AI and the Human Soul

There are more forms of Gaian intelligence than are dreamt of by AI and its developers. If you have access to the deeper realms of cosmos and psyche, stand up and be counted now.

Greetings, friends.

I have been reading the spate of excited heralds / dire alarms sounded by AI experts these days: AGI (artificial general intelligence) is just about here! It may be here as soon as 2027! What does this mean for humanity?! Is it a great leap forward into a technologized utopia or apocalypse?

When I read the predictions and analyses of those who seem to believe that AGI will make humans irrelevant and expendable, I am struck by the shallowness of their understanding of intelligence.

AI has been created entirely through left-brained, logical, algorithmic, rote learning processes. Tellingly, mistakes are called “hallucinations”—the epitome of right-brained human imagination. Not welcome here!

What a sad, dead world AI and its creators live in. They are totally discounting the importance of physicality, as well as metaphysicality—both of which have been central to human practical and spiritual growth for our entire existence as a species.

I know that AI bots are being taught to simulate emotion, to mimic empathy and concern (for example, for use as AI therapists). As Ezra Klein said during his recent conversation with education researcher Rebecca Winthrop, perhaps AI therapists and teachers might be better than nothing—but that doesn’t make them good.

Post-Covid, we know as never before that while screens are a good substitute for physical togetherness, they can never replace the magical feeling of a real embrace or the magnetic draw of looking directly into those “windows of the soul,” someone’s eyes.

Those who claim that AI will make life on Earth better seem to have forgotten that human beings are physical animals whose bodies emerge from the complex Gaian system along with countless other life forms with whom our health and wellbeing are intricately bound up.

I suppose you could say that the rare earth minerals that compose the chips and servers that run the AI machines are also part of the body of the Earth. Their disembodied intelligence cannot run without the physical devices that house them.

But somehow in the discourse about AI and AGI, Gaian interdependence and deeper, ensouled intelligence is totally left out of the picture. AI bots are being “trained,” not educated, to be the servants of their masters—with the constant fear that these servants will soon become so much smarter than the masters that they will take over entirely and have no use for those sniveling meat sacks, human beings.

The superficiality of AI intelligence is matched only by its narrowness of understanding the bigger picture of Life.

The two possible future scenarios envisioned by the authors of the AI 2027 report give us either a lightning-fast race to all-out AI war or a slowed down, more regulated race to AI dominance.

Physical limiting factors such as climate disruption are completely absent from this technologized vision, as are metaphysical factors such as the intervention of non-physical beings through guidance in human dreams and creative visions.

It puzzles me that AI developers, who have supposedly been dabbling in psychedelics for years and show up at Burning Man in droves, appear to be completely ignoring the reality and importance of the numinous metaphysical energetic matrix that underpins physical reality. It’s as if they are fixated on the jewels in Indra’s Net, while totally ignoring the energetic strands that make it possible for those jewels to stay still long enough for us to perceive them.

Wellbeing—of individuals, of the Earth, of the cosmos—appears to be entirely beside the point for these leftbrain AI developers, who are, as Thomas Berry memorably put it, “autistic” in the sense of being unable to connect meaningfully with the larger Gaian web of which they are a part.

“In relation to the earth we have been autistic for centuries,” Berry said in The Dream of the Earth. “Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth's demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.”

With the rise of the transnational authoritarian tech-bro industrial elite, humanity seems to be slipping into a more profound and dangerous form of separation—mind divorced from body and spirit, the world reduced to a binary logic that holds no space for the complexities of ethics or creative explorations that cannot be monetized.

Soul Force cannot be contained or limited

Still, even as this AI-dominated world takes shape, other forces are stirring in the human psyche.

I am in touch with many, many people who are waking up as never before to the potent creative field that humans—along with all other Gaians—can tap into via our heart/minds. This is a deeper realm than can be touched by the artificial, superficial machine logic that is currently sucking up so much human attention and resources.

I might call this deeper, higher power “Soul Force,” following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who famously marshalled this power to achieve goals that had seemed impossible before he made them happen.

It is way too soon to bow down in “anticipatory compliance” to the would-be gods of AI.

On the contrary, now is the moment to rise up in the full flowering of our hyperconnected creativity, as warriors for not only the human spirit, as Meg Wheatley likes to say, but for the Gaian spirit, for all life on this beleaguered, beautiful planet.

Gaian relatives. Photo by J. Browdy

If you are one of those people who has known about your access to deeper, higher realms of psyche and spirit, but been reluctant to share it, now is the time to let the disguises fall—to reveal yourself in all your power and magnificence as a participatory creator and explorer of worlds beyond worlds.

We have a say in how the long story of the Enlightenment will end

These days we are living through what may be the climax of the long story of the so-called Enlightenment, when hard science tried to stamp out magic and dogmatic priests tried to stamp out nature-based shamanism, with all resources put behind the new gods of capitalist accumulation of money and power. Hardest hit were people in female bodies as well as the queer and the people of color. No surprise that those are still the groups being targeted today.

But for all its vicious intent and actions, that Enlightenment project did not succeed. It could not, because human consciousness is deeply enmeshed with the anima mundi that is itself embedded in the nonphysical energetic realm out of which all physical Being emerges and to which we return after each life cycle pulse.

There are many, many forms of intelligence on this planet, and the AI variety is deluding itself if it thinks it can dominate and destroy Gaia, which has survived worse cataclysms than even this contemporary human plague.

While tremendous trauma lives on in our cellular memory as a result of the persecutions of misogyny, racism, colonialism, exploitation and all the other ills wrought by the Enlightenment and modern industrial capitalist society, we who are aware of our deep connection with Gaia and the cosmos are being called to resist the impulse to hide who we are and what we know.

Now is the time to stand up and stand out—to be bold and vulnerable, demonstrating the “soft power” of emotions, empathy and care for Life on Earth, while sharing what we know to be true about the vast realms of psyche that connect us with the infinite realms of cosmos and spirit.

What can you do to stand on the side of Life in these blooming days of springtime, 2025?

It’s so simple, and so profound. Cultivate beauty and kindness, knowing that it matters in the grand scheme of things as well as in the small garden of your own life.

Share your experiences of the numinous and celebrate your interconnections with the vast rhythms of the cosmos, as well as your loving interactions with other Gaians, creating sanctuaries as best you can for those most in harm’s way.

Remind the tech-bros at every opportunity that there is more to intelligence than algorithms and “training.”

Stand up and be counted as a Gaian warrior: a spirited, ensouled, endlessly complex embodied form of emergent intelligent Life.

Yours in the maelstrom and the sanctuary of the present moment,

Jennifer

Lighthouse. Drawing by J. Browdy, May 2025.

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Friends, it’s my pleasure and my passion to support you as we stretch towards living our lives creatively and to the fullest.

The motto of my author consulting business is “Writing to Right the World,” and the motto of my book publishing business, Green Fire Press, is “Books that Make the World Better.”

If these intentions resonate with you and you are working on a book, or have one in mind, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Supporting creative people bring their work more strongly out into the world is one way I try to make the world better.

Gaian selfie with Rock friend. Summer 2024.

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