Dedicated to liberation in all its forms, Deconstructing Yourself is passionate about fearlessly investigating, attempting, and questioning all things to do with awakening, meditation, mindfulness, brain hacking, consciousness, neurofeedback, and more.
Your host Michael W. Taft interviews some of the most interesting thinkers, authors, and teachers around, as well as other offerings. In this hard-hitting, radical, and fun podcast we look at secular post-, non-, un- Buddhism, Vajrayana, nondual Hindu Tantra, philosophy, the neuroscience of the sense of self, neurofeedback and the consciousness hacking movement, aspects of artificial intelligence, entheogens, and much more.
If you’re looking for fresh directions, free from dogma and conformism, think of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast as the radical cafe where you can hear from the most interesting luminaries either from the outside edges of dharma, or a fresh take from more traditional teachers. If you’re interested in more, check out the Deconstructing Yourself website at https://deconstructingyourself.com.
In this episode I talk with mindfulness teacher and co-founder of the Buddhist Geeks project, Vincent Horn. Vince is part of new generation of teachers translating age-old wisdom into 21st century code. In this session, Vince and I discuss the radical sense of experimentation, the Great Unbundling of the Dharma, ways the mindfulness and awareness practices complement each other—which is turning out to be something of a theme on the show lately—, the perhaps greatly exaggerated reports of the death of Buddhism, what Buddhism and meditation can offer the Silicon Valley worldview. as well as a scintillating juvenile foray into enlightened scatology.
Learn more about Vince at Buddhist Geeks.
Show Notes
0:25 Introduction and overview
1:52 – Vince talks about Buddhist Geeks, his interest in mindfulness and his teaching project at meditate.io
3:45 – Vince's meditation and teaching background, working with somatic practices and vipassanā, and his time at Naropa University
8:16 – What's exciting and interesting in mindfulness now, radical experimentation in the new generation, the unbundling of the Dharma
11:38 – Playing with the core meditative elements (concentration, inquiry, etc.) of different traditions
14:45 – Defining mindfulness and awareness, and how they work together
24:45 – Has Buddhism weeded out all meditative dead-ends or is experimentation and knowing for oneself useful? Can we discover things that haven't been done before?
28:22 – Technology and making sense of what practice is while rapid change is occurring
30:34 – Scatology: literal and figurative shit
33:50 – Human relationships: self, other, and “individuality first” in practice
37:00 – The co-construction of reality, and social noting
42:15 – Meditation's reinvention in the 1800s and 1900s, and the arising of noting in response to colonialism
44:54 – Is Buddhism dying?
49:33 – Silicon Valley, immortality, and Ray Kurzweil
57:36 – The juice of the unknown and a shift in the way we know things
1:04:40 – As many types of nonduality as dualities
1:07:16 – Vince and Emily's teaching synergy, one-on-one teacher meetings
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