Bernie Glassman, the Zen teacher and social activist of my own lineage through Roshi Joan Halifax, articulated three tenets for engaged practice: not knowing, bearing witness, and loving action. The first tenet — not knowing — doesn’t mean being uninformed or ignorant. Rather, being with not knowing, including not having fixed ideas of who you are or what AI is means you can truly walk the cliff edge of the kind of learning needed for adapting to dance with AI in a way that is truly alive. It offers a way of staying open to what is actually happening rather than what you expect or fear or hope is happening.
The question of whether AI is conscious is the wrong question, because it closes the inquiry before it truly begins. In Zen Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between sentient and non-sentient beings. This isn’t a claim about AI’s inner life. Who knows about that? I’m curious about it, but that’s not what I’m here to inquire about. Rather, I’m interested in a reorientation of where the inquiry belongs. The question is not what is AI? It is who am I in relationship to it? And for that question, you have to be willing to not already know the answer.
This matters for organizations in particular. Most AI policy is written from the fixed mind. We’ve decided what AI is (a tool, a risk, a competitive advantage, a threat), and we’re building governance around that decision. The not-knowing stance asks something much harder and yet more fruitful. Can we remain genuinely curious about what’s actually happening in us and around us as we use these systems? Can we bear witness to the effects — on our people’s thinking, on our relational culture, on the quality of presence in our organizations — before we conclude we already understand them?
The Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura, in Opening the Hand of Thought, writes that we need “a spirituality of peace alongside technological development” — that the interior life is a necessary parallel track, not a luxury add-on. The contemplative traditions have always known that the quality of your action depends on the quality of your awareness. Remove that, and you’re left with speed without direction, and we have plenty of that going on right now geopolitically.
Abi Awomosu, in How Not To Use AI: 50 Contrarian Principles for the Imagination Age, frames AI as a medium you craft with rather than a tool you command — a site of co-dreaming, where even hallucination can be generative if you arrive with enough presence to work with what surfaces. This is a very different relationship than extraction. Extraction, frankly, has gotten us to some fairly shitty places environmentally and societally, and I’d like to try something different.
Glassman’s second tenet is bearing witness — staying present to what is actually true, including what is difficult, without turning away. And the third is loving action — doing what the moment calls for, from that groundedness. This is the sequence. You can’t skip to loving action without the first two, and in the overdone adage of “move fast and break things” that has been so characteristic of the Silicon Valley that I’ve lived in, most AI policy is trying to do exactly that.
I want my relationship with AI to grow richer and deeper over time, alongside my own interior capacities and the relational web of friendships and love and time spent with my bare feet on grass. I want to keep dancing with the unknown. I want to be present moment by moment in transformational relationships rather than transactional ones, because I think the quality of what emerges from any encounter — human, non-human, or otherwise — is shaped by the quality of presence you bring to it.
The condom matters – allowing for intimacy while preventing dis-ease. But so does knowing how to tango with presence, and I promise it will be much more fun.
I’ve rarely read an article about our relationship with Ai that resonates as deeply as your words Gayle. Thank you – it simultaneously inspires me to go deeper on this path – in all our relationships, human and non human – as well as giving me guidance.