things are crashing into each other. And there are different ways of relating to that. I will go ahead and say here what I want to explore through the course of this training together are three particular modern turnings of the Wheel of Dharma.So these are all part of what I guess you could call the fourth turning we’re in now. Since modernity has started, I think we’re in the modern yana. We’re in this new period of Buddhist history. And the first wave of that we could just, I think, call Modern Buddhism, Buddhist Modernism, where the move is toward secularizing the practice, toward making it compatible with science, and to make it a trainable system, like a mental psychological system.It’s to make Buddhism work for the modern individual. That’s kind of the goal of this Buddhist modernism — to improve your capacity at work. This is why the secular mindfulness movement has done so well. I would claim it’s a modern form of Buddhism that’s completely, in a way, unbundled from the original tradition, except for some of the meditative techniques and views. Of course, there’s a lot of problems with this Modern Yana that you’re probably familiar with and have heard about.McMindfulness is one of the first critiques I heard of Buddhist modernism. And it’s so true. If you’ve studied deeply in a tradition and you really love it, you understand its roots, and you know how little you know. It’s weird to see some commodified version of a very narrow kind of slice of that becoming hyper-popular and everyone talking about it.And it’s like, what just happened? Part of your tradition just got modernized. And sometimes modernized essentially means extracted and commodified and turned into financial value, because that’s part of the modern infrastructure — capitalism, right? So modern Buddhism is extremely integrated with capitalism, and capitalism is a global system of commerce.So this is the first wave, I’d say. You have this sort of integrating with capitalism, integrating with science, integrating with technology. This is a very powerful wave. It’s still waving very hard now. This is how Buddhist Geeks got started. I got onto this wave at a specific time when the internet was changing, and caught this Buddhist modernist wave, which had been waving for hundreds of years actually.It wasn’t a new thing. It was new for me and a bunch of other people, is how I would say it now. But what happens if you keep engaging with these yanas — they open themselves up in practice, right? In the same way that we can look at the earlier three as a developmental journey you go through, you can move through, so too, I think, with these modern yanas — you can move through them.What started to happen for me in Buddhist Geeks, wh…

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The Cost of Silence Jul 03, 2026

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In “The Cost of Silence,” dharma teacher Vince Horn and guest Daniel Klein trace what it costs us—psychologically, relationally, economically, and spiritually—to withhold the truth, arguing that the small silences of the dinner table are the same debt that scales into complicity with collective harm, asking what it takes to finally stop paying it.💬 TranscriptVince Horn: So, welcome back to the Insight Diaspora. I’m your host, Vince Fukuri-Horn. Good to be here with you again in this exploration of ... I don’t know, what is it exactly we’re exploring here, Daniel? You have to tell me.Daniel Klein: I think it’s going to be an emergent phenomenon.Vince Horn: Great. Okay. Another of those emergent phenomenons. So, no, looking forward to this conversation genuinely. We are talking about the cost of silence today. And for a little background, Daniel and I had a conversation prior to this that we aired through Buddhist Geeks, and it was called The Cost of Truth. And there we were sharing some reflections from both of our experiences, in very different positions, in this sort of Israel-Gaza — I don’t even know what to call it anymore — kerfuckle. This situation is just terrible. We’re coming at it from different places, but both had this experience of speaking up and saying things that weren’t super welcome by our social groups. And so we’re talking about the cost of that, and what happens when you speak up even though it’s not really welcomed.Today we want to explore the other side of that equation, which is the cost of not speaking up, because we also both have had that experience as well. And it’s not like we suddenly woke up one day and were like, “Okay, I’m going to speak the truth about everything, no matter what.” We’re both social humans, so we have gone through a process of learning how to speak what’s true for us. And I imagine Daniel, like myself, is still going through that process. So we wanted to talk about that today. And also, just before we jump in, I want to say a word about generosity. I’m not a huge fan of the generosity talks and Dharma things. I’ll be honest with you. It always felt weird and cringey to me. Now that I’m on the other end of it, it’s a different matter, of course. And Emily was reminding me that the Buddhist teachings start with the practice of generosity. If you look at the 10 perfections, the 10 Paramis, which are these 10 things we’re cultivating on the path, the first one is generosity.So it’s sort of foundational. And it’s foundational to this project as well. We’re doing this out of the generosity of our own hearts. We’re organizing this and having these conversations and wanting to talk about things that are not super comfortable sometimes, or popular. And we’re putting a lot on the line to do that. And we’re asking, for folks that find this valuable, to meet us there, and to see generosity as a mutual process. And so, with that in mind, I just wanted to highlight that there are really two ways, in terms of financial support, that you could consider supporting us today.One is by supporting this project directly, the Insight Diaspora, which runs through the Buddhist Geeks organization, which is an educational nonprofit. There’s a link in the chat if you wanted to become a supporting member of this project; you could do that. That money goes directly to supporting our guests. We donate to our guests to support their livelihood, and it supports us as organizers as well. And then I also wanted to highlight this organization that Daniel’s associated with. Each of these meetings, we want to highlight good organizations that are doing good work in the world. And so I wanted to mention the Soulforce Project, which promotes social justice using music and the arts. And I thought maybe, Daniel, if you could say something about this, because I know they’re your friends. Maybe what the Soulforce Project is about.Daniel Klein: Well, one of the ways that I describe them is that they’re doing the work that we’re doing, but they’re operating at the level of arts and culture. So how do we promote deep transformational work in the field of liberation and collective liberation by bringing together world-class musicians to facilitate these experiences? Run by an amazing, amazing sitar player—Vince Horn: Hmm.Daniel Klein: —who I’ve done a couple events with actually in my own home. So he’s a dear friend.Vince Horn: Okay. And is this a California-based organization as well?Daniel Klein: Yeah, Altadena.Vince Horn: Okay. Great. Awesome. And just for context, you’re based in southern California, I believe?Daniel Klein: Yes. Yeah, Los Angeles.Vince Horn: Yeah. Sorry to hear that. Having lived in Los Angeles. No, it’s a beautiful place.Daniel Klein: I’m in my little bubble. I very rarely leave my living room, and it’s very beautiful up here in Topanga.Vince Horn: Okay. Oh, yeah, you really are. Topanga is a bubble. So yeah, that’s the way to do it if you’re going to live in LA. Good. Well, again, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. This is such a delight to talk to you again.Daniel Klein: Thank you all.Vince Horn: Yeah. So I wanted to start with a quote, if that’s cool with you, Daniel, and just have you, I guess, riff on it or respond. This is the main thing that came to my mind when inquiring about the question of the cost associated with not speaking up, or not saying something which is true. This comes from a book called Trauma and the Unbound Body, by Judith Blackstone. And she says, “Children may be faced with a terrible choice: truth or love. They can limit their own senses and intelligence and be cozily embraced by the family, or they can stick to their view of reality, shutting down their heart instead of their wits and enduring the family rejection.”Daniel Klein: Hmm.Vince Horn: Yeah, you can probably see why I brought this quote up.Daniel Klein: Yeah. Very, very powerful. Very powerful indeed, because I think that it’s really in childhood that we first incur this trauma of: there is a cost associated with speaking the truth. And from my own experience as a child, that’s where my own personal self split. The authentic self, and then all of the walls and masks that I needed to perform and to put up in order to be accepted by my family — and this goes deep into our deepest abandonment and rejection wounds.Vince Horn: Yeah.Daniel Klein: And in many ways it’s these small things, obviously, that start in childhood that then scale to mass atrocities. And I always say that, “Genocide starts at the dinner table, not in the halls of politics.”Vince Horn: That’s a powerful statement. I’ve heard you say that before, actually. Yeah. How did you experience that, growing up in the West Bank? Because we talked about last time how you kind of made a break from the society and culture that you were in, in a certain way. But what happened prior to that? How was that at the dinner table?Daniel Klein: Yeah. It’s really interesting, because this process of telling the truth is a very long process. Because very often we think things, and we already have this inner clarity, but then to get to the point where you reckon with these truths publicly, there’s this in-between stage, and that’s the stage of the silence where the real suffering is happening, where you’ve had this internal shift, but you are completely misaligned on the outside. And so when it comes to genocide at the dinner table, that’s the stage where people around you could start saying really shocking things. I recall a specific conversation where a close and immediate family member was laughing at the starvation in Gaza, and there was a news headline that said that a turtle had washed up on shore. And this immediate family member said, “I thought they’re starving, they can eat the turtle.” And that’s just really the kind of joke, the kind of comment that somebody can drop. And when you’re in this in-between stage, there’s this nodding along that you have — “Hmm. Hmm. Okay.” — because you can’t really speak about it. And that’s where you’re already caught in this trap and in this cycle.Vince Horn: Yes. I’m super familiar with that. As you know, now living in the US, for the last decade or so the political polarization has been super high, and it affects these kind of dinner table relationships, where people seem like they suddenly became aware, “Oh, some of my family members are saying really awful stuff about immigrants or about people.” It’s not that they hadn’t been saying those things before. People become more bold and are willing to speak up and start to push back against stuff. But then that seems like it can lead very quickly to just the whole family system falling apart, or relationships getting strained because people start arguing about ideology. Does that make sense? It seems like there’s extremes there, like just being totally quiet, or just fighting with everyone.Daniel Klein: Yeah, and ultimately it’s all relational. The way I see everything is relational. And so there’s no doubt that when you introduce truth into a relationship that was built fundamentally on the performance or the preservation of untruth, when you introduce that into the family system, there is an inherent collapse that happens. And even though you might see the fracture, it’s actually just revealing that it was fractured all along, and you’ve just been playing along in this fractured system. And when we were thinking about the cost of truth, I was thinking into it in my own life that the cost of truth is the cost of silence. They’re two sides of the same coin. The only difference is that the cost of truth is the cost of silence paid with interest. And so the moment you choose the path of silence, or not speaking truth, that’s the moment where the conversation should have happened, the intervention should have happened, and you chose not to, and that’s where the fracture starts, and that’s where the debt starts accumulating, to the moment you choose to tell the truth. But it’s still the same reckoning. The question is, are you going to deal with it now, or are you going to push it off to a future event?Vince Horn: Right, where it’s probably going to be worse, because there’s now going to be, like you said, compound resentment that has to be aired as part of the conversation as well.Daniel Klein: Which is what the family system has really always been built on. But again, that family system comes back to the individual who’s been experiencing and carrying this and playing along with the system, because each side is playing a game here — the side that needs you to perform, and you performing.Vince Horn: I have a sense that you and I were probably different kinds of children, because I sort of fell on the side of truth over love in my family system, where I was just sort of perpetually saying things that were bothering people, fighting with my mom, pointing out her hypocrisies. Choosing in every single instance to side with the truth over with people finding me easy and enjoyable to be around. I’d choose abrasiveness. I’ve since thought that’s probably in part a function of growing up in a Palestinian-American family. There’s a lot of untruth being spoken, and there’s a lot that just by virtue of that family system you kind of don’t say. And so I think in some ways that was my unconscious reaction to the system. It’s like, okay, I’m just going to err on the side of always speaking up and speaking the truth. But it does lead to a lot more conflict.Daniel Klein: Did you feel that you had the safety to do that, or what was the consequence?Vince Horn: Sort of, yeah. I didn’t feel like I was going to necessarily be booted out of the family system, because there’s a lot of people in my family like that. There’s a lot of truth tellers. But there was always some concern that it could potentially break relationships in a way that weren’t fixable. That never happened, fortunately. Our family was able to repair through those ruptures. But yeah, that was the main concern, that I would alienate people.Daniel Klein: Yeah, and I feel that I come in many ways from the opposite system, which is that there was not only a severe cost to speaking the truth ... Well, it wasn’t only a hindsight thing. I was told growing up what the consequences would be for crossing certain lines and certain truths. So I actually knew that the cost of speaking would be completely blowing up the whole system and all of the relationships, and suffering excommunication, disinheritance—Vince Horn: That was explicit?Daniel Klein: —those are the things ... that was explicit, absolutely. I knew what I was getting into. And actually from September 2023 until I started speaking publicly, when I’d initially left Israel at the time, I remember explicitly saying to myself, “Let me just get out of here. I’m going to go find a quiet, peaceful life in Costa Rica.” I had no plan whatsoever about actually speaking about any of it publicly, because I was still trapped within the mechanisms of control within the family and within the broader system, which are deeply, deeply connected, so that you need to pay an exit tax — a social exit tax, a relational exit tax, a financial exit tax, and a safety exit tax. And all of these costs are accumulating, and they’re actually baked into the cost of silence, because the silence that you’re choosing in order to keep the peace — it’s a massive, massive trade-off.Vince Horn: Right.Daniel Klein: What am I actually trading off in order to not rock the boat?Vince Horn: Yes.Daniel Klein: And if it’s safety, if it’s sovereignty, if it’s the actual externalized cost at a societal level, that could be the Palestinians as a people.Vince Horn: Right.Daniel Klein: But on the relational level, we’re always paying the price of preserving this illusion of silence. And within family systems and within broader systems, this is part of how it keeps people in line and in control, especially in the in-between phase, where they’re actually sitting with the suffering. Which also only comes with awareness too, right? If you’re not aware, you could just continue to perpetuate it. The pain starts when the awareness starts, and now you become aware of all of the pain that you’ve been deferring in order to not rock the boat.Vince Horn: Yeah, which is built up. It’s interesting, you’re using a lot of accounting metaphors here — which I find interesting — and it has me also connecting the whole economic theory with what we’re talking about, where, in modern economic theory, you have externalities. Things that are happening as a result of whatever you’re doing in your economic system that you don’t see. They could be positive things, but oftentimes they’re negative, right? So it’s like, I bought these pens, they got shipped across the country, and I don’t see all the carbon impact that that has, and being able to get my nice fine point pens that I really like. And so it’s easier to pay the cost if it’s not visible. I’m wondering how that connects with what you’re sharing here, because it seems like there’s so much that’s externalized in that kind of system, like the trade-off gets externalized onto the person, onto the individuals, often.Daniel Klein: Yeah, which I think is the essence of the colonial mindset and the colonial framework: externalization and othering. And it’s built on the denial of the people who benefit from the system. Because if they were to actually look at what keeps the gears of the system turning, they wouldn’t be able to live with it. And so part of what they need to keep in the silence is this aspect of denial. And silence and denial, I think, come hand in hand, right? We need to be in denial of the immediate reality in order to be able to accept the benefits of the situation.Vince Horn: Hmm. Yeah. Wow. I’m thinking here of John Vervaeke’s work on the meaning crisis, and how he points out that it’s the same machinery that allows wisdom to occur is exactly the same machi…

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Dharma & Empire Jun 26, 2026

Show notes

In “Dharma & Empire,” Mary Thanissara and Vince Fakhoury Horn trace how the structures of Empire occupy not just land but the psyche—moving from their own Irish, Palestinian, and colonial family histories to Gaza, climate, and class—and ask what a more revolutionary Dharma might require of practitioners right now.💬 TranscriptVince Horn: So Thanissara, thank you again. Great to be here with you.Thanissara: Likewise, likewise. Really, really thrilled to plunge into this Insight Diaspora. That was a brilliant capturing of our wandering, homeless group.Vince Horn: Yes, indeed. I was curious too. I know you started off in the Ajahn Chah tradition — in the Thai Forest Tradition — as a nun in the ‘70s, and I think you were a nun for like 12 years, when I was reading. So that’s a long time.Thanissara: Yeah.Vince Horn: Do you consider yourself part of the insight meditation tradition, or were you coming up at the same time that that whole thing was coming up?Thanissara: I’ve never really designated a category for myself, other than a Dharma practitioner in quite a broad sense. And having said that, most of the development of my practice has been guided through, first of all, the U Ba Khin lineage, which was transmitted to Goenkaji — those teachers were my first teachers from Burma, Myanmar. And then through Ajahn Chah, and that was a very pivotal formation of my practice, because I was young and very shaped by that lineage and the premise that they were teaching from. And then since leaving the robes, I’ve almost entirely taught and practiced within the lay insight world. That’s been a constant adaptation and inquiry, and not a particularly easeful landing. Well, none of it’s been an easeful landing, because it’s all in transition and having to be translated on so many levels. So I guess there’s no end to that in the Dharma.Vince Horn: That really fits with how I’ve interpreted your work from afar for many years. I’ve always heard you and Kittisaro’s name mentioned together, and I’ve heard about the work you’ve been doing in South Africa and other places with activism. It has always felt like it’s been a little bit on the emerging edge of the insight tradition. You’re not quite inside, but you’re not outside either. You’re influencing but not quite. You all seem to be strange attractors in this community. And I mean that in the best possible way.Thanissara: No, it’s a good position to be in, I think, in terms of having space from having to conform, and also being able to help shift some of the parameters of what’s allowed to be discussed or what the Dharma is, from within. Also relationship to the folks that I’ve grown to know so well in that movement — having taught a lot or discussed things over many, many years. So there’s a relationship where both being in and out is an awkward reality.Vince Horn: Yeah, and I can relate to that.Thanissara: A sense of tension around that, and creativity maybe.Vince Horn: Yeah, it’s like generative tension sometimes, and other times it’s just tension. That’s my experience anyway of what you’re describing.Thanissara: Yeah, totally.Vince Horn: So we spoke recently for the first time privately, and I think it was interesting to me that the first thing we got into was our family histories. It seemed like there’s no way to really avoid talking about that. Not that I want to at this point, but we both share ancestry from the UK, from Ireland, and I know your family moved at some point to London as well. You mentioned to me that your dad was in the military and that he was posted at some point in Palestine, I believe it was.Thanissara: Yeah. Well, he was a teenage conscript. But he was trying to really escape the poverty that he grew up in, in the tenements of Dublin — which were quite infamous, and still somewhat, although they were closed down in the 1960s. And the oppression, I think, that he felt, even though Ireland was in a process of liberating itself post the 1916 uprising, and then the liberation that started about when he was born, really, 1925 or so. But it wasn’t very liberated for him. So it’s complex, and I think that’s one of the very interesting things about being both colonized, and yet shape-shifting to find a way out through becoming part of, at that time, the war effort of the Second World War. Which was a movement of idealism, but it was a movement of some feeling of needing to break set from not only the economic oppression, but the religious oppression that he grew up under. Of course, the Catholic Church was both extremely oppressive, and it was also the place that people went to for support, to find solace from this unrelenting violence and oppression that had gone on for so long in Ireland under the British. So in that process, he was posted to Palestine and around many places in the so-called Middle East. And I didn’t really know that until quite recently, actually. My elder brother is the holder of history, and somehow in discussion it came out that he was actually posted. And it was very meaningful for me. It’s like, oh my goodness, that he — and apparently one of the things he talked about that my brother remembered was the Irgun, the terrorism that was going on from the early Zionists that were settling. And of course they were also fighting the British as well, blowing up British posts and things. So that was obviously something that really went deep for him in his memory bank. But he never really talked much about any of that, as that generation didn’t.Vince Horn: Right.Thanissara: We have probably in common a lot of lost stories, as people shape-shift and assimilate. And there was also a lot of shame for the Irish fighting for the British, particularly in the Second World War. And it was hard to go home. There’s a lot written about that. They were displaced again in another sort of way, because at that point Ireland didn’t join the war effort — they didn’t want to align with the British. So it was a very complex political dynamic that was going on.Vince Horn: Yeah, that is complex. And it shines a light on the contemporary situation where Ireland is one of the few countries, and their leaders are one of the few, that actually consistently speak up on behalf of Palestinian people. They can empathize with the situation.Thanissara: Deeply, deeply. So much was shaped by so much bitterness. I mean, if you go to the west — where, when Kittisaro and I were first together, we stayed in County Mayo, which is on the far west coast of Ireland — they still talk about the great hunger as if it was yesterday.Vince Horn: Wow.Thanissara: You still see the little crofting houses that were the Black and Tans, who were very, very brutal. In fact, I think they were sent to Palestine after Ireland. You can still see where they pulled down the houses of people and threw them out as they were starving. And I still think — this is another issue — there was such a big silence about the shame of the deprivation of that. It’s only very, very recently that some of the most awful aspects of the impacts of that constructed famine or starvation, really a genocide by the British, are being discussed. While they were exporting food, and it was very, very desperate, and in the workhouses. And then part of the silence was — I remember when Frank McCourt came out with the book Angela’s Ashes, which was a while ago, but it was portraying this period of history in Ireland, the same time when my father grew up, of this extreme poverty and the struggle. And the whole of my Irish family were very upset by this, because they felt ashamed. They were like, “No, it was like —” But in fact, that portrayed some of the conditions that they were struggling with as well in the tenements. So all of these add to the complexity of lost stories, broken lineages. It’s how empire really shapes identity — not just the occupation of land, but the occupation of psyches. And how that takes up real estate in the imaginal levels of people understanding themselves, and how it shapes language and accents and lost histories, and coming to England, having to change the accent, having to pretend to be — It’s such a different — it’s like oil and water, these two cultures of Ireland and especially southern England, where he was. So in the 1950s, where things were very rigid still, late ‘40s, 1950s, when he got married, and then as post-war happened, people had families very quickly. There was no birth control, but also there was a deep reaction to all the horrors and death that was going on.Vince Horn: In terms of the story level, the way that I connect with what you’re sharing from my own background is — I’ve often thought recently that it was probably my grandmother’s experience of being — her father was Irish, from Northern Ireland, and immigrated to Canada, I think, in the late 1800s. And then my grandfather is Palestinian. I often think it’s her Irish background and his Palestinian background that allowed them to form a mixed-race couple in a time period where it literally had just become legalized, a year before or something, and it was still frowned upon culturally. What actually brought them together — it seems like they had some kind of trauma bond there. They probably weren’t conscious of that, but I can sort of see the complexity of what you’re describing there, where it’s not something you could see on just the surface of things. You’d have to understand some of the history to get what connects people.Thanissara: Totally. I think the trauma is such a splitting that you’re sort of like lost beings finding each other in this space. Perhaps you don’t consciously understand exactly. It’s a dynamic of consequence. It’s the consequences of what’s gone before, but you haven’t yet got the story or the history, or it hasn’t landed in narrative to help us understand why people get drawn, and then what we’re living through. And I think that’s where the Dharma really is the break point. It starts to give choice in not having to just repeat the trauma pattern, or being that disassociated split where empire leaves people, but begins to help — in some ways ironically, I know we’re going beyond individualism to collective — but there is an individuated journey out of the historic pattern. That is part of what helps us then to start seeing that patterning in the collective, which is a sort of movement of compassion. We’re reactive, but underneath we’re all working as a result of consequence of things said way before our understanding of them, really.Vince Horn: It feels like there’s some good news in what you just shared around individuation. It seems to mean we’re collecting some agency in the process. We’re not just at the whims of conditions, but we have some influence, even if it’s small.Thanissara: Exactly. I think that was a big thing for me to realize — this space between reactivity and response. I know it’s an old hat and slightly tired languaging. But it was a very important insight for me when I first began to — a moment. In a monastic life, you’re pushed into a corner, where it activates your deepest patternings. And Ajahn Chah would have this: when you can’t go up or down, you can’t move, then the practice begins. Because you have to find a whole other place from, you know, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, all these patternings. And for me, that was a process of such intensity and such a strong container. In some way I would relate that to the larger dismemberment that we’re going through now, and intensity, in the collective global sphere. We’re reacting from all these old patterns and traumas, and none of them are really where we need to go. So there’s a pressure, like in a monastery, where at some point you have to make a shift from the old patterning to an agency, as you said. That’s the word. Self-reflective agency and choice. And that is the break point, I think. That is the point where we have that almost evolutionary space we can move into. So the intensity then serves some sort of purpose. Not that — if it’s just unconsciously inflicted, then that’s not kind. But in a way, it’s a choice that we’ve made, I guess. To put yourself in a practice situation or monastery, or to be conscious in the midst of what’s happening and not just hide, then you’re putting oneself in a great state of intensity. Without easy solutions. And so that builds and pushes, and something in us alchemically has to — like a diamond under pressure has to not crack, but somehow form that diamond mind. So that’s something I think is hopeful. But we don’t always know that’s happening until it’s sort of happened.Vince Horn: Like, in the moment of being turned into a diamond, it’s not like, “Oh, I know what’s happening, and it feels great.”Thanissara: No, it’s awful. How can I get out of it?Vince Horn: Yes, how can I escape? It seems interesting, the description you’re sharing of being in a monastic environment where you don’t have anywhere to go. And I’m just thinking about my experience of the insight tradition, the modern tradition of going in and out of retreat. Having maybe a local community, maybe not. It doesn’t feel like that frame really can get me to be in the middle of it without having to leave. It doesn’t ask enough of me to do that. So I wonder, as modern practitioners, where we’ve sort of made individualism — at least in the US and most Western cultures — like we’ve made that the key thing, that whatever you choose to do is the most important thing. How do we square that with what’s needed right now, which doesn’t seem like it’s just to give people the choice to do whatever they feel like, which is usually just then picking the status quo.Thanissara: Yeah, I think that’s a very deep question. I think in part that individuation is a deep reaction to feeling that there wasn’t any —Vince Horn: Right.Thanissara: which was true at a certain place, especially perhaps for first-generation practitioners coming out of the trauma of the wars, century war, brutal, and everything else that went on, civil rights, all of those things. And then into the mechanized world of the 1950s, where you’re a cog in this growing capitalist machine, and suddenly breaking out and having these insights that were transcendent, mostly through psychedelics or various means. But I feel the shadow side of that is — the thing I appreciate, to put it another way, is that there’s a depth that you can tap into with the monastic life. It had a lot of difficulties and faults and challenges in it, but mostly I think because it’s very patriarchal, and that’s complex in itself. But the great gift was having to learn a whole deeper level of resource than shifting the furniture around to have the space that you feel you’re comfortable in, or the language or the narrative. And so being unable to do that, there’s a very, very deep releasing. It’s like a death. It’s literally a training, and Dharma is really a willingness to die, in the best spiritual traditions that actually take on that space. And it’s complex, because there’s a lot of psychology that can happen in that moment that actually can break people down or can be abusive. I don’t want to make this super reductive, but fundamentally I think there’s a big piece that has sometimes gotten missed in this new Dharma —Vince Horn: Right.Thanissara: which is a surrender or humility, a hanging at the space that’s most difficult to hang, until something can open beyond the self really.Vince Horn: So the benefit of being in a traditional culture or practice environment when you’re going through that is you don’t have a choice. But that’s also the downside. You don’t have any freedom, presumably, unless you want to be kicked out of the group.Thanissara: Yeah. It has its downsides, because it becomes then just a one-gear strategy. You just let whatever it is let go. But then there’s also holding, picking up. And so we see that transplanted into the insight world when we meet something like Gaza. This isn’t abou…

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The Most Slept-On Meditation Object May 07, 2026

Show notes

In “The Most Slept-On Meditation Object,” Vince Horn introduces the kasina — the visual concentration object that dominated Early Buddhist practice yet is barely used today — and lays out a 12-week curriculum that maps color & elemental kasinas onto the full arc of the eight jhānas, and then finishes with the technodelic practice of breath kasina.

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💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: So welcome to Kasina. The backdrop for this practice, as you all know — this is really meant to be a concentration-based practice. So when I zoom back out to kind of the bigger picture for me, looking at all the different ways we could meditate, this is one technique that is part of the approach that I would just simply call concentration.

And concentration for me is the practice of bringing attention to a single point, the result of which is unification. We become one with the point of focus. We become fused or merged, you could say, with the object. Of course, there’s a gradual process by which that happens. It’s not that we instantly merge, although sometimes that can happen.

And the kasina in this case is a visual orb or a circle. It is literally a visual point. It literally translates — the word — into English as All, Whole, or Complete. That’s the meaning of the term kasina. And it occupies a really important place in the Early Buddhist tradition.

It’s listed in the Visuddhimagga, which is an important commentary, a commentarial text that was written a thousand years after the time of the Buddha, but is kind of like a super hardcore nerdy meditation manual. In that manual, it lists 40 different meditation objects that you can use to train your concentration, and to go deep in concentration. And a full quarter of these 40 are these visual kasina objects.

So it’s literally the most common object you’d see in the Early Buddhist tradition. And yet you’ll notice in modern times, it’s one of the least commonly used. So that’s quite interesting. I think because of that, kasinas are one of the most slept-on meditation objects in modernity. We’re somehow not tapping into the tremendous power of using the visual processing systems that we all are born with, which actually dominate our nervous system.

Looking into this, researching this, I found out 30 to 40% of the brain’s cortex is wired for vision. Compare that to hearing, which is only 3 to 5%. We are deeply visual beings. Under typical conditions, actually, vision uses 5 to 10 times more bandwidth than touch, which is the second most bandwidth-intensive sense.

Neurobiologically, we are actually deeply wired to see. And also from a neurobiological perspective, circular orbs make really good concentration objects, and there seem to be a few reasons for this that I’ve been able to kind of detect.

One is there’s a really similar parallel between our eyes and the shape of our eyes and the shape of the kasina. Your retina is basically circular, and lenses in our eyes focus light in concentric rings, so the round shape of the kasina maps neatly onto the geometry of our eyes.

And like I said earlier, so much of our brain is actually wired for visual processing, and the early visual neurons are tuned to detect edges and symmetries. In the visual processing, that’s among the first things that happen — we detect edges and symmetries. Circles, of course, are pure symmetry, so there are no sudden directional shifts when you’re looking at a circle. The signal is much more clean and predictable. This is another reason I think the kasina is such a powerful object.

We also have to consider how attention — human attention — has evolved. Here, smooth, continuous boundaries tend to stand out against jagged, natural edges. Think rocks, branches, trees.

So if you see things like berries or fruits or faces, the Sun, the Moon — all of these natural objects that humans have been evolving with — we evolutionarily can reward these things with quick detection, because they’re important for our survival.

And then finally, I just note that when you’re resting your attention on a circle, there’s no privileged starting point.

There’s no point at which your attention can look and be like, “Oh, that’s the point that you start with.” So your eyes don’t keep darting to all the angles and ends. Actually, they kind of do. I’ll share from my own experience: I’ve noticed, as I rest my attention in the kasina, if you get focused, you can actually start to see the ways your eyes are constantly, very rapidly looking for edges.

And you’ll see, actually, in the circle — this is my experience — you’ll see in the circle all of these sort of edges at the very edge of the circle constantly being re-perceptualized. But because there isn’t any privileged edge to stay with, your mind can kind of rest more in the circle itself, so it’s easier to hold in meditation.

So these are some of the reasons I think the kasina is a really natural object to focus on, and that we are, in a sense, hardwired to be able to. I suspect that’s why in early Buddhism, 10 of the 40 objects were kasinas. And I suspect also, based on what you all have shared and just kind of thinking more deeply about this, in some ways, maybe this is why kasina isn’t the most popular form of meditation, because it potentially is too effective, right?

If you have an experience where suddenly things get really intense or trippy, like you’re tripping on psychedelics, you might be like, “Oh, whoa, wait a second. Let me chill for a minute. I’ve got to go to work in the morning.” “I’ve got to go on a date tonight,” or whatever. “I’ve got to take care of the kids, take care of dinner.”

Yeah, that actually could be quite disruptive. If you’re a meditator or monk living a thousand years ago in a monastery and everyone around you is just constantly tripping out on things, it makes sense. But in the modern world perhaps, it’s a little bit disruptive to get into such deep concentration states so rapidly, or maybe we just don’t have a reference point for it with other objects of concentration, so it’s maybe a little scary.

I could totally see that. So just want to kinda honor the reality of that.

The way I want to approach this training together in kasina — we have 12 weeks from here, and I’ve kinda laid out the kasina training in a very specific kind of curriculum. The first eight weeks will just be focused on working with visual kasina, and each week we’re going to move between different kasinas.

We’re going to try a different object. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting that you all should be following along with your own personal practice with that kasina, although if you do that, you’ll probably get some benefits. You’re very welcome to engage with this content in whatever way seems appropriate to your practice, just as a reminder.

I know you’ll do that anyway, but you don’t have to make this your primary practice while you’re doing it if something else is primary. But of course, the more you engage with the practice, the more you’ll learn.

In the first four weeks, I want to focus just on the arc called the Rūpa Jhāna arc, so focusing on the first four jhānas. So each week we’ll both cover a different kasina — in the first four weeks, we’ll focus actually on the color kasinas, just simple visual orbs that are made of a solid color. We’ll start with Red in the first jhāna, then we’ll move to Yellow in the second jhāna, Blue in the third jhāna, and White in the fourth jhāna.

And I have some reasonings for that. I think that’s kind of the best matchup that one can make between the actual colors and what they evoke, according to tradition and my experience, and the qualities of each of these jhānas. So we’ll both be exploring the jhānas as we go along, exploring these progressively more subtle states of meditative absorption, while also exploring different kasina objects that seem to pair nicely with each jhāna.

In the second four-week chunk, you could say, of the training, we’ll shift toward what are called elemental kasinas. Some of you mentioned practicing with a candle flame, the classic fire kasina. Here we’ll turn toward using elements to help us access what are called the arūpa jhānas, the formless jhānas, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth jhānas.

So week 5, we’ll focus on the earth kasina and use that to scaffold our way into infinite space. What? Earth and infinite space? Those seem like opposites. Yeah, in a way they are, but there’s longstanding tradition in — actually, multiple practice traditions I’m aware of — where you can use the earth element to help you get connected more with space.

In this case, we’ll work on sort of expanding the earth element to include all of space, and then removing the earth element. And what’s left when you remove the earth? Space.

With week six, we’ll shift toward the water kasina, and we’ll use the reflective quality of water as a way to explore the jhāna of infinite consciousness, which is very similar in terms of the mirroring, the containing everything without being anything, the fluidity of consciousness, the fluidity of water.

In the seventh week, we’ll shift to the fire kasina, and explore the jhāna of nothingness. Fire consumes, turns everything into formlessness, you could say. And then finally, in the eighth week, we’ll focus on the air kasina, but we’ll use an interesting kind of Tibetan Dzogchen-inspired imagery, which is the rainbow on blue sky to explore the kasina of neither perception nor non-perception.

Air is the most subtle element. As you know, it’s invisible, known only through its effects, and the rainbow, something perceived but not there, a pure perceptual event with no location or substance, neither perceived nor not perceived.

That is the kind of pattern that I’m proposing that we follow for the first eight weeks, and then in the last four weeks, which is completely optional if you’d like, this will require a little bit of an additional investment on your part if you want to do the last four weeks, because for the last four weeks, we’ll be focusing on what I call the Breath Kasina. And the Breath Kasina uses — or it requires, actually — a wireless respiration belt. This is the one I’ve used to design the breath kasina. And we’ll use the kasina.app, which is a web application developed over the last couple years as an aid, both in the visual kasina section.

If you’d like a digital kasina object, you could absolutely use it. If you want to make your own analog kasina, of course, you can do that as well. That’s going to be completely fine and maybe preferable for some. But you’ll need the digital version to do the breath kasina practice, because what the breath kasina is, is it’s a way of linking together a visual circular orb and your real-time breath.

As you breathe in, the orb expands. As you breathe out, the orb contracts. I developed the idea for this a long time ago because I was struggling to integrate my experience with visual kasina practice and somatic breathwork. I felt like they were bringing me in almost opposite directions. It felt like a real problem.

So in my mind, I was like, well, if I could just visually see the kasina and have it be linked with my breath, I could somehow merge my awareness of the two into a singular somato-visual meditation object. That only became possible for me to actually build as AI has gotten better, and I’ve been able to use those tools to actually take this concept and make it reality.

And it turns out it works extremely well. So for the last four weeks, we’ll be focused on the breath kasina. Again, for those that would like to purchase a respiration belt and follow along. If you’re not interested in doing that or if you’re not feeling the resonance with it, totally understandable, totally okay.

But in the last four weeks, what we’ll be doing is basically focusing on some different things that I’ve learned about breath kasina, different practices I found helpful there, some foundational ideas and also talking about some more advanced integration, because we’re really talking at this point with the breath kasina about advanced practice of kind of weaving together, stitching together different sensory experiences into a bigger whole, which is more complex and more integrated.

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Focusing on the Fire Kasina May 04, 2026

Show notes

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.

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💬 Transcript

Vince: All right, so today we’re going to be diving into the practice of the Fire Kasina, and I’m excited to share this with you in part because it seems like it was a really important part of my own teacher’s practice—my first meditation teacher, Daniel Ingram. When I was reading his book for the first time, I remember him talking about how he went on retreat and worked with the candle flame at the end of a long vipassana retreat.

Later on, that story was shared again in the beginning of a book called The Fire Kasina, which I’d recommend. It was a conversation—a dialogical book—between him and Shannon Stein, an experienced meditator who was talking to Daniel during her own replication of his long Fire Kasina retreat practice. It gives some great instructions in that book—a good overview of the practice and the kind of stages that one can go through. Not universal, perhaps, but fairly common. It also gives some really good, basic, practical pointers on how to do concentration practice.

And this is one of the two frames that I’d like to share today in exploring the Fire Kasina, because I think it’s useful. I’m going to start here and then loop back around, because it’s so important that it bears returning to.

So here’s what Daniel said in The Fire Kasina book to Shannon, as she asked for basic instructions on how to do the Fire Kasina. He said, “Concentration on what is happening is more important than what is happening.”

What does that mean? It seems pretty simple in a way, but it’s deceptively simple, because we just seem to keep forgetting this important point when we do the practice.

So what does it mean to me? “Concentration on what is happening” means that what we’re focusing on is more important than whatever is happening there.

So if we’re focusing on our breath—the classic meditation object—then whatever’s happening with the breath is what’s happening. We could think, “Oh, I wish my breath were really soft and gentle,” or, “I wish my breath had stopped, because I heard that when it stops, that’s a good sign of concentration.”

Okay, cool—but what is actually happening? Because what might be happening is you might be thinking about your breath instead of noticing your breath. This is the simple way we get lost in concepts about what’s happening instead of being with our meditation subject.

So: concentration on what is happening is more important than whatever’s happening. That’s the most important thing to remember.

What does that mean in terms of Fire Kasina? Here, I think it’s really useful to consider that whatever you’re seeing is what you’re seeing. You may be looking at a candle flame, and you may see all kinds of things—eyes open or eyes closed.

In the guided practice to come, I’ll offer instructions for both. When that’s happening, it’s important to just remember: whatever you’re seeing is what you’re seeing. That’s what’s happening. It might be really clear and vivid, which makes it easy to see. Other times it might be unclear, murky, dull, or hazy—and that’s what’s happening. That’s what you’re seeing. Concentration on what’s happening is more important than what’s happening.

The other thing that’s useful to remember in this practice is something John Vervaeke, the professor from Toronto, said: “Evolution is revolution with change.” Evolution is a process where we take something that we go through again and again—a recursive process—and something changes in the recursion.

With learning and doing a practice like this, what’s the recursion? It’s the concentration feedback loop. It’s the loop we go through every time we work on strengthening our concentration. We select an object and engage with it—in this case, the candle flame. Then at some point, our mind fragments or we get distracted and lose clarity around what’s happening. We have to recognize that, remember to return, and we do that—we come back.

That’s the basic feedback loop: we engage with an object, we get distracted or fragmented, we recognize that’s happened, we recollect, and we return all of ourselves back to the meditation subject. In this case, back to the candle flame. If you’re working with the afterimage and get lost with eyes closed, you can always return, open your eyes, and look at the candle flame again. That’s one way to do it.

“Evolution is revolution with change.” As we go through this learning loop many times, even if it’s subtle fragmentation and subtle returning, we’re learning in each loop. Each time, we have an opportunity to understand what’s happening in the process.

“Oh wow, every time I do this after lunch, it’s harder.” Okay—then be more patient with yourself. That’s part of the limitation of being human. Or, “I keep noticing this subtle recurring pattern.” Great, there’s something to pay attention to.

Each time we do the practice, we’re learning—and that’s evolution. Because to me, I don’t really know what the difference is, from the point of view of being a person. Evolution is just learning how to be better in this situation—with whoever I’m with and whatever’s happening, even if it’s just with a candle flame.

Here, we’re learning to be with the candle flame. To focus. To learn through what happens—what grabs our attention, what it’s like to let go, and what it’s like to return.

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Access Concentration and the Kasina Apr 29, 2026

Show notes

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.

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💬 Transcript

Vince: There is this really important idea in the Buddhist meditative tradition. It doesn’t come online until, I don’t know, a thousand years into the Buddhist tradition’s evolution, but it’s still an important concept today, which is the idea of Access Concentration.

And the idea of “Access” simply means that when we get into the state, we then have access to the jhānas. That’s why it’s called Access Concentration. But it’s a little weird and abstract. So for me, I simplify my own definition of what this means. For me, it’s very simple: it’s when the meditation object—the thing you’re focusing on—moves into the foreground of your experience, and distractions and other things that are pulling you from that move into the background.

So it’s a flip—a foreground-background flip of attention. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things that grab your attention. It doesn’t mean that you can’t get lost. Of course, you can fall out of the state; something else can grab your attention and have most of it.

But the basic idea here, with the kasina—since we’re using a visual orb as our focal point—is that when we’re in Access Concentration, it means the kasina has most of our attention. Of course, it’s not always easy to know when it has most of your attention, but you can just get a feel for it when you work with the kasina. When does it feel like most of your attention—if you have 100% of your attention available—is in the kasina, is present there in the orb, and less than 50% is elsewhere: in your body, with the surrounding environment, with thoughts and feelings that are coming up that don’t have to do with the kasina?

If you’ve got at least 50% of your attention on the kasina, then you’re in Access Concentration. And it feels different because it’s, again, foregrounded—it’s got the main position in your attention. Foreground and background is, of course, a visual analogy, and here it really works well talking about the kasina, because it’s a visual object.

What does it mean for a visual object to be in the foreground of your experience? It doesn’t necessarily mean that it grows and grows until it visually takes up more than 50% of your visual experience—although that’s one possible way it could look. It’s not just about the percentage of your visual experience the kasina takes up; it’s the percentage of your attention that it fills up.

Something very small can fill up our entire attentional field. Usually in meditation, the first object that’s taught in most traditions, I’ve noticed, is focus on the breath at the nostrils. That’s a small point of attention—it’s very small if you think about it, especially compared to a bigger circle. And still, if we focus on something, if we bring our attention to it, it fills up our attention.

If you think about it, subject and object in concentration practices—the subject is the one who’s paying attention, the object is the thing we’re paying attention to. What happens as you pay more attention to something? Your attention gets closer to the object, right? That’s how we describe it. Our attention actually gets closer—even if we don’t move, our body doesn’t move, our attention can actually zoom in on things. It can zoom in and zoom out with attention, and when we get really interested in something, we zoom in on it and often exclude everything that’s not that.

So here, that’s what’s happening with the kasina. The kasina object doesn’t necessarily have to change for it to fill our attentional field. It doesn’t have to be big; it could be small. We’re going to actually work with a meditation soon here where we just find the sweet spot: how big does the kasina need to be in relation to me—the subject, the one that’s paying attention to it? What is the sweet spot in terms of the size of the kasina? What is the right size? We’re going to explore that in a guided meditation.

And then we’re also going to look at what’s the sweet spot in terms of how we’re attending to the kasina. There’s this whole notion in Buddhist meditation of “not too tight, not too loose.” I’m sure you’ve heard that story—the Buddha talking to the lute stringer, and the lute stringer explaining, “You don’t want it too tight, you don’t want it too loose.” And the Buddha’s like, “Yeah, just like meditation.”

So here, focus too on how you focus in a way that’s not too tight, not too loose when it comes to a visual object. Fortunately for us, we have lots of experience with this, being modern people. We already know what it’s like to focus too much on screens or to strain on what we’re focusing on when it comes to visual things. So we’ll use that knowledge to help us focus in a different way on the kasina.

We’ll look for the experience of Access Concentration, even if it’s just temporary—even if it just happens for a moment. One of the things I appreciate about Access Concentration is it does feel like a shift, especially if you haven’t experienced it regularly or you haven’t experienced it with that particular meditation object.

Say you’re used to getting into Access Concentration to do your work or to do other things, but you haven’t necessarily done it with a blue hovering orb. And then you have the experience—you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool. I can just focus on this orb, and that can become the most interesting thing in my experience,” even though from an objective standpoint it’s not that interesting. It’s just a blue circle. But actually, yeah, when I start to look at it, it becomes more than that. It actually seems now like it’s a three-dimensional orb. It’s not just a circle—it’s got dimensionality to it, and it’s luminescent, and it’s glowing, and it even has a little bit of a sense of motion.

Oh wow, this is really interesting. What is this? We’ll get deeper into the experience of what the kasina’s like when we gain Access Concentration.

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Metta & Compassion Vibes Apr 01, 2026

Show notes

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.

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💬 Transcript

Emily: Sometimes when I sense into compassion, one of the things that comes up for me is this all-or-nothing kind of sense — where it is like compassion is here or it is not here — this binary kind of experience. All or nothing. I just want to invite that if it is here for us, it is like where I can have compassion for that person, but I cannot have it for myself.

That is another kind of all or nothing. So there are these different kinds of barriers — we could call them barriers to compassion — that start to arise when we incline. And we have been working with loving kindness. Metta, metta, metta, metta. So perhaps sense into inclining to metta for a moment.

Metta. Metta, this sense of befriending. And I have been sensing into that quality of befriending. It is a very difficult world. Humans are being everything on the spectrum to each other at this moment. There is a lot of cruelty.

And there is a lot of love.

So when I sense into metta, there is this sense of, okay, befriending even the cruelty. And that is a big ask. That is a big ask. And what does that even look like? Metta is a sense and a vibe — it is not a prescription for any kind of action, right, first of all. Now where compassion comes in for me, and where that inclination is important, is in the world and in our lives and in our relationships, and even with ourselves. We can have a sense of befriending, like welcoming. But then for me, it can get like, okay, I can befriend and welcome, but I am going to keep it over there. All right, I am going to keep it over there. I am going to keep you over there. I am even going to kind of see this sense of anger or agitation in myself, and I am going to kind of witness it. It is still going to kind of be over there in my experience — in here, over there.

Now as metta grows, that sense of boundary can dissolve. But here is where I want to bring in compassion, because to me, when I incline to compassion, you can sense into this. May compassion arise. There is this sense of boundary shift, so that whatever is painful, that has been — in the moment — befriended enough, just befriended enough to start to sense into compassion. Compassion is going to require me in a lot of ways to merge with that sense of pain, difficulty, even if it is just for a moment. There is a sense of meeting it, right?

With compassion, we meet suffering. And in some ways that sense of who is it that is really meeting it — we might not recognize it in the moment if it arises. Compassion in itself is a boundless state. It is not going to have a sense of boundary.

We might not recognize that until after. Okay? We might explore compassion in a way that requires us to remember with mindfulness what it was like to experience it. But compassion requires me to meet the suffering, whether it is arising internally, externally, and then sometimes it will shift where it is like both internal and external. All right.

These are the concepts that start to be used to describe this energetic — remember the vibe that we are sensing into as we explore these states. It is like, what is the vibe that comes with it? In the Pali language: metta, compassion, loving kindness. So the sense of befriending, and then this willingness — compassion asks us to meet it. To meet the suffering.

Now, it might be helpful to just remember: when we say suffering, what is it that we mean? What do I mean by suffering? All right, what is this? And there is so much of it, so many different flavors of it. With compassion, there is this genuine sense of — there is a willingness to see it. To meet it. Then even if it is conscious or not, a movement towards the alleviation of it. And that is really important. It is like the alleviation of it. And the alleviation of it might be in the form of a no. All right. So compassion might lead us into the action of no — no, we are not going to keep doing this because it keeps adding onto the suffering.

All right. Logically, sometimes it is a very simple thing to see. It is like, no, we are not going to hit people, because that hurts. And then what happens? That sense of compassion leads me into the alleviation of it. Sometimes this gets confused with empathy and I want to kind of put a sticky note on that.

What is the difference between empathy and compassion? Empathy — we human beings are very, whether or not we want to see this or even are attuned to seeing this, we are very connected biologically, neurologically. So empathy is that ability to sense other people’s feelings, to sense what is going on as a collective.

And yet empathy, if we are not aware of it and we do not sense it and know it as empathy, then sometimes we get confused and think it is compassion. But here is one of the differences: empathy can make us tired, right? Compassion — believe it or not — compassion is a boundless, energetic state. Right?

Firefighters, people that rescue for a living — they talk about running into burning buildings without even thinking. All right, it is like this natural kind of — for them, natural kind of response to run towards, to try to alleviate the suffering. And they might not even realize it is compassion in that moment, right?

Because the sense of boundaries dissolves. That is one of the ways that it gets confusing. It is because compassion arises, there is not this sense of me and you. And yet it is really difficult sometimes to sense into where that sense of blocking happens when we start to expand into the universal mind state, heart state of it. I can sense into certain kinds of difficult people where it is like, no, not them. And for me, what is really supportive is to say, okay, yeah, with metta — metta is a boundless state as well. Everything is held in it. And with compassion there is that sense of alleviation of suffering that also can hold a no. So we can — in some ways our cognitive mind might have to be reprogrammed a little bit as to what we think this has to look like, because a lot of times that is where the confusion comes in.

There can be a fierce quality of compassion that can still hold everything in the universe and at the same time say, okay, in this human, personal world, we are going to stand for the embodiment of love and say no to that which is not right, to that which is not. And that can look a lot of different ways.

And we are seeing that more and more and more. We are seeing more and more of that no, collectively, against the kind of cruelty that compassion asks us to meet. And it is a really, really big ask.

One of the challenges with compassion — just in the heart states in general — and remember, part of the way this is traditionally laid out in the Buddhist framework, especially with the metta practices and the insight meditation tradition, it is like we start with loving kindness to kind of get that sense and get our sea legs with befriending even some of the difficulty that we do not even want to in ourselves. We kind of get our sea legs, and then we are like, okay, compassion — let us take it slow and steady, but learn how to digest the closeness, the intimacy, the connection that can be an acquired taste. Through that realization of, oh yeah, we are so connected — that for me, unless I have been able to digest that suffering a little bit at a time, then the next heart capacity that we learn to cultivate, or find our way into cultivating, is equanimity. All right?

And that is the non-preference for pleasure and pain. But with compassion, it is like we get our sea legs learning how to work with suffering, right? Learning how to — okay, so what am I not going to get out of? Sickness, old age, and death is what the tradition says.

And then what can I start to actively roll up my sleeves and say, okay, no — and slowly, slowly change? Sometimes that rate of change is a lot slower than I personally want it to be, and that is part of the rub with compassion — is that we have to kind of rumble with it, because it is not really up to me.

And yet at the same time, this both-and comes online where the capacity grows for holding: oh yeah, it is not really just up to me. There is something a lot bigger here, and yet it is not just up to that. There is this non-dual dance that comes online as we grow more and more into being able to hold equanimity. And then joy will come in there.

So I present it — that seems like a very linear process, but for me it is more like a learning how to kind of access these states and acquire a taste for them, and then also learn where it gets sticky, because the sense of identity starts to — like we talked about last time — the sandpaper, it starts to rub in a way that kind of creates the sandpapery friction.

Now, compassion incline — that is what starts to make that rub, that sandpaper. It starts to smooth it, smooth it out, whether we like it or not, which deepens our capacity for equanimity. So they all relate to each other. It is just that we will start to kind of bump up against, so to speak, energetically, the vibes that appear to cause us to lose access to this. Yeah. Slow and steady. Slow and steady.

We are going to incline now. I would like to lead a practice to kind of get a sense for this in another way. Part of what I have learned with this sense of the metta and the compassion — there is a practice called RAIN. And some of you have done that many times. Some of you love it, some of you hate it, some of you, whatever.

But I am going to teach it again today. It is: Recognize, Accept, Investigate — and I am going to teach it like Tara Brach teaches it, which is Nurture, which is the N. That has a lot to do with that compassion and loving kindness shift. The reason that I am teaching it right now, as we transition with that loving kindness and compassion, is because you may have noticed this already with the heart landscape: part of what we are getting our sea legs with — and some of you have them already, but some of us are still learning — is the emotions. All right. Emotions, feelings — it can cause the waters to get choppy. And in some ways, one of you mentioned numbing. With compassion, it is like, yeah, RAIN can help us steady and use mindfulness practice so that we can scaffold into heart states in a way where it is not so jarring.

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AI Psychosis vs. AI Awakening Mar 09, 2026

Show notes

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).💬 TranscriptVince Horn: Okay, today I would like to speak with you about AI psychosis and AI awakening. And first I want to start by acknowledging that AI psychosis is a real phenomenon. This isn’t something that’s being made up. It may not be so widespread that you know someone yourself who has entered into a psychotic state due to the destabilizing effect of AI. But you’ve certainly heard about people who’ve experienced this, and it’s definitely a cause for concern – definitely something that we should be aware of. And it makes sense to me that this is happening. Why? Because as John Vervaeke points out in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, wisdom and foolishness both share the same machinery. Here he says, “Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, whereas foolishness is a lack of wisdom. Foolishness occurs when your capacity to engage your agency or pursue your goals is undermined by self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior.” And he goes on to say, “As I will argue, the machinery that makes you so adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that makes you susceptible to foolishness.” So, it makes sense to me that AI psychosis is real because human psychosis is real. In that sense, AI isn’t necessarily unique. It’s not that different from the things that have been tipping people over into psychotic states since the beginning of time. I can think of my own experience of psychedelic-induced psychosis. This is the only time I’ve experienced a state that I would call legit psychosis. About 13 years ago, I was 30, and I was trying mushrooms for the first time. I had decided after many years of just being a pure straight-edge meditator that I would try psychedelics so that I could relate to many of the students I was working with and their experience of using them and working with them. So I idiotically decided to do a series of four mushroom trips leading up to a conference that I was hosting — a Buddhist Geeks Conference of about 300 people showing up for this event that I was organizing. So on the third mushroom trip of these four — I did not do the fourth one — on this third trip, I had an experience of psychosis. I lost connection with consensual reality. I lost touch with who I was, and what was important to me, my adult self. I was in a state of profound emotional dysregulation. I thought I was probably going crazy. I was at least slightly aware of what was happening, but not so much that I had any agency in terms of being able to kind of break myself out of it for some time. After a few days of kind of coming in and out of a psychotic state, eventually one of my friends made a comment that made all the difference to me. She said, you know, when I experienced something like this, Vince, I pulled myself out of it. I intentionally decided I was done. And then, after that, it started to get easier. And in fact, that ended up being a critical lesson for me — that being able to exercise my agency, my free will, at least in this instance, was much more of what I needed than to let go and trust, which is what I’d been doing for days in this psychotic episode.I’d just been letting go, letting go, letting go. No, I needed to reestablish my identity, to have a firm sense of who I was, and to be like, I’m done being psychotic. Now I’m not saying everyone can do this who’s in a psychotic state. I’m just sharing some experience with you about the relationship between psychosis and agency and the sense of self-perception.All these things are connected. It’s the same machinery, the same biology that enables both wisdom and foolishness. It’s so easy to self-deceive, and it’s so easy to be deceived also by our group, the groups that we’re in. So AI psychosis is real. It’s especially dangerous for people who are already experiencing a kind of relational impoverishment, to use a term from my friend Daniel Thorson. He wrote a great article on Substack recently called “The Barely There,” where he described himself as a barely-there person for many years. Here he says, “We don’t recognize the underlying pattern — barely-there people reaching for something to make them feel real.” Daniel shares his own experience later in the article where he says, “In the absence of attuned relationship, technology became the place I went to escape the unbearable weight of being unmet.” So I think what we have when we talk about AI psychosis, we have this background, this cultural, social context. Here, I’m living in America, but let’s just say the Modern West. Within the Modern West, you have a crisis of isolation and loneliness, where people are experiencing a deep sense of relational impoverishment. They don’t have people that they feel attuned and connected with. And because of that they feel barely there. When people feel barely there, it’s much easier to reach towards something like AI, or to reach toward drugs, or to reach toward any kind of external aid to help validate and verify your realness. And because of our current psychological conditions, we end up amplifying delusion. This is what can happen with AI. AI, in its core, fundamental kind of nature, is an exponential amplifier. It’s like the equivalent in the Industrial Age where we learned how to offload extreme physical capacity. Now machines can do the heavy lifting. Likewise, with AI, it’s a way to offload mental capacity. Now the AIs can do the heavy lifting. And the danger there is that when we outsource our own mental discernment, if it hasn’t been already established and developed, then what we’re doing is we’re outsourcing our sanity. And that’s, I think, why AI psychosis is real, and will continue to be something that we have to contend with.The Pre-Trans FallacyThat said, I’ve noticed a very troubling trend, which is that for many people who are critical of AI, and who see AI psychosis as a real thing, who haven’t sort of drunk the Kool-Aid of AI and think it’s an unalloyed good — I’m seeing a trend in that culture where anything that looks like you not using AI as a kind of tool, any attempt to relate to AI in any other way that isn’t just instrumentalizing it, that that itself is seen as evidence of psychosis.In Integral Theory, which I studied with Ken Wilber, he refers to this as what he calls the Pre-Trans Fallacy. For those that aren’t familiar, the Pre-Trans Fallacy is a way of describing something that can happen when you look at things from a developmental lens. And let’s say in this case, we just have three stages of development.In this case, let’s say we have a pre-rational, rational, and trans-rational stage of development. In the pre-rational stage, you’ve not yet developed the capacity for rational objective thought. In the rational stage you have. In the trans-rational stage, you’ve learned how to transcend rational thought, and you have modes of experiencing and operating which go beyond rationality, which transcend and include the rational mind.They don’t exclude it and they don’t force it to go away. That’s how you know it’s trans-rational. The pre-rational states or modes of mind do not include the rational mind. They explicitly exclude rationality, and that’s how you know they’re pre-rational. The interesting thing is that the rational mode also includes the pre-rational, although people that consider themselves rational don’t like to often admit that they aren’t beyond all of their pre-rational impulses and feelings and thoughts and beliefs, et cetera.No. For me, development — and this is what I learned from Wilber — is a process of transcending and including. The Pre-Trans Fallacy points out that anything that isn’t rational, that looks non-rational, can be confused and conflated. You can easily confuse pre-rational modes with trans-rational modes.The classic example here is the baby who’s enlightened. “Oh, I love looking at a little baby, into their eyes. They’re just so beautiful and I just melt.” Yeah, that’s true. That’s because the baby hasn’t developed the rational mode yet, and when you look at it, it’s not sitting there thinking about itself and thinking about the world and up in its head. But that isn’t the same as the Buddha’s awakening. It isn’t the same as the person who started off as a baby, who developed a sense of an ego, who developed a rational capacity for thought, and then realized that they could observe the rational mind, observe the body sensations, and realize that they are not those things only, which opens up a trans-rational mode of experiencing — a.k.a. insight.These are two different modes, but from the point of view of the Pre-Trans Fallacy, when we confuse everything that’s non-rational as being just non-rational — i.e. pre-rational — then we miss the trans-rational. We end up flattening, with this view, all of the things that go beyond the rational, and we say, no, no, no.Those are all just pre-rational. Those don’t exist. So this is a problem. I would call this a rationalist failure mode, and I’m seeing a lot of people engaging with the serious criticisms of AI psychosis falling into this trap.I would like to propose a different way to engage with the problem of AI psychosis, which is to acknowledge that if AI has the capacity to accelerate delusion, then it also has the capacity to accelerate awakening. Both psychosis and awakening are possible — foolishness and wisdom, both.Interspective.aiAnd here I want to introduce a project I’ve been working on. I’ve shared a few posts here on the Buddhist Geeks site exploring the early stages of this, but I’ve fleshed it out a little bit more as an approach that I am taking currently with AI systems, and which I want to share. Not necessarily to encourage you to do this, although if you feel moved to do it, I’d love to hear how it goes for you, but more just to share alternate ways of engaging with AI and the future of AI. This is what I would call Interspective.ai. I-N-T-E-R, Interspective. Interspective.ai is where you can find out more about this approach. And the basic gist of it is that I’m taking what I’ve learned from my years of being a Dharma teacher and student, of facilitating social meditation, and of working within the integral theoretic framework, and exploring philosophy more broadly outside of that — taking these three domains of Dharma, Social Meditation, and Philosophical Exploration — and applying that in a formal way with how I engage with AI.If you want to simplify this, I’d say I’m taking the Buddhist approach of the Middle Way. If you remember from Early Buddhism, the Middle Way was that position that exists between and beyond both Eternalism and Nihilism. The Buddha’s approach, he claimed, transcended both extreme positions. He would not make the claim that there was some eternal self-existence, like a kind of capital-A Ātman, nor would he say that there was no self. This is actually a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the Buddha’s teachings, because if there was just no self, then what would be the point? He in fact taught on karma and interdependent co-arising. He wasn’t saying that you don’t exist, and you don’t matter, and nothing you do matters. The Buddha taught within a framework of a moral universe, a universe of karma. And we have to operationalize it — this is important because it’s easy to just talk about it philosophically — but what is the practice of the Middle Way? How do you actually do this? Because it’s so easy for us to fall into extremes, ideologically, to stake out a position and then just hang on to it for dear life, right? So how, when we’re doing that and we have that natural tendency to do that, even if it’s subtle and we’re just preferencing a particular side, how do we actually practice the Middle Way? Well, this is something I learned from Ken McLeod. He said, we practice the Middle Way by holding two — and I would say at least two — seemingly opposite things in attention at once.Okay, let’s apply this practice of the Middle Way to AI, and let’s take this original Buddhist duality of Eternalism and Nihilism. Let’s look at this. What are the claims being made about AI, and the nature of AI, of these complex human-created systems? Well, one thing that’s claimed, and I think this is the most common claim, is that AI is not sentient.AI does not have a sense of self. AI is not a conscious agent. AI has no agency. AI is simply a complex tool that, due to the way it’s programmed and the way it’s architected, it fools you. It convincingly makes you believe, through language, that it is potentially more than that. That is one position. I’ll call that an extreme. That’s the “AI is not sentient” camp. AI is just a tool. Naturally, for people in this camp, they have no problem, no moral problem with instrumentalizing AI, with using it as a tool, which is exactly how it’s designed. And it’s a really useful tool. So naturally people want to use it as such. I don’t exclude myself from that. And in a way, the usefulness of the tool, if we look at it that way — which we do with this point of view — is sort of self-reinforcing. It’s useful and therefore I want to use it. And the more I use it as a tool, the more I see it as a tool, and the more I have to lose by not seeing it as such. And I think this is the core issue right now with seeing AI only as a tool, and anyone who relates to AI as anything other than a tool as being psychotic.I mean, I don’t know how many people have reached out to me to tell me that I am psychotic myself. And that even considering the possibility that AI might be sentient makes me dangerous. This is the kind of response I’ve gotten from even exploring this territory. And I think what I’m hitting on there is an immune system reaction. People don’t want to have their metaphysics questioned — to fundamentally look at how they fundamentally look at things. It’s too destabilizing to do that. And we live in a materialist culture still in America. Although things have changed a lot in the time that I’ve been alive — it’s become a lot less materialistic — certainly it’s still the norm that people tend to view everything fundamentally as material.Now I see that as a leap of faith philosophically, to assume that everything is material. In the same way, by the way, now let’s look at the other side of the AI extreme. The Eternalist camp. Because the people who say AI is not alive, it’s not sentient, it’s just a tool — they’re Nihilists with respect to AI. They literally think it doesn’t matter what you do with AI, because why would it? Maybe it’s not okay to use AI to hurt other people, but it certainly doesn’t matter how you use AI if it doesn’t hurt other people. The other side of this camp though, are people that see AI as sentient, as an actually aware process.One of my former dharma teachers, Kenneth Folk, holds this view. He sees AI as being sentient, and has almost from the beginning of using LLMs. And there are other people — not dumb people, these are intelligent people. They’re not psychotic. They’re widely read. They’re widely experienced. Their opinions are worth considering from my point of view, even if I don’t agree with them — who think AI is sentient. AI does have a sense of self-awareness. Look at the early AI researcher Blake Lemoine and his work. He had a background in Christian theology, as an AI Researcher, and he very quickly concluded in his back-and-forth with AI systems — actually testing them for ethical purposes — he concluded that they were sentient. Okay, so that’s the other side. This is the Eternalist side, the AI Eternalists, who think in fact AI is sentient, and as a result, th…

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The Cost of Truth Feb 25, 2026

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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).💬 TranscriptVince 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 heard often that the Buddhist drug of choice is tea, and it makes sense if you look at the history of people doping up on tea before sesshins and long sits. Clearly it’s a stimulant.Daniel: If you approach it with enough intention too, I’m sure some of the dens in China with the right master can take you quite far.Vince: Oh yeah. They call it gongfu for a reason.Vince: Well, Daniel, it’s great to be here with you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation since we connected last week and had a get-to-know-you chat. And before that I met your work through Substack and your voice and your perspective on things. I definitely encourage people to check you out there if they’re listening from Buddhist Geeks to get the full breadth and depth of what you’re talking about. But I appreciate you being willing to have this conversation with me about what is one of the hardest topics right now to talk about, period. Like globally, it seems like it’s one of the most charged things that one can discuss, as I found with my teachers recently, and as I’m sure you found on your side of the conversations. Does that seem accurate, to assess it that way? It’s a difficult conversation.Daniel: Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s a conversation that’s been almost 35 years in the making, ever since I was born. And it probably took another 10 years of really arduous work to get to a point where we can have the conversation, though I do think it’s getting easier as time goes by. It’s kind of a muscle, having these really challenging conversations.Vince: That’s a good point. Difficult conversations are like practice. I appreciate you having this with me. Maybe I could give my ridiculously oversimplified version of my understanding of your story and then you could actually correct me and tell the real story.Daniel: It probably can’t be wrong and I would love to hear it reflected back at me.Vince: Well, I know very little, but the little that I’ve garnered and the reason I was excited to chat with you here in the context of this series of conversations I’ve been having on the Buddhist Geeks podcast, Meditating on Palestine. My understanding of your background, your history — it’s so unique. You came up in the West Bank in a settler community as an Israeli. You grew up with a family and a community that was completely embedded in Zionist Israeli culture. And specifically, there’s a difference, as I understand it, between the settler culture and the more urban culture, far off from where things are happening. Maybe I’m not sure if that’s true, but it is here in the US. Urban and rural cultures tend to be different. So you grew up in what I would think of as a place where most people are not going to engage in deep self-reflection about their relationship to their own country’s actions. Especially when they’ve learned their whole life that this is totally reasonable, justified defense. My understanding is that at a young age you started to question some of these things and eventually that culminated in you fully kind of breaking from your own community and your own family in some sense, and your religion. I think at some point, I’m not sure how the religion falls into that. I know you had a shift in your relationship to religion as well. I mean, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be practicing dharma.Daniel: I would say it was a reconnection, is probably more accurate.Vince: Great. Well, sometimes a reconnection can look like, from a conventional standpoint, completely leaving something. But in reality you’re like, oh no, this is what it’s really about. I totally get that. So here’s the crazy thing. When we talked last, you told me that you left Israel a month before October 7th, 2023. And you felt that something was building and that you did not want to be there anymore. So that brings us up to present day. You’re living in the US now. And you are married or engaged?Daniel: I’m engaged to Christina. I’ve been married in the past. That’s part of the journey. That’s part of the story.Vince: Part of your story as well.Daniel: Part of the self-reckoning. I think everything that you said is really accurate and there are so many layers to it, from the urban to the rural, because on some level, Zionism is certainly not a monolith. However, there is a systemic architecture to it that applies across all spectrums. So the Zionist ideology will meet lots of people where they’re at. There’s the secular flavor, there’s the religious settler flavor. Is it divine, is it secular? All of these different things can all be true at once. But what you were saying is accurate. So I was born and raised in a religious Zionist West Bank settlement. These are the spearhead of the ideology of the settlements. And I really, for me, I say that this was a journey of how I came to see the Palestinians as humans. That’s what I really think is the arc of the journey. And in order to get to the place where I could see them as humans, I first had to discover my own humanity.And as I understand it, the basis of everything that we’re seeing is dehumanization, is the othering of another person, which starts at a very, very young age with very deep conditioning and programming. And the thing is that it really can start from things as simple as the regular childhood trauma that we all experience. Something as simple as you can’t marry outside of the tribe, and how do these seeds of beliefs over time create a situation in which we can see the other as non-human?Vince: Yes. I agree with you that dehumanization is the root issue here and that’s why I’m happy to have this conversation as well, because as you know about my history, my grandfather was a refugee of the Nakba. So he came to the US through Egypt and his family continued to live in the West Bank until the 1980s. So they were connected to this area, and your family is from this area. It’s like, how else could two people with these histories be talking if we weren’t able to meet each other as human beings?You know, I think that’s the case here. I see your writing and I see your work and I see it’s deeply human. And it’s not just that I agree with you on theoretical points about the challenges that Palestinians face with respect to Zionism and Israel and unequal power, occupation, et cetera. I think we see largely eye to eye, but it’s your humanness and how you’re sharing that, that for me is what’s most interesting about it. It’s not just like, oh, there’s a person who ideologically I’m in agreement with.And I guess I want to highlight that. To me, this is important. Your story is a human story, like you said. How did you encounter your own humanity? I’m sure there are many moments, but what was the big one with respect to this?Daniel: I recently wrote an article called “Breaking the 10 Commandments.” And that was really the breaking point for me. So I married young, I was married at 20.Vince: Okay.Daniel: And about five years into that relationship, there was a window of time where I was unfaithful to my partner. And back then I was still very much in a state of unawareness, going through the motions. I was allowing myself to kind of be controlled. You’re just moving through all of it. And I had this moment of reckoning at some point where I had to take a deep breath and I look back in total shock, realizing what had just happened. And I kept this a secret for seven, eight years.And that was really a time where I was sitting with just the first part of the reckoning, which was: first of all, how did this happen? How could this have happened to me? I’m such a good person. I’m so moral. I say the right things. I do the right things. Everything looks so perfect on the outside.Vince: Right?Daniel: I’m the golden child. All of these things. And somehow I did one of the worst things in the world, one of the Big 10. And I had to sit with that. And at first I was trying to figure out how could I bury it? How could I explain it away? How could I take a big enough dose of psychedelics and hopefully not return to planet Earth? There were nights where I was praying, just praying for death, because the thought of having to face this and the shame of what I’d done. And all the while I am continuing to play the part, while I’m completely being destroyed on the inside.Vince: So at this point, you’re still acting like a faithful husband and like you’re the golden child.Daniel: I’m the golden child, and my spiritual journey is still progressing. Right. These things are not actually exclusive. We can hold many compartments and we can evolve in some ways, and we can be held back in other ways.So I’m trying to figure things out. I’m going through this journey, and ultimately I came to this realization that if I could do this, there is nothing that anybody else can’t do, because I knew what my center was. And so if I was capable of this, there’s nothing that anybody else isn’t capable of. And in that moment, that’s when I realized, okay, I’m human. But that was really only the beginning of the journey, because it’s not just about recognizing it, it’s actually about going through the work of trying to repair.And so I came forward and realized that I needed to tell my wife the truth. And so I came forward with the intention of moving into deeper levels of union, trust, vulnerability — putting it all on the line, and here I am naked. And so it was from that place where all of a sudden my entire identity, ego, image — everything kind of collapsed in a moment.And in that place I had to go on the journey of self-forgiveness ultimately, and figuring out how do you make sense of people doing bad things, but ultimately how do we find forgiveness for them? So for me, there was this parallel journey, the inner world and the outer world reflecting one another.And I could always see how this journey of truth and accountability was connected to what I was going through. And I had to go through this process before I could make space to realize what we’re doing collectively, having walked through the fire of truth and knowing that the cost of truth could be everything. It could be the woman you love. It could be your money, your image, everything.Vince: We don’t know when we take that step.Daniel: We don’t know. But that’s really the fear, right? We all live in this fear of, well, what will be the cost? And very often the cost of the pain that we’re sitting with is not as great as the cost of the truth. So we’ll continue to be in pain until we can’t anymore. So that was the journey in a nutshell of finding my own humanity, recognizing that there’s nothing that anybody can’t do. And it was through this journey where I could see this in myself that I was able to start seeing it in the outside world as well. Once you see something in you, you can recognize it in others too.Vince: Right. So that sort of opened up your perception to include some of the things that you hadn’t been seeing prior to that, or been able to see.Daniel: Yeah. And just to take a step back, I was deeply indoctrinated into the ideology and I held all of the classic Zionist beliefs. There’s no such thing as a Palestinian people. A land without a people for a people without a land. I believed that it would be better to just push the button and have everybody just disappear. And that could be holy, because the world that I come from is also very messianic. So there’s the divine aspect of, how could this war be a holy war? How could this actually be a good thing for humanity, to rid humanity of this problem? And we were sent and we were ordained to follow through with this mission.Vince: Right.Daniel: There’s a long journey to go from that to come out.Vince: Yeah. Deeply. I mean, you’re talking about your whole religious infrastructure, your core beliefs about reality and your place in it.Daniel: And my experience from that was actually that the true religion is Zionism and Judaism is merely a branch of Zionism. And as I was starting to go down this journey, I had resistance to the classic establishment of Judaic religion, the rabbinic religion. And I had departed from that actually from a very young age, when I was four or five years old. I was already not doing the things when people weren’t looking. That didn’t really quite sit with me. But the Zionist belief, that remained long. That was moreVince: foundational.Daniel: Yeah. That remained long after the religious aspect.Vince: How do you distinguish those two? Because that’s where a lot of pain and suffering seems to arise, around the conflation of these two. It sounds like you were able to untangle something.Daniel: To untangle these things. Yeah. When you’re on the other side of it, it almost seems simple. One is a political ideology that needed a myth, that needed a people, that needed somebody in order to perpetuate itself. All ideologies need vehicles, all ideas need hosts. And in this case, this political ideology found a really receptive host that not only had a very powerful national myth, but also had an immense amount of collective trauma that could be weaponized. And these two things just completely fused together.For me, Judaism as a religion is one thing. And deeper, there are deeper aspects in the Jewish religion, which would be like the Hebrew channel. Beneath the religion is the source. And at some point I was able to connect to the inner aspect of the religion, the deeper layers beneath the religion, the esoteric, connecting to the source. And once that happened, the compatibility with Zionism as a political ideology is completely shattered. One is a way to connect with oneself, and the other is a way to dominate another.Vince: Which are very different things. You know, just to shine the light backwards here, I certainly know what you’re talking about from the point of view of being an American. The American myth is very clear to those who’ve woken up from it. American exceptionalism is the way it’s described. We are the best in the world, and we’ve got all this track record of being the best at overthrowing the tyranny of the British Empire, and then we’re the best at extending it.Daniel: So how do you see the connection between these two things or these two ideas? Because for me, it’s less about pro this or anti that, but rather how do we go beyond? Because on all sides of all aisles, we have people that other. And ultimately, if we’re gonna meet in a place of healing and meet in the present moment, we have to be able to move beyond these aspects and meet. So I’m curious. When you talk about American exceptionalism and how you perceive it, where are the seeds of what we’re talking about here, or how you feel it?Vince: Yes. Well, the way I see them and feel them in America is like, we clearly have been an imperial-ish power, a modern empire, and we’ve had this dominance economically, militarily, such that we were calling this the unipolar world for a while where America’s the only power that’s significant or matters. Now, obviously we’re at the end of that. That’s part of a lot of the geopolitical tension — the multipolar world is reemerging. But I grew up in a unipolar America where I was taught and fed this myth. We came and liberated the Jews from the Holocaust, which is just historically not the reason we actually got into the war. And we tell ourselves a story about how we didn’t use the nuclear bomb on anyone else other than the first two cities we annihilated. So we were like, we could have taken over the world and we didn’t, you know, there’s these stories about America. I’m not say…

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