The supreme sacred mystery...and the copycat
An examination of what makes life LIFE, and where--or if--AI fits in.
You’d think it would be so obvious to us all, the difference between life and not-life. Between the mystery of divine creation—life as the magnificent eternal outpouring of divine love itself…and things that just seem to look like, or act like, they’re alive.
You’d think it’d be a no-brainer, right?
Even though we, as a civilization, are far removed from the sacred and the natural these days; and even though popular ‘rational’ thinking tells us that only things having 3-D form actually exist: That there’s no such thing as an invisible life force that brings living things to life.
(I almost said even though science tells us only 3-D form exists. But science itself, particularly the science of the early 20th century, well understood the existence of the unseen world, the real and present actuality of the mystery.)
This quote, often (mis?)attributed to German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg, kinda says it all:
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
Yes. Hardly anybody gets to the bottom of the glass these days. Or they get shouted down if they do.
Nevertheless, and even without scientific validation, everybody knows there’s something unseen, some definitive quality of aliveness, that emanates from living things.
Everybody knows it. Here’s a very mundane example:
Real estate agents routinely advise their clients to leave vases of fresh flowers in every room of the house they’re trying to sell. Why? Not just because flowers are pretty; after all, there are some very lovely fake silk lookalikes out there.
But everybody knows a room feels different—fresher, brighter, more alive, somehow—with live flowers in it.
Or, in a different example, if you’ve ever had the bittersweet privilege of being present as a loved one or cherished pet has drawn their last breath, then you know. Unmistakably.
Just like that: In the moment of death, the mysteriously rich and complex quality of life itself has departed the body, and what remains is merely the now-empty package it came in.
Life…simply is. And instinctively, we all know it.
The rise of the copycat
Speaking of dead lifelessness and imitation aliveness, there’s this:
Behold Pepper, the robot priest, here seen performing a Buddhist funeral ceremony.
It’s a bit staggering, to me at least, that it would even occur to anyone to dress up an AI bot to conduct religious ceremonies. Let alone the kind that take place in a circumstance of deep pain and loss, where authentic human connection is so greatly needed.
But Japan is not alone in relegating its religion to AI bots, by any means. In Germany, for example, there’s a particularly demented-looking robot called the Bless-U-2, which shoots LED light out of its palms while reciting the bible blessing of your choice at you. I believe it will even print out a copy of the blessing afterward, for you to take home.
Such modern convenience. Takes your breath away, don’t it?
‘We wanted to consider if it is possible to be blessed by a machine, or if a human being is needed,' said Stephan Krebs of the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau, where Bless-U-2 does his thing.
Um. Yeah.
(Suddenly Buddy Jesus doesn’t seem nearly so nuts.)
Anyway. I think you get where I’m going with all of this.
The infinite ocean of life essence itself is always present, always flowing. It is the underlying foundation of this universe. It is the grand mystery. It is your own divine identity. It is love, divine love, in tangible expression.
I went on at great lyrical length, about life’s sacred holiness and exquisite beauty in this fairly recent post, so I won’t take up too much more space rambling on about it here. But basically, you get where I’m coming from.
We are in the final moments—or at least I hope we are—of the enormously destructive mechanistic view of the universe, in which everything and everyone is seen as being just a physical package made up of random, soulless bits. Like an insensate machine, reducible to its separate parts, each part replaceable.
It’s a worldview that denies the presence of spirit. It denies the very existence of wholeness and holiness. And that ain’t good.
AI and self-awareness
You’ll notice there’s been lots of chatter lately in the various media, about AI and the question of whether it has, or could someday have, conscious self-awareness: IS IT conscious? ISN’T IT conscious? DOES IT have a sense of self?
What we’re really asking is:
Is AI like us? Is it ensouled? If not, could it become so?
Could super-sophisticated AI one day become divinely creative, taking its place alongside us as part of the human family, part of the unbroken universal mystery of life itself?
I think you already know my answer to that question:
Sorry, no.
AI isn’t like us at all. It isn’t a super-high-tech repository of Life 3.0—and it never will be. It never CAN be.
AI is an imitation of life, built of separate mechanistic components, each algorithmic part replaceable. Nothing actually wrong with that, as far as it goes.
But there is no bridge between the imitative, mechanistic mindset that created and programmed AI as it currently exists, and the capital ‘C’ Creative infinity of the divine. There never will be.
No matter how sophisticated it gets, AI and life itself are made of incompatible stuff, existing at very different frequency levels from one another.
They. Can. Not. Mesh.
That won’t, however, stop some folks from trying.
Back to the movies
You will no doubt also have noticed how the interwebs are suddenly full of chatter lately, about the rapid and uncontrollable rise of superintelligent AI.
How it is quickly becoming a monster unleashed. How it will soon start behaving like every summer blockbuster movie has been warning us about for the past 30-odd years. And how we, lumpy, analog, 21st century humanity, will be completely unequipped to deal with it.
Well, maybe. Hell, I’m no tech wizard. So who am I to say whether that’s a real and present danger or not?
I can, however, smell from a mile away, the insertion of (yet another) false reality construct into our collective conscious experience. (Some of us have gotten rather good at picking up the telltake fishy scent of such overt manipulations each time they arise, in recent years.)
Get everybody wound up with some new and crazy threat to be freshly terrified about. Saturate all forms of media with how drastic the problem is. Then—TA DA!—offer the magical solution to said problem.
It’s a tactic that’s been going on a long, long time (minus the round-the-clock media bombardment, of course). Those in power have been been deploying this strategy to get where they want to go, for decades. Centuries. Millennia.
Sleepy me, I only started noticing it 3 years ago. Better late than never.
So. Is there anything we can do about potentially malevolent AI, a billion times smarter than us?
The solution, we are told, is to voluntarily insert into our own bodies an experimental, untested digital interface. To form a bridge across a divide that can’t actually be bridged. So that we ourselves can potentially, perhaps, become almost as clever as AI. Almost.
Thus equipped, then we, the plucky human underdogs, through sheer grit and courageous determination, will do our best to fight and win against insurmountable odds.
I will remind you that what we’re talking about here is no popcorn movie matinee. Nor is it conspiratorial wackadoodle. This is what’s currently on offer—the preview of coming attractions, as it were—in the so-called real world.
But, uh…the divide between life and digital-not-life can’t actually be bridged?
Oh, never mind about that. Because the problem is urgent. Unprecedented. And we need some way of fighting back.
Carrot and stick
Okay. We can see you’re not immediately sold on the idea, so let’s sweeten the deal: This amazing new digital AI interface, once inserted, will be able to cure any form of neurological problem currently plaguing humanity. Honest.
(Carrot.)
But much more importantly, as already mentioned above, it will equip us to do endlessly unwinnable battle with the forever superior AI (which, like all the best movie villains, can apparently keep upgrading itself to infinity).
And lest we forget, AI is definitely out to get us. Or if it isn’t, it will be soon.
Okay. Got it, thank you.
And what if we still don’t line up voluntarily for this digital interface?
Based on recent history, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine it will soon become such a critical emergency situation that perhaps governments around the world might be forced—forced, I say—to mandate it.
(Stick.)
To, y’know, save humanity from extinction.
What kind of monster are you, that you don’t want to save humanity from extinction?
You know what will go extinct, if you opt for that AI interface? You.
Or more specifically, your sacred divinity. Your human-ness. Your ability to connect with the oneness of all that is.
Gone for good. Because the human wiring that naturally allows for all of that glory, and all of that mystery, will allow it no more—not even as an as-of-yet unrealized potential. That is the whole point of this tech. Its sole reason for being.
I’ve written about all of this before, in earlier posts. But you know me; I tend to write in storybook metaphors, likening your innately divine wiring to a radio, for instance, which will no longer receive (or transmit) the full broadcast spectrum of your sacred song, if you say yes to certain kinds of new technology.
Well, that new tech is starting to show up on the scene now, and is just beginning to be actively promoted.
It’s go time. For real.
So it’s time for me to put the oblique metaphors aside, at least for now, and to speak to you as clearly as I can, about what’s what, instead. Because it’s incredibly important.
I’m not here to tell anybody what to do. You’re a divine being. Your decisions are your own, and I completely respect your ability to make your own choices, whatever they turn out to be.
I just want to do my very best, to make sure we’re all clear on what those choices actually are.
Because this attempt to create a human-AI hybrid race out of us, is that last-ditch psychotic effort I keep alluding to; a crazy attempt to keep us all artificially bound, by any means necessary, to a world made of fear. Even as that world is crumbling, and is being slowly and irrevocably replaced by the only real reality: The world made of love.
Ultimately the world made of love is definitely a done deal. There’s no undoing it. But (as I’ve said many times before) how and when it takes recognizably tangible form on this planet, is entirely up to each one of us.
If we can all be persuaded to go along with this digital hybrid agenda, the world made of fear will live on indefinitely, as a completely fake but nevertheless seamless construct—enforced digitally from the inside out, as well as the outside in—with very real consequences for anyone who tries to bust out of that system.
Eventually, even that digitally-generated system of fakery would surely crumble, exposing the world made of love that’s been the real and present reality all along…but it may take a few generations to do it.
Or…
You can say NO THANKS right now.
No thanks to giving away my true sacred identity. No thanks to a ruined, soulless humanity.
And then you can step neatly aside, as the old system turns to dust…and the sun rises on a very different, and much more beautiful way of being, here on planet earth: A world reflective of the actual truth of how this universe operates.
A world made of love.
And on that dew-kissed morning, we’ll hear, at last, the incredible sacred symphony that’s always been playing:
The glorious song of each one of us, together, sung and celebrated by all that is. The song of life itself, rejoicing.
It’s no pipe dream. It’s simply what already is…in truth.