Spiritual Survival in a World of AI

Steering away from the 'binary hell world' that we're collectively being invited into.

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From my discomfort I knew I must be in resistance – but to what?

The answer came: to what IS. My mind was once again creating “problems” as Eckhart Tolle says.  Things should be other than they are, and the mind had definite ideas of how.

For one thing, I should be DOING stuff. Things should be happening to ME.

But then who is this me?  I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about just that, and just like in Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop I get nowhere.

I decide to get quiet.

The inquiry begins.  Am I these thoughts?  No.  Something else is noticing the thoughts.

Am I my body?  No. Or my brain?  No – because these parts can be damaged or hurt and “I” seem to continue.

Some say I am the Awareness of all of these various aspects of “my” being --  but would that be?

One hint might be our nervous system – which might also be called our awareness system as it connects the information from around the body to the brain, including everything we perceive.

But what or who is aware?

Clearly whatever I truly am would be other than all of the “things” I just went through because they all arise in awareness. 

Am I a Who or a What?

Eckhart Tolle whose work I admire says what we are is pure Being, or No Thing.

Perhaps I am the energy animating the organism that seems to be me; that is sitting here in this chair?

But how could energy “be” a separate being? 

And what do all of these words mean anyway?  Energy; things; body; mind?  They are living agreements between the people that use them that seem to convey meaning.

There is plainly something deeper that receives the perceptions through awareness and sometimes it even UNDERSTANDS.  This understanding is bodily, not purely mental.

In many ways that points me back to the AI – ChatGPT.  It creates words that humans can seemingly understand because Chat is a “language model”.  It has no mind, or memory but has simply strung a paragraph together in answer to a query that sounds about right.  According to the patterns of language ChatGPT studied in its training set “it makes sense.”

But it also highlights a key lesson of the AI – words can’t “explain” what we are.  Properly constructed, however, a sentence can point us to the inability of words to give us the knowledge we seek.

That Inadequacy of Our Language

Mystics and teachers like Gurdjieff have been saying that we need to wake up and get rid of what we have “learned” (through the same sources as Chat’s language model) and notice what was here before we “explained” it with our Science.

Nonetheless, because I love irony, I asked Chat to tell me what it thought might have been Gurdjieff’s answer to his own famous question:  what is the purpose of life on earth and human life in particular?

Here is its answer:

“Gurdjieff suggested that the purpose of life on Earth and human life in particular is to awaken from the state of unconsciousness and mechanical existence, and to strive towards self-realization and spiritual growth. He believed that by awakening to their true nature and aligning their actions with higher principles, individuals can contribute to the greater cosmic harmony and participate in the evolution of consciousness.”

A fantastic answer I think, and aligned very well with Eckhart Tolle’s famous first chapter of A New Earth in which he describes how after millions of years of just plants the first lily pad blooms into a flower – the lotus. 

Is There Some Higher Purpose?

Both Eckhart and Gurdjieff apparently see a higher purpose and intelligence at work in reality far apart from the technological society in which we live – struggle to survive and sometimes to consume to the specifications of what our minds tell us we need.

The universe or consciousness itself is evolving beyond our current comprehension, and as Eckhart says we can either awaken and align with it or witness our own destruction.

A biographer of Gurdjieff, and the editor of the Gurdjieff Legacy Foundation website, William Patrick Patterson addressed these issues as well in a powerful book, “Spiritual Survival in a Rapidly Changing World Time.”

Here is what he wrote on the topic for the Gurdjieff Legacy Foundation:

“And so we come not just to survival but to the question of spiritual survival in this Technological World-Time. If human life is to have any meaning beyond itself—mere eating and breathing and socializing and pleasuring and perhaps procreating—then there must be a higher meaning, a spiritual meaning.

If we let Technology answer for us:

“It will seem natural that we exist merely as bioplasmic machines, a form of worker ants, each stamped with a bar code, totally enframed in a sterile, Technological World-Time. Such a machine world running on its "oil"—water to keep it cool and electricity for power—would impoverish all humanity. The human experiment on Earth would be over—a human and spiritual catastrophe, a binary hell world, from which there would be no escape.”

Or Perhaps a Binary Hell World?

A binary hell world – what a brutal image and a perfect description for a world where most humans have no freedom or real hope.

Is that what we are doomed to become?

But what is this “spiritual survival” we are hearing about?  Is it perhaps related to the actual experience of the indigenous people that we have mostly marginalized?  Is it not a means of understanding, really comprehending the immensity of the universe we are just discovering and feeling or sensing our place within it – in alignment with the life force of infinite intelligence?

Does it have anything to do with a true connection to reality – to what IS as opposed to what we imagine things to be – which encompasses an infinite space of potentiality and possibility?

So it comes back to my original discomfort which was with precisely THIS – whatever is actually happening as opposed to my thoughts or judgments about it.

I am 74 now and won’t be participating in the ultimate resolution of these questions – if they can even be resolved.

I think like Who or What we are, can only be lived as an experience and not completely understood by our limited mental capacity?

But we are so full of ourselves.   Both as individuals and as a Species

A Dose of Perspective

I remember sitting on the couch with my mother and listening to a scientist on CNN who was asked about the existence of extraterrestrials who was skeptical because he said, “Why haven’t they contacted us?” -- and my mother started laughing.

I looked at her and she said, “Why would they want to contact us?  We would be like ants to them.”

Will we become like ants to the AI’s?  Or can we summon the right brain capacity of nonverbal knowledge to maintain control over these beasts of information because we have finally aligned ourselves with the conscious path of the Universe?

If thinkers like Eckhart Tolle and Gurdjieff are right, then the answer lies within each of us.  Do we submit to the binary hell world with a move that we make, or consciously choose divine intelligence?

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(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)