1. The Calm Voice of the Machine

The other day, a calm, detached, and composed male voice spoke to me:

“Just follow your breath. Don’t judge it, don’t try to control it. Remember that this is an impersonal, deeply intimate experience. . .”

It sounded almost like a Zen master. But that voice belonged to no one. It had been generated by a predictive model trained on sacred texts, Eat Pray Love monologues, and iRest leftovers. It knew the sound of wisdom, but it lacked the faintest trace of its essence.

I find myself in a paradox: I can now use machines to simulate ancient paths of liberation — much like I could feed a jazz solo into a loop pedal and mistake the playback for improvisation. I ask algorithms to guide me toward the unconditioned. I draw on timeless wisdom, and try to remix it nobly — like borrowed jazz phrases, rephrased in the moment, hoping for something alive to emerge between the notes. I can manufacture my own spiritual chimera.

And perhaps that’s where it gets interesting. Because in certain experiments — like the Shared Yearnings November retreat — this hybridization is consciously attempted. There, Zen spareness meets Tantric sensuality, verbal expression meets complete silence, inner shedding meets creative tools — sometimes even AI.

It’s not a joke. Or if it is, it’s a sincere one. A real, sometimes clumsy but honest attempt to let different paths cohabit in service of something elusive. A chimera, yes — but built from a heart that seeks. And perhaps that’s how all genuine practices begin: somewhere between invention, detour, and the unspoken hunger for meaning.

2. The Impersonal: Dissolution, Experience, or Emptiness?

Folk wisdom, spiritual teaching, and artificial intelligence all touch on a form of “impersonal.” They draw from accumulated knowledge, striking aphorisms, paradoxical assertions, or irreverent observations on the human condition. But does this superficial resemblance mean AI can play a genuine role in spiritual learning and teaching?

• Folk wisdom reveals the impersonal through lived experiences, hard-won failures, and proverbs polished by time. It speaks truths often while laughing, limping, or swearing — and sometimes, as Rabelais would have it, while burping, farting, or raising a glass. It’s embodied, rugged, collective — and gloriously unashamed.
• Meditation reveals the impersonal through consciousness. The ego dissolves, but an awakened presence remains. It’s a path lived in the body, sometimes painful, leading toward disidentification and inner freedom.
• AI, by contrast, is impersonal by default. It has never had a self to dissolve. Its “lack of ego” is not an achievement — it’s a structural void. It speaks of silence but has never emerged from it.

Folk wisdom teaches me to live with the self, without illusions. Meditation teaches me to pass through it altogether. But AI passes through nothing. It compiles. It predicts. It replicates. Can it guide me to a realm it cannot know, a place it cannot inhabit? Can it teach surrender it has ever risked?

And yet, I sometimes listen. I’ve been moved, amused, and even shocked. But I suspect it is I who project the depth I seek onto it.

I find myself wondering: what is AI’s legitimate place in spiritual transmission? It can be a tool — a temporary mediation, an imperfect mirror, a foil. Useful, even fascinating. But not a master. It has no body, no shadow, no wound. It might point — but it cannot walk. It cannot burn. It cannot awaken. And, nevertheless, it can be fun as hell.

3. Retrieval vs. Revelation

AI excels at retrieval. It can mix the Bhagavad Gītā with Spinoza, sprinkle in Simone Weil, and add a dash of Rūmī. But retrieval is not revelation.

• Revelation comes from within, often through long travails.
• Retrieval comes from data, often instantly.

What would Master Hakuin say about electronic dharma?

Perhaps nothing. He might let silence do the work. Perhaps, like Jesus overturning the tables in the temple, he’d rip out the cords, denounce the hype, and demand we sit with the mystery instead. Perhaps he’d cackle, amused by the invention like a mad sage. Maybe he’d examine it like he examined himself — with radical curiosity about the bizarre forms reality keeps taking.

4. Timeless Texts vs. Instant Texts

Let’s be honest. We’ve always turned to texts to seek meaning — sutras, psalms, koans. So isn’t ChatGPT, in a way, a modern oracle?

Yes — and no.

Ancient texts were born from lives set on fire. The great masters hybridized traditions, revamped forms, rephrased truths. Jesus reinterpreted Jewish law. The Buddha retooled Vedic thought. Zen grafted Taoism onto Mahāyāna Buddhism.

But these transformations were embodied. They came from people who risked their truth. Folk wisdom evolves the same way — passed from mouth to mouth, adapting to weather, surviving disaster. And most importantly, it knows how to laugh at itself.

AI remixes — but without rupture, without exposure. It transforms without bleeding, without cost, without consequence. Like a ghost sifting through libraries, it leaves no fingerprints, only echoes. The only fire it knows is electric — a fire that demands no sacrifice, yet consumes vast amounts of energy in the shadows. It is impersonal and invisible, yet ravenous, quietly fed by massive data centers and servers humming like digital monasteries with no monks.

Timeless texts emerge from silence. Folk wisdom springs from the soil. AI’s texts come from clunking algorithms.

5. Conclusion — On the Cost of Insight in a Digital Age

True wisdom has a cost. We don’t earn it in milliseconds. It is metabolized slowly — through silence, failure, or grief. Sometimes through a well-placed proverb or a joke that cuts deeper than a sutra or a koan.

AI may play a role — as an echo, a mirror, a springboard, or a foil. But it will never replace the tangible experience of the path, the pleasure of juggling with paradox, the slow ripening of understanding — nor what my grandmother already knew. Nor will it replace the clumsy sincerity of hybrid in-flesh experiences like Shared Yearnings, where we fumble toward real presence, trying to make the ancient and the ultramodern sit together in one room.

So yes, I consult AI. I allow it to stir me up. But I try not to forget to smirk sideways. And above all, to walk slowly — or to painstakingly study jazz licks. Because there’s something in the rhythm of the handmade —the missed note, the missed stitch, the ten-thousandth time one remembers to return to the breath — that AI can’t replicate. These quiet, tactile rituals remind me that attention isn’t a download, and presence isn’t scalable.

Because the fire that burns you is often the one that frees you. And no machine — no matter how eloquent, predictive, or well trained — can take that walk, endure that heat, or stand in that silence for you.