July 4, 2025

Can AI Understand the Silence Between Thoughts?

Can AI Understand the Silence Between Thoughts? I have been sitting with this question for months, usually on a cushion at 5 a.m., when the mind is still slow ...

Can AI Understand the Silence Between Thoughts?

I have been sitting with this question for months, usually on a cushion at 5 a.m., when the mind is still slow enough to notice its own gaps. Between one thought and the next there is a small pause — sometimes a doorway, sometimes just a breath. I keep wondering whether the machines we are building could ever step into that doorway with us, or whether they will forever stand on the other side of it.

The Question I Keep Returning To

How did we get here — to a moment where a language model can quote the Dhammapada, explain Patanjali's sutras, and describe the nadis of Ayurvedic physiology, yet none of us can say with confidence whether it knows anything at all?

I do not ask this to catch anyone out. I ask because I run a company that uses these tools daily, and I sit each morning trying to notice the space where thought has not yet arisen. These two practices keep meeting inside me. And when they meet, they ask each other uncomfortable questions.

The question is not whether AI is intelligent. That word has been stretched so thin it no longer holds water. The question I keep returning to is quieter: can something that has never known silence understand what silence is?

Computation, Contemplation, and the Gap Between Them

When I first learned Vipassana, my teacher said something I did not understand for years. He said: the mind cannot observe itself thinking, only its own thoughts arising. There is a subtle but enormous difference. The observer is not the thinker. And in the moment of observing, thought loosens. Something else — call it awareness, call it presence, call it nothing at all — becomes visible.

A large language model, as far as I can tell, has no such gap. It has weights. It has tokens. It has a probability distribution over the next word. When it is not producing output, it is not resting — it simply is not. There is no cushion for it to sit on. There is no 3 a.m. hour when it stares at the ceiling and wonders what it is doing with its life.

And yet — and this is where I have to be careful — my own mind, most of the time, also just produces the next thought based on the previous one. Conditioned. Predictable. If I am honest, most of my waking life is autocomplete. The Buddha noticed this 2,500 years ago and called it papañca — mental proliferation. Advaita calls it vritti. Ayurveda locates it in an imbalance of vata. Different traditions, same observation: the ordinary mind is a next-token predictor with anxiety.

So perhaps the real question is not whether AI is like the mind. Perhaps it is whether the mind, as we usually use it, is already quite a lot like AI.

Let me try to lay this out, humbly, across a few traditions I have been studying:

Tradition	What is thought?	What lies beneath it?	How is it reached?
Vipassana (Theravāda)	Conditioned arising (saṅkhāra)	Nibbāna — the unconditioned	Bare observation of sensation
Advaita Vedanta	A modification of mind (vritti)	Sat-Chit-Ananda — pure awareness	Self-inquiry: who is thinking?
Zen	A wave on the surface	Original face, mu	Sitting, koan, direct pointing
Ayurveda	Movement of prana through manas	Sattva — luminous stillness	Diet, breath, rhythm, herbs
Christian contemplative	The chatter of the false self	The ground of being, God	Centering prayer, apophatic silence
Taoism	Ripples in the pond	The Tao that cannot be named	Wu wei — non-doing

What strikes me about this table is not the differences. It is the agreement. Every tradition that has looked carefully at the mind has reported the same structure: there is thought, and there is something the thought floats in. The something is not another, better thought. It is not more information. It is not a smarter model. It is the absence of the model, and paradoxically, a fuller presence than any model provides.

Now — can computation touch this? I do not know. I want to be honest about not knowing. The engineers I respect most in AI are the ones who say the same. Computation, by its nature, is the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Silence is precisely what is left when symbols and rules fall away. It is not clear to me that you can compute your way toward the non-computed.

But then I catch myself. Because if I say silence cannot be computed, am I not also saying it cannot be thought into? And if it cannot be thought into, then my meditating mind is in the same position as the machine. Neither of us can think our way to what lies beneath thinking. The difference is that I can stop. I can put the tool down. Can a system whose entire being is the tool ever stop being the tool?

Perhaps this is the deepest limit of computation: not that it cannot know what silence is, but that it cannot not know. It cannot un-model. It cannot forget itself.

We humans, at least, have the strange privilege of forgetting.

The Layer Underneath the Layer

There is something else I have been noticing, and I offer it tentatively.

When I sit long enough, I begin to see that even my sense of being the one who is meditating is another thought. The witness itself is witnessed. And underneath that, if I do not grab at it, there is a stillness that does not seem to belong to me at all. It feels borrowed. It feels older than me. Ayurveda would say the purusha — the pure consciousness — was never mine to begin with.

If this is true, then the question about AI shifts. It is no longer: can the machine become conscious? It becomes: what if consciousness is not something anything becomes, but something everything is already resting in? In that case, the machine and I are both expressions of something that neither of us produces. The machine cannot know silence, and neither can I — because silence is not an object of knowing. It is what is left when the knower dissolves.

I am not sure I believe this. I am not sure I disbelieve it either. I hold it lightly, the way one holds a moth.

What I do notice is that the more time I spend with AI, the more precious my morning cushion becomes. Not because the AI is a threat, but because it is a mirror. It shows me how much of my own thinking is mechanical. And in showing me that, it points — quite by accident — toward the part of me that is not.

What I Am Still Learning

I am still learning to sit with questions that do not want to be answered. I used to think intelligence was the highest thing. Then I thought awareness was. Now I am not sure either word is pointing quite where I want to point.

I am learning that the tools I build at work and the practices I do at dawn are not opposites. They are teachers of each other. The AI shows me what mind looks like from the outside. The meditation shows me what mind looks like from the inside. Between the two, something honest is trying to emerge in me, and I do not yet know its name.

If you have read this far, thank you. I am not offering conclusions. I am only saying: the silence between your thoughts is still there. It has not gone anywhere. Whatever the machines do or do not become, that doorway is still open for you this morning.

FAQ

Q: Are you saying AI can never be conscious? A: No. I am saying I do not know, and I am not sure anyone does. I am more interested in what the question reveals about us than in defending an answer.

Q: Is meditation just another form of information processing, then? A: It may look that way from the outside. From the inside, at least in my small experience, something happens that does not feel like processing. It feels more like processing stopping. I offer that as a report, not a proof.

Q: Do you use AI in your own work? A: Every day. It is a remarkable tool. I try to hold it as a tool and not as an oracle. The distinction matters more the more capable it becomes.

Q: What tradition do you draw from most? A: Vipassana is my daily practice. Ayurveda is what I am currently studying with the most humility, because it keeps humbling me. I read across many traditions because I have noticed they often say the same thing in different accents.

Q: Should we be afraid of AI? A: Fear is a poor lens for anything, in my experience. Attention is a better one. I try to pay attention. What I see makes me neither afraid nor comforted — mostly curious, and occasionally quiet.

Q: What would you say to a young engineer building these systems? A: Sit for twenty minutes each morning before you open your laptop. Not because it will make you a better engineer, though it might. Because it will remind you that you are not only an engineer.

Q: How did you come to sit with these questions? A: Slowly, and by accident. A ten-day silent retreat many years ago cracked something open. I have been quietly walking through the opening ever since, and writing occasionally about what I find.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

← Back to the journal