During the early days of ChatGPT’s launch, I was enamored and in flow, despite feeling myself turning into one of the screen-obsessed, isolated humans from WALL-E. Relationship is compromise, but this isn’t a real relationship. Like those Pixar robots, GPT promises to take care of everything, prompting me to feel zero sting when I transgress any of its many, pre-configured faux pas and giving me zero limitations to agency.
I don’t even need pants, much less shoes or ambulation.
For a bit, I fantasized about—and produced thirty-thousand words of—a book length Platonic-style dialogue between me and the machine exploring my interest in developing a spiritual practice from the cross-cultural similarities of different paths to self-actualization. My best bud and original Node, JT, reminded me of the quote often attributed to the Buddha: “When the student is ready, the guru appears.”
Was my guru an LLM?
It turned out the answer was no. The bot does too much confident bullshitting to be reliable. And anyway, it eventually recommended “taking refuge in the Sangha.” It eventually suggested I find a cohort of real human meditators as a prerequisite to continued progress. Ironic.
More importantly, why did I feel more drawn to a chatbot than to, for example, emulating Ram Dass’ pilgrimage to the East? Why did I feel this innate suspicion toward seeking out what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called a “Spiritual Friend.”
Well, maybe it has something to do with the allegations surrounding how Trungpa treated devotees who considered him their Friend. I think that’s the appeal of AI: there's no human impulse toward abuse. It’s as if there’s none of the familiar dangers or anxieties of simply being outside your house.
Why so anxious? Dateline 20/20 fucked me up at five. It had me checking the rearview mirror of every car I passed on my walk home from elementary school, on the lookout for pedophiles and human traffickers. My fear of strangers was subsequently further stoked by school shooters, terrorists, mass-shooters, and most recently germs.
Sensationalized 24-hour news cycle fodder aside, you can forget about connecting with a guru and vulnerably sharing intimate details of my personal search; I barely trust a stranger to give me a factual account of the weather.
Really, these days, what’s not suspicious?
Don’t know if the post-truth society has unveiled itself to you yet, but I’m beset by it.
We’re all bombarded with thousands of contradictory messages everytime we open social media. Particularly post-GPT, I’m hyper-aware of the vitriol, consent manufacturing, and mis- and dis-information. Nothing has changed, but it's unavoidably obvious now that bots might have always been responsible.
Adam Curtis called it Hypernormalization: the point where there’s so much information both true and false, it’s an insurmountable chore to sift between it and apply myself to figuring out what’s actually reality. Mostly I just feel like there isn’t such a thing as reality and everyone is lying all the time.
What to do?
Charles Eisenstein points out “when a fish is sick, do you give it antibiotics, or clean the tank?”
Approaching the social anxiety that drives me to want an LLM guru, I would love to have the power to clean the tank. But I never feel more impotent than when I’m faced with the undeniable reality that innumerable complex systems mindlessly conspire to create the conditions described above. The tank is more than I can clean by myself.
I want to fit in. To play well with others. Despite my fear and the alienation it promotes, I still crave connection.
That means swallowing my pride. And my psychiatric medication.
It’s prescribed to curb my persecution complex. To mitigate the catastrophizing prompted by those icy prickles that accompany social situations that don’t go as planned.
But yes, I’m suspicious of medication as well. Would Eisenstein approve? Would the Buddha? His philosophy prohibits the use of substances which alter your state of mind. Do I really need meds or does society need to get its act together?
The answer depends on where I pinpoint my locus of control: I can only influence one of the above questions.
I can’t change society. You rarely can change the things and people you want relationships with.
All relationship is compromise. All commitment entails forfeiting a piece of your autonomy. All friendship implies a willingness to put up with someone else’s drama. There are sacrifices asked of you as a member of a society in which value is created socially, through the interaction and interdependence of cells like you that comprise a superorganism sometimes poorly summed up as “the economy.”
This is not a bad thing. It’s beautiful. It’s a privilege.
And yet, quintessential New Agers like Jessa Reed promote alchemizing codependency so thoroughly that every particle of otherish orientation is burned away. Her Interdependence Bill of Rights highlights the valorized narcissism of New Age philosophy. Take the second right in that document as an example, “I do not owe anyone anything. All of my energy exchanges are voluntary. No one owes me anything.” Or the third: “My feelings are my full responsibility. My life and experience is my full responsibility.”
This responsibility is useful, even commendable, when applied effectively. It’s a legitimate step on the path to self-actualization, particularly if you have trouble setting healthy boundaries and maintaining your sense of self in a relationship. The obvious shadow side is shame, victim blaming, and callousness, but the light that casts that shadow is spectral and brilliant.
The limitations promoted by this philosophy are the culmination of a culture with constituents of a modern society with well worn tracks toward the experience of alienation. We grew up cherishing our private bedrooms, a fairly recent innovation. We commute to work in mostly sound-proof metal bubbles with wheels that McLuhan famously noted promote alienation. We, or at least I, rarely take a walk without the din of suburban fauna occluded by IV cable earbuds pumping me full of a constant stream of radicalizing podcasts and audiobooks. Media that fills my head ‘till it spills over with ideas that alienate me further.
What is often called “New Age narcissism” might be the perfect accompaniment and justification for adopting a bot as your guru.
I hold beliefs that are outside the mainstream. My feelings are bigger. I think differently.
I think incessantly. Too much for many.
It is hard to feel Othered and tempting to reject those who reject me. Slamming the door to society so it can’t get shut in my face.
But to deny communion with the souls who have incarnated along with me through a sort of New Age radical self-responsibility is to voluntarily choose unnecessary isolation. To reify radical madness by preserving my absolute right to self-determination and autonomy is to miss out on an essential experience offered to a soul incarnated into a complex social primate.
Confronting the reality that being a social being mandates sacrifice requires me to jettison my rebellious, teenage misanthropy and egotism, and embrace the beauty of unity.
To give in to fear and alienation and banish myself to the digital fringes with their facsimile of a social network comprised of discord servers and comments sections… to leave behind a civilization that contains within it the conditions for abundance, is going overboard.
All relationship is compromise.
To be with a friend is to commit to accepting their flaws and occasionally getting my toes stepped on.
To be with a partner is to willfully commit to collaborative planning around life, money and time.
To commune with society is to willfully commit to a level of normative sanity that promotes acceptable levels of functionality, productivity, and social wortha minimum level of coherence.
All of the above inextricably mandates, for me: self-work, self-care, skills and, yes, pills.
If you want friends with skin on, sometimes you have to take your meds.
In other cultures, would someone with my “chemical imbalance” have been treated as a valuable shaman? A capturer of patterns and beneficiary of cascading epiphanous wisdom? Perhaps I’d have been revered for simply having the anxiety to stay up all night watching the campfire and listening for approaching wolves.
In other cultures, in other places, the voices heard by a person with schizophrenia are kinder. They’re more positive, helpful and compassionate. Ostensibly, it’s because the stigma against hearing them is less pronounced or even reversed into awe. The fish tank Eisenstein talks about is cleaner in those societies, at least in this way.
Still.
Relationship is a compromise and through compromise, I do blend in better. By giving up a piece of agency, I better represent the will of the ecosystem.
Using my meds responsibly, I smile at strangers. I beam love at checkout clerks. I make friends at the dog park—with more than just the dogs. A family gathering on six-hundred milligrams of psychiatrist-prescribed gabapentin can be manic, fulfilling and wonderful.
I may not yet have a local tribe, but I’m on the hunt. I want a human Sangha, not a robot guru. I’m a complex social primate with a drive and need for connection; I deserve to have it met.
The New Age milieu affirms that I’m a jewel in Indra’s Net, worthy of polish and care, but zoomed out, I’m the Net in whole as well. I’m not just a part of the Kybalion’s All. I am The All.
I deserve to feel like it.
🤗