ON AI: STIR TO THE BOTTOM.
Tis’ the season for making apricot jam in my household; there’s a big pot of it cooking on the stove; my wife Alla’s waving a wood spatula and I’m under strict instructions to – each time I go into the kitchen – stir to the bottom! Well, that theme seems to be a good one to use here as I explore today’s inspiration: Artificial Intelligence, Ignorance, the brain/mind and Aware living…it turns out! đ
~ There is the immense inward demand for something beyond time. We are living in a world of technology, which is of time, which is of measure, which is tremendous knowledge. Can the two flow together? Unless this takes place, man will always be caught in technology. This is not a reconciliation; you cannot reconcile the irreconcilable.
~J Krishnamurti (to teachers, 1973)
Invasive AI, though highly useful in distilling immense gigabytes of data advancing research that could and will save lives and put man into all sorts of frontiers, castes a far greater shadow on a global humanity that is more and more estranged from reality by its access to bulk symbolic knowledge, to synthetic experiences of what is, by being progressively freighted with words about words that – no matter how abundant and life-changing – merely pack the brain with ideas about ideas that exponentially contradict, conflict, confuse and constipate and lead to root-bound minds that have lost sight of the sun; that cannot flourish from seed to flower in beauty, peace, love and joy.
TRANSFORMING LIVING IN A GRACELESS AGE.
Perhaps one need say no more about all this that’s familiar to our daily experience. Whatâs relevant here is the underlying individual and collective human need first, to feel secure, and second, to believe. The need to believe is essential to mankindâs mental health and well-being, and AI â while it promises us loads of information about how and why and when to act in life â it is word based knowledge that is in fact, symbolic; that re-presents what is as something we can, must and need to believe is reality. The symbols, the conceptual indicators of what is real, have themselves become Reality. Apparently.
Society lives, moves and has its complex being in the superficial, and the sentimental; the surface of life. The egregious consumption of this massive missed-understanding is the high degree of mental health problems that linger in daily living. Take the United States for example: a 2022 study shows that one in five of the population (60 million) participates in some form of diagnosed mental illness and therapy. And we daresay that there’s another very big segment of society that’s undiagnosed, addicted and drug dependent. đ
Of course, given the media maddened ways we live, weâre overwhelmed – not so much by life as it is, but by life as we conceive and believe it to really be.
In fine, if weâre not yet suffering from analysis paralysis and/or drugs leading to drudgery, weâre burdened with insatiable need, thirst and desperation for distractions, attractions and compensations that may or may not, keep us comfortably numb, at least for a while â until things get better, as promised. đ
STIR TO THE BOTTOM.
About 2500 years ago, a man called Buddha brought some big news to the planet when he said âThe cause of manâs suffering is ignoranceâ Today, in 2025 the cause is still the same. What are we ignoring thatâs making us so neurotically unhappy and unhealthy; thatâs metastasizing like cancer and sickening us to death? Could it be weâre ignoring reality – who or what we are and this is?
A MIND-MADE REALITY
It seems that some established religions and most of science are an articulate mindâs tale, told by the mind about the mind. Mind, being 0-1 binary (dual), can never know anything other than its ideas about ideas. Reality is not any ideas about it, beautiful and entertaining as they may be. Our conditioned brain sifts and sorts, compares and contrasts, verbal symbols that re-present reality, but can never know it. It labels and defines and in doing so, denies whatever it cannot comprehend with its symbols â all of which are deemed necessary to think and feel more secure in a world driven by its own desires and fears that it may, in truth, not know. This âcerebral cortex selfâ is a theory about the instinctive mechanics of observable phenomena, and useful in perhaps understanding the material âworld,â â the âknownâ that we conceive and store in fragments of memory accumulated as âknowledgeâ.
ALL WE ARE IS AWARENESS.
In aware living in a constantly changing world, we never know; weâre always learning. In deep self-knowing, we discover not what we actually are â whatever that is remains wonderfully unknown, there being no knower, only an imagined âMeâ. With grace and gratitude, in a quiet moment, we may discover what weâre not: a thought, a body, a mind, a separate independent entity, a brain with its cerebral cortex functioning as a machine.
In reality, weâre much less than we believe, much more than we conceive. We are a profound wonder, way beyond the body/mind; a universal energy thatâs vital, substantial and primary. In words: âpure spirit manifesting.â The noumena behind the phenomena so to speak. Awareness, aware of itself. Knowing that one is, is the ending of ignorance, the ending of suffering. In fine, in resting in the peace of our alertly passive being, whatever we thought we believed we were, weâre not; whatever we are, we never ceased to be. That’s the beauty of it all! Watch and see, yes. đ
One doesn’t need to know the truth. The instant the false is seen – in that awareness – reality presents itself to itself 
