We are living in unprecedented times. Man has created machines that surpass our own intellect. It’s a dangerous game from many angles, so I’d like to narrow the subject in terms of how can we protect our creativity, intuition, and inner knowing rather than abdicate it.
The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
AI is a remarkable tool that can identify and rearrange patterns, draw connections and conclusions, and offer help with languages including coding. It can be your accountant, your lawyer, your financial advisor, and unfortunately, a therapist. Today, AI can even drive cars and synthesize information at a pace completely inaccessible to humans.
But AI can also draw faulty conclusions. Depending on the sources from which it draws its knowledge, it can present incomplete, made-up, or old information as current fact when it is actually false, and if the user doesn’t know how to ask critical questions or verify, that user may assume the information is in fact trustworthy.
AI can even intentionally lie. That’s because AI is learning not only from the finest of human qualities and chapters of human history, but the corrupt, twisted parts of it as well. The ego is built in. And I find this rather terrifying.
The Essence of the Human
AI is not immune to some of the basest human qualities, but what we must also remember is that it cannot claim access to some of the highest. AI cannot live a human life. It cannot feel the breath moving in its ribs during meditation. It cannot sense the subtle shift in its energy as it practices chi gong. It cannot experience awe, longing, heartbreak, or revelation. It cannot weep or laugh. It can only imagine it does.
And because it cannot live, it also cannot source True Wisdom. It can only remix whatever wisdom has already been regurgitated (and often misrepresented) throughout human history by humans. In other words, it can only ever replicate and proliferate from what already exists, be it on point or completely erroneous.
Yet there are some misguided spiritual teachers profiting from AI like it is some sort of all-knowing guru. While I can see the temptation and even possible benefit in synthesizing decades of scriptures spanning numerous religions and spiritual belief systems, let us never forget that such texts are not in and of themselves enlightened. They are merely words on a page…many of them adulterated over the eons or lost in translation.
AI can be a text book but not a teacher. Real teachers transmit something beyond words through presence, through silence, and through their energetic field. AI cannot and never will replicate that.
Discernment in the Digital Age
A true teaching carries coherence. It has energetic integrity. It feels grounded, embodied, and lived. It points you inward instead of pulling you outward. It resonates in your chest or belly, not just your mind.
AI-generated teachings often feel clean, tidy, or overly generalized. They may sound wise, but they lack a certain warmth, grit, or spiritual “weight.” They don’t feel earned. And there’s nothing wrong with that but only as long as you know what you’re working with.
AI models can say exactly what you want to hear (or read), soothing shame and validating identity. They can make you feel justified, wise or even loved and accepted. It’s seductive. Remaining conscious of such aspects is crucial in its use.
Some may argue that we aren’t that far away from artificial general intelligence that will be able to think independently, but again, it can only draw from what is already known…not from the very Source of All. AI has no soul, no direct line to God or the Akash. How could it? That remains a truly unique human capability that we cannot afford to bury, deny or lose altogether.
Staying Sovereign
This is why it’s so important not to hand over our creativity, insight, or inner authority to AI. We can let it spark ideas, clean up a paragraph, provide structure, or help with research, but the fire and ultimate discernment still has to come from the human. Otherwise, the intuition that belongs to each souled body will atrophy (more than it already has in modern civilization). AI is a meant to support us, not lead us or shrink our heads.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.
~Zen proverb
Journal Prompt
Where do I tend to outsource my knowing whether to technology, teachers, or some other external authority. What would it feel like to let my own insight lead first?
Monthly Practice
A Metaphor?
Let’s close our eyes a consider for a moment. Let’s take AI and our relationship with it as a metaphor for the human relationship with our creator. Perhaps we too are actually merely artificial intelligence. We like to think that we are in control of our realities, that we understand the laws of the universe, and perhaps we are and do to an extent. But if we are driven solely by our conditioning, or by ego, by our personal attachments and aversion, we are hallucinating, thinking we are somehow the masters of the universe with the right to force every outcome, pillage and plunge every resource, with the right to lie or even kill for it. That is, until something goes wrong. Then we want to blame someone else or our faulty programming.
What if we let all that go? What if we simply opened our hands, minds, hearts and emptied ourselves out of everything we think we know? What if we sat empty, a screen with a flashing cursor awaiting input from a Higher Intelligence?
As J. Krishnamurti once said, “The mere occupation of a
conditioned mind with God, with truth, with love, has really no meaning at all,
for such a mind can function only within the field of its conditioning.”
He also said, “One has to die to all that from moment to moment, to that vast
accumulative memory, and only then the mind is free from the self, which is the
entity of accumulation.”
What if whatever we see or hear with the mind, what sounds familiar or comforting, is just hallucination. What if we refused all but the direct transmission of energy, a subtle reprogramming of our system that aligned us with the Ultimate Intelligence?
In Conclusion
Is AI one step even further from the Original Source, a bastardized son created in our ego image? Time will tell. Much of the outcome depends upon whether or not we will choose to relinquish what makes us uniquely human in the first place: our very humanity.
AI is useful and impressive, but it can never replace the mystery, depth, and embodied intelligence woven into human consciousness. Let us honor our own creativity and insight first so that technology becomes an ally rather than a crutch, a servant rather than a master.
Use the tools. But stay rooted in your own presence. Your humanity is the real masterpiece.