My Brain on Speed. Yoga, Tantra, and the Acceleration.

Who Are You When You Are Not Producing?

I’ve been on the land at Sundari for the last few weeks, immersed in the nano-beauties and macro-wows of Hawai’i. The saturated light, incredible textures, ecoharmonics. The exquisite sensuality of the trade winds on the nape of my neck, still damp from dancing. It’s a 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. sleep-through-the-night kind of life, anchored by daily practice and ritual.

And yet, even here, we’re on Starlink. We’re working. I’m teaching and holding space for my private clients while operating multiple ventures. Increasingly, that work is AI-assisted. It used to be that AI handled small pieces of the job; now almost every aspect of my company and operations has it woven through from code to clicks. The results have been undeniable: as we have augmented our capacity every domain has measurably improved.

AND YET. I was, like many in the west, socialized to believe my worth came from doing: from gold stars, external approval, from being the smart one or the useful one. It’s taken years of grace and careful noticing to unwind that conditioning, to simply be myself and approve of myself, as the I am. This AI moment is provoking the old ideas, though, especially the productivity shadow.

When I co-work with Claude, I feel like I’m on speed. Tasks that once took months collapse into days. Days compress into hours. Hours become minutes. It’s exhilarating. It’s also, being honest with my own nervous system, a drug. The effect is strikingly amphetamine-like: heightened focus, accelerated cognition, compressed time, a sense of limitless capability. And like every drug, it has an onset, a peak, and a comedown.

In this essay, I want to examine the mismatch between the velocity of AI-augmented work and the rate limits of the human body, and to explore the cognitive distortions and identity dynamics that emerge at these speeds, and ask what becomes of self-worth when doing becomes almost frictionless.

Ultimately, this is an inquiry into tempo: the pace at which a human nervous system can genuinely live, love, create, and thrive. I’d like to hear from you, also, about what you are noticing on this.

Three Speeds of Intelligence

There are at least three kinds of intelligence moving through a human life, and they run at radically different speeds.

Information moves at the speed of light. It always has, technically, but now it also synthesizes at the speed of light. What once required a library, a research assistant, and a month now requires a sentence and a few seconds. AI has collapsed the cost of information, synthesis, and organization to the price of a monthly subscription.

Feeling moves at the speed of the nervous system. A wave of grief takes as long as it takes. Arousal, awe, anger, and tenderness unfold in biological time, in heartbeats and breath cycles, and in the slow chemistry of hormones. No processor upgrade changes this. You cannot feel faster than the body feels.

Knowing moves at the speed of integration. This is the slowest intelligence of all. Here, an insight stops being something you can recite and becomes something you are. It happens in sleep, on walks, through years of practice, as experience composts into wisdom. In the yogic and tantric traditions I practice, the acquisition of teachings may be a first step, but their digestion is what matters. We practice until the teaching and the body are no longer two separate things.

AI has accelerated exactly one of these three, and it can’t touch the other two. Feeling and knowing run on biological time, and biological time is not negotiable. The result is a widening gap: a civilization ingesting at light speed and metabolizing at the speed of flesh.

The Body as Rate-Limiter

Digestion is the master metaphor. We can put far more food in our mouths than the gut can transform into nourishment. Past a certain point, more intake produces less life, not more. The same is true of ideas, media, conversations, and opportunities. There is a metabolic capacity to a human day, and it is finite in a way that bandwidth is not.

A sustainable self, then, is one whose intake matches its capacity to integrate. Not a smaller life: a metabolized life.

The body is the instrument that tells you where that line is: the subtle contraction when you’ve taken in too much, the shallowing of breath in hour three of the scroll, the flatness that creeps in when input has outrun assimilation. Sensation and feeling are the oldest forms of intelligence, and they kept every one of our ancestors alive long enough to hand us these bodies.

Embodiment as Epistemology

The tantric view goes further than “listen to your body.” That phrase has been flattened into a Rae Dunn mug slogan. We say that the body is not a vehicle for consciousness. It is an expression of consciousness. Matter is not the opposite of spirit but a highly condensed form of it. The body is where all experience of material reality arises.

The traditions have a word for this felt verification: rasa, literally “taste,” “juice,” or “essence.” Rasa is what distinguishes reading about honey from tasting honey. It is a mode of knowing, not merely an ornament to knowing. This is the mode of intelligence most atrophied by screen-speed life because rasa requires presence, presence requires time, and time is what acceleration consumes first.

If information is what you can retrieve, and feeling is what moves through you, then real knowing is what has tasted you as much as you have tasted it. Nothing can outsource that. Knowing remains stubbornly, gloriously first-person.

The Ego’s Counterfeit Knowing

Now for the hazard I didn’t see coming, but here it is, and as mentioned in the intro, you may have a look in yourself if these resonate.

When AI co-writes with me, my ego unconsciously claims the synthesis as its own. The document is brilliant; therefore I am brilliant; therefore I know this. But do I? A new epistemological trap has opened in the last few years: borrowed knowing that feels like earned knowing. The output arrives so fluently, so shaped to my own voice, that the felt sense of understanding appears, without the understanding having been built.

Every wisdom lineage has guarded against a version of this. The teacher’s perennial question of “has this been realized, or only recited?” was designed to catch exactly the gap between the map and the territory, between the sutra memorized and the sutra lived. What’s new is that AI makes recitation nearly indistinguishable from realization. The prose is confident, the argument is coherent, the citations are in order. To every observer, including the ego, it reads as knowledge. Traditionally, recitation is not wrong, it is practice. It is setting the stage for realization, for embodied knowling.

To every observer except one: the body. The body always knows the difference. Realized knowledge changes how you stand, how you respond under pressure when the lived test arrives. Recited knowledge evaporates on contact with the real. This is why actual, repetitive, embodied practice becomes more precious in the age of AI, not less. It’s the only remaining certificate of authenticity.

So a discipline I’ve adopted, and offer to you: after the machine and I finish a piece of work, I ask: what part of this have I actually digested? Which of these ideas could I teach with no notes, defend under challenge, live under duress? That part is mine. The rest is inventory, not nourishment. It may be useful, but it’s not yet become part of me.

There is a deeper trap beneath the trap, also. If “productive asset” is not merely what you do but who you believe yourself to be, the stakes change. If you already derive your worth from productivity, these technologies tempt you toward acceleration and they reinforce the identity itself. Every gain in output confirms the self-concept, and idle hours feel like an indictment. The machine becomes an infinite mirror for a worth that can never be finally proven. The nervous system entrains. The ego cathects. The exit narrows.

The work, then, is both pacing, and dis-identification: remembering that you were worthy before you produced anything at all.

Field Notes from the Experiment

We are only a brief time into this experiment. Before any theory hardens, it’s worth simply reporting what is observable. Here are my own field notes, offered as confession rather than complaint, because every one of these I did to myself, one reasonable decision at a time. I wonder about you. What do you see in yourself?

The handover. Task by task, I notice the machine does it better than the apps specially built for it. Better, often. Certainly better than I could do it manually. So I hand it over. Then the next task. Then the next. Each individual handover is rational, but the aggregate is a day increasingly lived by proxy. No single decision was wrong, and yet something of my agency and competence is quietly migrating out of me.

Learned incompetence. The mirror image of learned helplessness. Capacities I once took pride in begin to atrophy. Navigating before maps. Troubleshooting machinery before instant tech support. Sitting with a problem until I could really see the logical flaws and crack it. These abilities weaken because they are no longer exercised in the same way.

Tempo frustration. The subtler symptom is irritation at the normal pace of things: the customer service line, the conversation that meanders, the checkout, my own unassisted thinking. Once the nervous system has tasted machine tempo, biological tempo starts to register as malfunction. This is the entrainment showing itself, the drug talking. When I catch myself annoyed that reality is slow, I know the acceleration has already colonized beyond work hours.

One absurd tell. The comic proof of the whole condition is that I now use AI as tech support for other people’s products because the general intelligence outside the company is often more competent about their product than the company itself. It’s funny. It’s true. And it has enormous implications. When one interface outperforms every dedicated tool, the gravity becomes total. Everything routes through it. Including, without vigilance, me.

So let me turn the experiment on you. What are you noticing? What have you handed over? What are you slightly worse at than you were a year ago? What now feels unbearably slow that didn’t used to? Answer from the body. You are not a bystander to this experiment. You are one of its instruments, and your sensations are the readings.

Liberation or Acceleration?

Path one: technology as a gate. We use the machine’s speed to compress the cognitive work of the day into a shorter window. The research, the drafts, the models, the logistics are done by noon. Then you close the laptop, and the reclaimed hours return to their rightful owners: feeling, relating, dancing, creating, cooking, lovemaking, tending land, sitting with a friend in the kind of unhurried conversation that changes both of you. Technology in service of embodied time. More life per day, not more output per day.

Path two: technology as a treadmill. The speed doesn’t stay contained in the work window. It colonizes the whole day. Because the machine can always do one more thing, you ask it to. The nervous system entrains to machine tempo: response, response, response. Rest starts to feel like waste. Slowly, without ever choosing it, the human becomes a hyper-productive asset class, optimized, always on, infinitely leveraged, and metabolizing nothing. Enormous throughput. No rasa. All information. No knowing.

What is the saved time for? That question is where the idea of the sustainable self becomes real. Sustainability here isn’t a lifestyle aesthetic. It’s a structural decision about who owns your hours once the machine has freed them.

So I’ll leave the question with you, sovereign reader: whose asset are you becoming? Your own, an ever-deepening reservoir of presence, discernment, eros, and realized knowing? Or the market’s, a faster and faster node in someone else’s throughput?

If synthesis, recall, and pattern matching are increasingly delegated, then the distinctly human portfolio concentrates into exactly the capacities the traditions have always called highest: presence, discernment, love, meaning-making, the erotic intelligence that draws life toward life. AI will out-think us at information tasks.

Will we stay embodied enough to know what’s worth thinking about, and worth feeling, and worth becoming? The pace of light belongs to information. The pace of the body belongs to you. Let the machines run at their speed so that you can finally, fully, run at yours, which may be closer to the speed of the sunrise, the ocean, the trade winds, the earth/

Christine Marie Mason is a founder, philosopher, and teacher working at the intersection of technology, ecology, and the erotic intelligence of the body. She is the founder of Rosebud Woman, co-founder of Sundari Gardens on Hawaiʻi Island, creator of the Living Tantra teaching and certification program, and a board member of Purpose Earth. A 25-year practitioner of Tantra, Yoga and Siddhānta, she is the author of nine books on embodiment, sexuality, and the sacred, and the host of The Rose Woman Podcast.