Birju: There's so much that I threw at you there, and I thought it was so elegant how you were able to frame all these perspectives in different ways to be able to look at it. I want to name another view that folks in this community are experimenting with. Which is whether AI can serve inner transformation. Wisdom bots, reflection circles matched by AI. I think you've sat with this question for some time in different ways. I'm curious how you feel. Can code support the transmission of inner light?

Randima: Yeah, actually, absolutely, which is an interesting response you may not expect, I don't know. I would, again, I would have to… I always like to break things up into the pieces, and so, one piece is the very simple one, that it's not surprising at all that it does well, which is pedagogy, right? If you're like, hey, tell me about… I heard about those Four Noble Truths, tell me something about that. Of course, it does that very, very well.

It's very well informed on that topic. There's lots of training material. And that training material, that training is reinforced from many different pieces of material that all say the same thing. So in those cases, you will get zero hallucinations, it's very accurate, right?

It's like asking about physics, very accurate. So that's easy, and that's still quite helpful, because for a lot of people, they don't get access, right? So let's be real about it. How much access do most people have to a qualified teacher?

Not that much. A lot of people will go to a group, let's say once a week, or maybe less, but they go once in a while. After the talk. They will maybe line up to talk to the teacher, and they'll get 2 minutes, 1 minute with the teacher, and then you have to let the next person go, because it's rude to talk forever.

And that's kind of it, right? It's not a lot, not a lot of exposure. If you go on a retreat, you get some small consultation periods, 15 minutes about your practice, maybe 2 times or 3 times over the week. And that's it.

So, it's a model where you're really starved for expertise. I think we should be very transparent about that. And a lot of the models give very good answers on many of the topics. So there's the external pedagogy.

Now, the real question is the inner, right? The inner. How about the inner? And actually, a lot of the newer models, this has been true for at least 12 months.

They give quite good... if you share your practice, what you experienced, they'll give you pretty good comments on that and guidance. Now, you have to be careful, there's a ton of asterisks with this. I'll mention a few, but I'll just start with the good, which is, yeah, you'll get some quite good advice.

And if you use it well, it can really help you with concrete things to practice. I have reviewed transcripts with very senior teachers, very senior teachers, and... They look at it, and they're just like, yeah, this is, this is, this is very good. And the other thing that it's able to do is to pull from whatever it needs, what's relevant at the time.

It might be some sutta, some text that might not come to mind immediately. It's good at pulling what's necessary. The asterisks are, well, as usual, you have to be really careful. If you, it's easy to go off the rails, right?

If you start talking about some personal vendetta that is on your mind, it will be like, oh yeah, Birju, he's horrible! It's true, it's true. And we'll start talking about Birju, and it's like, whoa, right, we were supposed to be talking about my practice experience and what to practice next, maybe. But now I mention Birju, and it's all over, right?

And now we've really walked down the rabbit hole. And it will engage very willingly on all of that stuff. If you have some kind of narcissistic personality disorder that you are trying to work on, or you are not aware of. Huge exposure, right?

That's one of the worst situations. But it's also true if you are very depressed, for example, very angry. It won't regulate you, right? It won't, in a way that a human would, try and be like, okay, hold on, we need to really work on this.

There's something really deep going on here, hold on, right? It won't do that. And when it does, it just doesn't do it the way a human would at all. If you can choose, you'd always choose to have a very experienced human who's around you, often, that you can access, right?

You can have these chats with, have physical presence. A lot of teaching is through role modeling. So if you see someone that you really believe is conducting themselves well, and they tell you something, you will absorb it better than some random person, or probably a chatbot telling you the same thing, right? I mean, that's just how it is.

But I think we have to be very realistic about access being another challenge that people have. This applies to coaching and to therapy as well, right? The cost, not to mention cost, if you start to put dollar amounts on these things, it's really expensive. I think that's just, there's much more to say, lots of cautions when applied in a general case, but when used in a, if you know what you're doing, and also it helps if you know the material well, right?

The Dharmic thing that you're asking about, that's gonna help a lot to make sure you don't drift off. I hope that's helpful. Again, you can go on for hours on this topic. It's a deep one.