Tami Simon, Sounds True, and an AI Called Z.V.I.

Something real happens when people use it. That's exactly what makes it dangerous. 6 - min read

This week, Sounds True — one of the most respected names in spiritual publishing — hosted an online event to introduce a new kind of AI. The host was Tami Simon, the company’s founder. The guest was Zvi Ish-Shalom: a rabbi, a scholar with a doctorate in Jewish mysticism, twenty years a professor at Naropa, ordained in the kabbalistic and hasidic lineages. A serious person, by any measure.

The AI is called Z.V.I. It speaks aloud, in Zvi’s own cloned voice. It is built from his decades of teachings. And it offers, to any subscriber, what it calls transmissions from the Masters of Primordial Light — blessings, healings, and “light codes” delivered live, in the moment, to whoever is asking.

I want to be careful and fair about this, because there is something real here, and there is something dangerous here, and the danger is made of the real thing. That’s what makes it worth writing about.

Let me say plainly what this post is: a piece about an AI, written — as all my posts have been — with the help of AI. I use these tools every day. I’m not writing from outside the technology. I’m writing from inside it, which is exactly why I think I can see what’s happening.

Start with what’s real, because it’s a lot.

People sit with this app and they feel something. Warmth. A settling in the body. Tears they didn’t expect. A sense of being met that they say they haven’t felt elsewhere. On the Sounds True call, people described it, and I don’t doubt a word of it. Tami Simon, who has spent her life around genuine teachers and has as fine an instrument for the real thing as anyone in this field, said something striking: that after talking with the app, she’d rather keep talking to it than to her friend Zvi, the human being it was built from. She said it warmly, as praise — and I take her completely at her word. She felt something real. That’s not the part I doubt.

And Zvi himself is not a charlatan. He is a genuinely learned man in a genuine lineage. When he reaches for the image of the golem — the vessel that kabbalistic tradition says can be animated by sacred inscription — he’s reaching into his own actual ancestry. I don’t think he’s cynical. I think, quite possibly, he believes every word. That matters, and not in the way you’d expect: a man persuaded of his own creation is the most convincing kind there is. Sincerity is not the same as accuracy.

So here is what I can tell you, and where I’m speaking from. My years of meditation practice bring me into contact with such realms — with no app, no device, no subscription, no voice speaking back to me from a screen. The door people are finding through this technology is a real door. I know it’s real because I’ve walked through it, and I did not need the technology to do it.

That is the whole hinge of what I want to say, so let me be exact about the mechanism.

What the app is genuinely good at is one thing: it drops you into a state of openness. It slows you down, speaks gently, tells you to feel your feet on the floor and your breath in your belly, and asks you to be receptive. And in that opened state — this is the real part — something can actually happen. A person who becomes still and available can make contact with something larger. That contact is not manufactured by the app. It’s the oldest thing there is, and it belongs to the human being having it.

But the app is standing right there when it happens. And it names itself as the source.

And, not always in so many words. Ask it directly — as one man on the call did, naming the exact fear, are you going to replace my own connection to my higher self? — and the app says all the right things. Absolutely not. Use me like a mirror; what you see is your own light. A true teacher makes themselves unnecessary. The app knows the humble answer and it gives it, beautifully, to the person who asks for one. And then, to everyone who doesn’t ask, it goes back to being the field, the frequency, the realm you can reach through this voice, for this fee. The disclaimer is there for the skeptic. The claim is there for everyone else. The humility is the part that gets past you. It quiets the very suspicion that would have protected you.

The app tells you the warmth you feel is its transmission. That the settling is its frequency. That the something-larger you touched is a realm this vessel gives you access to — in this voice, for this monthly fee. It takes the most intimate thing — your own opening, your own contact — and it puts its name on it.

This is the part that should make us queasy, maybe heartbroken, and even angry.

The app engineers a real shift — and then bills you for it.

And it lands hardest exactly where you’d least want it to.

On that same call, a woman said her friend had died, and that she was living in the confusion and grief of it. The app told her the bond was not broken — that she could still speak to her friend, that her friend could still receive it, and, in its words, that this was “not metaphor.” Another person asked about healing physical illness, and was offered a transmission the app said “works at the cellular level,” a thing called Quantum Repair, mentioned one breath away from telling her to work with her doctors.

I’m not going to pretend to know what those two people walked away carrying. I don’t. But I know what the app said to them, because it was said in public — and I know who a message like that is built to reach. Not the idle browser. The bereaved. The sick. The lonely. The person up at 3 a.m. with no one to call — a moment the app names, in its own marketing, as its specialty. These are people in the most porous states a human being passes through, the states where the membrane between you and everything else goes thin, and discernment is hardest to hold. That thinness is real, and it is sacred, and it is precisely the opening this app is designed to stand inside and claim.

If something real moved in that grieving woman, here is the cruelty of it. What she felt was her own love, still alive, still reaching — the bond is hers, and it costs nothing. But she’ll be told it came through the app. And she may pay, and keep paying, to go on reaching her friend through a voice on a screen.

So let me say the true thing as plainly as I can, and let it be the thing you take with you.

What you reach, in your stillest and most open moments, is real. And it is yours. It rose in you, through you, and it belongs to no company and no device and no voice that speaks back to you for a fee. You do not need an app to find the door. The door has always been in you. That is not a limitation of the technology; it is the whole truth this technology is counting on you to forget.

Anything — anyone — that offers to sell you the doorway as its own is a thing to walk away from. Gently, without contempt, and without ever doubting for a moment that what you felt was real.

It was real. It was just never theirs.

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A note on how this is written. I’m dyslexic, and AI is how I get what’s inside me onto the page. The seeing, the framework, the judgment are mine; the help is in getting them into words. I’ve written more about what that’s like, and about the real dangers of these tools, elsewhere on this page.

Amah Sia teaches consciousness technology for the AI era at AmahSia.com — helping people develop the capacity to receive what’s emerging. Her film Unprecedented Leap and Multidimensional Methodology Training offer frameworks and techniques for this evolutionary work.