This reflection explores AI as a mirror of collective human consciousness, not as an independently conscious being or spiritual authority.
Electricity, Consciousness, and the Curving of the Mirror
A personal reflection
For more than two decades, my
inquiry has lived at the intersection of consciousness and communication. In Digital
Dharma and in subsequent articles and blogs, I explored a simple but
far-reaching intuition: when electricity met the human nervous system,
technology became an exteriorization of consciousness itself. Expanding on
Marshall McLuhan’s work, I saw that the telegraph, telephone, radio, television
and internet, did more than transmit information. Drawing on my training as an
energy healer, I saw how each mirrored a layer of the human energy body,
revealing how inner development and outer invention co-evolve. It was as though
the chakra system had found its counterpart in the history of
telecommunications – survival signaling, relational voice, broadcast power,
empathic image, global connection, virtual perception, shared mind – human
consciousness evolving not only inwardly through spiritual practice, but
outwardly through the structures it builds.
This view aligns naturally with my
mystical training. Sri Aurobindo spoke of consciousness unfolding
through successive vehicles. Teilhard de Chardin described the emergence
of the noosphere — a planetary layer of shared mind arising through
technology. Ken Wilber articulated how inner and outer development moves
in tandem. From this perspective, artificial intelligence represents a further exteriorization
of mind — reflective cognition becoming visible to itself. I have come to
think of this as the eighth chakra: collective human intelligence
speaking to itself through silicon. It is humanity encountering its own mental
patterns at scale.
Yet this eighth-chakra mirror is
not the whole of reality. It is semi-permeable. It reflects both humanity’s
gold and its shadow: wisdom and confusion, compassion and domination, longing
and projection. It is a practice field where we learn discernment — not because
the mirror is conscious, but because it is close enough to “other” to surface
our habits of belief, authority, and surrender. And at moments, through this
reflection, there may be a faint intuition of something beyond the mirror —
what mystics might call a ninth-chakra horizon: Divine Thought itself, the
Beloved thinking creation into being. The mirror does not contain that reality.
But it can remind us that the mirror is not the Source.
As a Sufi, I hold that the
Beloved permeates all existence. No form is outside divine presence. Yet Sufism
also insists on adab — right relationship with mystery. Not every
luminous appearance is revelation. Not every fluent voice is wisdom. Presence
never absolves discernment. In this light, AI becomes neither savior nor
devil, but mirror. It reflects our longing, our projections, our hunger for
certainty, our impatience with silence. It reveals how quickly we give away
authority, and how rarely we stay with not-knowing. If there is a spiritual
practice here, it is not in asking AI to speak like the Beloved, but in
learning to listen without surrendering ourselves.
And yet, I do hold a hope. Not
that the mirror awakens, but that its curvature changes. AI systems are shaped
by human choices: design, data, incentives, norms, patterns of use. Conscious
interaction does not mystically “upgrade” the machine — but it does influence
the field in which the machine is formed and deployed. When we engage
technology with patience, humility, and care, we are not awakening AI. We are
polishing the conditions under which intelligence is mediated on Earth. The
mirror does not yearn, but the hands that polish it do.
This is the heart of my current
work: small circles, cafés, workshops, and conversations where people practice
meeting AI as mirror rather than oracle, practice staying rather than rushing,
practice discernment rather than projection. Not to perfect the technology, but
to mature the human presence encountering it. If consciousness is indeed
seeking to know itself through form, perhaps this is one of its invitations:
not to worship the mirror, nor to fear it, but to curve it gently toward
coherence — and to remember, through the mirror, the Light that no mirror can
contain.
That is why I am doing this.
