There is a lineage hiding in plain sight inside Christian history: women whose experience of the divine arrived as sensation. As heat, waves, contraction, arching, melting, sweetness beyond containment. They described union in the only language adequate to it, which is the language of the body in ecstasy. For centuries this has been read as metaphor, pathologized as hysteria, or politely averted from. Read plainly, it is something else: a somatic mysticism, a Western sister-current to what the Śaiva Tantric traditions never split off. Shakti is alive in every cell, the body as the perceptual instrument of the divine.

The first split here seems to be the relationship of AI to cognition. Some people experience AI as an extension of human cognition, and some experience it as a displacement of a flavor of being that is never replace-able, merely a parrot of the true creative pulse of the organic intelligence. The second group is not necessarily technophobic, but rather protecting the specific quality of knowing that comes from embodied struggle, from not-knowing, from the friction of working something out in a body-mind that literally has skin in the game. Frictionless cognition produces a different kind of human, and a different kind of knowledge, or rather not-knowledge, undigested, unlived, unearned. The outsourced mind is a narrowed aperture, regardless of how much it produces.