Hot on the well-turned out heels of Lodro Rinzler and Emily Horn, we’ve got two more people to introduce as guest contributors to the new set of buddhify content available later this year.
Vincent Horn is a mind hacker & buddhist geek. He has been practicing meditation intensively since his freshman year in college—including a full year doing intensive retreat practice. He began teaching meditation in 2010 and in 2006, Vincent co-founded Buddhist Geeks, which has gone on to become one of today’s most important venues for exploring contemplative thought & practice in the 21st century. Vince has already voiced some buddhify tracks (he’s the American male voice on the app) and this is the first time that he has actually written any tracks. We caught up with him to find out more about how he’s bringing his depth of practice experience to buddhify.
Rohan: Can you say a little about the tracks you’ve recorded? (or one in particular)
Vince: I’ve written and recorded two tracks. One is a Just Meditation track called Universe and the other is called Infinity and is for the new section called Difficult Emotions.
In Universe I wanted to bring folks on a journey through both the inner and outer cosmos. In the outer cosmos the focus is on the awe and wonder which comes through contemplating a nearly infinite space, being a small dust mote within that. With the inner cosmos we flip that concept and explore what it’s like to experience the entire observable universe as that which arises in your experience. These two modes become two different ways of seeing the world and having that distinction can be really valuable.
As mentioned, Infinity is a guided meditation designed to work with difficult or challenging emotional experiences. Instead of using the typical strategy of avoiding difficulty or trying to bypass it, we instead feel the difficult emotion whilst giving it an infinite amount of time and space to exist within. The extra space allows the experience to contract and expand as it will, and the extra time gives it as long as it needs to exist. Everything becomes workable when we approach it with infinity in mind.
What are you finding most exciting about the meeting of meditation and technology right now?
I’m excited about the way that new forms of software and hardware can be used together to create powerful new ways to train the heart and mind. These “contemplative technologies” will make it easier for a broader variety of people to have quick access to states of mind and experiential insights that used to only be possible with years of dedicated meditation training.
As with every new technology it will probably bring with it new challenges, such as how to make sense of those powerful new states of mind and how to have them inform our lives positively rather than becoming a means of escape. As a result we’ll probably need new kinds of communities–probably based in virtual reality–where the techno-boosted contemplatives of the future can hang out, share notes, and explore consciousness together. Hopefully I’ll see you there!
Thanks Vince, they sound like they’ll bring an additional depth or gear to the buddhify content, exciting stuff. You can find out more about Vince’s work at vincenthorn.com and @vincenthorn.