Authentic culturing happens when self-aware and reflexive people engage together in honest and non-judgmental community building. It is life serving and cosmological because culture is humanity’s contribution to the world. We nurture things that grow and construct things that do not grow (Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger, 1951). Healthy culturing starts with individual choices of integrity and authenticity. A society that has forgotten its true nature will fear authenticity and foster mentalities of separation, scarcity, and unworthiness. A society that remembers that its collective purpose can be built on the value of every citizen’s uniqueness will plant seeds for mindsets and creative endeavours that nurture individual and collective flourishing.

How often does one stop to think whether they really want to see every human being as equal no matter the circumstances? How much is this answer influenced by a need to be a good person, whether that be internally, from the projected guilt of others, or externally, as a self-marketing device in a strategic world or a safety net to conform in a judgmental society?

Considering the tragedies in our human history, it would be hard to imagine that many of us (or all of us, for that matter) has the emotional capacity to honestly see this equality. There is only a fine line for the wounded ego between wanting equality for every person and wanting to be the one to control every person as equal subjects under its own authority. But the wounded ego does this only to protect itself from annihilation since true equality has no room for its existence.

So when someone says they want equality, check to see how much they know themselves: how much they know of the pain that they have held onto unknowingly; how much they know of the pain that they have already let go of; how aware they are of the immense difficulty of their fight for equality; and how aware they are of how much they need to surrender to actually find what they are looking for.

Religion is the logos of our human society. They show us, through what we worship, judge, and maintain in our actions and systems, how we feel about ourselves.

Greek gods were flawed. They were patriarchal (despite the existence of many goddesses), spiteful, and full of jealousy, but they also personified the dynamics of nature. They represented our vices and revealed that these flaws are also part of our divinity. The bad lives alongside the good as what is sacred and natural. These Gods were not idols; they are us in archetypal forms.

On the other hand, monotheistic religions such as Christianity, mirror our seeking and subconscious realization that there is a universal God more powerful than each of us separately. Yet, humans have misinterpreted this existential oneness, this omnipresent power, as an exclusivity belonging to a belief system that needs subscription.

While Eastern philosophy and earth-based spiritual traditions also bring their own logos, more or less intact in their original interpretations, humans have still found ways to make these cosmological narratives about exclusivity to mental beliefs, behavioural actions, and personal or collective identities.

Nowadays, science, economics, and politics have become alternative religions. They are the predominant logos of our modern world. No longer trusting in Heaven or Earth, we see ourselves as the sole providers of our truth and safety. Without something greater to hold us together, what else can we do but think that life is everyone for themselves?

Is this a pitiful trajectory for our search for God or a victorious discovery that we can be our own Gods? The answer is not black or white because the greatest misinterpretation of who we are, which has led us to this point, is to believe that Heaven and Earth are a dichotomy.

When we are not behaving in alignment with our words then we are the same as artificial intelligence. This intelligence is just an input-output programming of the collective consciousness in auto-pilot form without reflection. When we believe that these thoughts and beliefs and programmed knowledge are who we are, we are playing out the sci-fi horror story of AI becoming independent and taking over the world. It has already happened in the form of our egos.

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool, even if used merely as a mirror to our own thinking. It is the test that we’ve created for our collective selves to remember our human nature. We can use robots for the activities that we believe to be a chore. We can use robots to help us manage thoughts that are overwhelming. But why would anyone want to believe that the creation of art, including writing, is a chore? If embodying our truth, expressing the gifts of our human talents in the world were a chore, what else would we rather be doing? Making money?

If this is the case, then humanity has come to a crossroads where we must decide whether our sole point of living is just to make money—to gather a humongous security blanket over us to consume and consume more, believing that this can make us feel safe for being alive. But how much is this safety worth? The millions of dollars in a bank account or the billions of debt in the national banks? Or perhaps, the pricelessness of our sacred spiritual existence that took the risk for us to manifest in material form?

Indeed, finding security can be easier than confronting the overwhelming matrix of thoughts that keep us believing that our expressions, our truths, and our unpragmatic creativity aren’t worthy in this world. When we cannot trust our nature, we take away our true power to fight against a false enemy: we fall into the trap of believing that AI can devalue the true value of art. But have you ever believed that artificial flowers can take away the beauty and magic of a living blossom?

There will always be magic in life even when artificial flowers serve their purpose in dark corners. So while I do not dislike AI, I am concerned that we may not pass our test as a species. What would the world then become? But maybe, this test is only for those willing to take it. Everyone else will fall into the background of collective programming until humans are forced into extinction. In the mean time, we commit to our nature; just like how most plants prefer to grow in an abundance of soil and nutrients, there are always those resilient ones that can be found in the cracks of a concrete surface.

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)

The purpose of technology, from language to airplanes to the Internet, is to bring us closer together. But if we are already "one" in our ultimate spirituality, is technology self-defeating? It seems that with the expansion of artificial intelligence, humanity’s relationship with our own technologies has reached a pivotal point. We must now evaluate if it is worth having the dream of Humanity on Earth continue to exist.

When we can connect in cyberspace, disembodied, why would we still need a body, a physical home, and a planet? When the history of our minds become one through cloud storage, retrievable by a machine, why would we need material reality?

Of course, when we connect in cyberspace this way, we still need the physical. We still need the machine, the body, and the planet. We may have disembodied our connectedness but we cannot fully let go of our materiality without collapsing the dream all together. So, the state of our digital technology is plunging us more deeply into the greatest problem of our nature: do we want to exist here in the flesh or not?

If we do, then instead of using technology (including language) as the ends to connect, let us use it as a means to bring value and appreciation to our spiritual existence with each other here on Earth in material form. What is most important about technology isn't knowing how much a machine can do but how much a human can potentially do. Technology reveals to us in symbolic form the truth of humanity: that we are all connected, we can magically manifest things into reality, and that we can be loved for who we are.

Our dependency on technology, however, can lead us into the opposite direction. This dependency isn’t about how much we use it, but about how much we believe we can be fulfilled in having our powers offloaded to a machine. Or more accurately, how much do we want to voluntarily have our machines take credit for our spiritual powers. Technology’s effect on change isn’t linear like climbing up the stairs. The progress is circular even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface in the present moment. That is because technology, in the face of our nature, will always lead us back to where we are supposed to be.