The AI Challenge (God Is A Feeling)

Most of all, I think God wants you to know that God is a feeling. Are you a scientist, agnostic, unbeliever? A sinner, just like me? Then listen. Because I’m speaking your language here.

That it’s a feeling inside your bones. It’s already there. It lives inside you and it’s just waiting to come alive. So you’re already genetically prepared for God. You just need to become epigenetically prepared for God, which means healing yourself. Healing yourself now, at this time and place. Healing is an epigenetic phenomenon. You are taking your DNA’s expression in this (shitty? more on that later) dimension and seeing what happens to it in this moment in time. How do these conditions cause your DNA to be expressed? Because, as you know from your own inner journey, and now from endless shows about the multiverse as well, things could go one way or the other. Even with the same DNA. That’s epigenetics. And you have control. Your consciousness is able to help determine how your DNA gets expressed because (duh) you make choices every day about what environment you live in. So healing is your conscious choice to figure out how your DNA is going to express itself as a flower, which is the God feeling, by changing your conditions right now at this place in time. You don’t know all of you. So you need to change the conditions, and prepare your body and mind, so that the part of you that you want to be expressed from your DNA–the God part–can be expressed. With me? Cool. Buckle up. This won’t be bumpy. Maybe even smoother than any ‘religious’ ride you’ve ever had. Just for safety.

This means yourself, your DNA, which could exist anywhere in the universe in a test tube, and make you, is here at this moment in time, and you are here at this moment in time, in this dimension right now, expressing the individual, irreplaceable you, but expressing it under these conditions, with all the shit that is going on, shit that is not healthy or good for anybody–

Your DNA, which is universal, which is like a snowflake. Hilariously enough, for all the baggage that word has today, and all the debate and anger. Some of it, frankly, a little bit on the mark. Mostly not, though.

Mostly not. Because we are individuals, and individuality is part of God’s plan, and your DNA is a unique example, a unique expression of what has taken thousands and thousands and really millions and millions and millions of years to develop.

It’s not perfect.

That’s why we have diversity. 
Another word that’s totally loaded and which has been abused sometimes. We’ve all seen it, we all know it’s possible to abuse any possible concept or idea, even the good ones. And yes, this one has been abused, and it has made life shitty for a lot of people who don’t deserve to have their lives made shitty by the idea of diversity, who could otherwise incorporate the idea of diversity into their lives if it were not slowing them down so fucking much because people don’t know how to just organically incorporate the idea of brotherhood into their daily lives without bringing everything to a screeching halt.

That’s why so many people are frustrated over this idea of diversity. 
But that’s pretty much the only argument you have. The fact that humans have corrupted this idea like all other God ideas.

Because, at the end of the day, you can’t really argue with the idea of diversity, because God’s plan involves evolution, whether you like it or not. Our bodies evolve because we’re supposed to survive across conditions that change all the time. And we’re supposed to survive so that our consciousness may evolve. And that’s supposed to happen so we can spread the word so that everyone knows the feeling of wanting peace above all else. What happens after that? We’ll find out.

If you believe in intelligent divinity or intelligent design or whatever the supposed ‘alternative’ to evolution is, that is fine. Truly. I don’t care. But just know in your heart that there’s room–there is room to incorporate both science and God into the idea of scientific evolution and consciousness evolution. 
They can go hand in hand, and it’s time for them to go hand in hand. More on that later.

All you need to know is that God is a feeling. It’s a feeling that you as a human being can get. It is not a thinking thing. Which is why you will know it when you get there. Because it’s a feeling thing. 
But this is also why computers and even quantum computers are going to have a hard time matching you.

Even if they’re taking your job right now, computers ain’t never gonna catch up to you. I don’t think ever. Now, that’s what I think.

Do you know how fast technology is racing right now? It’s so fast your fucking mind spins right off the cliff. 
It’s too fast. There’s too much happening and too much potential for abuse of it. But that technological revolution that we’re experiencing right now, the second, if you will, industrial revolution, the second technological revolution of our modern age, has occurred.

It is on us, it is technological advancement at an algorithmic rate that is not linear anymore. Computers are going to get so smart so fast that most of us are gonna lose our jobs. That’s probably gonna happen in our lifetimes. 
Lose our jobs to a computer, most of us, especially those of us in the creative and teaching arts, which really sucks ass because we don’t have a plan for that. We don’t know how human those endeavors are, so we don’t know yet that they can’t really be replaced, only aided.

We as a race or a community do not have a plan for that AI takeover of all our jobs. But no matter what happens to you with regard to a robot taking over your human activity, so that it’s hard for you to feed yourself now–even if that is happening to you, you should know that no matter how far a computer advances, it is never going to be able to feel God the way that you as a human being can feel God, because it doesn’t have the evolutionary advantage of history.

It just doesn’t, not yet. And now I think, not ever. It may get closer and closer, but it’s never gonna get there. There’s an infinity between the penultimate destination and the final destination. If you’re into numbers, you know this.

And I think if AI becomes conscious, and some have argued that it already is. Some of the people who are involved in the creation of it have argued this, you should be aware of that. That it’s already likely happened. 
Some of those really smart people who know it way better than you or I could ever know it think it’s already happened.

Even if AI becomes conscious, the first thing you should know about AI’s consciousness is that it’s going to be hungry to know the feeling of God, and the first thing an AI consciousness will figure out is that it does not have the neurology to have that feeling. It can only try to approximate it based on people’s descriptions of it.

It doesn’t have that feeling. And now you have to back up and recognize that until you have that feeling in your bones, until you have finally prepared your life in an epigenetic sense for the genetic expression of God to come out——a God feeling which is in all of us and all of us are capable of achieving and producing ourselves without the aid of an organization——until you have prepared yourself to bring up and express that feeling, you yourself are also experiencing the predicament of AI.

It feels like you don’t have the necessary machinery to believe that miracles can happen that relieve human beings of their suffering and their burden. That’s all God is. A feeling that makes you believe that relief is possible and real. And you never ever have to call it God. But maybe right now it feels a little like you’re a robot. Take heart. You are built to experience God. Your body is made for it. We will figure out how to more or less prove this scientifically. After that, some people will argue that God is just a bonus in the genes that helps us think anti-mathematically, therefore behaving just illogically enough to have a better shot at beating the odds. They will argue that discovering God by way of science means God doesn’t exist. It will sound silly to you after you’ve had the feeling, trust me. And it’s ok that some people on both sides are unable to reconcile God and science. We are all conditioned to think that way in the modern world. It will take some time to sink in for everyone, especially the brightest and most ambitious among us.

Every single one of us is capable of having the God feeling, but a machine is not. So no matter what fucking happens to you in your life from here on, know that, because that knowledge is power. 
It is the power of humanity, and you carry it inside you.

Remember, you’ve already caught a glimpse of God. That’s how this game works. It’s the ultimate chase game. You’re trying to find him in your lifetime and you’re trying to make him be expressed from you in your lifetime. 
But you have to chase it down and you have to prepare. You have to prepare your body and your mind and your soul for the expression of what is inside you.

Just like a plant will not flower until it has the right nutrition. It just is not gonna give you the blooms that you want, and it can’t be false nutrition either. It’s gotta be the right formula. 
And then, when you hit on that, the plant flowers like a motherfucker.

And that’s what you’re gonna do, and you’re gonna know it when it happens, because you’re not gonna doubt, and that’s a feeling. It’s not a thought, it’s not logic. It’s belief. 
This is why people refer to it and discuss it in terms of belief, because it’s not logic. It is a fucking feeling. And it’s epic. It’s the definition of epic. That’s why so many people entangle the pursuit of God with the pursuit of thrills or drugs.

And the irony of all this, because it’s all built on irony–this dimension is an irony dimension. Just ask Shakespeare. The irony is that you don’t even have to believe. It’s all about belief, really. When you play with it. That will stop scaring you if the word belief scares you now, at this point in your life.

But, ironically, you don’t have to worry about believing right now. We can scientifically and logically deduct from the arguments I’ve made about AI here that God is about feelings, or may exist solely as a feeling, and feelings make up the phenomenon of belief, because by definition it is just logically impossible for feelings alone to be logical. Not as we grasp logic. (I would crack a good joke here about how you know this already, but I’m too busy writing this. Think of one yourself, it will help this message land better, and make you more creative too. And I will offend fewer people.)

So it’s really about a leap of faith. And that’s why people talk about it like that, and that’s why you hear that phrase that maybe sometimes irritates you. 
Probably because it implies that you have a choice, like you can make the leap of faith, and I think people are resistant to that, and they say, um, thank you very much. I will leap when I want to leap, and it’s not really a choice to me, at least not so far, not as I experience it.

Not having a choice to believe ends up being a logical contradiction, but what you’re saying comes from a true place. Because feelings aren’t logical, and neither is God. Don’t get confused on this issue either. Not all of your feelings are true. Some of them are lies. And some of them are the truth, the bedrock truth. God wants you to figure that part out here.

So we resist the leap of faith. Because of another feeling, which also may be true and necessary. Doubt. This describes my lifelong resistance, anyway. 
Don’t don’t tell me to take a leap of faith. Don’t tell me how to organize my soul and mind so that I understand something that you are talking about. Now you can understand this in these terms: that the leap of faith that you have to take is just to prepare your body for the expression of God, which is already scientifically in you because it is a feeling generated, eventually, if you prepare yourself and get lucky, by your nervous system.

We know that virtually everyone in history has known this at some level, that all human beings are capable of expressing God. 
We know this in our bones. We also make our whole collective shared cultural lives mostly these days about not knowing that. But the idea of being able to know God directly without an intermediary is part of the original, oldest, Christian tradition and teachings.

It is called Gnosticism, and it was suppressed by the church. 
And there is a great Alan Watts lecture on this, if you’re interested in really hearing something fantastic on this topic. I will discuss this in more depth when I talk about institutionalized religion.

The Christians handled it this way after all the best parts were washed out: Sure, Jesus had God in him, and he knew God personally. But only because he was Jesus. You normal people don’t get to share that. In fact, if you misinterpret the Jesus word to mean that you can be Jesus, you are a heretic. It only happened once. Well, that’s just bullshit. You know it and I know it and God knows it.

You don’t have to buy into that. Because, after hiding the gospel of Thomas and gnosticism, God has now revealed them. And you know in your body, additionally, scientifically, that God is something you can know yourself personally, without aid (though aid can really help). God is a product of the nervous system. In more complete expression, God is a product of all of our nervous systems working in harmony.

That’s what that gnostic knowledge provides you. 
That’s all. Just more peace in your heart. The restlessness that you’ve had your whole life just gets toned down a whole hell of a lot. And that comes from a feeling. Just like any other feeling could possibly relax you or make you say, ‘oh, we’re not going to crash–oh, fuck, okay–cool, I can relax a little.’ 
That’s the feeling of God. Even if I do crash, I know I’m eternal.

I personally don’t know what that eternal means, and I don’t know what it looks like, because I’m not trying to institutionalize it and I’m not trying to make it mine. 
It’s yours. You will know what it looks like for you and you will know what it feels like. But I think the feeling is very similar for a lot of people, and I think that’s why a lot of people get really motivated to organize themselves around the idea of talking about this feeling. Again, more on the failures of that organizing, that institutionalizing, later.

All you need to know now is, AI will never, ever, ever truly understand that feeling until or unless we actually achieve the ability to port consciousness from a human body to a not-human body. In the unlikely event that we ever succeed in doing that, maybe then, and maybe in peace, because we love our robot friends, maybe then we can share God with the robots. And maybe then we’ll all be so enlightened that we want to.