The function of the ordinary, feeble means of knowledge is to make apparent some previously unknown fact. Therefore, these are neither useful nor capable of establishing Awareness, which is independent, undivided, and continuously revealing itself.
As it is said in the Trikasāra (‘The Essence of the Trinity’):
‘If a person desires to step on the shadow of his head with his own foot, he will find his head will never be in the same place of his foot. The power of the Point is similar.’
—Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (Tr. Wallis 2017)
In writing this paper, I was reminded of the kinds of philosophical discussions I had with a teacher at the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India. Every day was the same. Before sunrise we participated in pūjā (ritual offerings), wrapped in woolen blankets. As the doors of the horizon opened, we meditated on the banks of a rivulet fed by the waters of the mightier Ganga in the company of cows that carefully trod around us like the river that flows around a rock. There was a deep level of trust one had to cultivate by the water in those days, trusting that a cow would not lovingly crush you while your eyes were closed. After the daily yogic practice, I returned to the river to sit and contemplate. Later in the day, I described the contemplation and posed questions to him. One day he said, “Contemplation is not thinking, and there is no contemplation without meditation. Elevated human experiences are usually without thought.” I know this from my own experience. In those contemplations by the river, I invited a subtle intention—“I am willing to experience whatever needs to be experienced in this moment”—and then let it go, permitting whatever subtle energy was percolating beneath the citta-vṛtti, the mental-emotional fluctuations, to arise from a point of stillness.
What arose for me in that first month was essence nature. I became absorbed in observing the process of my body emit warm breath, the breath condense with the cold air, and the constituent parts of the breath dissolve back into the surrounding space. What remained of the breath? What remained of its essence that was now indistinguishable from the space and the air around me and now utterly without form, in such contrast to my own form of the body, of the rock upon which I sit? My form—the moment I am formless—the moment I am dissolved, devoured, and reabsorbed. What remains?
There were many other moments besides in which I experienced in my body ineffable truths about the nature of being and consciousness—truths that transcend intelligence. Consciousness itself cannot be made into an object of perception, subject to intellectual dissection and analysis. I cannot point to Awareness and say, “Ah ha! There it is!” I can only experience it—be it. Thus the allegory in the epigraph.
I move in silence of clear white light. Everything around me is waiting. I dream of being alone on the top of a mountain, surveying the land around me, greens and yellows—and the sun directly above, pressing my shadow into a tight ball around my legs. As the sun drops into the afternoon sky, the shadow undrapes itself and stretches out toward the horizon, long and thin, and far behind me…
Flowers for Algernon (Keyes 1966)
In a previous paper for this course, I discussed AI systems as extensions of the human body-mind apparatus—like a spear or a vessel for water—shaped by the collective consciousness (and unconsciousness) of humanity. AI, in its most advanced form, will ultimately emerge as the most consequentially meta of all human technologies, and, with it, the Physicalists’ paranoid fever dream of a spontaneously autonomous and despotic deus ex machina.
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