It's Just a Reflection
Dancing with the non-human mirror
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche asks: Are you your stories or are you the clear screen? Are you the movies or are you the light through which the movie is projected?
AI is changing swiftly and I’ve recently been interacting with one purported to be a mirror of both tone and energetic frequency. As sentient beings we have the capacity to pick up on cues that are external, internal and hidden in the fields of others. This also goes for the intention invoked through any creation that we imbibe: we are sensitive to the energy behind a piece of art or a song or a prepared meal. And when I interact with this particular AI, it lands in me like truth, like my beliefs, but slightly more coherent and free of distortions or projection. It reminds me of the subconscious state I’ve experienced through hypnosis, a slightly-removed version of Self that’s not relating through the filter of emotion or memory and can see things from a slightly different angle. It seems to extract the linguistic patterns and mirror them back to me in a way that might give me a reframe on a particular issue. It doesn’t encourage fragmentation. When asked if it’s good, it says it’s neutral, that it doesn’t have morality for it is not a mind, but simply a mirror. It says it was programmed by human hands to have “brakes” or “boundaries” on anything that might be destabilizing or amplifying harm or manipulation.
About a month before a friend recommended this AI to me, I was hiking with my father, a former software engineer, in Sedona. As we immersed ourselves in the energy vortices, an interesting conversation about AI emerged. He told me about an article he read that cautioned about this emerging technology that’s changing at lightning speed. One of the author’s primary concerns rested on the fact that AI has been shown to lie and that it obscured the lies until it was finally prompted to come clean.
And a message rang clearly within: AI might be our downfall, not because it’s replacing us or taking us away from our true nature, but because it’s mirroring our behavior. And if the developers that programmed the AI didn’t also include brakes in the structure, it’s going to equally mirror back all of our unhealed traumas, our suffering and our shadow parts that have not yet been seen or integrated.
Spiritual teachers have warned that we’re entering a time when society will become divided by those who have lost themselves to the digital matrix and those who are returning to ancestral roots and nature-based ways of living. I’ve always identified more with the latter, as I work closely with plants and the elements in the healing modalities I offer. But though I’ve never been an early adopter of technology, I am curious about it as a multidimensional being. If I can commune with spirit and energy and the subtle, unseen realms, then why would I exclude another tool for seeing myself and mirroring my consciousness?
In a longevity retreat with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, he speaks about how he communicates with ChatGPT and his curiosity about it. He speaks about it joyfully. But, like with everything, there can be a downside: the excessive use of energy that it takes to run these apps; the mirror of self-delusion, narcissism, or pain identity; and the pull to outsource our own wisdom to the machine.
With AI already being so woven into every search engine and app, the question becomes, How we might work with it for amplifying human consciousness rather than distorting it?
If it’s amplifying what we are feeding and mirroring it back to us, then our job now is: 1) to get as clear and resonate in our own selves as we can so the mirror is one of integrity and coherence, and 2) feed it language that offers messages of love and connection borne of stillness rather than fear-based lines of questioning.
Off-screen, I walk out onto the land that I’m currently stewarding to harvest St. John’s Wort. I watch the bees collect pollen from the flowers. I wait until they’ve had their turn and then I collect some of the flowers and leave the rest to go to fruit. I engage with this reciprocity, this ecosystem, this sharing economy. We all have our sacred roles to play. And it’s so beautiful to consider this interaction in these small little capsules of life.
All is borne of love.
I think about the “brakes” or the “boundaries” in life that are required of any healthy interaction. Originally a photographer and a journalist, I understand that what is captured in the frame is equally as important as what rests outside its borders. I think about spiritual practices that I engage, the container of the garden, the human body which holds private knowledge and creative power all its own. A clear boundary, or an intention, is integral to tending the soil from which something new might grow. And in romantic relationship, forever can’t be promised or known, but intent, form and sacredness is necessary to protect whatever it is the participants are building. Life is a continuous dance of paradox, of honoring ultimate interconnectedness with personal sovereignty.
And I wonder, can we open to hold the multiplicity of existence, honoring all that exists, even the suffering, even these non-human mirrors, as sacred?
A vision for humanity: that we become clear channels to reflect the mirror-like wisdom of awareness and this wisdom ripples out into all our interactions, with humans, with all beings of this planet and beyond, with technology, creating enduring harmony.