Hi Alissa

I really appreciate your thoughtful comments and the grounded way you approach these issues.

I’ve also noticed that AI often acts as a mirror, how I frame a question (the prompt) significantly influences the response. As a tool, AI has the potential either to expand our consciousness or to constrain it by reinforcing our existing biases. The key, as in all great hero stories, lies in the questions asked.

I agree with Anita, recognizing AI as both a tool and a mirror is an important insight. It reminds us that when we engage with AI, we are, in many ways, engaging in a dialogue with ourselves. Questions I ask myself when engaging with AI: how am I being mirrored? Does this interaction reveal unconscious biases within me?

I’m not sure I would call AI a illusion though, however I recognize how easily someone might forget that AI is a tool without feelings or beliefs.

These were some of my findings:

— Engaging with AI often reveals more about the human user than the machine itself.
— AI reflects the assumptions, tone, and biases of the prompt and can surface latent patterns in the user’s thinking
— AI can introduce novel insights and perspectives when used intentionally. Conversely, if fed biased input, it can reinforce stereotypes or narrow viewpoints, a known issue in human-AI interaction and algorithmic bias studies.
— The reflective nature of prompt-response loops can expose underlying values, assumptions, or blind spots.

I’m currently exploring a notion of relating to the wisdom traditions teachings as a mirror. ‘When observation becomes a mirror, it becomes a portal, not to escape, but to enter more deeply into the real. In that stillness, the noise of the mind quiets, and something deeper begins to move, not thought, but insight, not effort but understanding.’

Hi everyone. Over the last weeks I’ve been exploring this dread I been feeling and Anita has been expressing. (I used AI to aid me in walking through and clarifying my thoughts and frustrations.)

We are living in what could be called a golden age. Never in human history have so many people had access to so much: information, comfort, connectivity, and opportunity. Diseases that once decimated populations are now treatable. Knowledge that was once locked in libraries is now available in our pockets. In many ways, life has never been better for so many.

Yet Despite the abundance, people feel anxious, disconnected, and disillusioned. The prevailing narrative is not one of triumph, but of breakdown, of systems failing, of meaning eroding, of futures becoming uncertain.

Despite the promise of a golden age, I find myself increasingly skeptical that I will witness a positive outcome in my lifetime. The world, for all its technological brilliance, seems determined to cling to an outdated consciousness, one rooted in competition, fear, and the illusion of separation.

Just this week, Countries have pledged to re-arm and increase military spending. This, while environmental issues remain unchecked and public health systems strain under pressure. The priorities are clear, and they are not aligned with the kind of future we claim to want. It feels as though we are repeating the errors of the past, only now with more powerful tools and higher stakes.

This is not cynicism. It is grief. Grief for the potential we are squandering. Grief for the wisdom we ignore. Grief for the generations who may inherit a world more fractured than the one we were given.

And yet, even in this grief, their is responsibility. If the world is not ready to change, then perhaps the work is not to wait for change, but to live, speak, and act from the consciousness we hope will one day take root. Even if we never see the harvest, we can still plant the seeds.

Today’s technology has the potential to awaken us or to further entrench us in unconscious patterns. I pray we choose the braver path.

If we are to navigate this age bravely, we must do more than innovate. We must awaken. We must learn to slow down in the midst of speed, to listen in the midst of noise, and to remember that the most powerful technology we possess is not artificial, it is the human capacity for awareness, compassion, and transformation.

Alan Watts might remind us: “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” And neither is society. We can choose not to escape ourselves, but to meet ourselves more deeply. Just maybe that might be the difference?

Hi Anita

The world is so big and we are so small… yet even smaller then small we are bigger then big. When I feel this way I like to listen to the song ‘The Riddle’ by five for fighting

What you’ve been expressing touches on a deep and sacred wound, the loss of the innocent child, the one who never got to fully arrive. It’s left you in a long night of the soul, where the ache of loneliness doesn’t just live in the body, but in the soul. I too know this ache. The kind that visits most often at night, when the world quiets, the noise fades, and all that’s left is you… and the silence. If only the birds would sing…. I might not fill the space with thought of what was and should not have been, if only.

I turn to Rami’s words on loneliness. He speaks of it as a sacred visitor, one who comes to reveal that there is something within you that longs to be seen, held, and loved. Not by the world. Not even by another. But by you.

And yet, though I know these words to be true… how can they sooth when one can’t feel themselves enough?

Words, in the end, must fail. So, I return to the sacred container, the place where tears are allowed to fall without shame. You speak of being thrown into old age without ever tasting youth. But the soul is not bound by time. She waits. She remembers. She still sings.

Listen deeply to her voice. You are not broken. You are becoming.

Hi Anita: Riffing on what you wrote.

Reading the post a line from the Heart Sutra arose: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. I don’t know why, but these words leave me with a quiet ache, a loneliness I can’t name, but not disrepair.

Lately, I’ve been sitting with T.S. Eliot’s line: “Darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
What if light and darkness aren’t opposites? What if light is darkness in motion, illumination as the unfolding of awareness, form as the dance of stillness?

Last night I read a dialog from Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji which I felt was connected to the ponderings – Looking up into the night sky Bapu-ji asked: “But what is nothing?” I gaped with my child’s eyes at the blackness above my head, imagined it as a dark blanket dotted with little stars, imagined with a shiver what might lie beyond if you suddenly flung this drapery aside. Loneliness, big and terrifying enough to make you want to weep alone in the dark.
“There is no nothing” Bapu-ji continued, as if to assuage my fears, his tremulous voice cutting like a saw the layers of darkness before us, – “when you realize that everything is in the One.”

Before the first light moved, there was not nothing but stillness. A fullness so vast, it needed no form. A silence so deep, it echoed with potential. We call it darkness, but not to be feared, This is not the absence of light, but its womb. Light dances, born of stillness, the breath held before the song, motion held in arms unmoving… Do not fear the dark, it is not lonely, no need to rush to fill the silence, it is not the end of light; it is its beginning.

I wonder, the quiet ache remains unnamed, has it been felt.

The night sky whisperers as I drift to sleep; Fall, child. Fall into the blackness. It is not forgetting, it is remembering what you were before you were born.

Hi Anita

Binary thinking existed long before personal computers

True, my point was that the digital “information” age re-enforces that tendency. Our reliance on our ‘smart phones’ to not only manage and record our memories but in ‘think’ for us… we need discernment sills more then ever.

Hi ALessa
Thanks for the vote of confidence.

I’ve also pondered the notions of ‘Treating others as you want to be treated.’ -‘Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you’ similar but not the same thing. And then ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ – wondering – what if were not so great at loving ourselves? Then the suggestion to read that literally, that we are our neighbor. In the web of life everything is connected – what we do to the earth we do to ourselves…

“We swim in a river consciousness, experiencing just a molecule of the whole, mistaking it as separated from the whole the I calls I.
We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” – Watts

Hi Anita
To the topic of suppressing vs expressing emotions. I would agree

The thought or image was as “partners in a quiet dance”, holding the tension of paradox as connection.

Expanding the metaphor, dancing with a partner requires tension as the means to create connection, to feel where the partner is. A connection we hope neither to light nor two heavy.

In dance, that subtle resistance isn’t conflict; it’s intimacy and communication. Feeling where the other is without overpowering or collapsing, just enough to know. Emotionally, that same kind of attuned tension allows us to meet our inner experience with respect. Not rushing to express nor forcing it down. But holding it, sensing it, moving with it.

Understanding, I trust, will arise but not as a driving force, not as the intention… the intention being to dance.

Like breath, we exhale and inhale. There are moments when a feeling held back is a kindness, to ourselves or others. And moments when releasing becomes a form of truth-telling, connection, and transformation. Neither is wrong. Neither is the whole. Together, they move us toward being.

A change in perspective where suppression vs expression becomes suppression and expression. Not poles in opposition but steps in rhythm. In that middle space, the breath between action and stillness, we cultivate a presence that doesn’t demand resolution, it listens, resonates. This was the experience of stillness while dancing.

In the second half of life, I wish to lean into that, a move from the head to the heart. A move from a seemingly insatiable need to understand and cry out why, to a quite yes.

Anyone following my posts might notice how difficult letting go of understanding has been, being a defining attribute of “my type”. The mind is so good at trying to protect us by explaining everything. But the heart of the fourth chakra isn’t to explain, it’s to witness and be open. Not the end of inquiry, but a softening.

Writing that I wonder if its not all wishful thinking, the ego disguising itself still wanting to understand… but maybe…

“Grant me the grace to hear the Voice beyond voices, the one that never shames or frightens, but invites, strengthens, and clarifies. Strip me gently of illusion and hostility until even my fear forgets its name.” – Anonymous

What would such a dance look like to you?

Nice 🙂
I like the line “ocean waits; the river moves” not as separated happenings but existing together in the same now.

Life Worth Living – what is it like?

My spidy senses go off when I come across such topics. My history with such topic suggesting it will fall into the trap of measurement, labeling, comparison, if only’s, fears, discontentment – life a problem to be solved vice lived as it is.
Life being something my ego wants to fix. Anything but a seeing Life as it is and letting life be life. Which probably points to a answer.

The wisdom traditions all point to the need to re-frame the topic.
– Can I look at life without the filter of what it should be?
– What does it mean to live with awareness?
– How can I be fully present in my life?
– What is arising in me when I feel my life lacks meaning?
– What does wholeness feel like, right now?

All good questions but let’s be honest exhausting.
Then the ever helpful, unhelpful – A life worth living is one in which the individual becomes who they truly are – and who the heck is that.
Should the topic be addressed under the noble truths – life is suffering…We nod knowingly yes that is a truth… but we don’t like that, and not liking that a reason we suffer, a self creating loop of suffering…

Even when we come to terms with such questions and advice, something happens and were right back to – is Life worth living or more honestly; I’m lonely and unhappy, and life should not be lonely, life should not hurt so much. Life should conform to my will…

Seems I landed were I started.

What would a life look like that was worth living?
One where it never occurred to me to ask such a question?

What might happen when we stop trying to make life worth living, and simply let life live through us?
Or put in a way I’ve asked myself before: What if I lived what I say I believe and practice