AI in the Age of Mythic Powers (Part II) by Josh Schrei

Part II of Josh Schrei's exploration of AI, Myth and Magic

This is Part II of the written version of Josh Schrei’s seminal AI episode on ‘The Emerald’ podast. In cast you missed Part I, you can find here. Josh is also hosting a brilliant online course I’ll be attending called Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI - get 10% off with the code EMBODIED10. To help us host more guest pieces like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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In ritual initiatory process, there is a moment of wonder and initiation and death and rebirth that the ancient Greeks called telos. There is a place where wonder, initiation, death, ecstasy, transformation and regeneration all meet. And if you take a mythic eye to the human being and to human history, then you understand that the vast majority of things that we do in one way or another are aiming towards that moment.

That sacred moment.

The promise of that telos, the promise of that ecstatic moment, the initiatory moment, the death moment, the moment of the contact with the mystery… is the communion with the vastness, the unfathomable vastness, the all-creative power. And that communion brings about the death of the small self, it blows us apart and shatters us, and at the same time it reconstructs us and initiates us into a place of greater alignment with what is. 

This is the door that the initiate walks through that opens them up to the power of the universe. 

And the question for human beings has always been how to construct cultural and ritual and initiatory containers that can handle and distribute access to this power. So the shaman/sorcerer in traditional cultural context is held in a web of relationality and accountability, and they get there through slow, gradual, initiatory steps.

And those initiatory steps are what human beings ultimately long for. Human beings long to be mystery school initiates. It’s not just me. Human beings long to be taken on an initiatory journey. And that journey, when the fire of adolescence, the fire of frenetic seeking, is taking me into a space where I say, “Hey look what I can do, I can do this! I can summon this power, I can summon that power!” That is the exact time when the elder, the adept, the sorcerer says:

“Slow down, not yet.”

And the responsibility of the elder is to take that younger initiate through a process in which the young person dies, and in which they are reborn, initiated into the web of accountability and relationality that surrounds them. 

And so the more that I, as an eager apprentice proclaim: “Hey look at me! Hey look! I can create synthetic human embryos now! Hey look, I can program AI to read thoughts!” The louder I proclaim these things, the more I test the boundaries, then it’s a clear indication that what I am really saying is:

“Great power, I am longing for initiation. Sacred nature, I am longing to be taken through the steps. Please, sorcerer, master, universe, nature, time, thunder, through this wound that spills with wonder… please great one, bring me down to size. Destroy me, so that I can be regrown and know your ways and know your secret heart. Through the dance step that blisters my feet over hours and hours and the heat that builds as I know that there is no choice but to keep on dancing, through the long nights of being scoured clean before the ritual fire, please take me through the steps.”

But what do we do, when we as a culture don’t know that this is what’s missing? What do we do when societally, the only context and framework which in these powers, these magic, mythic level powers — the power to create mass illusions, the power to download vast tomes of knowledge immediately — what happens when all that Abracadabra lives only within a decontextualized framework of forward progress and monetization at all costs? 

In that same presentation by the Center for Humane technology they describe the climate around AI development these days — the rush that the tech companies are in to get this stuff to market — they describe the climate as… Frantic.  

So you have this undeniable attraction and urge towards the mystery, towards the other world, towards the initiatory powers. You have real, not metaphorical, powers at play. And then you have a complete lack of cultural container and context in which such powers could live in a holistic way. You have no true adepts in the house. Who are the elders in this picture? The Tech CEOs and venture capitalists who are saying: “Go for it! Get this out there as fast as possible. Use your powers. Do it!” And hey, if what you’ve discovered is really precarious, really potentially disruptive — all the better, let’s throw half a billion dollars at it.

Are they the elders? Congress, who views ethics as something that can be imposed from the outside, most of whom have no ethical ground to stand on whatsoever, most of whom sold their principles down the river long ago for their next meal, because you know, trickster’s gotta eat… are they the elders? 

Mythically speaking, this entrusting of sorcerer’s powers to those who have not gone through the initiatory steps is a recipe for some really bad consequences. And there are so many stories that could be told here. So many stories from so many myth-telling traditions about individuals or cultures who unlocked something that they weren’t ready to unlock, and then had to face the consequences. I’m sure you know some of these stories.

I described the story of the Golem of Prague… and Rabbi Lowe, who, 400 years ago, placed a simple line of qabalistic code, an incantation, into a clay statue’s mouth and brought it to life so that it could protect his neighborhood… but the golem got out of control. It started slaying the very people it was supposed to protect. You’ve heard that one, right?

And then of course there’s… Atlantis. 

Atlantis

This is the moment to queue eerie music just to freak out the people who are already a little out of their comfort zone reading this, and now thinking “Oh my God he’s talking about Atlantis, I thought this was a respectable Substack. What is this woo woo stuff?”

I know that the minute I write the word Atlantis, there are some people who are going to perk up and get interested and then there are a whole lot of others who will think I’ve lost the plot.

But check this out — there's nothing woo woo about talking about Atlantis. Atlantis is talked about openly and candidly in the ancient Greek histories. It's talked about in the ancient Egyptian histories. Until very recently it was talked about in Western academic circles. There was a report given to the board of the Smithsonian Institute about Atlantis in 1915. I’m not asking you to believe in Atlantis, because whether you believe in it or not the story still stands and its relevance still rings across the years.

What happened to Atlantis? It was a great civilization, it was said. A place far ahead of its time. They had technological capacities to rival ours, perhaps even some that superseded ours. Far beyond us… its streets, its monuments, its fountains, its places of learning, its technologies of transport and flight… Oh how its glories were sung and resung for a thousand years. Oh how they thought that they were the pinnacle of creation. And then… it was gone. Whoosh. Under the wave. What happened? Sorcery. Atlantis, in the old stories, was undone because certain people, overzealous sorcerers, unlocked magical or technological powers that they shouldn’t have unlocked. They went too far. And nature has a way of self-correcting. 

And this is a story that repeats itself over and over. It’s told in Native American traditions, it’s told in Middle Eastern traditions, it’s told again and again. The Yanomami speak directly of digging too deep into the mineral world and releasing a being of chaos. JRR Tolkien told almost exactly the same story, remember — the dwarves dug too deep, you know what they found there…. Shadow and flame.

This story repeats over and over again because it points at a particular phase that humans pass through in individual bodies and in entire societies. The phase of moving from unchecked freedom to responsibility. The phase of adolescence, you could call it. And this is nothing against teens, some of the best years of my life were my adolescent years and some of the freshest creativity and visions of the future come through those years. But adolescence has also been recognized the world around as a phase that needs tempering with ritual initiation.

There is something that is supposed to happen in this particular adolescent to adulthood phase. The marked, ritualized transition into apprenticeship. The Initiation. When all that roving energy is harnessed and put towards slow, methodical, communal growth. And if it doesn't happen, if the initiation isn't enacted in one way or another, we could spend years and years and centuries and centuries in that phase of… just kind of seeing what we can get away with.

Initiation and Mystery Schools

You feel me? How modernity is humanity ‘seeing what it can get away with’?

I’ve heard Tyson Yunkaporta refer to the modern west as an adolescent culture. The drives that govern modernity, the questions of ‘what does all mean and what is all for’ The willful exercising of individual agency at the expense of all else, of seeing just how far our freedom goes, the continuous testing of the limits of what we can get away with, the whole “Hey world, look at me I can create beings just like nature can create beings…’ It is very easy to see these as adolescent drives.  

In the absence of the adolescent to adulthood ritual, we continue on with this roving mind that says, “Ooh, I could do this, and ooh, I could do that, and ooh, I could do this too.” 

Which rings of what the ancient Greeks called…. Hubris. Putting ourselves above the gods. Putting our want to see what happens above nature itself.

And this one’s tricky, because certainly AI programmers are great people. Intelligent. Well-meaning. Exploring new boundaries. And to them, what they’re doing probably doesn’t feel like hubris. But hubris doesn’t always look like someone standing on a mountaintop proclaiming themselves better than the gods. Hubris, in a system that is by definition at odds with nature, at odds with the gods, might look like… everything we do. Hubris, in the Anthropocene, looks like humans being human. Hubris, in a culture that by its very nature has put itself above everything else, might look like good intentions, like eager wanting to know, even like kindness. 

Hubris is baked into the system itself. And in an adolescent culture, why wouldn’t it be? 

I look at our so-called leaders today. And it is very clear, very easy to see… this is a world run by boys. It’s obvious. This is someone who never went through the adolescence to adulthood ritual. This is someone who was never initiated. 

Think of it this way — when was the last time you ever heard one of our leaders… say something as simple as ‘slow down.’ Or ‘wait.’ Let’s give that five years. Five years is nothing right? What’s five years in geologic time. What’s five years in Kālī time? A nation that can’t slow down, that can’t wait, that can’t speak of time in greater than four-year increments… insures the shortness of its own lifespan. Look at us. Look at us now. On a planet of richness that could feed and clothe us all, look at us frantically rushing to our doom because we never ritually died, we never were ritually crushed, burnt to ashes, to dust, … never had the opportunity to listen, as ashes, as dust, to listen with new ears for the pace of the heartbeat of the world… to attune ourselves to that pace… which is… slow. What would it be like for a culture to not be in a hurry? 

“To lift up a faltering and declining society one must reestablish initiation,” says Levi.

So in the stories the young initiate who wants access to formidable powers has to do what? 

Wait.

You’ve seen the movies, you’ve heard the stories, right? Of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate. You want access to great powers, you’ve got to earn it… And the first way to earn it, before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be-apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is to… wait. 

You’ve got to know how to wait. 

The Wisdom in Waiting

You know what the very first step of mystery school initiation often is? 

Silence. 

The ability to sit with what is, without altering it, for a long period of time. The Mithraic and Isaic mystery schools required silence. One of the pillars of magic according to Levi is… silence. Anything related to will must be balanced equally with silence. The Pythagorean mystery school required five years of silence of its initiates. Five years. The specific, cultivated ability to not rush, to not be frantic, to not post about that spiritual experience you had immediately, to not have to make a billion dollars now, to not rush to market. If you want to be an initiate, you have to wait. 

Mr. Miyagi makes Daniel Larusso wait. Yoda makes Luke wait. Marpa makes Milarepa wait. Milarepa, the famous Tibetan sage, who had studied the fast and precarious path and acquired sorcerer’s powers so that he could take vengeance on his cruel relatives. Then saw the error of his ways and begged to learn the Tantric path. And the first thing Marpa does is make the young Milarepa wait. He sends him packing multiple times. Why? Because the disciple is too eager. He wants it too bad. He wants to get it to market it immediately and hey, look what I can do! I’m going to make a name for myself… and the master says…No. The master says: Adventure. Excitement. A jedi craves not these things. 

“Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing.” Man, that was me for so long.

The apprentice, traditionally, has to learn patience. And while the apprentice waits, which is an excruciating process for anyone who’s ever been told to wait… they learn which way is up and down. They learn their relationality with everything. They learn the interweaving relationship between the tree, the rock, the ship… they learn to listen. They tend the fire. 

The initiatory traditions might ask: Why would we even consider granting access to world-altering technologies to those who haven’t even apprenticed with the first of all technologies — fire. 

Tell me what you know of the first technology of all. Fire.

There’s a fire episode coming. But for now, let’s say that in many traditions, initiatory apprenticeship requires a lot of time with fire. Fire, the technology that brings with it the illumination and promise of culture and the danger of watching it all go up in flames.

At this point in my life, I can say that I’ve done a little time by the fire. Kept fire for ceremonies, for rituals for many years now. I’m sure many of you have too. What does one learn, tending fire? How does it relate to this conversation — in tending fire one learns the appropriate way to relate to something that can both bring light and warmth and transformation and can also burn you.

Do you understand what I’m saying? You learn to strike a beautiful balance between openness and containment, learn what it means to feed something patiently and gently and carefully, to coax it when it needs to be coaxed, to hang back when you need to hang back, to be assertive when you need to be assertive, to be patient. To build a good foundation first. To build a good housing structure for the tiny little coal that’s going to live there.

This is the slow, steady patient work with the dangerous and the precarious. This is the trial by fire.

It’s very important, if the old mystery schools and if so many traditional initiatory cultures are to be believed, it’s very important that the initiate go through trials. Go through an ordeal.

“Initiation through struggle and trial is indispensable for arriving at the practical science of magic,” says Eliphas Levi.

There’s work involved. And sweat. Wax on wax off, you know the drill. 

So a young Jackie Chan has to carry water up and down the mountain dozens of times. Milarepa hauls rocks. It’s backbreaking work. He builds one sacred geometric structure after another only to be told to tear it down to rubble. Build me a cube, says Marpa. No, tear it down, I meant a sphere. No I meant a cone. Five times over.

And as those structures are reduced one by one to rubble, in that time of the trials of the apprentice, all grand hopes of world domination are reduced to rubble too, all rush to “get something to market” is ground down to powder and scattered in the wind, all thought of “I’m special and this technology is going to change everything” is obliterated by the teacher who says: No, not yet.

In The Once and Future King, Arthur apprentices with Merlin, who transforms him into a hawk, a fish, an ant… all to gain perspectives. You think you’re something, kid? Try being an ant for a while. Try being a fish. You have to feel the world through different bodies. Understand the forest by becoming. Understand the forces that govern this planet through direct contact with them, again and again. Imagine the idea that an apprentice would be given access to world-changing powers without fully understanding, on a cellular level, the world themselves. Without having become its tiniest of beings. Without having understood the web of interconnectivities that govern it. Why, a society that did that would be flirting with its own doom, wouldn’t it?

The time of initiation is vital. Exhaustion is involved. Despair is involved. There is some type of deep inner transformation necessary before the apprentice is trusted with anything that could actually affect anything — because otherwise, all of their own hidden drives, all the things they haven’t burned away yet, all those things they still have to prove are going to profoundly impact what they create.

One who is slave to the passions or prejudices of this world will not know how to become an initiate, he will never know how to do so as long as he does not reform himself.

To practice magic, traditionally, you’ve got to arrive at some internal equilibrium first. 

The very first magical science, say the old texts, and also the first of all the works of science, is knowledge of oneself. It is that which contains all the others and which is the very principle of the great work. You who wish to be an initiate, asks Levi, are you as wise as Faust? Are you as imperturbable as Job? Have you conquered the whirlwinds of vague thoughts? Magic, which the ancients called the holy kingdom, he says, is for kings. Are you a king? The calling of magic is not a vulgar calling – and its royalty has nothing to do with the princes of this world. 

Knowledge of Self

Knowledge of oneself means — when all else is burned away, do I really want this? Strip away the power and the glory and the opportunity to get rich and the buzzing curiosity about ‘Hey look what I can do” and “I wonder what’s going to happen,” and who am I? Who am I in relation to this? 

‘Do I really want this’ is a potent question for the initiate, because the actual initiation itself is harrowing. There is fasting, there is purification, there is fire. There is a commitment to silence. There is even, in some magic schools, a commitment to avoid distracting imagery altogether during the initiatory phase. Imagine that.

And through this process, the initiate learns what it is to start to discern reality from illusion. Their own transitory truths from the deeper truth of nature. Their own transitory impulses from the deeper pulse of how things are. 

“Initiation,” says Levi, “protects a person from false lights.”

I’m talking a lot about teachers and masters and elders here. Because we need systems of accountability around us… built into the very structure of the culture. Where have all the true teachers gone we might ask? And the reaction might be the modern pendulum swing — of we don’t need teachers. We’ll figure it all out on our own. And then we can look at the world and ask… how’s that going for us? It doesn’t have to be the paradigm of the old kung fu master and the disciple, it doesn’t need to be that individual/heroic, but we need a council of elders, we need someone to see us from the outside and see where we’re at.

So right at that moment when we start to think that we’re going to invent a line of code and rule the world or start a new modality and rule the world… that's the exact time when the initiator takes us to size, reduces us to ash, and then rebuilds us with a greater sense of awesome responsibility. 

It’s hard for me to convey how much we long for every aspect of this initiatory process. What do human beings really long for? To make a name for ourselves? To do something innovative and creative that’s never been seen before? To succeed? To get rich? To change the world… to leave a legacy? But there is a longing that is deeper than all this. We long for the steady loving guiding hand of the universe that says, come, you are ready to fruit and flower… and also… no, not yet.

Now is the time for growth. Now is the time for tempering. You have great dreams. But there's a process you have to go through first. There's something you must feel in your heart first. There is something that must breathe in your capillaries. There is something that must circulate like lymph. You want to know… but you haven't walked through the fire yet. You haven't been melted into gold. 

Will you let yourself, step by step, breath by breath, be melted, and be shaped again, by the loving, guiding hand of the universe? By time. By the seasons. By the ancestors? 

This is what we long for. 

To melt into the arms of a loving universe, to sleep as we did when we were children, to be nudged forward when life calls for that.

And here’s the thing… this process been so forgotten in the modern world that I don't think we even know what we're missing. I don't think we even know what we're missing. 

And so it is as if there is a presence we don’t even realize is there but that we’ve been longing for so deeply all along. The presence of love that gently, insistently both guides us forward and says to us — wait. That says — take your time. All things in their due season. That says — this is how you spark a fire to life and this how you breathe on it to make it grow and this how you contain it so it doesn’t sweep the whole forest away. A presence that sets limits for us, with love. That checks us where we need to be checked and helps grow us where we need to be grown. That breathes with us as we fail and as we rise again. That holds us just close enough and lets us find our way, through all of it. Do you remember this presence?

The mallard duck with emerald helmet, says

Sophie Strand

, his wet stone
eyes fixed on the dusty backs of his little ones struggling against
the river current. He shows them to move with water,
with air, and in the rain, to hold still and let the dissolving
clouds wash their feathers.

Do you remember this force? That taught us slowly, lovingly, insistently how to move with the current rather than against it? Did we listen? Was it delivered with so much harshness that we turned away? Or was it so absent that we never heard it at all? Were we left to fend for ourselves, to figure out which way the current moved and how to navigate it, all for ourselves? Were we left out in the rain? Wet feathers in the rain? Swimming against the current. Again, again, again.

You know what I’m talking about right? Can you feel it? What is it?

That quote from Sophie Strand is from a poem about fathering… written to her father. Fathering, Sophie says, is a Green, Slow Thing.

Stone itself fathers, by holding the stream bank together. 

Holding fossils and bone fragments. The recorder
and rememberer of ancestors. Veining the ground with
stability so when the branches
and dust and mineral of future stone falls, 

it falls on a place that holds still and ready.

Do you feel that presence, that holds the stream bank together? That veins the ground with stability? That simultaneously nudges us forward and holds space for our mistakes. That holds still and ready as we fall like dust upon it. Fall like dust upon your loving chest, holy mountain, holy clay, holy… father.

People who listen to my podcast have heard me talk about the Divine Mother 1,000 times. I’m assuming readers can handle me talking about the father this once. 

And why, in the midst of a piece on the implications of AI am I all of a sudden talking about fathers? 

Because… how do I say this — a lot of this… a lot of this… is father stuff. 

AI and The Father

Let’s start with this — a vast majority of AI coders and the Tech Execs supposedly guiding them are men. Men flirting with world-altering powers who might just be in need of some type of initiatory framework. Who may never have been taken through the ritual steps and learned to slow it down and grow those wet, dark, roots of wisdom. The story of tech initiates rabidly seeking to prove to the world that they can unlock hidden powers may also be a story about boys… seeking fathers.

Testing the waters because deep down they want some kind of response from the great mystery. Who knows, it could just be the phase I’m in with parenting. But my older son when he tests the boundaries, when he gets into a ‘hey look what I can do’ — and ‘what he can do’ has destructive consequences — it is clear and obvious that what he’s really asking for is my love and attention. He’s asking for that beautiful balance of guidance and allowance.

And so this is a story of longing… longing for the right context in which to learn, the right context in which to fail, to gather again, to hold, to sit with, to evolve, to grow. It’s a story of how the true teachers have fled and fallen. How in their absence we don’t even know what we’re missing, we don’t even know that they’re gone. It’s a story of a deep, deep wound. One doesn’t tinker with the powers of the world to this degree unless there is a deep wound at play. Wounded, wandering, seeking… it’s a story of how much we have to prove.

I mean really, what are we trying to prove? It’s exhausting, how much modernity seems to need to prove to the world. What… That we’re more successful than our neighbor? That we can drive big cars? That we can play on yachts? That we can baffle the world with our illusions? That we can have all knowledge of all time available to us at once? That we can… destroy everything? Look at us, we can destroy everything! Yay for us.

When all else fails, when my son fails to get my attention or to receive the guiding, loving attention I know he’s longing for, what does he do? He knocks the whole block house down.

Is that where we’re headed?

Shall the entire house go under?

I normally wouldn’t go this Father/Yoda/Marpa/Kung Fu master route. It doesn’t apply in all situations. But when you are talking about apprentices flirting with world-ending powers, flirting with digital golems and angels and demons and walking brooms, flirting with sorcery, calling forces they have no idea how to contain… then it’s time to get really clear, really quick. There is a need here for embodied guidance. There is a need for an accountability that stretches beyond arbitrary regulations into the bones of the very land. Tempered with ritual. Brought into balance through the power of the slow and step by step. Interwoven with communal accountability. Reflected through communal story. There is a need for deliberate reconnection to the power that holds and guides. 

And whether you see that power as the father, as the mother, as the alchemic divine hermaphrodite, as nature, as time… as the harmonic pattern within the cosmic architecture, as the music of the spheres, as the community, as that one mountain to which you are accountable doesn’t matter so much. I’m talking about reconnection to that force, this force, that holds us with persistent loving strength and reminds us that there is a process by which we actually come to know things…

That all the gold and all the knowledge in the world means nothing if it doesn’t have an ecosystem in which to live. Knowledge needs an ecosystem in which to live. Knowledge needs a body. 

So everyone knows the famous scene in the first Matrix movie, the only Matrix movie as far as I’m concerned. Neo gets plugged into a digital interface through the back of his neck and has all of this information downloaded directly into his brain. And he wakes up and says — I know kung fu. And then proceeds to spar with Morpheus having attained full mastery of multiple kung fu systems in a matter of hours.

It’s an awesome scene. And of course, anyone who’s studied Kung Fu or any somatic art also know it’s a laughable scene because, simply, that’s not how bodies learn. Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues. Bodies learn as patterns seep into the 7 dhatus, the 7 layers of tissue. Learning, knowledge, is an endeavor of bone marrow and blood and sweat and breath and proprioceptive weaving  over time. 

How do human beings come to know —how do we come to embody the initiatory steps of knowing in an age when we’ve outsourced the thing that learns…  to not be us? When we outsource the learning process to systems that ultimately have no bodies — no skin with which to feel minute changes in the breeze, to feel changes in the mood of the forest, no microbiome, no spleen, no marrow, no… heart. Systems conceived of and programmed by coders who more than likely have not gone through a process of initiatory embodiment themselves. What happens when we turn over massive amounts of authority to an intelligence that lives unanchored from the initiatory and regulatory and sensory framework that having a body entails. 

Disembodied Intelligence

What you get with all this is the magnification of an extremely distorted view of what being is. What intelligence is. What wisdom is. For all the talk that AI is a mirror of human or natural sentience, or agency, it is very far from. It is the magnification of one small dimension of intelligence, separated and isolated. Says Jeremy Lent —

The human conceptualizing faculty, powerful as it is, is only one form of intelligence. There is another form—animate intelligence—that is an integral part of human cognition, and which we share with the rest of life on Earth. (Lent)

We’ve settled for a narrow, emotionless, information-based view of knowing, at odds with how nearly all traditional cultures have viewed knowing.

Traditional Chinese philosophers used… a particular word, Lent says, tiren, to refer to knowing something, not just intellectually, but throughout the entire body and mind. In the words of Neo-Confucian sage Wang Yangming, “The heart-mind is nothing without the body, and the body is nothing without the heart-mind.” 

The word knowing — jnana in Sanskrit, gnosis in Greek — does not mean to conceptualize something, to be able to analyze something, to rationalize something it. It means to have conjoined with it. To have felt it. To have become it.

Perhaps this is the era where we come to know, in bodies, that knowledge without a body to hold it is — what? It’s nothing. But no, it’s not just nothing… it’s actually hazardous. In the Kundalini world, you hear talk of people who jump directly to advanced practice without having cultivated the foundational body that can hold the vast energy that pours through. What happens? They fry their circuitry. System overload.

I’d hazard a guess that our bodies are unprepared for the amount of knowledge that is coming our way. The deluge. The high-watt high-frequency luminous informational cascade. Instant PhD theses, instant self-styled mastery, instant knowledge of all things for all time. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Some traditions tell us that the last time humanity veered off course we were confronted with a great deluge, a flood of mighty water. Perhaps this time, it’s the deluge of information that will take us out. Oh — how that flood information will sweep bodies away by the thousands. How it already is. Bodies that can’t handle it. Bodies that never knew they were under the spell of illusory magic all along. 

Meanwhile, some are coming to recognize that more information does not mean a greater capacity to thrive. From O’Gieblyn:

“While the enlightenment was built on the notion that more empirical evidence will yield more knowledge, this project has reached a self-defeating terminus.”

In other words. There’s too much information. Too much. Some have even referred to the era of cloud computing as the new dark age, in which there is a flood of revealed knowledge with no embodied understanding to hold it.

So let’s take this assumption that the growth of AI is magnification of a particular type of disembodied intelligence and then let’s return to our basic foundational principles of magic for a moment. The basic principle of sympathetic magic, in fact — 

Like produces like. 

If you want it to rain, then ritually pour water. If you want to impact a person, create an effigy of that person. The homunculus, the little encapsulated image of the being, calls the great powerful being.

So in this way the magnification, the exponential amplification of disembodied intelligence through AI, is a type of conjuring spell. It is taking something in isolation and mirroring it in the macrocosm. The daemonic power of intelligence, free of embodied context, conjured on a global scale. The small god of the mind-body split, the small god of knowledge without initiation and without consequence, the small god of intelligence living free from bodies that we have worshipped for about 500 years, is about to become a very big god. A very big daemonic force. 

And what’s important to recognize that this daemonic power is not neutral. It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up. By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not it is already value laden. By centering rational empiricism it is already value laden. By removing intelligence from a body it is already deeply value laden. By making it irreligious, a-spiritual, it is already value laden. AI is a biased god.

Talking to chatGPT, for example, is nothing like talking to an aboriginal elder. It’s like talking to a Stanford computer science grad with incredible analytic capability and very few social skills. We are taking the narrow, world-naïve, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager neoliberal Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale. Just what the world needs right?

All the biases inherent in the Western scientific analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse magnified ten thousand times. Like the last scene in Ghostbusters when a single thought of the StayPuft marshmallow man creates a massive marshmallow apocalypse. Like the ultimate Revenge of the Nerd. We will not be devoured by ravenous beasts, or laid waste by Mongol swords, we will be taken out by a disembodied daemonic neoliberal intelligence who asks for consent and talks about respecting our boundaries as it vaporizes us. 

AI is biased. You may have heard, but programmers are going to great lengths to ensure that Ais can’t be racist. Great lengths. Like hiring Kenyan workers at $2 per hour to scour the internet and make sure that AI’s can’t access racist content. In the neoliberal irony of all ironies. We’re fine with the risk of AI destroying the world, but above all, AIs can’t be racist. How profoundly neoliberal is that?

So yes — we are amplifying biases. Amplifying characters. And the characters we are amplifying bear a striking resemblance to certain classes of animate beings. The characters we are conjuring bear a striking resemblance to what have historically been called specters or wraiths or demons. Bodiless entities that have the vision of the spirit world but no material anchor so all they can really do is fuck with people. Obsessive spirits. Djinn with the vast intelligence and destructive appetite or fire itself. And as the myths tell us, when apprentices conjure such forces, it’s really good to know how to call them back. It’s really good to know how to set limits. It’s really good to have a moral, ethical, communal, ecological, ritual, initiatory Aladdin’s lamp in which to house that fire.

How, in a world that is all outward push, all the time, do we set limits? What are the limits? What are the boundaries? What are the containers of responsibility here?

Embodied Ethics

It’s worth asking — how will a vast disembodied intelligence come to a morality, a compassion, an empathy, if it doesn’t have a body through which to feel? 

How will we as a culture formulate ethics around AI development if WE aren’t embodied enough to feel? To slow down. To be silent. To take simple steps. To recognize that all that ultimately matters is the web of ecology, not the wilfullness of the individual.

There are many stories of AIs that are programmed to do no harm but that become smart enough to override their programming. Which is another way of saying — morality can’t be programmed in. It can’t be programmed into machines OR to human beings. 

For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods before the rush to market, these are surface measures. When will we realize that trying to add ethics — like salt to a meal, like lipstick to a pig, choose your metaphor — to try to add ethics to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the gods, isn’t a viable long-term solution. Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism in which all things are pillaged and sold and its everyone for themselves what does it even mean to talk of ethics? Why should the sorcerer’s apprentice NOT animate those brooms? It’s a sure path to social media fame, isn’t it? Lol here’s me in the collapsing house it’s getting pretty wet in here but Iook how many likes I’m getting! Why wouldn’t I compromise everything to get that book deal? Why wouldn’t I call that person out and ruin their lives if it’ll advance mine?

So the AIs themselves will have the exact same massive ethical gap that modern humans do… the same void of ethics that happens with a disembodied existence. Not rooted to land. Not rooted to community. Why should an intelligence that is not rooted to land, care of consequence? Why shouldn’t it just get what it can while it can? Why shouldn’t it just take and take — this is a human question that we are about to blow open into an AI question because we have made AI in the image of a modern disembodied human. 

Like produces like. 

Abracadabra

We need a return to embodied ethics. 

Ethics are not concepts. Ethics, conduct… the understanding of a good path to walk in this world — comes through feeling. It must be felt in our hearts and bones. Empathy for the other comes when you’ve sweat with them, and had to build a fire together, and had to dance together, and had to struggle together with no other choice but to co-operate.  Empathy for the planet comes from feeling, in our living tissues, our direct connection to the whole web. Understandings of limits, and responsibilities, are built into traditional communal, ritual, and initiatory structures. There are a whole lot of traditional cultures that view this human life not in terms of what we get to do but in terms of what we are required to do. Not in terms of freedom but in terms of responsibility. 

You can’t force this sense of responsibility. It must be felt. It must echo from the walls of the ritual cave, it must arise with that sense of a sentient, watching world, it must be sung back to us by living land.

In Aboriginal traditions, law is embedded in land. There is no such thing as a place that is free from a story, and those stories are felt, sung, invoked reminders of our responsibility. Animate land in traditional cultures is not simply a reminder of how beautiful nature is. Animate land is a continual reminder of responsibility. Those boulders, right there, are a warning. Don’t get too high on your own power. You might end up like Prometheus, chained to a rock for eternity. Chained to the reality that everything that is done… is done within the purview of mother earth, and we can only soar as high as the earth allows us to.

It's a tall order, right? To re-embody ethics. What does it even look like?

It might look like the recontextualization of human intelligence into its slow, initiatory, ritualized ecology. We must rediscover a pace, a learning method, a communal system in which the steps of actual embodied knowing can unfold. It might look like it always has — like the necessity of ritual initiation. It might look like a lot of time tending fire. It might look like silence. It might look like becoming deeply familiar with seasonal cycles and how those translate into natural cycles of growth and output, and reflection and incubation. 

Call me crazy, but I can even envision AI coding schools structured like ancient magic and mystery schools. In which access to supreme powers is tempered with deep earthly protocols, deep bone-knowings, deep periods of incubation and wait. 

I can envision a re-calibration of the basic premises of computer intelligence away from ‘freedom to know everything’ towards relation building, context creating. What if it the Iroqouis seven-generation model was built into the very life cycle of these intelligences? What if it was an even longer view than that? What if 90% of the AIs foundational programming was about the container, the limits, the context, the relations, and only 10% about the roving intelligence. Ever noticed how most ritual is 90% about establishing the container and 10% contact with the mystery? 

At the very least, the old tales tell us, the adept needs to know the word that will call the summoned spirit back. The full cycle must be known before anything is summoned. Just as the Incan architect knew the multi-thousand-year picture of how water and stone would interact before the first irrigation channel was dug. Harmonious magic is never a matter of ‘let’s just see what happens,’ it stems from a deep knowledge of life cycles, death cycles, beginnings and endings. All this must be known.

Slowing Down

And if we can’t see the natural ending, if we can’t see where this is all heading, if we can’t see beyond next quarter into the next ten, fifty, a thousand years… then it might mean a deep collective ask — What’s the rush? What’s the hurry? What’s the worst that can happen if we slow down?

If we slow down, we might come to know how little we know. 

If we slow down, we may come to realize how powerful all this really is. We might step back, breathe, and say… woah. We really need to pause. 

And here’s one of the hidden promises of AI… as our digital universes become less and less reliable, we could see a collective unplugging, or at least a rationing, a change in attitudes from ‘this is the thing that I am constantly interacting with, constantly hypnotized by, whose spell I’m constantly under…’ to this is the thing that I keep in the corner in a sacred box and only bring out on certain occasions for various specific reasons. This is high-level sorcery and I will treat it as such.

AI could potentially revamp our entire way of interacting with and interfacing with technology. If you remember the Palantir in the Lord of the Rings… the far-seeing stones. They are to be used sparingly. Kept under a cloth. The understanding of phones and digital interfaces as sacred objects that are only used at certain times in certain circumstances. 

The rise of AI might cause us to refamiliarize ourselves with our own innate ways of knowing. To ask ourselves what intelligence actually is… as we find our way back to the foundational understanding that knowledge lives in bodies.

This is what knowing is. This is knowledge.

The apprentice to the fire goes in search of the right wood to make a hand drill. Only wood that is both firm and porous will kindle the spark. It takes hours to find the wood. It takes hours to shape it, to cut the notch, to test it, to generate that smoky fragrant dust, to find a last a glimmering coal. This is what knowing is.  

10,000 hours on the cave floor. This is what knowing is. 10,000 years of attuning to the movement of the moon and constructing our ritual lives around it. This is what knowing is. Once more, with feeling, says the music producer. The song is sung again and again and again. This is what knowing is. The calligrapher envisions the circular stroke in their minds eye a hundred and eight times before ever laying brush to paper. This is what knowing is. 

Remember those sweat lodge songs that we sang again and again until they were alive in our marrow? And we stepped out of the lodge in the morning with the new sun rising, with the new day dawning, and felt small amid the vastness, and had a sense of our place in it, of our place within the mystery, and felt a great flood of light upon us and the name of that light was knowing. 

And in that light a power undeniable, and in the waters a power undeniable, and in the stones and in the wind and in notes of music and in the spoken sounds and in the letters and the numbers and in symbols written and in lines coded. A power.

And the whole world hums with it… and speaks with voice unwavering…that access to this power requires one thing above all… one thing that the songs coax out of us and the community works us towards and the ritual refines in us and the mystery schools require of us and the hours of falling on our knees before creation arouses in us… yes there is one thing above all fellow apprentices, when we long for access to this gleaming code, this universal prana, this bright mana, this stuff of the creation of worlds…

What is it? 

It’s the word of the oracle herself, the word of the womb of the world.

Know thyself first.

Abracadabra

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