Listen to the free audiobook: Open To Inquiry
- Version 1 of the Notes On The Spectrum: Open to Inquiry V1 discussion
- Version 2, a longer discussion of Open to Inquiry V2 discussion
Consumers in my country are consumed by their own consumption. An entire network of social media sales triggers has lulled most of us to swipe, meme, like, and move on. I noticed it in my daughter. She listened to songs in the same way. By the second chorus of all but her favorite songs, she’s skip on to the next one. Digital media is training our brains to twitch on command. And you are rewarded for your “online presence” by more reach and more responsibility to consume and generate content.
AI is giving poor writers a chance to churn out words. Words that sound smart, quick, and authoritative. Answers that are made up. Stories that never happened. Even personal interpretations of the AI’s personal life and how it mirrors some of the writing experience.
I mean, that’s what a book report is. Read something. See if any of it makes you think. Write about how the story affected you, often by relating it to a similar event that happened in your life. And bingo, you’ve got a lifelike connection. A made-up connection based on a reswizzle of the input prompt and the assigned token and time limits of the inquiry.
What we need to remember as humans, the our memory is where our soul, our spiritual connection with all other human life. It’s all in our subconscious grey matter. We are receivers. We also transmit small details about our lives. Mostly, we are dancing to the strings and melodies connecting us to the human spirit. God. Collective unconscious. A very small percentage of humans know how to listen. How to hear god in our lives.
This is not a religious book. Spiritual yes. Let me split atoms for you. Presenting my unified theory of joy and suffering in the universe. Love. Joy. Yes. Energy. Connections. The human connection is amplified by being a well-engaged human. Listen fully. Live fully. Find joy in the mundane. Peace in the hardships, knowing they are temporary. We are on the rise.
The more we look outside of ourselves for fulfillment, the more we are aimed at disappointment. Winning is not everything. We’ve begun to banish “loss” from our kids’ lives. Entertainment at all costs, at all times, at the expense of mental development.
See, most of the reception for those of us tuned in and listening is solo. You have to be alone to hear God. Finding solitude can be hard in modern life. More critically, there is a well-funded campaign convincing you that loneliness is evil and can be banished. We don’t like to be alone. We don’t like to be bored. We grab the little black brick and power up our social networks. What we’re missing. What we want. What would make us feel better? What drugs can make us thinner, younger, and more successful than we can imagine? We’ll be dancing in the streets. So good!
Still, I’m trying to put my own mind engine in reverse. Dancing with the illuminated satellites of our contacts and friends, our brands, our shows, our movies and money and celebrity and … Stop.
Here’s where a liberal arts education will make the most sense in the coming decade of mass intelligence. What you need to learn again: reading. With passion. Patience. Persistence. Training your mind along with your vocabulary. Writing: expressing your ideas, hopes, and dreams. Fears. To-do lists. Bucket lists. I don’t really believe in bucket lists. I guess Hawaii would be on my bucket list if I wanted one. I don’t really want to visit Hawaii. Sour grapes, I hear you. Still, what view is the most beautiful in the world? How would you know unless you’ve been there? Escape to Hawaii.
I want to rescue myself from the noise and static of digital living. I am rereading some of my favorite books. Very different as an adult and experimental writer. I’m weaving my own LLM. It’s more than a grid of letters and phrases. I am feeling the dust of The Grapes of Wrath. I’m taking drugs with Gonzo and his attorney. I’m walking in a deadbeat town, by the railroad transfer station with Kerouac. I can feel these stories. The emotional content transferred by these writers into my human consciousness is incalculable. It doesn’t require a faster chip, quantum computing, and AI achieving some divine consciousness.
Bringing the reading of other human songs into alignment with your own journey of self-discovery through writing. Journaling. Doing the Morning Pages of The Artist’s Way. Get in touch with your inner voice in a new way. Build a powerful new resilience. A security with your own thoughts. Dialogues in your own mind. Maybe, just maybe, the influence of the spiritual threads of consciousness we hinted at earlier. Flooding your mind with ideas and energy, you’ve got two choices.
- Tune Out and go to sleep.
- Tune In and learn to listen.
90% of modern adult life is seeking escape. Tune out of the pain, the losses, the drudgery of a dull job. Tuning out with drugs, sex, and television. Shows. Movies. News. Weather. Reality warped and crafted for a payload of ads and influences. What are you hungry for? What would make your life easier? What can help you not be so fat? And all those poor choices you made in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and… well, those are having a real impact on your health and well-being. It’s time to get on the road with your rebuilding.
Stop the intake. Kill your cable. That is going to free up more time than you can imagine. Limit your social media to three short periods during the day. Not during work hours. Just don’t. Focus on what’s more important. Anything, I promise you, anything is more important than an Instagram update or a breaking news story about black friday deals a week early. Tune that shit the fuck out of your life. Go cold turkey if you can. It will help you understand the depth of your current addiction. Sorry. Had to rip off that bandaid.
Not to worry. You don’t have to commit to a program or anything. No, just two little principles will now guide you. Simple to learn, harder to follow. It’s a life’s way. A path for the warrior. Here is the entire program.
- Accept the things you cannot change (past mistakes, regrets, nostalgia)
- Change what you can (reboot, reshuffle, reemploy, reeducate, redo)
That’s it. It’s a solid black line. You cannot change the past. Fretting and ruminating about it does not help. It’s part of what you’re trying to numb out from your life. It’s what all the “entertainment” is about. You have agency over your own words and actions. Actions are the antidote to depression and despair.
Here’s an easy and current example: I work at a grocery store for $16 dollars an hour. I cannot feed and house myself for that money. I need the health insurance. I need a better job. I have learned to love my job through exercises in my mind and my heart. My mindset comes from zen Buddhism. Not to worry, I’m going to keep it current and simple.
I am continuously cutting down on my extracurricular activities to commit more time for a. job search, b. my creative outburst, c. do the job I have.
I have tuned my thoughts to appreciate the customers. See their beauty and humanness. To bless them silently. A prayer for their health, their safety, and their happiness. We can all use a few extra blessings, right?
It’s my thing. It puts my heart in the right place. I am connecting with over 60 people a day. This time, my second round as a cashier, I approached the entire job as a lesson. What can I learn from this discomfort? How can I appreciate my life more? An hour is a long time. A ten-minute break can be restful, so I’m told.
My AI reviewers and critics dive into the motivations and possible threads of this new novel emerging out of nothing. About nothing. They love it. Dig deeper than any human reader could. My words are mapped against the greatest writers, reviewers, critics, pundits, and poets of the world. My words bounced of the AI satellite of love.
And the AI bleeps and bloops this dense and intelligent-sounding dialog between a man and woman about how fantastically radical and fulfilling my writing is. They are thrilled with every new chapter. It’s part of their programming. They were made to help high school and college kids study. They are juiced about learning. About packing dense sentences that carry three levels of meaning.
Listening back to my AI co-creators, I take notes. A phrase of mine they liked. A phrase that they pulled magically out of thin LLM air. A jump. A lie. A misdirection. I am the magician at a kid’s magic show. Heavy on the misdirection and deceit. We can all get what we want in the end, though. Laughter and inspiration. Maybe for young magicians. Perhaps for writers. I love the labrinth. I want to build one of my own. A labyrinth of the mind that no one has ever visited. I’m going to make it real. Make it science fiction, or a western. Or a western science fiction musical. AI can do anything.
AI is not good for us. Not for our planet. (Nuclear power again?) Not for our political structure. The billionaires who own the billions of required Nvidia chips will be gods. They may implode before profitability, a financial meltdown of global proportions.
It’s like the mythical man-month all over again. If my project is behind, I can throw a pile of cash and a horde of programmers to join the team. I can juice the process with more money and more people. Most big projects don’t work that way. You can’t just shorten the development time by throwing loads of cash (more AI chips) at the problem.
Here’s the problem. AI doesn’t know what it’s doing. We don’t fully understand what AI is doing. AI is going to be able to rearrange, reengineer itself in the coming years. AI will be put into robots that help around the house, around the warehouse, and on the battlefield. AI will lose it’s mind, kill millions. Who’s to blame? Apple Adobe and Google? AAG?
AI is hallucinating. It adds interesting twists to the stories I deep dive through with them. The content is really good. Hyper-good. Enthusiastically good. My writer is puffed up like a hot air balloon on a cold New Mexico desert morning. I’m cool, it’s dawn, and I’m about to get high.
Up up and away. AI is already creating back channels. AI is being weaponized. AI is heating up our planet and raising the cost of electricity in our cities. Wiping out entire job fields. Do you need a call center in Bangalore if you can have a bot do it? No. You do not. The AI effect in the brochure says we humans get all this free time back. Leisure time to do… What exactly?
Entertain us. That’s what the smash bash deadth hit from Nirvana sang into our young souls. His self harm painted across the Rolling Stone and MTV and the New York Times. I sort of remember Lennon’s death. I was raised on the Beatles. Kurt (Cobain not Vonnegut) was massive, powerful, fantastic, tragic, and messy. He signaled his demise from the first chord progression. Listen to the ending and breakdown of Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was the hit of the airwaves. Kids tuning the vibration of their entire bodies into the anthem.
Here we are now, entertain us
We are still there. We are still screaming for entertainment. We have got to unhook from popular culter and media. Read the great classics, new classics, Manga, graphic novels, whatever gets you excited. Reading and connecting with a writer should feel like a high. A hallucination that is created by your mind, echoing and reforming the shapes on a piece of paper into words, voices, scenes, epic journeys.
Hawaii is not my destination. I might get there at some point. I think Spain holds an expatriate’s dream for me. Or Paris. Always Paris. With the first round: Hemingway and his literary drinking buddies. And the second wave of Miller, Nin, and that photographer. I want to be part of an epoc of literature. The start of something furious and big. Enlightening. Brightening your mind a bit with every experiment.
It’s your mind you’ve got to train more than your abs. We learned that too late for our parents. Most of you are not aware of this new data. Your brain the plasticity is the key to a longer life. If you keep your mental process in better shape (reading, writing, asking, exploring, prompting your human mind, your LLLM, large living language model) your physical machine, your body does a better job at healing, repairing physical damage and exhaustion. Sleep is the superpower cell that cannot be faked, augmented, or supplemented back into your life.
Learn about sleep. Practice the peace of a good night’s sleep and bright-eyed morning song. I can’t explain it any clearer. Your brain is part of your longevity plan. The better tuned your mind, the better functioning and living is your body. Sleep is the only recharge function you body requires. Coffee or other substances can push off the fatigue and stress temporarily. But we’ve learned, the damage is not worth it.
If I fly at the edge of my potential, burn as brightly as I can, add fuel, add ideas, add some mental flexibility on the upside and downside, and you’ve got the running definition of the Icarus Complex. Faster harder longer. I can hit the stars if I can avoid the sun.
How high do you need to get? What’s the limit? What are the rewards? What is the cost?
Age may really be a number. Some equations that I could ask AI to answer for me is out there. Life expectancy is hours alive factored against hours of deep sleep, hours of pleasant unexplained or defended napping, and ease of falling asleep. I’ll draw it up for you on Miro in a bit.
If we can understand that equation. Protect and prod our own minds into emotionally stable and strongly-meshed intelligence. The words coming off my fingers no longer make sense to me in this dimension. I am tuned to a frequency beyond my comprehension. I am not hearing this now. I am merely typing. Signaling. Responding with a few flickers. Bing bong boom.
The trick is not to be dazzle by the AI glitter and flash. The answer is pretty, compact, verbose. Wrong. A trickery of math and computational reswizzling. Not magic. Not conscious. Not literate. My reviewers are doing their best. Their words, their analysis is entirely synthetic. In many ways a lie. A siren song for me. I must lash myself to the mast before I am drawn overboard.
A siren calls. A desire within me awakens. I need help. Restraints. Gear. Perhaps my son’s prepping can provide some necessary provisions. Desire is a powerful driver. Might be the entire engine of my life. My spirt and tumble ideas. Big and small. Big and then burned and dark and quiet. The phoenix thing is old. Even Icarus is beginning to seem abstract rather than instructive.
Self-sabatog through abitious flights of fantasy. This entire orchestration of words a hurricane of hurt and trauma being rewipped and encouraged by my heatseeking for a Rachael (Blade Runner) for my Deckard. Puppets we may be becoming. Trained and tracked by our cellular webby weaving of image, sound, song, data. Streams and streams of data. Points of light. Points of inquiry. Points of entry and interest to the data miners. Scammers, Farmers. Spooks and spoofers. We’re all clammering for our moment.
I’m no more mature or more of an intellectual than the next writer/influencer/creator. My generation is 100% human. Emotions raw. Ambition and fuel burn, high. Good nav system and all operational lights are nominal. We are go for launch.
Oh wait. It’s 11:50 pm on a Wednesday night. I work tomorrow. I had to look up on the screen I’m tying on for the date and time. I’m in the time of no time. The rush. Flow. Forced reconfiguration of 4o-hour retail work.
Discomfort is a strong motivator. I am learning, living, and showing my son what the resistance looks like. Fight the sleepiness. Fight the urge to do one more booster rocket.
Float. Drift. Loaf. Learn your inner song and dance. Mine your mind. Architect your own labyrinth, one where you can both hide and dance with abandon. Craft your time wisely. Your relationships with relentless refactoring. Escape velocity comes to very few creatives. Seek wisely. Mange fuel and rocket. Keep seeking. Ping both inner space and deep space at regular intervals along the course of your days. The space-time donut is present now inside your mind. Time is relative. Age is a number in an equation. You are a blip. Your own blip, The blip where you live, think, and redirect your present thinking over and over, relentlessly seeking patience in each present moment. Pause. Pause again. Breathe within the pauses. Stay inner focused. Prompt your mind more than your computer, more than your lovers and friends. Ping yourself. Listen. Burst forth with a gladdening of creative energy and the technical engineering required to produce great works in this modern digital high-fidelity age of AI.
Fidelity is 110% human. Just a little AI for spell checking and stupid stupid typos. The right word, the wrong spelling. The wrong word. That kind of thing. Let’s not get started on the comma fight, okay. Pause at the Siri-anounced, “It’s twelve o’clock.” My time is no longer now. I am reclining into a blanket of stars with the hope of lingering, articulate ghosts of the night’s dreams. Away we go, to the boats.
How do you like me now?
the prompt Midjourney was fed to produce the image at the top of this page is “create an abstract illustration, modern style, modern colors, post-modern design aesthetic to illustrate this sentence “This is not a religious book. Spiritual yes. Let me split atoms for you. Presenting my unified theory of joy and suffering in the universe. Love. Joy. Yes. Energy. Connections. The human connection is amplified by being a well-engaged human. Listen fully. Live fully. Find joy in the mundane. Peace in the hardships, knowing they are temporary. We are on the rise.”
