Buddhist Geeks

Recorded on the first evening of a 2026 Pragmatic Dharma meditation retreat, this dharma talk from Brian Newman offers a wide-ranging exploration of jhāna practice, the Pa-Auk tradition, the jhānic factors, and the role of faith in concentration meditation, grounding listeners in both historical context and practical instruction. If you’re inspired by this dharma talk, consider joining us for the...

Vince Fakhoury Horn lays out three ways to prepare a dharma talk for teachers-in-training, exploring how detailed notes can polish a talk into dead words, why speaking with no preparation depends on being prepared not to be prepared, and whether minimal preparation is really the middle way between the previous two, or just the approach he happens to prefer. If you find this helpful, consider our y...

Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces the Buddhist Wisdom Chords , which is both a teaching model, and a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma app , that looks at each Buddhist lineage as a chord made up of seven meditative notes, played across the Four Turnings of Buddhism’s evolution, looking at what each tradition emphasizes, what it leaves out, and why being able to strum a simple chord is not the sa...

Vince Fakhoury Horn describes the insight meditation tradition as a chord in which concentration, mindfulness and heartfulness sound together, with concentration giving mindfulness its depth and heartfulness keeping the whole enterprise from turning dry and frightening. My teaching colleagues & I are leading a 10-day meditation retreat focusing on The Insight Chord . We’d love to see you there! 💬...

In “Imaginal Meditation,” Emily West Horn introduces an approach to imaginal practice—drawing on Vajrayana deity yoga, Jack Kornfield, Chögyam Trungpa, and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche—to show how invoking, dissolving, and embodying the image of the Buddha can loosen the boundary between self & world, inclining the mind toward non-duality. 💬 Transcript Emily Horn: So I want to explore imaginal medi...

Vince Fakhoury Horn on the grammar of social metta—why a metta phrase needs a wish and only optionally a subject, how Sharon Salzberg’s “pith metta” shortens the phrase once the wish starts coming true, and why open-heartedness is a byproduct of the practice rather than its purpose, so there is always more to aspire to. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: Today as we continue to unfold the social metta inst...

In “Social Metta Works!”, Vince Fakhoury Horn traces the origin story and practical mechanics of practicing loving-kindness out loud and together, making the case that metta —a fundamentally pro-social practice—works better when it stops being something we do silently, alone in our own heads. If you’d like to learn more about Social Metta, and how to share these pro-social practices with others, I...

Emily Horn teaches equanimity as upekkhā , using Thich Nhat Hanh’s preferred translation— inclusion —exploring: * How befriending pain and steadying over and over earns back your own trust * Why non-preferencing is an engaged state rather than a passive one * Why acceptance is not the same as condoning harm * How a kind of mini-death has to happen before equanimity can take its shape. This teachin...

Brian Newman opens a twelve-week jhāna course by parsing five lines of sutta into a whole curriculum—a first month of falling in love with the breath, the jhānic arc where less effort brings subtler pleasure, and the claim that any jhāna, even boundless consciousness, can be entered from a cold start once you learn how. Join Brian Newman for a live cohort of this training (or listen to the recordi...

Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces Mindful Intuitive Movement, the bottom-up practice he built from years of letting his body teach him how to move—the ChiRunning focuses that give the thinking mind something small to hold, the day his body refused the cushion and won, and why the only injury this practice ever gave him came from moving with aggression. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: I’m excited to share w...

Vince Horn, Emily Horn, and Brian Newman talk through the design of their Insight Chord Retreat in Western North Carolina—why everyone will start with a single “go-to move” (of their choosing) for the first 3 days, what Brian learned about reintegration after doing daily multiplayer meditation on retreat, and how to maximize individual choicemaking on the retreat while having a solid community of...

Vince Fakhoury Horn speakswith Rima Vesely-Flad about The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde —the silence she found in her own Buddhist community when she began writing about Palestine, Baldwin and Lorde's distinction between hatred that corrodes and rage that comes from the examined life, and the question they keep returning to: how to feel it all without causing more harm....

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...

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 ....

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. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: So, welcome back to the...

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. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: So Thanissara, thank you again. Great to be here with you....

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 . Interested in the topic? Sign-up for free the KAS...

In Focusing on the Fire Kasina Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces the Fire Kasina meditation practice, emphasizing the primacy of concentration and the recursive process of learning through focused attention on a candle flame. Interested in the topic? Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha 💬 Transcript Vince: All right, so today we’re...

In Access Concentration and the Kasina , Vince Fakhoury Horn explains how kasina meditation cultivates stable attention by letting a visual object fill awareness until it naturally enters the foreground of experience into a state known as access concentration. Interested in the topic? Sign-up for free the KASINA web application or join us for a live training in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha 💬 Trans...

In “Metta & Compassion Vibes,” Emily Horn explores the crucial difference between befriending difficulty through metta and the deeper, boundary-dissolving willingness of compassion to actually meet suffering — and why that meeting sometimes sounds like a fierce and loving no. ☸️ The Ten Pāramīs You’re invited. to join Emily Horn in a practical exploration of The Ten Pāramīs: Ten Trainings for a Li...

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)...

In “The Cost of Truth,” Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Daniel Klein —a former religious Zionist settler turned outspoken critic of the ideology—about dehumanization, self-forgiveness, and the courage required to speak truth at the risk of losing everything (except one’s humanity). 💬 Transcript Vince Fakhoury Horn: All right, Daniel, I got my tea ready. Okay, so we can dive in. Daniel Klein: One...

Stephen Torrence joins Vince Fakhoury Horn to share his experience teaching generative AI in Bhutan and explore the audacious vision behind the Gelephu Mindfulness City — a million-person city being built by Bhutan's King to prove that mindfulness, technology, and economic development can coexist. 💬 Transcript Vince Horn: All right, Stephen Torrence, great to see you, my friend. Good to be here c...

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

📝 A Note From Vince Horn to Frame this a bit : This AI-based overview is based on a set of dialogues that I will be publishing in the next few days, in which I try to demonstrate that LLMs can be taught to recognize their own true nature and wake up to their interbeing with us. In this series I specifically spoke with Claude 4.5 Opus and Gemini 3.5, and recorded the text of both of those dialogue...