#11 Stop and See: Mind Hacking, Meditation and Leadership - with Vincent Horn

Reboot011-Meditation_Leadership

Welcome to the Reboot podcast. I'm Dan Putt, one of the partners here at Reboot and I could not be more excited about this conversation. We're here to showcase the heart and soul of authentic leadership, to inspire more open conversations around what we consider the most important part of entrepreneurship, the emotional struggle; and hopefully, we open up some hearts along the way. We are extremely grateful that you have taken the time to be with us and look forward to this journey ahead with you. Now, on with our conversation.

"Consciousness is so turbulent." That quote is from Emily Horn, a mindfulness coach and teacher and Emily Horn is the wife of today's guest, Vincent Horn. Vincent recently joined Reboot as a mindfulness coach and teacher. Vincent, can you tell us a little more about how you came to work with Reboot?

Vincent: Yeah, about two years ago, Jerry started to work with me as a coach and most of our conversations as he supported me with running Buddhist Geeks were about how I was or wasn’t bringing mindful awareness to work, to this project. So about a year in, October 2013, I joined the first CEO boot camp as a participant and then a year later, I came back to teach meditation and mindfulness and was really thrilled to be supporting other entrepreneurs and learning how to integrate the practices of mindful awareness, compassion, what I sometimes called mind hacking into their own work. So it's with a lot of gratitude that I'm joining the team and I'm really looking forward to supporting folks as they go through their own process of entrepreneurship; the crazy journey that it is.

Dan Putt: And now on to today's conversation where Vincent talks about the work he does with mindfulness, mind hacking and how it can make you a better leader.

Jerry Colonna: Hey Vince, how are you doing?

Vincent Horn: Yeah, good Jerry. Good to be here with you.

Jerry: It's good to have you. Hey Vince, before we get started, why don’t you take a minute and tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background and what you're doing and what brought us to this moment in time.

Vincent: Well, let's see; I was a computer engineering student who dropped out to meditate and that led me to a place called Naropa University which you know well. I finished my degree there and while I was there – and Naropa is interesting because it's one of the few Buddhist inspired universities I think that exist.

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Jerry: Yeah.

Vincent: And I don’t know if you have heard this but when I was there, we used to call it the Buddhist Harvard.

Jerry: [Laughter] I hadn’t heard that and Vince knows but I'll say it loud for audience, I'm the chair of the board of the trustees at Naropa so he's making my heart go pitter-patter. [Laughter]

Vincent: And when I was there, I really wanted to bring together my interest in meditation and the inner world with the technology side of things that I kind of in a certain way had to put aside. As a result of that, there was a conversation, a podcast that was born, called Buddhist Geeks. It was really me and a couple of friends' attempt to explore the relevance of that ancient practice and a series of practices in contemporary culture with modern technology changing as rapidly as it is and a culture that is increasingly global and interconnected. As part of that, we started a company that first was really just kind of a hobby and then it became a lot more than that because people really found what we were doing to be interesting and insightful. So we ended up building really a company around it and I served as the CEO of that for several years. I am doing so now and the capacity of a non-profit which we recently transitioned to. As part of that, I also started teaching meditation several years ago and part of that has connected with your work in Reboot and I have been kind of participating in the CEO bootcamps as a – I guess, meditation instructor, would be the right way of putting it. So that's been really cool, the kind of bringing together now of my long-term interest in business practice with meditation and mindfulness practice.

Jerry: Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I was excited to be able to have this conversation with you. Our relationship now is several years old and I have watched your transition from various stages as Buddhist Geeks has evolved but also as and you'll appreciate this phrase because this is a very Naropa-esq thing; that you've taken your seat really in the world as a meditation instructor and really as a leader in thinking about the role of mindfulness in the workplace. But you know, I was curious; take me back a little bit. I remember some of the initial conversations that we had as our friendship was unfolding and I'm thinking about the – some of those early days and some of the struggles that you experienced and

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even some of the things that you shared with the group when you were actually a bootcamp participant. Could you share a little bit about that?

Vincent: Yeah, I mean it's so funny because when I went to the bootcamp, the first thing I realized is, you know, everyone there was going through similar challenges to me even though their businesses often look quite different.

Jerry: Yeah.

Vincent: And so I don’t think anything that I was going through is going to sound unfamiliar to people who are in this position. But you know, the main things were fear, insecurity, not knowing if I had what it takes to build a long-standing, sustainable organization and to really actualize the vision that was so important to me. I dealt with really challenges around being so deeply invested in the company that any time there was a criticism or attack on certain things, I would feel it personally ripple through me. Challenges connected to that, challenges around learning how to balance my sort of contemplative idealism [Laughs] I guess with just the practical skills of learning a business and managing people and managing cash flow budgets and things like that. The practical stuff.

Jerry: Right.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: And I was struck – you know, we had that email dialogue in anticipation of this conversation and you were talking about how in a way – and I'm going to mangle what you said because I don’t have it in front of me but the – how the inner state was being reflected in the company. Is that – do I have that right?

Vincent: Oh yeah, totally. Doing meditation practice for a long time, I noticed that I would go through these cycles, these moods I guess you could call them. One day I'd be feeling great, on top of the world, seeing everything clearly, knowing exactly what to do, feeling completely invincible and then, you know, three days later, it's like my whole world was collapsing and I didn’t know what to do and was uncertain and afraid and hopeless and yet still needing to publish the next week's podcast. And I started to really see the cycles that I had experienced in mediation and was really learning to work with

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the ups and downs of life that they were reflected in and unfolding through the phases of business. Oh I hope that – 'I am so excited I met this new investor, they are going to invest in us, they totally get what we are trying to do' and then it's like three days later, 'they haven’t signed the term sheet yet. I am really scared [Laughs] what's going to happen next' I started seeing like these same cycles were happening in my inner world as were happening in my business and they really weren’t that disconnect actually.

Jerry: It's like the theoretical became visceral.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: That's probably not an entirely accurate word because I know from my own practice that you do see the turbulence of your own mind, the up and down, the roller-coaster and you do experience it. But then there's a funny thing that can happen which is that you step into your job, you step into your role and it's like you somehow expect that whole experience will shift and not happen because you are at work.

Vincent: Yeah. Like, there's these two compartments; there's my life and then there's my work and in my work I'm supposed to be this person that has all the answers and knows what to do and somehow it just doesn’t really work. [Laughs]

Jerry: Yeah, you know, and I remember my own laughter and crazy response when I realized that; holy mackerel, I'm the same human being in my life as I am at my work, at my job. Of course, you say it out loud and the absurdity of that observation just sort of hits you because what did you expect? Did you expect to drop your humanity the minute you walked in the door?

Vincent: Right.

Jerry: I wonder, in thinking about that and as a long-time practitioner, I am going to presume, even though I am a long-time practitioner, I am pretty crappy at this that you have the ability to observe things on occasion. I wonder if you could make any observations about the people that you worked with and their responses to your inner state.

Vincent: Yeah, and I appreciate that you said 'on occasion'. [Laughter]

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Jerry: Well, that's why we call it practice, right? [Laughter]

Vincent: Exactly. Yeah, you know, I work closely with a few people on Buddhist Geeks and I noticed especially being in the leadership role where they were looking to meet a really, I think take the lead on things in terms of action but also in terms of holding some sort of emotional stability and intellectual stability that when I was really unstable and wasn’t able to really observe what was happening and just was lost in the torrential pouring out of different feelings and experiences that they would freak out. They would freak out in response to me often and then when I was, they would be cool. Not always because sometimes they would help me see that I was freaking out and would be like my greatest allies but I felt often that because I was in that position, and even in that position, there's a certain level of just connection there where people – they really do respond directly to my change of state and awareness of it or lack thereof.

Jerry: To me it's a further explication of that notion that when a leader sneezes, everybody catches a cold. It's an understanding that what's going on for us internally in that very human aspect of our experience, affects everybody around us.

Vincent: Yeah, we can't hide it.

Jerry: We can't hide it and nor can they inoculate themselves from it. I mean they can create some resiliency to it and learn to separate; okay, that's Vince's anxiety versus my challenges and my issues that's going on there.

Vincent: Yes.

Jerry: But there again, I find it interesting; if we were to talk about say your relationship with your wife Emily, we might be able to discern well, you know, that's Vince's stuff and then Emily's got her stuff and we could sort of apply the filter being able to separate out. But for some reason, we go into a work environment and we think like there again, we're not going to be human, we are not going to have the sort of emotional triggering that happens in the environment that somehow we are not going to replicate all the same emotional vicissitudes of our life in the office and it's not going to trigger those things. And we're surprised when it shows up that way.

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Vincent: Yeah and it's extremely challenging when it feels like there's so much on the line. So I think that part, the feeling of vision being on the line or the company, people's livelihoods and investors who you are serving I think when all of those things are there, it makes it sometimes even harder to stop and sort of reflect on that and work with it in a vulnerable way because it feels like if I do that, then I'm going to be letting all these people down or I might fuck up. [Laughs]

Jerry: Yeah.

Vincent: So, yeah, it makes it somewhat more challenging being in that position.

Jerry: Yeah, I think in listening to your reaction to it or seeking about the ways in which the emotional stakes of success and failure, seem to be so much greater in those environments perhaps not necessarily in our key romantic relationships but certainly in many other environments. I'm thinking about the way we care about the people that we work with when we think about potentially succeeding or failing. As you well know, this podcast and everything that we are doing right now is all part of Reboot and Reboot is a new entity and I stepped into the seat as CEO and we were having a meeting the other day and I asked my colleagues to help me with the way I tend to internalize ultimate responsibility for everything and the desire to be able to sort of navigate that anxiety that can arise. So, if we don’t get enough attendees at a camp or if somehow the business doesn’t hit its financial milestones, I start to feel it viscerally as if it's my fault.

Vincent: Right.

Jerry: And does that resonate with you?

Vincent: Oh yeah, like taking responsibility for everything as if like yeah, I am the ultimate source of responsibility for everything; which is incredibly neurotic [Laughter] no offence.

Jerry: Oh it's neurotic and it's egotistical, you know, it's reifying of the self and the sense that you know, it all flows through me. It's not [Unclear 0:16:25] in that sense. The only thing that gives me a little bit of relief is to know that it doesn’t necessarily directly aggrandize my sense of self but I guess in a sense it does. I'm curious, what role do you think meditation plays in enabling you to work with these situations?

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Vincent: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because for me, it's been a foundational skill ever since I was I guess 19 so it's one of the first things that I try to use when I am dealing with these situations and I think the main thing that it's enabled is first just an awareness of what's arising in my own experience, that I can sort of see clearly 'oh, this is how I am feeling, this is how it feels in my body, these are the thoughts associated with it' and it's like I can take a step back and just see what's happening with my own system first. That seems to – as you talk about with people all the time, it creates this sort of space or this gap or this opening to be able to interject a little intention, like a little – just a micro-moment of steering things in a new direction. That's been hugely helpful in being able to respond to some of these situations because I can at least take responsibility for my own experience and see that it's not being necessarily created by anyone else. It's real but it's something that's happening for me and me alone. I think that's kind of, I'd say, the fundamental level, the thing that has enabled.

Jerry: How does it then impact the rest of the team?

Vincent: Yeah, I think when I am able to, as you put it earlier, take my seat and be present for my own experience, the rest of the team I think recognizes that it's okay to like say certain things, it's okay to bring up stuff. There's not a feeling of everyone walking on eggshells trying to avoid irritating me or pissing me off because they know that at some point I'll come around to [Laughs] acknowledging what I am experiencing and taking some amount of responsibility for it. I think that's what I have noticed.

Jerry: I think the core question, you know, as practitioners, I really relate it to your thought that turning in effect to the cushion and taking your seat on the cushion has become a sort of first response. I know that that's true in my own life that when the biggest challenges are happening beyond my daily practice, the people in my life will laugh because I'll say, "I got to go sit" and what that is, that's me saying to myself, I have to go pause.

Vincent: Right.

Jerry: I have to go stop. I have to go reinforce the phenomenon of being here now. But sometimes I think what happens for us

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long-time practitioners is that we lose sight of really helping people understand of why that works and the ways in which that work –

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: – because it becomes so much a part of our response to the world.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: So do you have any – why does it work?

Vincent: Yeah, I mean, it seems like from what I can tell, there seems to be two main elements to why it works and I have heard – expressed really simply as stopping and seeing. I like that formulation with other ways of talking about it but what you just described as that period in your day where you go and just pause, that's the stopping. It's the interrupting whatever is happening to make space for a more simple way of being and noticing. Then that's not really enough though if we just stop. We have to also see what's there to really bear witness to whatever is present, whether it's something quite pleasant and enjoyable like joy or calm or clarity or having brilliant creative ideas or it's actually something more difficult to bear like sadness and grief or frustration, confusion, just being able to see those things and being able to really know what they are like and become intimate and familiar with them because they are not really going to go away any time soon. That's something that I think is also – it's a realization that dawns gradually and I wouldn’t say that I fully understand it because I still find myself wanting to get away from and rid of those human experiences. But I think that stopping and being able to let go of whatever we are kind of enamored with or caught on or stuck on – the kind of attention traps that we get into –

Jerry: Mm-hmm.

Vincent: – and then being able to see what's operating and see how it's presenting itself in our actual experience, in our first-person subjective experience. Like a scientist of the mind studying and becoming really familiar with the patterns of the body and emotions and thoughts and being able to kind of, in some ways, know them with a deep precision and a deep care and a deep allowing that I think really starts to transform one's relationship with experience and it starts to develop all these

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meta-qualities of wisdom and of opening of the heart and patience and all these virtues that various wisdom traditions and philosophies always describe as being really good ideas. [Laughter]

Jerry: Well, and not only wisdom traditions of the past but wisdom traditions Harvard Business School describing as the good qualities of a leader.

Vincent: Absolutely; I mean, they are one and the same, right?

Jerry: That's right.

Vincent: There's a perennial-ness to wisdom; it's not something – it's not a fad, it's not something that comes and goes. It stands the test of time.

Jerry: Yeah. You know, as you were describing it, I had a few different memories, a few different thoughts and one is – the first is to really elaborate on this because we have been talking about the anxiety, and we talked a little bit before about that emotional roller-coaster ride of when you see, when you are so attached to the enterprise that everything becomes so intense for you as an experience and I was thinking about, what I often refer to as the feeling of standing still while your hair is on fire. That sensibility that comes over when you are trying to do this new startup or you are trying to do something that hasn’t been done before and you are so attached to the outcome that it exacerbates almost an inherent anxious state of mind. So I was thinking about that and then I was thinking about my own experience with my own therapist and I was talking to her just the other day and I said, aside from the fact that – I asked her, "Why am I so anxious?" And she said, "Well, take a look at your parents." But leave that aside for a moment. She said, – she asked a really cutting-through question; you know the way a good teacher will cut through and ask a good question?

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: And she said, "What feeling or what experience are you trying to avoid by being anxious?" It was so powerful and of course, the feeling that I was trying to avoid, and this sounds kind of strange, but it was actually of being scared. It was like the anxiety was a mask for the scary thought. It wasn’t the scary thought itself.

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Vincent: Yes.

Jerry: And the scary thought was that the thing that I was holding close to my heart wasn’t going to work out and there was a corollary feeling of disappointment and anger and I didn’t want to experience those either because those are painful.

Vincent: Yes.

Jerry: And so what my mind did was, it wrapped the whole thing in a candy coating of anxiety and said, here, 'swallow this buddy boy'. In the stopping and seeing, which I loved the way you framed it, in the stopping and seeing, I get to see past the experience of the anxiety to the experience of being scared right through to the experience of disappointment and anger.

Vincent: Yes and I think where the rubber hits the road on this practice and where it becomes imminently practical is you know, when you see that or when I see that or when anyone sees what's actually there and then we come to have a complete experience of it. We are really fully able to be with it and bear witness to it and then it suddenly changes how we operate. We have a new vantage point on which we see what we are doing because we are no longer kind of caught in the attention trap of anxiety. Now we are like – we have actually faced our fear. [Laughs]

Jerry: Yeah.

Vincent: Been with it.

Jerry: Yeah.

Vincent: And then I think that's where the most practical aspect of this practice is it helps move us through the things we are most scared of facing and then it transforms us in the process.

Jerry: It's like the energy it takes to try to move away from it –

Vincent: Oh gosh.

Jerry: – becomes anxiety.

Vincent: Yes.

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Jerry: And the energy that it takes to stop and see is that meditation moment, is that mindfulness moment which then causes the opportunity for a transformation of how we feel about what's actually going on.

Vincent: And then that energy like you say, it's freed up suddenly.

Jerry: Yes.

Vincent: It's liberated.

Jerry: Yes and I think I have seen in organizations that when that energy gets liberated, it becomes creativity, or it becomes innovation, or it becomes spontaneity which is ironic because typically the thing that is provoking the anger or the guilt or the disappointment or that core primary feeling that we are trying to move away from, typically those are things that could require and be best served by our creativity, by our spontaneity our intelligence, our innate wisdom.

Vincent: Yes and I would say from my experience, even crazier and weirder is those fears that I think most entrepreneurs have, they're tied in with the feeling of not being creative enough or not being innovative enough or not – it's the very thing that we are scared of not being able to do that's preventing us from being able to do – to actually have the capacity to succeed at what we are doing or at least to find out that it's not going to work.

Jerry: Yeah, it's really quite perverse if you think about it.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: It's like our emotional reaction fosters the very conditions we are trying to run away from. It's like, I have this image of being chased by the bear and the bear is sitting on your tail right there; every time you run away, it's still there whereas if you stop running and confront it, or since we are talking about Eastern traditions, it's probably a tiger more than it's a bear. It's always a tiger, right? [Laughter]

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: And if we stop and turn around and look at the tiger, and deal with the tiger, there's a transformation that starts to occur.

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Vincent: Yeah. And that's a really different way of approaching business; it's like letting go as the main mechanism for being able to step into something new as opposed to kind of being like, okay I know what I need to be and I'm going to step into it. It's a slightly different kind of way of doing it.

Jerry: Yeah, I am sitting here thinking about the folks who might be listening to this and thinking that if I were them, I would say – and if I were new to a practice, I would say, okay, this is all well and good for me as an individual but I've got a whole team of people. How do I either a) get them there if I believe this will work and b) how does this impact that organization?

Vincent: Yeah. I hear what you are saying and I could imagine that as well. I think one insight that sort of started dawning for me in the last few years that's been really helpful for thinking about this is that meditation isn’t a solitary activity actually. It's a social – it's also a social action because – I mean, as we know from neurobiology, there's this great phrase, "Neurons that fire together, wire together."

Jerry: I love that.

Vincent: It's a beautiful phrase and when you think about us individually as neurons within this larger collective of other neurons, because we know that actually the way that our neurobiology works is through mirroring. We are actually firing and wiring together collectively not just inside of our head and so whatever stability, whatever peace of mind that we have developed, it actually ripples through the network of human consciousness and potentially even beyond that. So I think when people are thinking about this with respect to teams, again, it's – our state of mind is constantly informing and shaping just as others are on us, each other. So I wouldn’t even say it's really always necessary for other people to have to learn these skills or do this as much as it is for us to kind of do that first and to set an example for what could be possible. I think people always respond more to actual, what in the Zen tradition they call live words, live actions. It's not just the idea or the concept, it's actually the embodiment of those things. I think that has a really much bigger impact at least that I have seen from my own mentors and in my own experience.

Jerry: I think you've explained it so beautifully; there's a phrase that I often repeat that I learned from Cesar Millan, the dog-whisperer.

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Vincent: Nice.

Jerry: And that is, "When the alpha-dog is unstable, the pack is unstable" and in any organization, the leader is the alpha-dog and I think what Cesar is identifying, he's making an observation which is true of those sentient beings, dogs or as our partner Ali would make the observation about horses. It's the positive impact of one individual learning to manage or learning to be with – I don’t like the word 'manage' because it implies a kind of repressive response but learning to be with the emotional turmoil that's going on and to find the ability to stand still and see in the midst of all that. That becomes the neurons that start to fire together and then they become wired together and I can see how this would then lead to deeper teamwork.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: And so you see it in an orchestra or you see it in a basketball team in the famous example Phil Jackson working with the Lakers back when he was coaching with the Lakers and teaching them to meditate together and then go out on the court and the flow that occurred between player and player was beautiful.

Vincent: Yeah, and I was thinking as you were saying that and this is kind of in some ways the magical part of mindfulness and meditation practice to me is – and I don’t completely know how it works actually is that the more capacity I have to hold my own experience and to be with it and to allow it, the more I seem to be able to do that for others and the more they are willing to open up and share what's happening and to be vulnerable and to acknowledge the things that are difficult to acknowledge. I think even though that feels really scary at times, because it's so intimate and so bare, it's also the thing that leads to the most deep and meaningful relationships and enables the kind of teamwork that it's like at such another level because it's almost like one organism as opposed to all these people here that are just slamming into each other, trying to avoid hurting each other's feelings.

Jerry: Or being hurt themselves.

Vincent: Or especially –

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Jerry: Yeah, I think that it's the very thing that you identify that is the currency by which it happens and that is, it's not necessarily – you said, it's hard because it requires a kind of – and the word that pops in my head is vulnerability; it's that vulnerability, it's that rawness of the experience that I think becomes the actual currency by which that connection occurs.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: It's because I'm allowing myself to experience those things that the mirror neurons that exist between the two of us within a group get bonded.

Vincent: Yeah.

Jerry: I witness your vulnerability and I resonate with it.

Vincent: Yeah. I mean, I feel like in the bootcamps that we have done, half of what happens that's so profound is that people really just sharing and opening up in that way and revealing to each other our own deep humanity.

Jerry: I did a – Khalid, Ali and I led a management off site the other day for a client company and there was this powerful moment where the CEO had said to us at the beginning, "Listen, one of the challenges we have is that we are not necessarily working as collaboratively as we'd like and I'm finding myself sort of not being brought in to assist. I know that there are things that I can do to bridge connections between the departments." So we said, okay, we'll explore that and what started to unfold was that there was this collective yet unspoken belief that it was not okay to ask for help. The most powerful moment was when the CEO realized that that’s exactly the way he had grown up; that it was wrong to ask for help and that it would cause him to be criticized and chastised by his mother. So, there was this slap-the-forehead moment where they realized, or he realized that he had replicated unconsciously that experience. So in essence, the whole offsite was a moment of sitting still and seeing because the presenting idea was 'we are not collaborating' but the real issue was this collective engagement, it's not okay to ask for help. So then we got a chance to choose what is the leadership culture we want to create. Oh, we want to say and we want to force ourselves to lean into a difficult thing which is to teach each other and hold each other accountable for that very act of asking for help. That was quite powerful. So if

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there was one lesson or teaching you could draw out as it related to the application of these and you and I love this term when we talk about mediation, these age-old technologies to the work environment or to an individual but I am really focused on the collective at this point; is there anything that you would say?

Vincent: Yeah, [Laughs] that's such a [Unclear 0:39:59] one Jerry.

Jerry: Yeah. [Laughs]

Vincent: Oh there are so many things.

Jerry: I mean, for example, the importance of your individual practice and then the relationship to the collective.

Vincent: Yeah. I think the thing I'd say as a kind of framework or like an idea to help see why awareness is important and why mindful awareness is so critical is – and I think this is something I found extremely – I keep coming back to this again and again is that whatever we're able to see, to experience, to make into an object in our awareness is something that we are no longer blindly identified with and caught in. As soon as we are not caught in it anymore and because we can see it, we can work with it. Once it's an object, once we are aware of it, we can actually work with it. When we are not aware of it, when we are blindly identified with it, it's like when we are in a movie theater and we are totally so absorbed in the movie that we forget that we are even in the theater. Once we realize that this is actually a play in a way, that this is actually a story that's unfolding right here, you know, and become aware of certain aspects of that story, we can begin the story in a new way. We can [Unclear 0:41:39] – take a little bit more of a creative position and I think the beauty of that is the malleability of reality when we start experiencing things that way.

Jerry: It's almost like the sitting and seeing enables more adult participation and engagement with your life; adult meaning a kind of – I hesitate to use the word 'choice' but a kind of more active participation –

Vincent: Yeah.

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Jerry: – because the movie-goer is sitting in the audience having the experience happen to them versus really being engaged in the experience itself.

Vincent: Mm-hmm.

Jerry: Well, that's beautiful and I know I have put you on the spot there and –

Vincent: Thanks.

Jerry: – you responded really well and I appreciate that.

Vincent: As you always do. [Laughs]

Jerry: That's my job, my friend. [Laughs]

******

Dan: Before we end this episode, we'd like to share a guided meditation that Vincent recorded for the mobile mindfulness app, Buddhify. We hope you enjoy it.

Vincent: How we experience the universe affects how we experience ourselves. In this meditation, we'll explore two ways of perceiving the observable universe. The first way will be as ourselves arising within the vast physical cosmos. The second way is as all conscious experience arising within our awareness. By meditating in this way, we gain a deeper familiarity with two of the most core ways of knowing reality. One from the Western-scientific tradition and the other from the Eastern-contemplative traditions. We'll begin with the universe you probably know best; the physical one. Take a moment to relax your body, relax your mind and close your eyes. As you relax, let your attention settle on the inner movie theater of your mind, the screen of your imagination. Begin by picturing yourself in the room that you are in just as it is. Imagine the setting and layout and feel yourself inhabiting that place. Now allow the picture to expand to include your city perhaps as an aerial shot. See how much space you take up in this space, how much smaller you are.

Now expand your imagination even further to your region or state and then to the country that you are in. Notice where you are in this picture. Now we're going to allow the aerial shot to go all the way into space; imagine seeing the Earth from the perspective of the International Space Station. See where you are on the planet, notice how vast the Earth is, this big, blue marble.

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Now expand even further out moving away from the Sun, past Mars, Jupiter and the rest of the planets in the solar system. See the Sun shrinking into a smaller dot and the Earth starting to vanish from sight. Take in the whole system from the very edges of our solar system, vast open space and us, sitting on Planet Earth not even visible now, hurtling around our small Sun.

Now allow your mind's eye to zoom out even further moving much faster than the speed of light and go back all the way to the point where you are taking in the whole of the Milky Way galaxy. Take in the 300 billion or so points of light that make up the luminous core and spiraling arms of the Milky Way. Notice where the Sun is located, nearly halfway between the core and the outer arms of the galaxy in the rural backwaters of the Milky Way. How much space do you take up at this scale?

Continue zooming out going far enough back to take in the Virgo super-cluster; a cluster of tens of thousands of galaxies including our own Milky Way. Notice the self-similar pattern of organization even at this scale; how shining points of clustered matter and light come together with vast distances of space in between.

Continue zooming out further and further watching innumerable galaxies stream by, going all the way to the point where you can see the entire observable universe. Take in all of the known universe with its hundreds of millions of galaxies, each of which contain trillions of stars and planets. Notice how inconceivably small you are from this vantage point. What does this vantage point bring up for you? Awe? Fear? Confusion? Wonder? Notice how seeing yourself as a tiny part of the vast cosmos changes your experience.

Now during this whole thought experiment, every single thing we've imagined has been in your mind. You didn’t physically travel to the outer edges of space. Instead you imagined your way through a series of complex thoughts. Notice that as you sit here, not only are thoughts arising in your awareness but so is every other aspect of your experience; sights, sounds, smells, tastes, the sensations of your body, all wash through your experience. Waves of thought and emotion course through this field of sensory experience arising, persisting for a while and then changing.

Notice how not a single thing arises outside of your experience. All of this is happening in your awareness. Furthermore, it's the only experience you have ever known; can you think of anything that you have ever known which you didn’t know through your direct experience? From this vantage point, every single thing we have thought, felt or known has arisen within this human experience of ours. See what it's like to take in the entire observable universe as what's currently arising in and as your awareness.

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Anything you can imagine as being outside of it, including the vast magnitudes of space, arises as a thought within this experience. We are the universe knowing itself. Take another minute to feel what this way of experiencing yourself and the universe is like. [Silent pause] Now, reflecting back on the meditation, take note of what it was like to imagine yourself as a small part of the vast physical universe. How did that contrast with experiencing the whole of the universe as that which is arising in your experience right now? How can these two different perspectives help illuminate more of who we are and the universe we inhabit?

As you end this meditation and go about the rest of your day, see if you can feel what it's like to be able to toggle between these two modes of experiencing; each literally revealing an entirely different universe. This has been a Buddhify meditation by Vincent Horn. You can find out more about my work at Vincenthorn.com and Buddhify.com. Thank you for your time and attention.

******

So that’s it for our conversation today. You know, a lot was covered in this episode from links, to books, to quotes, to images. So, we went ahead and compiled all that and put it on our site at Reboot.io/podcast. If you would like to be a guest on the show, you can find out about that on our site as well.

I’m really grateful that you took the time to listen. If you enjoyed the show and you want to get all the latest episodes as we release them, head over to iTunes and subscribe and while you’re there, it would be great if you could leave us a review letting us know how the show affected you. So, thank you again for listening and I really look forward to future conversations together.

[Singing] "How long till my soul gets it right?Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?I call on the resting soul of Galileo,King of night-vision, King of insight."

[End of audio 0:55:34][End of transcript]

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