Kirsten

from ‘Stand out of our Light’ by James Wilson Williams

Saved this in 2020….

Mentioning machines understanding us better than we understand ourselves. Maybe that is because we do not understand ourselves very well and we have relied too much on machines for that understanding. We increasingly do. Tell me how many steps I took, how deep I have been sleeping…what to do if I am not sleeping. Not saying there cannot be very valuable knowledge gained this way, but if we ignore the other ways that we come to know things of course we will lag behind and will be easily manipulated. One of the big spriritual questions often asked as a form of inquiry is ‘Who am I’, and right now when we ask that question we often turn to machines to answer it. What do I do instead you might say? Humans managed to survive (with fewer comforts you might argue, but also more content in many ways) for a long time without machines. If there isn’t a machine when you ask ‘Who am I’, what comes up? What do your emotions tell you about this? What do the trees say? What do the bugs say? What does your skin say? There are so many answers that have nothing to do with machines and this is a form of intelligence. To have any chance at not being hollowed out by machines we need to turn to this other intelligence and start giving it the value it has in our lives. It comes before machines. It is older and wiser and we would not be here without it.