A Vision That Feels Like Hope

Dear Friend,

I came across something today that made me think of you immediately — you know how we've talked about technology feeling both miraculous and terrifying at the same time? I read this conversation with Shinzen Young, a meditation teacher who's nearly 80, and his perspective on AI and meditation stopped me in my tracks.

What moved me most was how he describes feeling like he's 8, 18, and 80 all at once. The 8-year-old in him is "like a kid let loose in a candy store," excited about what's possible when math, science, meditation, and AI dance together. There's something so beautiful about someone approaching 80 who hasn't lost that sense of wonder — who can look at artificial intelligence and see not a threat to human connection, but "a subtle breath of the angels."

Here's what he's actually working on, and it surprised me: not ChatGPT teaching meditation (which he says is superficial), but something much more thoughtful. He's building AI that combines old-fashioned, transparent, rule-based systems with the flexibility of conversational AI. He calls it "a much, much better version of an interacting book." The idea is that it could stay with someone "hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year" — offering guidance that no human teacher could sustain. He points out that historically, only emperors had private meditation teachers. Now a hundred million Swahili speakers could have expert guidance in their own language, available 24/7, by pressing a button.

What I'm still thinking about is his honesty. He doesn't pretend human teachers are perfect — "Our human teachers don't hallucinate? Our human teachers don't make horrible mistakes even when they're masters?" And he's clear-eyed about risks: if you accelerate meditation practice through technology, more people will experience difficult side effects. But his approach is what he calls "sober optimism" — the benefits vastly outweigh the harms.

His vision is captured in what he calls his "elevator pitch at almost 80": that individuals and groups should establish free and equal access to science-aligned meditation training for comprehensive wellbeing at scale. Free. Equal. At scale. He imagines this as "a subtle breath of the angels... subtly supporting the better tendencies of our species."

I know you've wondered, like I have, whether all this technology is pulling us away from what makes us human. But what if some of it could help us become more fully human? What if it could support, as Shinzen says, "the better angels of our being"?

I'd love to hear what you think about this. Does the idea of AI-guided meditation feel like possibility or loss to you? Or maybe both?

With love,
Your friend