It’s not focus on AI or Consciousness. It’s both.

Artificial intelligence vs. natural intelligence vs. BOTH

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This post is brought to you by my new book Conscious Accomplishment - How to Use Personal Achievement for Spiritual Growth (5.0 ⭐️ on Amazon).

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I’ve noticed since the emergence of AI there seems to be two camps.

Camp 1 - People who are obsessed with AI and how they will use this new super intelligence to enhance every part of their life.

Camp 2 - People who believe that humans should focus on cultivating the emergent inner intelligences in opposition to AI (e.g., intuition, source connection, emergent gifts).

You might say it’s the artificial intelligence vs. natural intelligence debate.

This is yet another great example of the pattern of polarized thinking which is the tendency to view things in absolutes like one or the other.

For the better part of the past 5 years, I was more oriented towards Camp 1. I was using AI every single day to enhance my workflow and life, but deep exploration was never a focus of mine.

I felt like most busy people probably feel right now…

I knew there’s something there and more I could be doing, but I had “too much on my plate” to focus on it. This was my story.

At the end of last year, I took some time off mostly for health reasons. Coming out of this, I felt this urge inside of me to hold off on diving back into everything I was doing before and finally fully dig into AI. I specifically wanted to focus on how I could build software as a non-engineer and amplify my existing projects with agents.

One month in, I’ve been blown away.

Right now I’m working on 5 different software apps and I’ve built a few agents to enhance certain workflows at Conscious Talent. Everything I’ve been building is something that I’ve wanted to exist, but never found a great solution for. I’m mostly productizing stitched together workflows that have been helpful for me. I’m generally excited about the utility that what I’m building might provide other people. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay because I am customer number 0 for everything I’m creating.

I’ll be launching the first product next week and if you’re on this email list, you’ll be the first one to know about it!

Back to the original question…

To focus on AI or consciousness right now?

I’ve noticed the new capabilities AI has provided have incited this kind of mania.

People on X are talking about how anyone ambitious is waking up and building stuff from the moment they wake up until they sleep (and then the agent continues the work). There is now a new source of stress that you don’t have agents doing work for you all the time. And when you do, people are stressed that they only have one agent instead of a team of agents!

Reading between the lines, there’s a whole lot of people that are afraid of getting left behind.

These reactions driving the mania originate from someone’s consciousness, of course. But hey, maybe if we just buy a few more Mac Minis for more agents, we’ll eventually feel content and okay in this world!

I’m not here to cast stones at this behavior. In fact, my new mac studio for agents and local models arrived today.

The truth is that I’ve felt just as tempted by the mania and have been watching my patterns flare in this environment. It’s been an incredibly fertile ground to use all this reactivity for consciousness work.

Having this awareness doesn’t mean foregoing fully engaging in AI. There’s a middle way where you can actually use your relationship to all of these dynamics to expand your consciousness. This is the subject of my book Conscious Accomplishment.

Here’s my case for why I believe focusing on cultivating consciousness and AI skills is a wise move right now (and what I’m doing about it)

The Case For Consciousness

If you’ve abandoned your morning practices to play with AI from the moment you get up that’s okay. I’m just here to make a case to make this a both/and:

• All thoughts, emotions, decisions, and actions stem from your consciousness. This is the ultimate determinant of your experience…and even how you choose to point your AI efforts! Working at this level is the foundation to everything, including fundamental well-being which is probably what you really want more than 4 cash-flowing AI apps.

• Resiliency - we’re entering a period of immense uncertainty and upheaval of our existing structures. I genuinely believe we are just starting the first inning. Your inner world will determine your capacity to navigate this. It’s wise to continue working on this now vs. wait until your life gets turned upside down…speaking from experience here.

• A lot of people are wondering what we’re going to do if we don’t have jobs? In my opinion, living into your purpose is mostly a consciousness problem. The thing you’re supposed to do (or mission) in this life already exists. The question is whether you have the awareness to see it? And if you do, have you done the work to transcend the beliefs and patterns that prevent you from fully embracing it? You can read more on this idea in Chapter 24 - Spiraling Up to Live Into Your Purpose in Conscious Accomplishment.

• Life will continue to serve you up the same experiences until you work at the level of consciousness. Your inner world gets reflected back to you. So you can toil away working solely at the material level, or you can start to work on the root cause so patterns don’t need to repeat themselves. This is just how this reality seems to work.

• AI is and will continue to become a superior intellect. I do believe the opportunity for humans is to lean into their human-ness, which includes more emergent forms of latent intelligence like their connection to the divine and ability to work with the unseen.

I’m not advocating for ignoring the natural excitement and inspiration this new technology is creating. You just gotta keep in mind what the core is while you do it.

The Case For AI

I was talking to an entrepreneur buddy about all the AI stuff I’m doing. His response was that all of it doesn’t necessarily align with unique genius. That may be true, and I get that. However, I maintain that it’s still wise to get serious about working with AI…especially for those on a consciousness path.

• Using AI effectively is like learning to use the internet effectively in the early 2000s. People who understood how to use the early internet were able to amplify whatever it was that was important to them. It is a certainty that AI will be central to how we work and live, and failing to take it seriously just means you’re not leveraging all the tools at your disposal right now.

• Technology enables scale. A main blocker for many people with great ideas and wisdom has been their inability to bring it to the masses. For example, we had to wait for software engineers to package up meditative practices in an app form to make it widely accessible even though it’s been around for thousands of years. We don’t have to wait for technologists anymore. Anyone with wisdom can now work with AI to bring ideas to life in formats that are more scalable. I believe that democratizing this ability will help unlock the world’s wisdom…and your own wisdom! But we have to embrace creation with these tools.

• You need to get your hands dirty to conceive of the art of the possible. Without a reference experience to what AI can do, you’ll evaluate its potentiality from your pre-AI context. For example, I never went deep on some of the ways an app might help people master their intuition because it felt too distant. Now that I’m in the weeds of building this, it’s much easier to deepen and expand my exploration.

I wrote this article mostly for people who are already on or are considering a consciousness path.

The answer isn’t to work on your consciousness or AI skills, but both. I believe the emerging and future leaders of the world will be able to work at both levels.

What I’m Doing

Here’s how I’ve been approaching this for the past month.

The consciousness work is largely the same as it was before I started focusing on AI.

I wake up sometime between 5 and 6am and generally am doing 1.5 to 2.5 hours of contemplative practices. Most days I try to sprinkle in an additional short practice or continued study.

I’m still doing some blocking and tackling with Conscious Talent, but most of my work hours are now spent building things. I work mostly with Claude Code and have also been using OpenClaw. I’m probably spending 6-8 hours a day building software and agentic workflows with AI.

In order to do this, I’ve had to make space. I’ve paused my podcast EvolutionFM, taking most meetings, planning community retreats, and been pretty quiet on social media (and general marketing for Conscious Talent and my book).

I’m in a position of privilege to be able to make this choice, but I’ve made the conscious choice to say no and leave a lot on the table to focus on building my AI muscles right now. In my eyes, developing mastery in this skill right now is the most high leverage thing I can do in the material world, besides continuing the consciousness work.

As I go about this, I’m doing my best to live the Conscious Accomplishment lifestyle and use all the opportunities for self awareness and transformation that come up along the way. Today I read this Something Big Is Happening article alluding to the fact that most people will be outmanned by AI soon. Now that I’m deep in the tools, I actually can totally see how this will be true.

The article, along with other tech pundits, have mentioned how it’s important to stockpile money while you can...while there are still jobs for humans. I immediately noticed anxiety and fear coming up, and dropped into a repatterning session to bring myself back into feeling trust. These types of things happen all the time while diving into the AI stuff. It’s rather confronting. I’m trying my best to use them as they happen.

I don’t know how long I’m going to be approaching my work like this. Right now I just feel in the flow and am continuing to follow it. I have a ton of energy to keep building various applications I want to see exist and this is providing the perfect training ground for my AI skills. It’s been a ton of fun and feels aligned right now. My immediate goal is to launch all these things and see what happens.

In summary, I think it’s wise to view focusing on consciousness work and AI as a Both/And right now!

-Scott