A Conversation with Vincent Horn, Part 1 On Vulnerability, Knowing and Not-Knowing
This is an excerpt of an interview I was privileged to have with L.A based Insight meditation teacher, and owner of the website Buddhist Geeks, Vincent Horn.
Peter: The most recent article on your website is around the theme of vulnerability – I found your writing on the subject very moving and powerful. Could you say something about the capacity to trust in not-knowing and also opening into a vulnerability on the emotional and spiritual levels? Would you say that it’s an essential counterpoint to the more linear or goal oriented ways in which we can conceive practice?
Vincent: Yeah, I think so. It’s both a counterpoint in that it undermines the tendency to want to be the ‘knower’, which itself can become a fixed position that we can take, or a kind of new identity that’s not seen clearly – which in that sense, isn’t actually in alignment with the way things are! (laughs)
And it’s also a counterpoint in that it is actually directly from the first person perspective when I look in. For example, I was taking a walk the other day and I asked myself the question, ‘Can I see any of the stages of enlightenment in my experience right now?’ And the answer was, ‘No’. I can’t see enlightenment period, and I also can’t see these stages or conceptual maps in the present moment experience. So in that sense, I’m always forced to acknowledge that I don’t really know what’s happening on this level. It’s just this open experience. Or, sometimes closed! And it’s just the raw moment of experience – and in that sense it is very vulnerable, because I can’t say ‘I’m enlightened’ or “I’m this, or I’m that’. Those are all useless in the face of this moment.
At the same time, when I move to stepping out and looking at my first person experience, as it’s progressed over time, which is more like the scientific or objective perspective, I can really see a difference over time, and I can really see certain patterns that have played out, and also that my experience of the first person moment has become more open, more fresh, more alive, more
mysterious. So I have to acknowledge that this is also true. I don’t want to discount the capacity to step back and look at things over time from an objective perspective. If I were to discount that and say that it’s completely invalid, then we wouldn’t have a lineage of teachings, we wouldn’t have a history of the world – there’s so many things we wouldn’t have! We’d just be walking around going, ‘Wow! Look! It’s all open!’ (laughs)
So I really see both of those perspectives as being important. And in my practice and my teaching I have been looking to find the appropriate way to acknowledge these perspectives, and not to over-emphasize either one. So, that’s where I am in terms of working with how to maintain a dynamic relationship between the two. And it feels to me like in that dynamism, or even tension, that’s actually where a lot of personal growth happens. That’s where a lot of maturing or wisdom seems to flower. At least for me that seems to have been the case. I have to kind of keep going back and forth between looking at things and seeing patterns, and also opening up to new knowledge, and on the other hand just having to drop it and let it go. There’s a saying from Zen Master Dogen that comes to mind.
He says, ‘At first you raise the bodhi mind and seek enlightenment’, which is when you get in touch with that deep longing to know what’s true. And then the second phase is to ‘Practice and attain enlightenment’, which is to really get it on a deep first person experience level – to really know what it is you were looking for in a direct way, even though you could have never predicted what it would be beforehand, which is the nature of enlightenment – it’s always something other than what we think it’s going to be!
And then the last phase, which is so interesting to me, is to ‘Cast enlightenment away, and raise the bodhi mind again’. Which is to let some new level of longing or seeking emerge. Some new subtletly of something we didn’t see before – a slight obscuration, or something we didn’t see before… So his perspective is that the process just keeps going.
Peter: So you’re saying that it’s about having a balance between the direct or intuitive approach, while also having a compass of the direction we’re going in, or what’s possible.
Vincent: Yeah. Those three phases give room for all the different parts of the process – so we can talk about ‘seeking’ – we don’t have to make it wrong. When one gets a glimpse of a ‘something else’, and that ‘something else’ seems other, then there’s a gap, and a natural seeking emerges in that gap. It’s like, ‘Oh I want to get there. I want to bring all of me over to ‘there’ wherever ‘there’ may be… ‘ So we don’t have to ignore this phase. It’s something we can honour. We can honour that there’s a process involved in going from where I am now to where I an trying to go. But it’s both a linear and a cyclical process, in that a lot of progress is about dropping, or letting go as opposed to gaining something new.
And it’s also that awakening does happen. It really is hard wired into our biology to be able to discover something that isn’t really touched by any kind of experience, what we call Nirvana, and then to be able to integrate it into all aspects of our life, so that there’s no separation between the two, actually. There is that phrase, ‘Nirvana and Samsara are one’. I have found that to be an accurate description of where the spiritual path is heading.
For me the profundity of this process is that it doesn’t have an end. There’s always some new horizon. One of my teachers has a saying: ‘The closer you get to the horizon, the further out it goes’. So that to me brings an incredible sense of humility and awe, actually. That I can continue this path, maybe forever! (laughs).
For more wonderful teachings by Vincent, please visit his website
Vincent Horn is a Buddhist Geek, teacher, and explorer. In 2006 Vincent helped start, and now runs, a popular Buddhist media project called Buddhist Geeks. And with the encouragement of his teachers — after nearly a decade of intensive meditation practice in the Burmese and Thai Forest Theravada tradition — he teaches both online and in Los Angeles, CA at the InsightLA meditation center.
