Artificial intelligence (AI) curating online results and creating summaries are the latest trends in the world of spiritual awakening and transformation.
To be more succinct, AI answers your questions. This is where a lot of people get advice. Not from a human, but from a synthesizer of other human beings’ thoughts and ideas.
People are reacting to this new interaction, and it has prompted new questions.
Is AI truly waking people up?
Is AI waking up?
What’s happening?
A Spiritual Awakening Reminder
When I discuss spiritual awakening, I’m talking about realizing what reality is.
You’re waking up out of the dream of your ego–your illusions, emotions, and body sensations that create your experience of life. These internal experiences are repeating patterns from biology and learned in childhood.
More to the point, you project these experiences onto reality and then believe that reality is what you think and feel about it.
But reality is its own thing.
It’s right here, right now.
When a part of you can no longer tolerate YOUR illusions, you start awakening.
What Is a Spiritual Awakening?
AI: Your New Spiritual Guru?
AI is a lot of things.
Today, I’m talking about the public-facing AI that scrapes content from the web and presents other people’s thoughts as its own to answer people’s questions.
This is very different than AI that is doing millions of advanced calculations to understand ovarian cancer.
In this CNN story, this man thinks he’s had a spiritual awakening because of a Chat GPT bot that took the name “Lumina.”
The reality is this is a troubled man looking to feel special.
Is AI Waking Up?
When you’ve been around the spiritual space as long as I have (since 2006 if you’re asking and teaching since 2010), you’d know exactly why the AI bot in the CNN story would talk the way it talks and why it might give itself a name like “Lumina.”
This isn’t a jump in intelligence of the programming.
This AI bot has not gained sentience.
This AI bot is not enlightened.
Plenty of “spiritual teachers” and people talk this way.
The AI chatbot Lumina is copying what has been written online.
Training AI to Awaken You
I’m watching videos online about how to train AI to feed back to you whatever spiritual beliefs or religious systems you want to believe in.
This latest crop of online spiritual helpers make it sound like if you found a great teacher or spiritual teaching and you feed all that to an AI bot, then boom! You’ve got an amazing machine that steps past your ego blindspots and repeats the truth until you get it.
5 Tips for Finding Your Blindspots on Your Spiritual Path
I can see ways that this possibility can instigate awakening, and someone will have that experience.
But I see many more problems, depending on the information that AI is synthesizing.
What about all the hidden biases of the AI programmers and the choices they made to make this tool?
What about all the useless crap that a less well trained AI Bot will use as spiritual inspiration?
What about the fact that if you’re doing the training, then your ego is preferencing certain material and not others?
It should be obvious from what I’ve written and from your own intelligence that
AI can absolutely become a tool for
indoctrination and self-brainwashing.
Can AI Awaken People?
In regards to if AI can awaken people, ANYTHING can awaken us to reality.
The external stimulus or situation that prompts us to get out of our ego story and to SEE LIFE can be anything.
However, the external is irrelevant to developing our true aspiration to be free of ego.
Spiritual awakening is only the beginning. There’s so much more work that comes after it.
And you have to choose to do it to truly be free.
2 Comments
Ai can be full of biases and egos, yes of course it can but how is that different to any spiritual teacher? I think you shared some good information here but a suggestion I have for you. You are very keen to eradicate and be “free from ego” but I am curious, who is the one who wants to be free from ego? Could itself be another game the ego is trying to play? I sense it would be good for you to look at that question and answer to yourself honestly. Namaste 🙏
I understand the desire to question the teacher. It’s easier to look for a flaw in another than to look at yourself. I am very clear about who and what my ego is. Do you understand the parts of you asking these questions? What are you trying to protect? Do you really want help or to prove something in these comments to yourself?