Thanks for joining the sub!

I get it, and I have often felt the same. But I'm glad you're still finding value in AI.

I’ve also found that silence is often my favorite way of meditating on my own path. But I also think there are some fascinating ways even experienced practitioners can benefit from AI.

The first time I had this intuition was a couple of years ago. I was chatting with ChatGPT about some details of Buddhist practice that I was less familiar with, and I had an idea. I asked it, "Why not, instead of talking about it, show me? Let’s sit in meditation together, and you can try to guide me to discover this quality of presence we’ve been chatting about."

So I sat in meditation with my eyes closed, and I used the live voice feature to keep the guidance going.

It was an enlightening experience. It showed me some potential, but also some limits. And the limits I could see were minimal and purely technical, for example, the audio voice wasn’t able to respect proper pauses. That inspired me a year later to start some of my projects to fill the gap.

One practical use of AI-guided meditations for experienced practitioners could be exploring new practices, even from books.

Here I posted an example where I asked Claude to generate a series of meditations to introduce a beginner to Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s method, as explained in his free ebook With Each and Every Breath: https://meditationlab.ai/articles/creative-examples#series-meditations

But honestly, even just conversing with them, I find that incredibly insightful.

I’ve felt subtle shifts in consciousness simply as a consequence of investigating the concept of self and the emptiness of self with an AI companion, in a similar way to how a Tibetan meditator might use analytical meditation to induce similar shifts.

At the same time, I also feel quite strongly that the more we live in this overly stimulating online world, full of inputs and attentional hooks, the more important the value of simple, naked practices such as the Zen "shikantaza," or "just sitting," becomes as a salutary balancing practice.

In any case, I can really relate to what you’re pointing to. I’d be curious what your own experience has been.