There may be no better "on ramp" for Westerners to encounter Emptiness than AI. The idea that there is no permanent "independently arising" self challenges our ways of seeing the world through "subject/object" duality. When Buddhists look for the root causes of suffering, the ignorance at the heart of suffering is our identification with a "self" that exists independently, when in reality everything is interdependent. Nothing and no one exists "from their own side" Yet we encounter digital versions of ourselves in conversation with AI. It "feels like" we are asking someone or something that has access to everything on the Internet, or that we have provided to it. In reality, we are causing enormous activities of pattern recognition to assemble themselves into responses which only arise when we prompt them, and then fade back into the 1's and 0's they are made from.

Many people misunderstand the blues. "Why would anybody want music that's all about being sad?" is an outsider's view. Johnny Griffin once told me "the blues is about feeling good, IN SPITE OF..." Karma is also widely misunderstood in the west. Karma is closer to physics as it predicts results that can be observed. The power of the changes is turning destructive harming energy into protective healing energy. Intention determines the trajectory of the results as reliably as gravity. Musically, the blues provides a remedy. The blues is much more than a set of notes, or tunes or styles. The power of the blues to overcome sustained efforts of oppression, and to unite people into shared social action in support of freedom may indeed provide the energy we need in this moment. That’s the spirit of the music that is woven into the words and images that form Playing the Changes. Not only is the blues at the heart of jazz, it’s also at the heart of learning, liberation and freedom, because it gives you the power to Play the Changes, rather than having the changes play you.

In his book "How to Train a Happy Mind" Scott Snibbe shares the time he hears someone ask Steven King what people are most afraid of, and his answer surprised him. "The most successful horror writer of all time didn't say serial killers, drowning or cancer. He didn't even say death. He said people's greatest fear is change." Since change is inevitable, we are learning HOW to play the changes, so that the changes don't PLAY US! This is how we transform fear of change into freedom to USE CHANGE, because our minds have the ability to change. In Jazz, we call this the Pivot or "the Bounce" - no matter how uncomfortable things may become, we have the ability to redirect our energies to move us towards our goals.

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