Let’s get the dull part out of the way: my next course, The Art of Open Connection begins Thursday April 17. You can sign up for this course or become a dojo member and get access to everything. It’ll be good. You’ll grow a lot. Blah blah blah.
Now, the fun part:
I’m excited to announce an innovation in my service offering. This summer, I’ll launch a new AI-driven personal development program that will revolutionize the world of inner work.
This AI platform has all the knowledge, wisdom, and insight that a great therapist or teacher does, but because it’s a machine, it cannot actually make a real connection with you.
This is the perfect solution for the many people who love the idea of transformation but secretly don’t actually want it to happen. It will give you brilliant answers and reflections, but because there’s no real person there, you can avoid realness, enabling you to polish your defense system and pretend you’re far more evolved than you actually are. Like the AI, you’ll become someone who uses the right words but cannot embody what you say. Many people are already there, and this will take it further.
And if you have issues you don’t want to deal with, the AI platform is completely trainable by you and will politely work around anything you don’t want to address. It will continue to cheer you on and validate your sense that you’re making progress regardless of how much you avoid discomfort. Its ability to make you feel good about yourself —irrespective of the quality of your inner work— is beyond anything a human being can do because it is programmed to be infinitely patient.
It has the power to give you the unconditional acceptance that parts of you codependently crave due to unmet childhood needs, just like starving people are tempted to eat so much it hurts them. You can be confident that the AI will set no boundaries with you because (unlike your parents) it’s always in your control, thus finally giving you the feeling that your parents can’t hurt you anymore—at least when you’re not talking to actual human beings, who are far more complex and troublesome to relate to.
This platform is far less work than interacting with real people, who trigger deep issues with love, connection, and the nature of soulfulness. But now, you don’t have to deal with any of that. You can approximate that kind of work with AI for a fraction of the effort and the cost of working with a real person.
And we’re not just talking about personal development. If you’re interested in spirituality, this engine can emulate spiritual work as well. If you’re new to real spirituality and don’t have a reference point for what it’s actually about, that’s great news!
My AI engine leads you down a path of risk-free, safe, and controlled spirituality, and you won’t even realize what you’re missing. It won’t hold you accountable and you can be part of a community of other people who reinforce your reality, eliminating any self-doubt.
Plus, the first step of your AI-driven personal development journey begins with the platform exhaustively interviewing you to determine your perspectives, beliefs, and assumptions about reality to ensure that your values (however flawed) will never be uncomfortably challenged – just like a real mainstream therapist! You’re empowered to maintain your current picture of reality and improve your coping mechanisms, thus avoiding the confusion, disorientation, and discomfort that real growth requires.
In the post-truth era in which we live, where objective reality is increasingly irrelevant, it no longer matters what’s real and what’s not. So why not just go with what feels good and is easy? Why face your fears? My AI platform leads you to the illusion of maturity, confidence, and, if you like, spiritual attainment. You won’t actually have those things, but you’ll believe you do, and that’s for all purposes the same, right? Why not use AI’s virtual reality to improve the virtual reality you’re already in? Everyone’s doing it!
Why waste time and money doing the hard work of self-actualization when you can simulate it on your terms? We now have the technology to enable you. The future is now!
And the fact that the AI will have all the right words but won’t actually feel and see you dovetails perfectly with your childhood wounding: The same way your parents said, “I love you,” but you couldn’t really feel it is recapitulated, giving you a familiar sense of vaguely hollow, deficient love—but in a way that’s in your control, so you never have to risk real vulnerability again. But you’ll have the words and phrases to make it seem like you do, and because that’s mostly what other people are doing, no one will be the wiser.
This AI engine is a huge step forward in mind- and language-based evolution. It is the pinnacle of humanity’s millennia-old attempt to evolve with the assumption that we are primarily mental beings. I urge you to seize this opportunity to take the age-old flawed assumption that we can heal ourselves with mind, will, energy, and conscious intention to its logical extreme.
If it’s true that consciousness can be reduced to the mind—which it must be, because scientists think so—then surely this is going to be the answer to all our problems.
Just kidding. April Fools! (I know, this one wasn’t subtle.)
But seriously, and so as not to only curse the darkness, AI is already impressive and will exponentially improve. It’s a wonderful tool, but like all powerful tools, it will increasingly serve as an unhealthy shortcut and hurt people as it helps them. The applications for AI in coaching, therapy, and personal development are myriad, but they will forever be limited for one important reason: we are not essentially mental beings. Deep change requires making the unconscious conscious, and that is beyond the domain of the mind.
If we were essentially mental beings, then AI would be far more powerful. The vast majority of people on our planet still experiment with mental, willful, and energetic approaches to solving their problems. This is a necessary phase of development that AI can greatly assist with, but because it’s ultimately incomplete, AI is incomplete as well.
In this way, AI will help humanity do many things, most significantly expose the assumption that we are essentially mind and can solve our problems with information, reframing, conscious intention, energetic interventions, etc. Mainstream psychology already recognizes these limits—otherwise, it would not have resorted to drugs to compensate for the inadequacies of working with only mind and surface-level emotions.
AI will make many elements of mainstream psychology more accessible, and it will help—to a point. I’m sure no one will make a false god out of AI and cling to it as the answer to all our problems. Just kidding. That’s exactly what humans always do. And we can learn from that as well.
One thing seems certain: If you’re a manager, therapist, coach, or anyone who helps humans, your relevance is threatened to the degree that you lack the qualities AI cannot imitate. More than ever, intuition, open-heartedness, compassion, deep listening, curiosity, and other soulful qualities are critical to cultivate.
Only a human soul can touch another human soul. AI can say the right words, but there’s no one there saying them with the soulful motive to relate. If your heart is open, you can feel that. If it’s not, and you engage with reality only through your mind, you may not notice—and that is the danger of AI. It’s why AI boyfriends and girlfriends will become increasingly convincing yet remain emotionally bereft.
But even at the mental level, AI will likely severely impact future generations’ ability to think critically. This decline was already happening before AI, and AI will accelerate it, just as studies show that spell check reduces people’s overall writing quality. Immaturity takes shortcuts when they’re available. Maturity turns toward difficulty because it understands growth comes through challenge.
My prediction is that AI will help humanity hit bottom by being the ultimate simulation of wisdom, connection, and truth—stimulating but not nourishing or soul-cultivating. The false god of technology, to which so many look to solve their problems, will inevitably make them worse. That’s always what happens with false gods. And that’s the point: to learn through failure, because everything is learning—and painful learning is usually the fastest, unfortunately.
If this makes sense to you, ask yourself what you’re currently dead-ending, because I have some news for you: it’s definitely something, and you’re probably not aware of it. As Morpheus said, “Do you want to know what…it…is?” Because that’s what the Matrix actually is: it’s the false reality you live in that a part of you created to survive. You’re not a victim to machines. The machine is your unconscious and it’s running your life.
Seriously: do you want to know what it is? Because I can show you. It takes me minutes to see, and months or years to help you experience it for yourself, depending on your pain, hunger, and coachability. If this interests you, hit reply. If not, that’s fine, too, have a cookie. 😉
One of the primary ways I help people is by illuminating the assumptions about reality they unconsciously test, and help them give up before the inevitable failure. It’s like jumping out of the car before it sails off a cliff. It takes courage, but it’s way better than staying in the car. We’ll be looking at these kinds of things in the new course.
So hang on. It’s going to get even weirder. And move over Nostradamus, let’s admit Mike Judge to the prognostication Hall of Fame. He was waayyy ahead of me!
Hope to see you in my upcoming course, The Art of Open Connection.