It’s been two years since we moved two miles north of our previous home, where we lived for a decade. When we moved, we thought of it as scaling back to a smaller space, and it’s true: we now have a smaller yard, one less room, and both cars are inside the garage instead of the pile of junk that covered every inch of our old garage floor.
My current office is set up virtually identically to the office I had in the sunroom in our old house. As I sat on the couch this morning, looking at my computer and desk on the far wall, I realized they’re about five feet closer than they used to be, and that now I have to move carefully around the coffee table in the center of the room that used to float in open space like a raft in a pond in our old sunroom.
This configuration of furniture and equipment in a space that is about 40% smaller has become so familiar that I don’t usually notice this reduction. Except this morning, something about this process of shrinking itself struck me as familiar. Then it came to me. That’s how my memory works.
Events and circumstances have breathing room as I experience them. But when they have been stored in mind as memories, there is little space around them. Memories feel like garments that have been vacuum-packed in storage bags, with the air sucked out. Just as air is needed for garments to take shape around our bodies, we need space in order to experience our world. But in memory, events are largely shorn of the spacious lift that allow unknown next moments to keep showing up in life as we live it.
For me, mental depictions of past events feel like collapsed versions of things that were once spacious. Perhaps that’s why I have a persistent sense that a greater realm underlies and animates this visible one—as when an underground river feeds the roots of a towering pine tree, its branches waving in the breezes that blow across the land.
I try to keep that kind of vision alive in an evolving world that seems to be collapsing into a replica of one that once lived and thrived.
A few days ago, I received an e-mail from a friend, with whom I have studied over the years. He is the man who made an online spiritual discussion group happen at a time in my life when our son had just died. So, when I received his e-mail stating that he was contacting a few friends who share his spiritual interests, in order to ask if we could support him in attending a winter retreat with our teacher, I gladly made a contribution. But now, four days later, I have received no acknowledgement of my gift.
A suspicion has begun to gather that his e-mail has been hacked and an AI program that has accessed everything he has ever written online about his contacts, his interests, his allegiances, and the kinds of thing he likes to do. As each day goes by without a word from him, I find myself suspecting that an artificial mind has been set loose with the instructions to use all that information to compose a request for money and to send it to targeted individuals who share his background and interests.
I hope that he has just not checked his e-mail since sending out this request.
I have already experienced the capacity of AI–generated programs to exploit my hope that my books will interest others; “and reach the readers that my vision deserves”. Some of these e-mails must have harnessed AI software that has read everything stored on my website (summaries of my books and hundreds of blog posts); because they speak with an uncanny “knowledge” of things that even I have forgotten. And then, incorporating all that information, they speak in the voice of someone who understands my psychological tendencies better than I do.
I suspect that we all now need to discover in ourselves some core humanity that cannot be captured in a spreadsheet of characteristics or reduced to our demonstrated interests. Our new world has learned how to reflect back to us images that let us feel we can help with a few keystrokes. It isn’t that easy to recognize when we are in the company of grinning clones that have been sucked dry of the fresh air of wonder and human companionship.
A very timely reminder of how insidious the internet can be. Everything written or posted can be used against others – or sometimes FOR others (which is probably OK) as in the case of a sick friend who has benefited from others’ knowledge. I write as I feel; nothing noteworthy or terribly ‘avant garde’ (as in never before been said!) but I like to write when I have the time. I enjoy your written pieces Michael and hope they keep coming!