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.
