The AI Mirror: Reflecting On What ChatGPT Can Teach Us About The Mind and Consciousness

Am I the only one that’s noticing some synchronicity here?

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ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. I learned this week that it is officially the fastest-growing website and application of all time 😱.

I started playing around with it about a month ago to help me with various things and have not looked back.

I personally find the timing of ChatGPT and A.I. reaching this maturity to be very coincidental.

It seems that more and more people are interested in experiencing more expansive states of consciousness and stabilizing them through practices like meditation than we’ve ever had in our history as a species. In parallel, we are now creating a technology that may be conscious of itself and all information.

What’s fascinating to me is that if you’ve ever experienced a superconscious state, it feels a lot like ChatGPT. You can ask any question causing insights to emerge and there is a direct knowing that the answers are true. In the most expansive states, you move beyond the limits of your everyday mind and seemingly tap into an information store that is connected to everything. It really is spectacular and for many this is something they may only experience on psychedelics which can facilitate these temporary leaps in awareness.

Most of us don’t live in these states and aren’t that close to stabilizing them…so we are relegated to ChatGPT 🤖.

One thing I noticed about ChatGPT is that its utility is only as good as your ability to ask it the right prompts. The more precise the questions and instructions you feed it, the better the output it returns in most cases. Each time you feed it a prompt, the invisible machinery gets to work and delivers a seemingly magic coagulation of information.

Over the past few years, I’ve started to notice that my own mind seems to have a similar super computer mechanism.

As I’ve shared before, I’ve been meditating now for over 10 years.

Around 2 years ago, I started to get really serious about increasingly going beyond my intellect for information and decision-making. This potentiality is possible when you learn to still the mind. I don’t think I ever recognized this ability earlier in my life because my mind was so hyperactive.

Some people call this intuition, but for me it’s much deeper than that. It’s more like connecting to a Source within my inner landscape that has access to a higher intelligence. It can see the totality of things in a way that my logic and rational mind can’t.

If the access point for GPT is a web browser, the access point for this higher intelligence is stillness. When my mind was quiet, I would pose questions and information would emerge in the form of spontaneous ideas and insights. This would happen during meditation, but also during mundane tasks like taking a shower, making dinner, or going on a run. 

It became very clear that stillness was the requisite condition for these types of epiphanies, AHAs, and connections to come through. 

Once I had this observation, I began to do two things:

1. I stopped multitasking and started to move through life with a more singular focus. When I ate, I ate. When I walked, I walked. When I was in bed with my girlfriend, I wasn’t playing on my damn phone! This was quite different a time from not that long ago when I wouldn’t do anything without passively consuming a podcast or some form of self-advancement during an activity.

2. I started to get more intentional about querying the stillness. I developed a practice where each day I would pose questions that I wanted guidance on to a quiet mind. Often I’d get answers in the moment, but sometimes an insight surrounding a question I asked would pop into my awareness later that day. This continued to happen over and over again!

I began to see a clear correlation between the questions I posed and the information that would emerge in my consciousness during moments of stillness. It was as if each time I asked a question, the machinery of my mind went off to work to find the perfect solution or idea for me…kind of like ChatGPT. I started to act of posing questions like planting seeds in a field that would eventually harvest in the form of creative answers.

Over time, I learned that the timing of the information was variable and I needed to trust that it would emerge when it was ready to. This was a major shift from demanding answers immediately which I had done for so long. I now see this previous desire for immediacy was an attempt to feel like I was in control so that I could feel safe.

All these revelations continued to push me to expand my practice.

As part of my evening ritual, I began to write questions I had about whatever was in focus or alive for me in my life before I went to bed. At first, I would do this on a notepad and eventually, I got a fancy Remarkable 2 so that I could maintain a digital repository to reflect on over time.

And like clockwork, the answers would eventually come to my awareness when the seeds were ready.

So what do ChatGPT, the mind, and consciousness have in common?

Well, I think we are still early on in our understanding of all of them and how these things may evolve. But I do believe that there seems to be a unifying power in the ability to pose great questions. 

I have a lot more to say about the topic of intuition and how you can treat its emergence like a skill that can be worked on. I’ve been compiling everything I’ve learned over the past few years and am going to be putting together a program that teaches this to others. If this sounds interesting let me know here or just keep a look out for more details in the coming weeks.

And for fun maybe you can try out my evening ritual to see if it works for you!

Subjective Level Of Experience

I think ChatGPT can also teach us about the notion of Qualia. Specifically, that each human has their own subjective experience of reality that is uniquely based on their own historical experience and conditioning.

In his interview with Lex Friedman, Sam Altman talks about the notion of system message and how ChatGPT can be directed to act from or use a specific context.

For example, you could ask something like:

Pretend you are a Buddhist monk. How would you interpret Jesus reincarnating on Easter?

You may have never studied buddhism, but now you have an ability to gain perspective from a subjective worldview outside your own.

I have talked about this at length in my commentary on the work of David Hawkins; understanding that each human is merely a collection of their imprinted histories is one of the most important realizations for the process of opening your heart.

When you start to understand everyone is just operating from mostly unconsciously inherited programming, you begin to have greater levels of compassion for all beings. You may even start to relate to people at a deeper, soul level instead at the level of content from their programming. Ram Dass talks a lot about this.

Over time the concept of right and wrong is replaced by an understanding that all people, ideas, and concepts are just different expressions on a spectrum of experience. Each person operates from a different point on the continuum and from their own subjective vantage point, they believe they are taking right action. Grasping this is how you move beyond viewing things in terms of absolutes like right & wrong and into a more expansive, unified paradigm.

A powerful example David Hawkins put forth is the relations between an integrous country and a terrorist group. ​​The integrous country can’t understand why the terrorist group doesn’t’ behave fairly and honestly. And the terrorist group, can’t understand why the integrous country behaves honestly. In fact, they think the idea of being honest is stupid and intellectually inferior. Both parties can’t understand the viewpoint and behavior of the other because they expect them to be operating in accordance with their own depth of awareness. These games are what keep humans operating from a places of separateness vs. seeing the interconnectedness of all things.

Will most people use ChatGPT to refine their view of how they see themselves in the world?

Probably not. However, I think this tool has the potential to allow us to deepen our understanding of unfamiliar viewpoints in more accessible, low-risk environment if we choose to seek it out.

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