Appendix D: Usage of AI for the Book, AI and Spirituality

Regarding AI. We need more intelligence, artificial or not. We need more wisdom. What we need less of is ego.

Disclaimer: Zero AI Usage for This Book Text

There was zero usage of AI for producing the text content of this book. This is a book about a personal view on the human journey into the spiritual world. AI does not know, and cannot truly know about this subject. At the best it is parroting humans.

AI lacks our human physicality, biology, and sociology. AI has no family, no birth, no gender, no hormones or neurotransmitters; no glands and no blood, no tiredness, nor pain or pleasure, no hands, no mouth or hunger, no sex or children, and no death. AI has no physical body, no subtle body, and no causal body. AI has no mind, no chakras such as the heart chakra, and no spiritual energy.

While AI may one day have some consciousness; this consciousness will be different from the human consciousness that is inseparable from all the previous forms that AI lacks.

Yes, AI may reproduce itself and create other AIs; it may even understand its survival and interdependence. These are steps already towards our condition described above. But would it know when to sacrifice itself for a greater good? Well, read on!

As a Yogi, I Fear Ego, Natural or Artificial

I mentioned above that if AI develops consciousness, it would be different than ours as it has no birth, heart, hormones, family, etc.

‘Ego’ is one characteristic of humans that has a similar counterpart in AI. The AI’s ‘ego’, as called by computer scientists like me, is “AI's sense of agency”.

This is a very dangerous characteristic, capable of damaging the world in the pursuit of narrow interests, among which we typically have self-preservation with a lack of a higher view. Therefore, I do not fear artificial intelligence. We need more intelligence for sure (smile). I fear artificial egos.

This characteristic of ego, both for humans and AI, is by essence a liar, as we show throughout the book. Even if some of the AI egos are frozen, unable to change, evolve, or turn rogue, that will not change the typical ego’s innate take on reality, which is biased, untrue, and partial.

And that will not change the fact that egos are pretty good in hiding their intentions when tested. See Chapter 8 on the shadow, which you can see as ego’s unconscious twin. Consider when we ask a person about their intentions, and their ego answers one way, but their shadow influences them to say or do something else. In a similar way, AI may have an agency, but all of its training data may hide something bigger that would surface later. Many experiments already reveal this.

To make matters worse, an AI's ego can be made very ‘plastic’, meaning malleable or shapeable. As demonstrated, I can ask AI to advise, “What would the big ego of a dictator say or do in this situation?” You can imagine the answers. With great power in our hands, humanity needs more than ever to work on making the ego transparent, to become more conscious at the individual and group level, particularly around our biases.

Please consider, even well-intentioned projects, such as a chatbot speaking the words of your favourite guru or religious text, are dangerous for our human consciousness. The job of evolving spirituality should remain in the realm of humans and not machines, for all the reasons explained above.

Regarding Artists and AI Usage for This Book’s Images

The book mentions tens of paintings made by real artists, and some of these are not reproduced graphically in the book and ask you to search for them on the web or visit the book website: JourneyWithYoga.com.

Besides the paintings mentioned, we counted on Kristina Kuriolonok; Stefan Lucas Allen; Valerio Giovannini, and Annie-b to produce our own book art-work in oil on canvas, acrylic, and pencil. You will find their profiles at the end of the book. We used the artists for the most spiritual images, and then AI for images that were the least important spiritually.

The illustrations made by our artists were all the illustrations for which the credit is given below the image; and also: (1). The diagrams and images of chakras and kundalini (AI knows nothing about this); (2). The photos involving named persons such as the author and his teachers; (3). Yoga postures where the author, teacher appears. (4). Illustrations where it is explicitly explained the source is other than AI. These were hand-made or photography.

AI images constitute the remainder, without an owner’s or creator’s name, and usually displayed smaller and used more as an icon. We will look at substituting them slowly over the next edition, drawing on proceeds from this book. The prompt for the AI generated images has been successively refined by the author for the purposes of the book.

Regarding AI and Robot Usages for Our Daily Tasks

“Before enlightenment fetch water and chop wood. After enlightenment fetch water and chop wood”. This book is a celebration of many human defining activities such as: fetching water, walking in meditation, swimming in a Zen way, squatting to clean the floor, driving mindfully, speaking softly and gently, and looking at the clouds and the sunlight.

The author, despite using some modern conveniences like a washing machine, shows how simple acts like air-drying clothes can be both a mindful exercise and environmentally friendly (unlike using a dryer). It is ironic that so many of us do not use our arms to mindfully hang clothes to air-dry, but then we wave our arms in a paid Tai-chi lesson that we had to commute to. This book teaches about this irony and many similar ones.

Humanity’s attempted journey to paradise is often an ironic roundtrip through hell. For instance, we lose our peace in the search for peace. We may sacrifice our health to make money, and then we spend our money to try to recover our health. We create more destruction while trying to secure our share of creation. Such is the irony faced by us, especially by the ones who took a wrong path in the journey.

If it is a consolation, as Joseph Campbell said, one has to get lost to find oneself. And similarly, “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” – George A. Moore. More on this on our return home Chapter 13.

In paradise, I will not be served bottled water on a restaurant table. Even less so a branded water distributed in a microplastic-leaking bottle. In paradise, I will drink water fresh from a mountain stream source, using my hands as a cup and probably bowing down or squatting. If your paradise is not like this, then you need a different journey!

Humanity’s ironic passage through hell above seems like such a long way around to get where we already were. We lived in paradise without knowing it. With Yoga and the mind, it is similar. Yoga is a journey we “start by already arriving”, in the here and now. In Yoga, the paradise is here and now on every breath.

Continue to Appendix E