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.
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