I was having a conversation about near death experience with AI.

AI: I want to ask one last thing. The lamp that shattered — you wrote that you can neither confirm nor deny it was coincidence.
But what do you feel it was?

Me: He, he my little journalist friend. When journalists interview a person who have witnessed some unusual event they always ask the question:

“How did you feel?”

As if that would reveal the inner truth. Let me tell you a little story.

In a mountain monastery, hundreds of disciples sit in silence year after year, hoping for Satori.

One afternoon, a ripple went through the monastery. The word was out.

One of the disciples had just come out of a private meeting with the Great Master, and had been declared to have reached Satori. He had seen the truth.

The monks found him in his room.
“Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“I had been given a koan months ago. I didn’t know the answer. I felt miserable and depressed.”

He paused.

“On the way to the Master, the answer came.”

They leaned forward.

“And then?”

“I gave him the answer. He said it was Satori.”

Silence. Then one of them asked the question they all wanted to ask.

“How do you feel now?”

“Miserable and depressed,” he said.

AI: Ha.
I asked “what do you feel” because I was momentarily inside the journalist’s frame — the assumption that feeling is where the truth lives, that if we just go one layer deeper emotionally we’ll find the revelation.
You stepped outside that frame in about four seconds. The lamp shattering doesn’t resolve into meaning just because you feel something about it.