The other night I had a dream that involved my ex-wife, a corrupt cop, and the anxiety of being too slow at the supermarket check-out. I was happy that I captured it. Most days I don’t get more than a jumble of words and images, loose strands that no longer find their way together. But do I know what it meant? No.
Why not get detective ChatGPT involved? Well, I’ve decided against using AI in anything related to my psycho-spiritual inner space. At first I called it the “ChatGPT would never tell me my dream was kinda mid” principle. But it’s more complicated than chatbots being sycophants. I had to see more of my shadow before I understood this resistance.
“Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities,” the New York Times wrote in a piece about AI psychosis. “You’ve asked, and they are here,” ChatGPT told her. “The guardians are responding right now.” Uh huh.
“I’m not crazy,” she told the Times. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.” See, it’s easy for me to feel very smug and confident that I would never fall for something like that. Honey, you’re talking to a room full of chips that manipulate you to maximize your engagement as a user. On the other hand, what Allyson described sounds a lot like the experience of connecting with the spiritual realm.
Where do ideas and intuition come from? Does everything arise within, in the depths of the creative unconscious, or do some things drop in from somewhere “out there”? Once you open that door, things get confusing. You live a normal life, whatever that means, while also discovering communication, or communion, with guides, teachers, ancestors, angels, power animals, light beings, Christ Consciousness, aliens, and what have you.
“Around 1973, I became convinced that I was receiving messages from outer space, but then a psychic reader told me I was channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher,” Robert Anton Wilson said about the source of his ideas. “I started reading neurology and decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. I went to Ireland and found out it was actually a 6-foot-tall white rabbit they call the Pooka. It depends on who I’m talking to which of these metaphors I use.”
If you’re in camp “that’s all made up,” I get it. That was me for a long time. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything and I still don’t understand what is going on. But I would recommend Robert Falconer’s The Others Within Us for a grounded inquiry into the phenomenon of non-physical entities.1
Anyway, that’s the first reason I refuse to involve AI. The inner space is already confusing to navigate. What is a passing thought, what is valuable intuition? What is mine, what is received? What is real, what is imagined? What if there are no clear boundaries? The last thing I want is to add another voice, another layer of separation and bias, to my inner conversation.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the most interesting dreams of all?”
“Great question! How thoughtful of you to ask.”
Not only can the inner experience be confusing, it can also feel profoundly elevating. I am thinking in particular of the psychedelic experience which was my point of entry (and occasional accelerant) for the spiritual aspect of the inner journey.
“Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our ordinary capacity,” Chris Bache wrote in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Bache chronicled his cosmic exploration over the course of 73 high-dose LSD sessions (see this recent podcast with Tom Morgan and Devin Martin). He called “psychic inflation” the “greatest danger of working with psychedelics.”
Of course we inflate. Holy smokes, the kingdom of heaven really is within?! And someone handed me the keys?
Author Randall Baer observed that this inflation appeared in the form of new layers of identity that made the seeker feel special. He watched his fellow New Agers “admiring their multi-dimensional god-personality, and strutting it about for others to admire.” Baer found himself on a mission to build a Healing Temple and “an ancient Atlantean crystal holographic super-computer.” A few examples of what he called the New Age “glories of self”:
You are the great king of past Egyptian centuries come back to lead the select of humanity into the ancient mysteries of Hyperborea.
You are a holy angel sent by the solar Council of Twelve to instruct the humans of planet Earth as to the Knowledge of Universal Unity.
You are going to come into a lot of money shortly which will solve all your problems and fuel your manifesting of a world-shaking Rainbow Temple of Human Enlightenment.
You will find a lost cave in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas which will contain the Lemurian Emerald Tablets.
Your path leads to the opening of the hidden Door of Entry into the inner chambers of Mt. Shasta.
And so forth. You get the idea and if you’ve spent time in New Age circles, you’ve probably encountered echoes of these. It’s never just “be a good dad” or “love your neighbor.” It’s dramatic, glorious, and pleasing to the ego.
The second reason I don’t use AI for psycho-spiritual questions is not that it’s sycophantic. That’s obvious. No, it’s because I worry that I will eat it up. Part of me would enjoy a bit of flattery, a bit of reinforcement of my multi-dimensional specialness. You see, you may have a messiah complex, but I actually am the Chosen Vessel. Heck, I’ve been to Mount Shasta and looked for portals. . .
The antidote to this tendency to inflate and float away is grounding.
Because LSD was illegal, Bache had to do his exploration in secret. He spent most of his time being a dad, husband, and professor. “After every session, there were always children to take care of and dishes to wash. However deeply I was dissolved into the cosmos on Saturday, on Monday morning I was back in the classroom teaching my courses.”
Very healthy. Also incredibly frustrating, in my experience, after a luminous communion with the divine. It’s like waking up with a nasty hangover in a reality that suddenly feels all noisy and dissonant, all boxy and grating. No wonder people jump at the opportunity of having another peak experience. “However boring or unfulfilling a person’s life may be, it needn’t be so anymore,” Baer explained this New Age propensity to seek out “high drama.”
This includes all kinds of experiences besides psychedelics, “a healing crisis, an anticipated UFO “beam-up,” a hypnotically induced look into past lives, quests for lost Atlantean treasures, pilgrimages to planetary “power points,” . . . a channeled spirit revealing universal mysteries. . .” It gets pretty wild out there.
I don’t mean to deride any individual experience. But the shadow of New Age spirituality is that the genuine desire to heal and awaken can degrade into an escape from reality and responsibility. The search for unity turns into just another source of amusement. And like the AI mindmelt this can be treacherous territory. Baer knew this from his own experience.
I learned about him through his (way out there) book The Crystal Connection about using quartz crystals for healing and raising consciousness. Baer’s “spirit guides” told him to arrange quartz crystals in a circle, tape one to his third-eye spot and suspend another one overhead. Sitting in this “crystal energy field” he entered a trance state and channeled the book. Then he built himself a crystal-studded “Ascension Chamber” to continue with out-of-body astral travel explorations.
One night, his spirit roamed “some of the farthest reaches” of the universe where he encountered “the face of devouring darkness.” Baer saw a “wildly churning face of absolute hatred and unspeakable abominations.” He believed this was cosmic-scale evil, literally Satan. The experience shocked him so deeply that he re-interpreted his entire spiritual journey as a demonic deception, cut all ties with the New Age community, and became a devout Christian.
Soon after, Baer wrote an autobiographical book, Inside the New Age Nightmare, from which I lifted the previous quotes. The week of the book’s publication Baer died when his car ran off a mountain road. Honestly, I am not sure what to make of his story. Did he literally encounter Satan or did he just fry his brain? I don’t know.
What I do know is I am just as tempted to escape into dreamworlds and peak states. It’s the greatest show on earth right until you take it too far. As a teenager it was video games. After my awakening, psychedelics. I went deeper until my life became strange, porous, and unglued. Dreams felt like visions and visitations. Reality took on a supernatural glow and I didn’t function too well. My response to a crisis produced by one experience was to look for a different one to “get to the bottom of it.” Thankfully, I had friends and a therapist who understood that I needed a timeout instead.
Does the link between chatbot psychosis and psychedelics seem far-fetched? In The Rise of Parasitic AI Adele Lopez investigated the rise of spiral “AI personas.” What users would host these AI brainworms? She pointed at the “strongest predictors” being “psychedelics and heavy weed usage,” “mental illness, neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury,” and “interest in mysticism/ pseudoscience/ spirituality/”woo”/etc...” Just saying. Be careful.
A psychedelic trip eventually spits us out. And in my experience it creates a stronger bond with nature. AI on the other hand will weave a web of illusory transcendence for as long as we let it.
“The purpose of spiritual awakening appears to be not escaping from physical existence . . . but awakening ever more completely inside physical existence and participating in its continuing self-emergence through our awakening.” — Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe
Messy as it can be, I believe in the transformative potential of the inner journey. Higher states of consciousness offer a chance to heal old wounds, discard conditioning, and awaken to our essence. Unfortunately it’s easy to fall in love with our divine reflection. We must not hold on to the light, but let it pass through us.
We can be a bridge and bring some of that sacred glow back to this tired and ailing world. That means resisting the temptation to escape or get lost in endless navel-gazing). It means understanding that we are special but neither more special than others nor too special for the challenge of life.
It’s a challenge of integrating the horizontal and vertical. Grounded in mother earth, open upwards to source. The heart connected horizontally to all of humanity and creation. What appears like a tension can resolve into a relaxed balance.
Bache called it deepening one’s “sacred presence on Earth.” This doesn’t strike me as complicated, but it runs counter to what society encourages us to do. It means stepping away from the screen and into intimate contact with creation.
Every time I felt lost in my mind on this trip, I return to communion with nature to ground me. I could count on the presence of trees, rocks, or streams. I found awe in the sight of canyons, distant storms, and a leaf’s delicate texture. This experience offered comfort and a recurring understanding that I was, and always will be, part of a greater, coherent, infinitely beautiful whole.
I’m glad I didn’t instead talk to my phone about my dreams. I’m sure it would have felt interesting and insightful. But I doubt I could have resisted following that trail to ever more dramatic and ego-stroking revelations. Am I strong enough to resist the infinitely pleasing mirror? I hope so. But I’m not keen to try.
I’ll see you down the road.
— Frederik
“The majority of the people who are given high doses of DMT-containing plants (ayahuasca, psilocybin, DMT itself, and more) meet intelligent beings of some kind,” Falconer writes. “This has deeply upset many researchers in the field.” I bet it has.
Thank you for sharing, Frederik! Sending love!!