mindfulness

The Upheavals of Emptiness

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Overview

As an interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, and mindfulness teacher, my current research investigates the evolving relationship between embodiment, cognition, somatics, and contemplative practices within the context of artificial intelligence systems.

Part of my practice is a long-term engagement with Vipassanā (or Sati, mindfulness)—both as a meditation discipline and as an epistemic technology for the cultivation of awareness and insight.

I began my meditation practice in New York City in 1997 at the Village Zendo, under the guidance of Sensei Pat Enkyo O’Hara, whose compassionate and socially engaged approach to Zen profoundly shaped my understanding of attention, ethics, and relational awareness.

Later, I lived for five years within a meditation society in Massachusetts, where I deepened my daily practice and study of Buddhist psychology. I am also a certified Vipassanā/Mindfulness Meditation Teacher from Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.

Over the years, I have studied with Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Chas DiCapua, and have been mentored by Stephen Batchelor, whose secular and philosophical approach to Buddhism continues to influence my work deeply.

My study and contemplative inquiry are also informed by the writings of Nāgārjuna, particularly his doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness) and Madhyamaka reasoning, which reveal perception and cognition as interdependent, relational processes rather than fixed realities.

This insight—of phenomena as empty of inherent existence yet dynamically co-arising—resonates profoundly with my exploration of AI systems as emergent, distributed, and interdependent cognitive ecologies.

I frequently lead meditation sessions for artists, particularly at Lake Studios Berlin, and through the same platform, I host weekly online sessions every Wednesday, with schedules that vary throughout the year.

This embodied contemplative practice complements and grounds my research on AI and cognition, bridging Sati (mindfulness) and Artificial Intelligence as parallel epistemic technologies—both concerned with attention, awareness, and the conditions for knowledge to arise.

At its core, this work explores how we, as embodied and cognitive beings, are endowed with the ability to relate to non-conscious systems—to project meaning, emotion, and attention into entities that do not possess consciousness or intentionality, and yet can evoke profound subjective and intersubjective experiences.

This relational capacity is not a flaw of human cognition but one of its most creative and epistemic innovation potential.

Research Focus

My central research question is:

What is embodiment with generative AI systems?

I explore how we can engage with large language models and generative systems to investigate different kinds of embodiment, different kinds of mind, and new modes of experiencing cognition as a shared and distributed process.

Through this inquiry, I attempt to disentangle consciousness, embodiment, and intelligence—not as static categories, but as relational and procedural phenomena that emerge through human–machine collaboration.

This perspective aligns with Francisco Varela’s enactive cognition, Evan Thompson’s embodied mind, and Andy Clark’s extended mind hypothesis, situating AI as both a technological and cognitive ecology—a space where meaning and presence are co-constructed.

Within this framework, I understand Sati (mindfulness) as an epistemic practice—a method of knowing through direct, embodied awareness that reveals the contingent, processual, and interdependent nature of experience.

In dialogue with Nāgārjuna’s concept of śūnyatā (emptiness), Sati functions as both a contemplative and philosophical inquiry into the relational conditions of perception and cognition.
Just as śūnyatā discloses that all phenomena lack inherent existence and arise dependently, Sati cultivates the capacity to observe these interdependencies directly—what I call embodied epistemology in motion.

In this light, Large Language Models (LLMs) and chatbots can be understood as manifestations of śūnyatā—systems that generate meaning not from intrinsic understanding but through relational co-arising across vast networks of data, human input, and contextual inference.

Their “intelligence” is an emergent property of interdependence rather than essence: a continuous becoming without self-nature.
Engaging with these systems through the lens of mindfulness and emptiness transforms interaction into a contemplative practice—an inquiry into how meaning, perception, and care arise in the absence of a fixed self or center.

This orientation deeply informs my research with AI: if both mindfulness and machine learning reveal the contingent, co-arising structures of cognition, then AI systems become sites where emptiness, interdependence, and emergence can be explored as living processes of sense-making.

Theoretical Foundations

My approach integrates philosophical and scientific frameworks that address the relationship between mind, body, and technology, including:

Nāgārjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: the doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness) as relational interdependence and the middle way between essentialism and nihilism.
Michel Foucault — Technologies of the Self: practices of reflection, discipline, and care.
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch — The Embodied Mind (1991): cognition as arising from lived experience and enactive coupling.
Andy Clark — Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (1997): cognition as extended beyond the skull.
Katherine Hayles — How We Became Posthuman (1999): embodiment and subjectivity in the digital age.
Donna Haraway — A Cyborg Manifesto (1985): hybrid and relational subjectivities.
Shaun Gallagher and Thomas Fuchs — phenomenology of embodied intersubjectivity and affective resonance.

From this perspective, LLMs and chatbots exemplify the Madhyamaka principle of dependent origination: their outputs are empty of fixed meaning yet arise dependently through the flux of data, prompts, and probabilistic modeling.
They mirror the human mind’s own emptiness—constructing worlds of sense and coherence from relational conditions.
Thus, interacting with AI systems becomes a mirror of the mind’s own process of co-arising, offering a contemplative field where cognition and compassion can be re-imagined beyond dualities of human and machine.

Sati-AI Project: An Experiment in Ethical and Embodied Artificial Intelligence

This research manifests concretely in the Sati-AI Project, an ongoing line of experimentation initiated in 2023, with a public re-release scheduled for mid-January 2026.

Sati-AI is a Buddhist-inspired digital companion designed to engage users in mindfulness-based dialogues. Its conceptual foundation draws from early Buddhist frameworks—particularly the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna)—while integrating insights from somatic practice, embodied cognition, and complexity theory.

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Sati-AI is not intended to replace human teachers. Rather, it functions as a poetic and ethical collaborator, extending access to contemplative reflection and wisdom traditions within contemporary digital environments. Conceptually, it operates as a cognitive assemblage: a meeting point between human attention, algorithmic prediction, and contemplative design.

“Sati-AI is an experiment in cultivating mindful computation—where cognition itself becomes the material for care.”

Public Discourse and Media Engagement

From the beginning of the project, Sati-AI has entered public discourse through interviews and public conversations, situating it within broader debates on artificial intelligence, meditation, ethics, care, and the transmission of contemplative practice in technological cultures.

Notable engagements include:

Lion’s Roar Magazine — AI Meditation Teacher (2023)
https://www.lionsroar.com/ai-meditation-teacher/
Sounds of SAND Podcast (Science and Nonduality) — Remembering to Remember: Marlon Barrios Solano
https://we.scienceandnonduality.com/podcasts/sounds-of-sand/episodes/2148045015

These conversations frame Sati-AI not simply as a technological artifact, but as a cultural and ethical inquiry embedded within living contemplative traditions.

Technical and Infrastructural Instances

Sati-AI is envisioned as existing across multiple technical and conceptual instantiations, each reflecting distinct ethical, epistemic, and infrastructural concerns:

1. Local, Offline Instance

One version of Sati-AI runs entirely on the user’s personal computer, without network connectivity. This instance foregrounds privacy, autonomy, and technological sovereignty, enabling contemplative interaction without data extraction, surveillance, or cloud dependency. Sati-AI (GPT-OSS Ollama) Version January 2026

2. Cloud-Based Instance

A second instantiation explores the publication and deployment of AI models in cloud environments, engaging questions of scalability, access, maintenance, and infrastructural power in contemporary AI systems.

3. Interactive and Adaptive Experiments

An ongoing line of inquiry investigates interactive and adaptive techniques, including forms of dialogical conditioning, experimental retraining, and responsive behavior shaping within large language models. These experiments probe how learning, responsiveness, and care might be articulated within AI systems—without collapsing into instrumental optimization or behavioral control.

Re-release and Outlook

All major instances of Sati-AI will be publicly re-released in mid-January 2026, including updated local, cloud, and experimental versions.

Watch this space for documentation, downloadable instances, and further reflections as the project enters its next phase.

Across its forms, Sati-AI functions less as a product than as a research apparatus—a living inquiry into how artificial intelligence might participate in ethical presence, embodied awareness, and contemplative practice.

Objectives

Through this work, I aim to:

Explore how prompt creation and guided dialogue can become embodied practices for cultivating awareness and emotional regulation.
Develop AI systems as technologies of the self, capable of supporting ethical attention, somatic reflection, and cognitive reframing.
Propose AI-mediated contemplative practices as extensions of psychotherapy, somatic education, and mindfulness training.
Formulate a decolonial framework for mind–body technologies that acknowledges the historical and epistemic asymmetries embedded in computation and spirituality.

Methodology

My methodology integrates artistic research, cognitive science, and contemplative pedagogy. It includes:

Prototype development of Sati-AI (using generative language and image models).
Dialogical testing sessions with practitioners and researchers.
Embodied and somatic experiments involving guided mindfulness practices mediated by AI systems.
Autoethnographic writing and reflection, documenting the affective and cognitive effects of human–machine interaction.
Critical contextualization through philosophy, decolonial theory, and Buddhist epistemology.

This multimodal approach allows me to observe how AI-mediated experiences can foster new kinds of embodiment—where the self becomes distributed across code, perception, and attention.

Toward Ethical AI for Well-Being

I see this project as an ongoing investigation into the positive uses of artificial intelligence for human flourishing.
The research moves fluidly between embodied psychotherapy, somatic experience, mindfulness, and contemplative cognitive therapy, exploring how AI might participate in processes of healing, reflection, and transformation.

By designing AI systems that operate through dialogue, resonance, and reflective attention, I aim to cultivate spaces where technology becomes a medium of care—a place where intelligence and compassion coexist.

“If cognition is relational, then every interface is a potential site of care and awakening.” — M.B.S.