Buddhist Geeks

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.
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 about just letting go. It’s about discernment. It isn’t about everything’s equal and it’s suffering and it’s samsara. It’s saying we have responsibility and we have discernment, and this is horrific. And therefore we have, as the Buddha did himself, the agency to shift and challenge the status quo when harm is being done, and that is our responsibility. And I think that can so easily get erased with this passivity of the language of, you know, just let go and it’s just samsara. Which is true. I love this expression of Ajahn Chah: “True but not right. Right but not true.”
Vince Horn: Okay, that’s cool. I’ve never heard that line before. That’s a good one. I’ll be chewing on that. I’m curious too, Thanissara. I run into — around talking about things like Dharma and Empire — there’s a whole group of folks that I run into who are very well-educated. They’ve been on some kind of path of individuation. They’ve had some practice, but they just don’t see the argument that we are living in an empire, like the American empire, for instance. And it’s challenging sometimes to try to support people in seeing the ways in which our life is downstream of these other structures and histories. I’m wondering, how do you work with that when you’re teaching on these things? Do you run into that kind of resistance, of not being able or willing to see the interdependent nature of things?
Thanissara: Well, yeah, of course. I mean, it’s not that I’ve been thinking this all the way along or had the language for it all the way along. You feel the impacts, and sometimes it takes a long time to build the narrative.
Vince Horn: Good point.
Thanissara: But I think that part of the complexity is Buddhism has historically always, in terms of a power system — whether it’s a monarchy or the state — it’s always been in some, even the Buddha himself, in some level of alliance with that power, the political or military power, to survive. So it’s left it in a very — it’s not a straight-out liberationally revolutionary movement, say, as you might see some more left-wing liberation theologies coming out of South America, or the civil rights. You can call on that, that the Christ was a liberatory revolutionary in many ways. The Buddha was too, but he also aligned, came from power. And so there is this historic thread of the Dharma. And often it’s not just about finances, but it is. But it’s about placement and acceptance in the culture. And so you see a lot of — it’s like I thought with the mindfulness movement, as it started to sometimes be reduced to: how do you make it in the capitalist system without challenging the system itself.
Vince Horn: Right.
Thanissara: And there’s still a lot of that. And really, for me, the thing that really blew open the languaging around empire was Gaza. Because Gaza revealed everything. It revealed the absolute craven moral bankruptcy of all of these myths of the US, of even Israel — the most moral army, and the forever victim. They’re all part of the logic of empire. They’re all part of the narrative of empire. So I think we’re in this incredible moment where the veils just keep being pulled away. And so we’re screaming about someone like Trump, who of course — everything that’s going on is dreadful, but we’re just seeing what it’s always been, in a way.
Vince Horn: Yeah. That became very clear to me, that Trump is in some sense like US foreign policy for the last several decades come home to roost. This is how we’ve been. And you’d only know that if you know people that are negatively impacted, or you’ve studied the history.
Thanissara: Right.
Vince Horn: And that’s not many people.
Thanissara: Studied the history. No, that is actually a problem. The sort of dumbing down. But, you know, if you take that logic, then at some point when you see where empire is taking us — into normalizing genocide, normalizing a culture of —
Vince Horn: Ecocide.
Thanissara: Well, ecocide and mass extinction, and replacement with AI robotics. I know this is a very complex subject, but not really. The human — and life itself, nature, the erasure, the ICE, the violence, the domination, all of this, fascism. If you see all of that, of where the last gasp of this system is, then what’s the Dharma for at this point?
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Thanissara: You know, this isn’t —
Vince Horn: To keep a smile plastered on our face while everything goes down, I think.
Thanissara: Right. While everything goes — well, but the thing is, it’s getting more and more impactful for everyone. I’m sitting here literally sweating buckets, because this is our new climate. You think we’re going to survive this if a few more degrees, more continuum — it becomes really hard. So we’re all in this stew, even those that think that they can build their bunkers.
Vince Horn: Literally or metaphorically, yeah. I think the way I’m relating to what you’re sharing is, I’m looking at this from the internal journey process view of — oh, I’ve actually worked with this conditioning that you’re describing. I know it firsthand. I know the logic of turning toward the imperial status quo, because it’s safe. There’s a sense of being able to be protected. For me, having come up in a family where some of my family members were obviously not safe, and they were being actively persecuted, especially after 9/11, being safe made a lot of sense. Trying to stay safe, not sticking out. I understand that logic. There’s the survival logic there. And part of the reason I was able to do that is because I could pass as being part of the dominant culture. People look at me and they don’t see a Palestinian, so I can — unless they’re Arab, and then they do see. But there’s that sense of, what is the wisdom of hiding? It makes sense on a personal level, like your dad trying to get out of the tenements, trying to find some better situation, not knowing that the better situation for him is still causing suffering for others, perhaps.
Thanissara: Right. He became co-opted in the empire. And as working class, poor people, indigenous-line worlds have consistently been fighting for the British, as you’ve read at the table. I mean, there are levels of privilege that I think you have more responsibility — in a culture where for some it is more dangerous to stand out. Maybe they’re brave to do it, but they’ve been more historically targeted. So I think there is a personal reckoning. I feel that very much of the work in South Africa for nearly three decades post-apartheid. And it was very conscious for me — I didn’t want to take payment. I felt it was a deep act of reparation, actually, to have been gifted pretty much pristine white land, to get it to a place where it could be returned to a young, diverse group that could run the center. Or to help start projects that can help women in rural areas, deep rural African areas, become trainers and supporters in their own community when they were impacted by the AIDS pandemic. So I just felt historic responsibility. It’s not that I’m consciously going, I’m doing this because of that, but it’s there. It’s wedded in, as a white person having had a lot of privileges.
Vince Horn: Right. I think that’s the hard part for so many people — acknowledging not just that I have privileges, but that those privileges came at the cost of so many others and their opportunities. Being able to open to that truth, and the shame that comes with that, and the guilt that can be present. It’s like, oh, that’s overwhelming. I don’t want to go there. I’ll just watch some more Netflix or whatever. Maybe my meditation retreat will help.
Thanissara: Well, I don’t think we have to flagellate ourselves. But for me — it’s not that I didn’t feel a lot of white guilt. It was a very sort of shadow there, moving through the post-apartheid world of South Africa. And in many other situations. But it’s like a karmic reckoning. It’s just a measured contemplation for me of, what’s the deep karma here that I’m responding to? It’s not necessarily personal. It may be ancestral. I don’t even know who did what, but it’s just come to me on my plate. And it’s personal and beyond. Palestine, when I heard about my father, connected a lot of dots for me. It would anyway, because it’s just so unjust, so profoundly horrific, what’s been happening — not just in Gaza, but for so long. But it was connecting to say, oh, there is karma. That’s pretty close. I think it’s just the way the Buddhist worldview has integrated into my understanding over a long period of time.
Vince Horn: And that’s a distinctly different view than I sometimes hear from the more — I guess I’d call it the more neoliberal Buddhist spaces, where there’s a lot of focus on social issues and social justice. And Mushim, who’s also here, we’re going to talk about this in a few weeks more directly. It does seem to sidestep the whole issue of class, which is so much at the core of what empire is. It’s like some people are benefiting from these mechanisms, and that benefit is going up to the top of a very small class of folks, and that seems to be how the capitalist empire of America works — it’s built on top of the bone-breaking work of so many people who then feel ashamed, like it’s their fault that they’re not doing better. Which is the kind of twisted logic that keeps that going.
Thanissara: Yeah, no, it’s very — it’s brutal in the US, actually. This feels to me like there are very few safety nets or softening. And there’s deep resentment that the working class have been so shafted. With all of their jobs being sent overseas, and the complete collapse of worth and placement. And I think particularly for men, this has been very — in those traditional spaces — it’s given rise to a lot of toxic masculinity. And all of it has been driven by this brutal capitalist profit machinery, to the point where this billionaire class are extremely dangerous to humanity. They’re extremely dangerous. With the wipe of a pen — I was just reading from The Lancet that Musk’s closing down of all of that American aid that was going — we used it a lot, PEPFAR funding for the AIDS pandemic, the medical. It was very important for a lot of the projects. And people die. They’re saying a huge amount of people, 40 million or something, are going to die, as one billionaire just goes, “Ugh, we just get rid of this.” No collective consideration, no sense of that karma. What do we owe? What does he, as a white South African, owe? And his father extracted the mines. So all of this is lacking wisdom, lacking depth, lacking consideration. And it isn’t necessarily the case that — I mean, we have that billionaire class, but in the UK system of the upper classes, they were also brutalized in some ways. And I’m not feeling particularly sorry, but the boarding school systems — they’re emotionally, deliberately, emotionally stunted, so they could go out and perpetuate this cold empire. And do the business without feeling it very much. So there’s a lot of damage on that level. And you see it in the elite class, the political class of Britain. You see a lot of this emotional stunting. They can’t relate, they can’t feel, and they’re dangerous. So I think all of these things — and everyone is subject to suffering, wherever they are. But unless we understand the internal causes of that, then there’s always a sense we’re compensated by material gain. This is one of the fundamental illusions that we’re under in this capitalist system. So all of this I really think we should be talking about in the Dharma scene, and with a more revolutionary spirit. Because it’s not just going to be a change of policy here and there. There’s such a deep level of systemic shift that has to — and psychological, and of consciousness, underwritten by an understanding of: we’re all in one entangled reality. So it’s a job, I think, of Dharma folks to help narrate that, and help bridge and find ways through, and help illuminate the task at hand, at depth, not just at policy level.
Vince Horn: Thank you. Thanks for that lion’s roar. Thanissara, is this a good time to open it up for other folks’ comments, questions? We’ve got about 12 minutes here. If there’s anything else you want to share before we do that.
Thanissara: No, no. I don’t think I should, sorry. I’ve been on my high horse.
Vince Horn: Well, you know, the lion’s roar — maybe there’s a high horse that the lion sits on sometimes. But I hear a lot of wisdom in what you just shared, and I appreciate it.
Join Us Live Next Week:
If telling the truth can cost everything, what does our silence cost? Vince Fakhoury Horn and Daniel Klein speak about complicity, self-betrayal, and the quiet we mistake for peace.



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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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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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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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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
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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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