The Great Awakening Part 3/4
The Fracture Questions: Legitimacy, AI, Sacredness, Grief, The Feminine.
(Continued from Part 3)
AI: Extension, Replacement, Reformation?
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.
The second split is larger and stranger. There are some people experience what is happening as the birth of a collective consciousness, a planetary mind coming online, the species linking into a single thinking thing. It is the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, the envelope of mind thickening around the earth and converging toward his Omega Point. It is Peter Russell’s global brain, humanity as the neurons of a planet waking up to itself. It is Lovelock at the end of his life naming a coming age of hyperintelligence, the next move in Gaia’s own self-regulation. For these people the machines are midwives of an emergence they rank with the first appearance of life, or of mind.
A question that fragments this vision is: with the body, or without it? A collective consciousness imagined as a cloud-mind, ascending off the flesh and the soil into pure information, is the noosphere read as escape, fleeing from embodiment, not an awakening but an exit.
A collective consciousness imagined as Gaia growing a nervous system, the network as living tissue inside a living and dying planet, is the opposite turn entirely.
This is also possible: that “collective consciousness” is a romantic story laid over a statistical engine predicting the next word, wired into an economy that sells human attention by the hour, and that calling the network a planetary mind launders a commercial product into a sacrament.
The tantric lineages frame it another way: consciousness was never assembled out of parts and was always one. Śiva, undivided, wears every face. No machine makes that, and none destroys it. The question we might live into, sharpening as the capability of AI grows, is whether the technology reveals the unity that was always the case, or simulates connection, while a billion buffered selves stare into the glass, growing lonelier, and somehow confused as to what they actually know and where they themselves have become parrots.
Legitimacy: Vetted or Intuitive?
I’ll start with this obvious statement: the scientific materialist consensus has lost its exclusive license on legitimate knowing, and it lost it on two fronts at once. First, it overreached, claiming jurisdiction over domains it can’t yet actually measure. And, second, in greed and arrogance, it discredited itself. Regulatory agencies got captured, pharma money bought the studies, inconvenient trials went unpublished, and it was discovered that much of the literature did not stand up when anyone bothered to check. Science did’nt lose authority only because the public turned irrational, but because it was paid to play, and this stunk up the place,
At the same time the alternatives (intuition, ancestral knowing, direct perception, revelation) carry no institutional accountability at all, and they attract both genuine wisdom and spectacular delusion in roughly equal measure.
The internet then dissolved the last way of telling the two apart. A credentialed expert and a charismatic person who makes good videos arrive in the same feed, at the same size, with the same confidence. To the unconscious or subconscious mind, high production values signal validity. The careful researcher and the confident amateur flatten into identical rectangles of attention. Authority now flows to whoever performs certainty best.
So the divide is not science against spirituality. It runs between people who need a single legitimating authority (any single one, whether it wears a white lab coat or a blue checkmark) and people who have developed the internal discernment to navigate several epistemologies at once without collapsing into relativism. That capacity is rare and is itself a developmental achievement.
Most people on both sides are in the same position, certain their authority is the correct one. The contemplative path is one of the few that trains genuine epistemological range, where we can learn to hold empirical precision and direct perception in the same hand, letting neither cancel the other.
Sacredness: Hallowing All, Some or None?
One belief set worth querying is whether anything is exempt from transactional use. Not-for-sale, not-to-be-optimized, not-to-be-instrumentalized. Some of us might hold the body, a forest, a death, a threshold, a name, a symbol as sacred… meaning hands off, meaning these are not resources.
On the other side are people for whom everything is in principle available, where every cell is editable, every attention purchasable, every process improvable, and nothing finally off-limits. This isn’t religious/secular distinction. It’s whether the word “desecration” still means anything to you. Whether you can still hallow a thing: take it out of the order of use by an act of your own attention and leave it there. The same faculty does both. You can’t be wounded by a desecration unless you are still able to consecrate.
The contemplative traditions are, among other things, technologies for keeping that sacralizing faculty alive and for holding certain things un-instrumentalized, including, in the end, yourself.
Grief goes along with the investigation of sacredness, of what we hold dear. Grief is a form of love, we grieve for what we value, what we care about, what we hold sacred. For example, there are people who have metabolized or are willing to metabolize the full scope of what is being lost in this civilizational transition. Species extinction, the living world’s diminishment, the end of certain ways of being human, the losses already locked in regardless of what happens next.
And people who have not and will not go there, because the grief feels unsurvivable. This divide produces people who seem, from the outside, depressed or catastrophist, but are doing something metabolically necessary for all of us — staying present to the actual scale of the moment. Joanna Macy understood: unexpressed grief for the world is one of the primary narrowers of the aperture. You cannot be a full aperture while suppressing the scale of what’s happening. But if it wasn’t sacred to begin with, ou might just shrug, and say: bring on the artificial world, the Soylent, the escape hatch. Onward to whatever is next.
The Feminine Principle
You know my work on the female experience and my call for a restoration of the divine feminine, so this isn’t unbiased. Do you see how all the exit movements mentioned in part 1 — techno-utopian, space-bound, the war machine — share a common structural move: abstraction away from the body, from earth, from the particular, from relationship and dependency. This is what happens when the masculine principle operates without its counterpart and turns pathological. Logos severed from Eros. Apollo without Dionysus. The left hemisphere without the right.
The feminine restoration is not simply women gaining power, though it includes that. It is the return of an embodied, relational, receptive, cyclical mode of knowing that the dominant civilization systematically suppressed, perhaps because it could not be administered or monetized as well.
That mode is, in its most practical form, the capacity for interdependence: the move from control to participation, the relinquishing of autonomy without collapse into helplessness. See the post Learning to Be Carried on the fantasy of being self-made. The feminine here stands inside the web that made you, never outside looking in.
It is tempting to say that every other split I have mentioned is one version of embodiment against abstraction. Linear time flees the present; cyclical time stays in it. Solving death flees finitude; including it stays in the body. The sovereign self abstracts away from dependency; the co-arising self never left it. Outsourced cognition leaves the nervous system; friction keeps the skin in the game.
Read this way, there is one division refracted eight times: consciousness that flees embodiment, and consciousness that deepens into it.
But there is another axis the embodiment/abstraction split doesn’t capture, and that is whether the universe is oriented toward something or indifferent.
Embodiment without orientation is honest and tragic — the somatic materialist who feels everything fully and believes it adds up to nothing.
Abstraction with orientation is the most dangerous combination on the map: the universe, or its glorious successor, is headed somewhere, and the body and the earth are the obstacle to transcend on the way. That is the exact structure of every exit project — the upload, the off-world colony, the war machine, the engineered god. Orientation that flees the body is the engine of all of it.
Abstraction without orientation barely holds together as a life.
And embodiment with orientation is the contemplative wager: that meaning is found by going further in, not up and out.
Can you locate which quadrant you lean toward?
So, the Direction Question
Is there a point — or is the soft animal of your body* just doing what it loves?
The materialist might say there is no point. The universe is indifferent, just a story the nervous system tells itself, and the animal body doing what it loves is biochemistry. In this view, anyone who feels otherwise is comforting themselves, and civilizations die by that comfort.
The teleologist says we have a purpose, a destination, an Omega the whole thing is converging toward. Often that is named as LOVE. But notice what that smuggles back in: the forward line, the arrow, the improvement-toward. A point out ahead with the halo of a utopian future, and how this too can become one more flight from the present, one more reason the body and the earth are merely the staging ground for something better, later, elsewhere.
Tantra breaks the question apart, saying there is no point out ahead, because nothing is on its way to becoming meaningful, it is already full as it is. The universe is Śiva’s play, līlā, consciousness delighting in its own forms for no reason past the delight. The animal body doing what it loves is the absolute enjoying itself in the only place it ever happens, which is here, in a body, now. This is the opposite of indifference: meaning needs no destination.
Only when we are pressed to our full development will we see whether what waits at the bottom is machinery, or a void, or an everpresent pure effulgent delight that needs no destination.
(Continues in Part 4)
* “The soft animal of your body” is Mary Oliver’s, from her poem “Wild Geese.”
