Dear friends,

I have been interrogating what artificial intelligence may mean for women’s lives: our work and money, our intimacy, our mothering, our bodies and our safety. This summer the inquiry became a survey, forty-eight questions grown from real conversations with real women. The first wave has answered, and answered at depth, staying with the questions for half an hour and more.

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.