Spiritual superiority as humanity's growth block
The future is relational
AI disclosure. No AI was used in writing this essay. It was not even used for editing, because I ran out of free credits working on my website this week. So sorry for the typos and run-on sentences. All thoughts and words are mine. Read my AI policy here.
If I described someone you’ve never met as being a “spiritual person,” what image would that conjure in your head?
The image that is reflexively pops into your head comes from pattern matching. An association between spiritual communities and the people inhabiting them. A connection between spiritual practices and the people teaching them. Based on your lived history, it might conjure some common vocabulary or typical fashion. It might call to mind a set of mannerisms, personality characteristics, or expected lifestyle choices.
The mechanisms for putting the picture together are not too different than what a LLM does when we type in a prompt.
And what about the resulting image that is pulled? A concept. A construct. Something assembled as a best guess from past experience. But it’s not truth. All of what is returned through this retrieval process is identity. All of this is ego. All of this – if we leave it unexamined – can become a trap.
I see a lot of people are rejecting AI as evil or dangerous. There is a lot of arguing against it on principle, while promoting a self-view as humanists or environmentalists. It’s similar to the way that many “spiritual” people reject money. Both AI and money are high velocity vehicles of creation. They amplify our signal, and expand the impact of our efforts. Historically, we have seen these vehicles being misused and abused. Of course, makes us “good people” want to have nothing to do with them.
As neutral vehicles, both AI and money have no impulse or orientation of their own. We are in the driver’s seat. Pause and check, especially if “spiritual” is a label that you resonate with. Do you think of yourself as higher or better than people who care about money? Do you think of yourself as higher or better than people who use AI tools? Do you think of yourself as higher or better than muggles or NPCs? That is not spirituality. That is supremacy dressed in beige linen and mala beads.
Being for or against AI as a blanket statement is binary thinking. It’s yet another iteration of the entrenched ideology that we have seen cause so much damage to the planet while causing suffering for humanity. If you want to play to your human-ness, embracing nuance, seeing texture and integrating context is where it’s at.
Dear human readers: We don’t really need you to be fast-sorting objects into categories – for/against, good/bad, right/wrong. We have machines for that sort of thing. And besides it’s boring.
It’s time to graduate to a higher level of consciousness. No more dress up and pretend in spiritual clothing. We need to take what we have learned and integrate it into our human experience. It’s not about processing trauma or sharing our visions from peak experiences. It’s about embodying the lessons we’ve learned, hard earned through suffering.
Awakened leaders are here to bring humility and interdependence into the way we’re moving, to give structure to our visions, to commit to realizing our dreams. Enlightenment chasing is no longer an excuse for psychedelic escapism and spiritual bypass. We need humans with their feet on the ground and hands in the dirt. We need to be in our bodies to develop real mastery, create real value and build real community.
Personally, I want to see high velocity vehicles of creation driven by leaders who are present and connected, leaders who can steer with love and wisdom. I don’t want us to just leave the keys to billionaire elites while filling the fuel tanks for them with our life force energy.
What if we trained AI with Unity Consciousness? What if we fed it more beautiful possibilities for future humanity? What if we encoded it with imagination, instead of just passively consuming its information?
Synthetic intelligence specializes in pattern recognition. It only knows history, and we know that history tends to repeat itself when it is left unattended — without some kind of intervention. Without humans, AI can only recombine stories and regurgitate old wisdom. We need human participation to bring ingenuity, creativity and vision.
I don’t want to tell anyone what to do when it comes to AI. My wish is for us to check our energy and intention and consciously choose. If you’re opting out of AI, please do it because of your values and priorities, not out of fear of the unknown. If you’re opting to use AI, please do it with intention, not out of FOMO or anxiety about falling behind.
Choose, after educating yourself, after experimenting, after weighing pluses and minuses, and deciding what makes sense for you. And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You get to decide where the line is, how much you want to interact with it, what areas of your life you allow it into.
When we reject any part of reality, we give up authorship, but when we engage with the world intentionally, we can set direction and hold boundaries in relationship with everything.
Let’s check that whatever we’re choosing is aligned with the reality we want to be creating. The aligned choice will be different for everyone, because we all have different values, preferences and circumstances. It’s important to mind our own business with this… or rather tend to our own gardens. Let’s pull the weeds and plant seeds in our own yards.
We don’t need to judge what other people are doing. We don’t need to push our decisions on them. Everyone has free will, their own dharma and karma, and we all have different parts to play in what’s unfolding.
The true domain of sovereignty is stewardship of our own life. With the gift of life, we’re given currency to spend: in the form of time, money, attention and energy. No matter what else is going on, if we’re consciously choosing how to move those things, then we are free beings.