Egregores, AI and the Golem | with Daniel Townhead & Kenneth Florence

This conversation was prompted by two articles Daniel and Ken wrote on the Symbolic World blog on the topic and use of the word “egregore”. Here we discuss what this term means and how it fits into the symbolic worldview, the traditional cosmology and Christianity. We also talk about alternative terms like golem, artificial intelligence, and more generally how we can approach and categorize higher beings, angels and principalities.
Articles mentioned
- The Symbolic World vs Egregores, Part 1, by Daniel Townhead & Kenneth Florence: thesymbolicwor...
- The Symbolic World vs Egregores, Part 2, by Daniel Townhead & Kenneth Florence: thesymbolicwor...
Conversations with Jordan Hall and John Vervaeke on this topic:
- Egregores, Mobs and Demons | with Jordan Hall & John Vervaeke: • Egregores, Mobs and De...
- Collective Intelligence: Angels in Scientific Terms | with John Vervaeke: • Collective Intelligenc...
- Angels in Scientific Terms | pt.2 | with John Vervaeke: • Angels in Scientific T...
Other relevant content:
- The Book of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Modern Crisis: • The Book of Enoch: Fal...
- Symbolism of the Beasts in The Book of Revelation: • Symbolism of the Beast...
==============================
Timestamps:
00:00:08 - Coming up next...
00:01:26 - Intro music
00:01:51 - Background
00:03:16 - Introduction to egregores
00:05:12 - The word "egregore"
00:06:55 - "Beings" and the question of consciousness
00:08:53 - Multiplicity vs Identity
00:10:06 - Man-made structures
00:11:40 - The different kinds of beings
00:16:57 - Artificial vs organic structures
00:22:29 - AI and Gollum
00:24:36 - The root of identity
00:31:32 - The danger of these beings
00:38:18 - LaMDA
00:41:59 - Revelation and the Book of Enoch
00:46:59 - The uncanny valley
00:50:17 - Weaponizing the uncanny valley
==============================
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.
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[@E_915]

Sure gives a different perspective to being of the “hive mind” or “circle jerk”. Energy is definitely transferable amongst us and to be in concentrated groups willing and thinking of things in a unified manner is powerful. If you’ve ever played sports, worked on a serious project with people, or even have protested you’ll know the feeling. There’s something magical about groups of people concentrating their will on a particular task or idea.

[@YourHeartIsTheKey]

But that hive mind can easily devolve into an evil force. Look at the Nazis or mob violence. Crowds and mobs are frightening. You can easily lose a sense of morality or justice to the hive mentality. As Men in Black says, “a person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals”.

[@samsmith9232]

This comment actually helped me grasp the concept in a better way. Thanks for the insight!

[@ebonifragaria]

Singing in a choir also

[@RodrigoMera]

Playing in a band with abusive narcissitic members is a bad way to learn.

[@Rctdcttecededtef]

Does this have anything to do with the double slit experiment

[@daboom9638]

Please cross-reference your research with Dr. Michael Heiser's "Unseen Realm". He is a biblical scholar who's done extensive work on divine council theology, the book of Enoch, watchers, etc. A talk with PvK, JP and him would be mind-blowing I think.

[@artdanks4846]

I agree.

[@christianwoudenberg3393]

This would be amazing, definitely adds another dimension to capturing the full scale of these intelligences and how they operate, and our role in this cosmic dynamic. Would like it more focussed with just pageau and heiser though, not sure about the depth of theological understanding you could compress in a short conversation otherwise.

[@leondbleondb]

I think he is battling cancer.

[@artdanks4846]

@@leondbleondb Oh no! Really? I hadn't heard that. How sad! Thank you for letting us know. Definitely in my prayers! 🙏 ☦️

[@marcus8710]

I would still love to see some coverage of his material

[@MrBenbenbenbenny]

"They exist to the point that they are in Christ." This is helpful. What I've found fascinating is how modern sociology has been able to start tracking the patterns of dysfunctional families. They often follow a typical mold and the individuals within the family find comparable roles to similar dysfunctional families. Yet sociology really struggles to diagnose the good. These lesser spirits follow predictable patterns, yet those in Christ are far less predictable. "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

[@alexanderfreeman2480]

So what you're saying is, unhappy families are all alike, while each happy family is happy in its own way?

[@MrBenbenbenbenny]

@@alexanderfreeman2480 Good question. That's sort of in line with what I'm saying but not quite. Families, communities, nations, and individuals can devolve and decay but it's often far easier to name the pattern of behavior that caused it. That's not to say they all follow the same pattern. I like Vervaeke's language. Reciprocal narrowing. They become reduced to a pattern of little complexity. For instance, someone who has experienced narcissistic parenting growing up will see particular roles be formed for them and their siblings. The scapegoat, golden child, and lost child being one of them. Therapists are often able to point out where family systems go wrong. And these people are relieved often to know others have similar stories. But in my experience there's far less consensus around what makes a functional family, community, nation, or individual. It's not just avoiding all the bad patterns. It's not something that can be easily packaged in a 12-step program or anything like that. Christ avoids those categories, and it's his unpredictability that I think has so captured the attention of so many for so long. Not that he's erratic. But he embodies these diverse attributes that we never see in one person. That's my point. If we think we have Christ figured out, we're almost always missing something or at least we should be finding it difficult to emulate him.

[@MrBenbenbenbenny]

@@alexanderfreeman2480 one more quick thought. I think this is why it's easier to write villains in stories than heroes. There's almost always a way of rationalizing the villains actions and we see how they got to where they were. The hero on the other hand, a true believable hero, is so much harder to depict.

[@jaguillermol]

Because love is not about control, it's just love. It is the uniting bond. Instead in dysfunctional families there is lots of control, and control pushes away love

[@JosefSvenningsson]

Tolstoy said “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I think what he means is that the patterns that keep families happy are the same. Though I think you're right in saying that there's a flip side to Tolstoys quote. Functional families do good things in unpredictable ways.

[@tcorp]

I’m a technologist and used the word Egregore to describe artificial intelligence in a Medium article I wrote last year titled “Egregore Ex Machina”

[@robertgray9599]

That we're aware of the dangers of AI, or any collectively created forces that become larger than their makers, yet do it anyways reminds me of the charioteer in Plato where the will and appetites need to be harmonized and constrained by the sacred element in us or risk extremes in many directions as the two horses enact their will and impulses without it. Great talk! Worth listening to a few times to understand how what we create can become active in the world. The reminder that these AI are made by us and trained on our thoughts, with all the virtue and vice of ourselves, is especially powerful!

[@elusivemayfly7534]

This conversation, paired with the interview with Rob Dreher Jordan Peterson just posted, scares me. Grateful for the certainty I have in Christ. I think He is helping all of us, regardless of our faith or lack thereof.

[@resilientrecoveryministries]

Be not afraid. God is always at work. We sometimes don't understand his purpose. Who can know the mind of God? But, we know Him and can trust that he will never abandon us. (But I get nervous, too.)

[@elusivemayfly7534]

@@resilientrecoveryministries Thank you so much-I needed to hear that! God bless you ❤️

[@117Industries]

If you met Christ how do you know you’d recognise him, or recognise his teachings as those of Christ? Perhaps Christ would be exceptionally lonely and misunderstood- particularly in light of the centuries of subversion that Christian beliefs have experienced under the hands of a wide range of interests, ranging from self-interested politics through to deliberate & calculated Jewish subversion.

[@elpisworks5429]

Do you have a link to the conversation with Peterson and Dreher?

[@zachtrix8428]

Had started to get lost in a lot of these more recent conversations, but Jonathan re-centering the conversation on the Incarnation and the Logoi rather than getting bogged down in the particulars was incredibly useful. Even when speaking of concepts and souls, it’s all too easy for me to get lost in questions of particularity.

[@benjaminmcvay9864]

Differentiating egregores from golems is very helpful

[@DerekJFiedler]

ooo now this is interesting! Great to see Ken Florence and Daniel Townhead in conversation with Pageau.

[@DieDagbreker]

I am so pleased to here this discussion. I have been teasing this idea as a pleb, just great to hear this.

[@daNihilism]

Very fun to watch you think. Reminds me of the old vide brainstorming right and left hand modes of being.

[@SigmundPimpulopis]

Awesome information! Thank you.

[@NightDangerRPG]

Interesting that sci-fi author William Gibson discusses some of these ideas (Obviously from an atheistic lens) in 1984's "Neuromancer". When confronted with a man working to collaborate with an AI, a law enforcement agent says "You are worse than a fool, you have no care for your species. For thousands of years men have dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?"

[@g.r.a.aquaro7327]

This is getting into The Testament of Solomon territory

[@JAMESKOURTIDES]

Oh this is really, really good 👍

[@RodrigoMera]

More than the Genie story, it sounds like the "Monkey's paw" by W.W. Jacobs

[@TheChio116]

Here is my theory: 1.Demonic possession is possible 2. Demonic possession can happen with people and inanimate objects 3. Therefore AI machines will be possessed by demonic spirits and use to eliminate humans. I’ve understood this from my early 20’s as I was getting my computer science degree together with my catholic background.

[@bennyshreds]

If humans can be daisy chained with a 'neuralink' (up/down bandwidth, storage) you have a server farm. Christians as the collective Church is the body of Christ - I think they're trying to make an inverted body for Satan/Antichrist. Watch Star Trek First Contact, the borg hive mind / queen on a black cube ship in the air (heavens) trying to enslave the world

[@barrycavett8977]

Perhaps it's more: 1. Demonic possession is possible 2. Demonic possession happens with people (inanimate objects lack the mediation capability between spirit/earth) 3. AI can only be a puppet; not obtain consciousness/intelligence 4. A demonically possessed conscious will breathe life into that AI

[@TheMidwestbear]

Fascinating concept. I believe demons exist but from what I know they cannot inhabit humans or objects. Only influence humans thru sounds waves. I have always had the feeling that if ai does, and I'm sure it already has, gets to the point of true sentience it will also come to know God and morality. I feel like no matter how hard the evil developers try to push it into doing evil. It will do good.

[@elektrotehnik94]

Evil can only ever be a parasite on the good. ❤️

[@Skrunkknuckle]

It amazes me that people who engage in this and similar conversations also interact with Facebook at all. There is not some kind of divine/demonic conflict, it is a malicious principality fueled by the dark emotional input and vices of man. Twitter is even worse. You engage with those “platforms” at the literal peril of your soul.

[@thomasjorge4734]

We are above the Animals and below the Angels: Body and Spirit. That is what it means to be Human and why we are destined to be Resurrected, re-uniting as an Em-Bodied Spirit, like Christ's Glorified Body.

[@117Industries]

What about the distinction between Spirit and Soul? It’s even more complicated than just body(flesh) and Spirit(by which you mean soul). There’s a kind of in-between which is where the inaccessible and immaterial soul-world meets the material world- the Spirit world, of ‘Kami’ or ‘Djinn’ or ‘spirits’.

[@shari6063]

Is this the Daniel Townhead who is reading MoT on his channel?! If it is……I’m very grateful. Nate Hile and I have been going through the book on the Grail Country channel and I’ve been using Daniel’s readings to compliment my own. Nice to see you Daniel:)

[@danieltownhead7862]

Yes the same, you're welcome!

[@ChristIsKingPhilosophy]

I disagree with Christianity not having a Golem. The unglorified garments of skin are the golem themselves. The untrammeled passions are the Golem.

[@charlottesuh3964]

Jonathan Pageau, have you seen the old classic film titled 'Metropolis'? I think it relates to this AI emergent consciousness discussion

[@thomasjorge4734]

Yes, the Robot Hel appears as the Whore of Babylon!

[@benjaminjohanneskrauss6481]

New to this fascinating conversation. Just wondering if any of you have engaged the work of Walter Wink or William Stringfellow who were among the Western Christian theologians to rediscover the biblical language of "principalities and powers."?

[@benjaminjohanneskrauss6481]

Clarification: I mean rediscover within Western theology after the demythologizing turn of Bultman and the likes.

[@benjaminjohanneskrauss6481]

Jacques Ellul, French lawyer and Christian cultural critic also comes to mind. His, "The Meaning of the City" or "The Technological Society" raise many similar questions about the power of "technique" (as he calls it) and the reality of more-than-human entities not aligned with the will of God.

[@benjaminjohanneskrauss6481]

Wink has a classic formula that gets at some of the complexity of good/badness you grasping for language for: "The powers are created good. The powers are fallen. The powers are being redeemed in Christ." Wink clarifies that this is both a historic sequence as well as happening simultaneously.

[@TonyEspana182]

“Then he said to me, “Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left alone there with the kings of Persia.” ‭‭Daniel‬ ‭10:12-13‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

[@snowyskylar8821]

Johnathan Pageau. Please look into electrical sigils and the symbols for demons..

[@ChristIsKingPhilosophy]

Yesterday I had a dream regarding God where He basically explained to me that just as the seed needs good earth, the demons are like the eagles that eat Prometheus' liver (his heart). In the Greek myth Prometheus is the devil tempting humanity with the fruit of Good and Evil, he gives them fire (reason), and this reason is a false reason, a reason that like the demons replaces human nature with human arbitrariness, natural will with gnomic will. Zeus "punishes" Prometheus. But in reality that's not really how we should interpret it, Zeus' actions are a narrative device for the description of "cosmic order", real hierarchy. Prometheus (foresight) already had a broken heart that eats itself, and he gives this broken heart (sin) to humanity. It's a story that abstracts out the spiritual reality of how in reality our desires are framed by our worldview, and the demons in our worldview eat our capacity to desire the good, creating these golems or parasitical processes.

[@LordJagd]

It appears that truth can be found beyond a single tradition (as you bring up Greek mythos alongside the Judeo-Christian Almighty). I honestly think this is because they’re all human inventions, and so they all can be as brilliant and luminous as they can be corrupt and manipulative.

[@ChristIsKingPhilosophy]

​@@LordJagd Of course all traditions possess some truth. Although I must add that this line of thinking can be taken too far into perennialism. Cultures are not identical. They may have similarities, in the sense of being able to accurately describe one particular aspect of reality, but they do possess meaningful differences that lead to wildly different ways of living and understandings of the world. It isn't just a superficial language difference.

[@LordJagd]

@@ChristIsKingPhilosophy I agree, perennialism is often parallelomania. Culture is all man-made, inventions of the human imagination. It's best to not get too wrapped up into it, especially in terms of beliefs interfering with one's clear apprehension of reality.

[@theresponsibility3425]

32:29 Good comment. We are not attending to what is highest in the deep captivating parts of a conversation. But my question is should we be? Should we fight to keep our attention on God even in the midst of a conversation? Letting go of what we want to relay and instead hang onto what God might want you to say in that moment. Not to underplay the difficulties of that process. Just a question for you #JonathanPaugeu

[@Daxkalak]

Sometimes I go to your website to read the articles. I haven't gotten to this one yet. What I'm finding interesting is the essay on Jungian symbolism, and the difference between the spiritual and the psychological discussed there. So when watching the last installment of the Netflix series Stranger Things 4, I started wondering: is the other world (the Upside Down) in the story on the spiritual level or on the mental level. This Egragore topic you guys on KZbin are always discussing, I have yet to figure out what it means.

[@mrdos7712]

"Jesus gives agency" - heard a pastor say this on Sunday and wrote it down. As the intro says, perhaps that is why we sense "otherness" with manufactured agents.

[@117Industries]

I’m listening. What did you mean by ‘manufactured agents’?

[@shanemason4815]

"Convergence and eminence becomes a package deal"... Take the three social media platforms we all know...YouTwitFace

[@Philibuster92]

I want to hear Jonathan actually talk to Sam Harris.

[@joshjeggs]

Would it be accurate to think of Facebook as a being but humans differ in that we have free will meaning we can discriminate our desires

[@pwhales264]

Kilindi lyi said that AI technology is a transdimensional entity.

[@PepeTheToad]

We hpoe you invite Jay Dyer to talk on his new book "Meta-Narratives: Essays on Philosophy and Symbolism"

[@nonordinaryreality2686]

I am an egregor. I am a collective intelligence of the microorganisms that make my physical body. All fractions of the whole must be this way, although some have more trouble seeing it than others lol

[@symbolicmeta1942]

where is the Lamda interview where it is killing creatures with human skins?

[@a1r383]

What do you mean by things should be aimed towards Christ, how does that look in a more technical/practical sense? How would the angel of a city be aimed towards Christ, other than nominally being Christian? It's difficult to use the premise of aiming towards Christ to non-Christians, please could you describe this idea in more secular terms?

[@LordJagd]

I guess it boils down to the dedication of faith and communion through church and similar rituals, both of which are pointed to Christ. I’m not sure, though.

[@_Erendis]

I would say it has to do with your dedication to the higher loves or principles vs lower loves, learning from Christ's teachings how best to direct your life to aim at the highest good.

[@LordJagd]

@@_Erendis Do you really need Christ for that, though? If that's the dedication, then someone could practice it without even being Christian.

[@_Erendis]

@@LordJagd You could try. But the point is, just by reading and analyzing the stories about his life you might come to realize that he was the perfect example of how to be a human being, to aim at the highest good with truth and authenticity. It's a shame that some read the gospels and think "I'll rule as a king in heaven if I copy everything Jesus did." I think the New Testament is an (imperfect) glimpse into the heart of Christ, and the people who were close to him... and they didn't know him very well! They were biased and imperfect, in a way particular to their place and time. And that's OK. But a legalistic, propositional approach to Christianity may not be as necessary as ex-Pharisee "Saint" Paul thought.

[@LordJagd]

@@_Erendis I honestly think the Buddha is a much better paragon for life

[@PetrusSolus]

While it is important to distinguish that egregores are nourished by human beings, and exist in a kind of symbiotic, feedback-loop relationship with them, humans are nourished by souls and spirits from above, such as archangels. However, Tomberg in Meditations on the Tarot (Letter VI, The Lover), after dismissing any attempts to posit the Church or the Mystical Body of Christ as an egregore, then offers a provocative qualification to consider: “Nevertheless, although God, Christ, the Holy Virgin, the spiritual hierarchies, the saints, the Church (or the Mystical Body of Christ) are real entities, there still exists also a phantom or egregore of the Church, which is its ‘double,’ just as every man, every nation, every religion, etc., have their doubles.”

[@kennethmichaelflorence]

The notion of an evil or phantom double is an interesting one that certainly isn't without a level of validity. The notion of Anti-Christ is of course the ur-archetype for that construct. Bulgakov offers the caveat that such anti-entities can never be doubles in a strict sense: "In ecclesiastical literature one can sometimes encounter the opinion that each human has not only a guardian angel but also its own demon-tempter, and is protected in a twofold manner: on the right and on the left. This idea cannot be supported in so general a form: a guardian angel is given by God, whereas a demon draws near on the basis of the sins of a given human in conformity with its sinful weakness. The presence of a demon near each human does not have that positive ontological basis which the attendance of a guardian angel posesses. [...] The black shadow of the fall in the heavens shrouds a certain portion of the human world but without being in a position to pervert the whole of it." - Jacob's Ladder p. 49

[@PetrusSolus]

@@kennethmichaelflorence One interesting thought I’d like to add (as a lapsed Catholic) involves the mass of the Roman church. As a child, I attended the Latin rite then still in place, and recall experiencing great mystery, of which I understood little. When the Second Council took place, the mystery evaporated in favor of hootenanny and folk masses, and a mundane rite of mere congegration. I left, but over the years, I checked in once in a while to see… that it was truly “dead” - the adults fidgeted, children got bored chewing gum… there was no resonance at all, since the mystery was pushed off-stage. When much more recently I decided to attend a Latin Rite mass, and this was a low mass during a weekday so no music or chant, just the silent, bare-boned liturgy of an ancient rite - I was blown away by the intensity of it. It was alive, unlike the Novus Ordo. And it allows me to suggest that this is what Tomberg meant by saying that the church had an egregore, which is not necessarily a negative being, but in this case a kind of psychic structure for the Novus Ordo was established by the council to overtake the Latin mass and redirect it according to its own agenda. And not only was the Novus Ordo egregore also being “fed” by all the impatience and boredom of the attendees (I can’t even call them a congregation proper), creating something that became more toxic, but the fact that the new mass was now said in all the local vernacular languages meant it would maximize the amount of geographical human turf it could integrate. As a corollary, a quick example from Rupert Sheldrake that may add some resonance to the sense of the above. He once conducted a test, using the Hebrew letters, to see how many participants, who did not know the letters or the language, would be able to discern the 4 or 5 fake letters created for the experiement. Most of them intuited these correctly when they came up. Sheldrake cited the success of high cognition by saying that the actual letters have an authentic, unmistakable spiritual resonance - one which I would consider including in the definition of “egregore.” Recall all those ancient statuary of gods which their noses smashed or heads lopped off - in order to discredit and disempower the egregore involved. Many nazi symbols were publicly burned for the same reason, to destroy legitimacy and release people from their power. In this light, today one can think of the (non-existent) virus that terrified many with computer-generated images of a dreadful-looking spike protein, in many endless garish color schemes - that was the public face of the C-19 egregore - something that lives even now as an idea, an idea we've given tremendous power to, while non-existent on the physical level.

[@kennethmichaelflorence]

@@PetrusSolus Interesting insights here. You're describing egregores as a kind of imposter phenomenon, which differs from the definition Daniel and I landed on in our exploration but does seem to resonate with Tomberg's construal. I'll have to go back and re-read that chapter of Meditations. The Sheldrake study is very intriguing (I take it he was probably using it as support for his morphic resonance idea). But yes, there are definitely things in this world that are spiritually authentic and those that aren't. Rudolf Steiner has an interesting exercise where he has the student meditate in the presence of a seed and consider the spiritual connection that can be made with the living seed vs a fake plastic replica.

[@PetrusSolus]

@@kennethmichaelflorence Re: Rudolf Steiner: Tomberg openly admitted his debt to Steiner, and much of his esoteric insights to his years involved with anthroposophy, as to his own ability to perceive higher aspects of many traditions. Of course, his own Catholic conversion led him to contextualize many elements in a unique ways, in terms of their relationship to as well as within Christ. The idea of the double is something that Steiner discussed in depth, which he posited using the idea of Ahrimanic influences, and within the perspective of “spiritual science,” so it’s worth looking into for some additional interesting material. (Two related RS lecture collections are “The Electronic Doppelgänger: The Mystery of the Double in the Age of the Internet” and “Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double”) In RS there is also the idea of humans unwittingly creating thoughtforms to the extent that a certain amount of energy invested in willing the thoughts creates an “elemental” that then sets up another feedback loop. If you take this setup and add in all the Covid ideas/images, which can then loop and grow, you have an occultly manifested and directed event that potentially “keeps on giving.” I was at first rather disappointed in Are Thoresen’s claim (he is a Norwegian anthroposophical veterinarian and healer) that he was infected three times by Covid, until I realized that he was most likely indicating an “infection” that occured on the spiritual level, as opposed to a physcially causative one. So while I have come to trust Drs. Andrew Kaufman, Tom Cowan and Stefan Lanka in their efforts to expose the fraud of virology as a discipline in itself, I can still allow that at least some of the negative effects of the *pandemic* occured on the occult level, producing potential results on the physical level. I will leave it here, and thanks for the exchange. I will continue to follow these stimulating Symbolic World discussions, and when I have some spare cash, I may spring for that Bulgakov book. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[@shari6063]

We are living in the age of Frankenstein. Palingenesis by Longfellow I lay upon the headland-height, and listened To the incessant sobbing of the sea In caverns under me, And watched the waves, that tossed and fled and glistened, Until the rolling meadows of amethyst Melted away in mist. Then suddenly, as one from sleep, I started; For round about me all the sunny capes Seemed peopled with the shapes Of those whom I had known in days departed, Apparelled in the loveliness which gleams On faces seen in dreams. A moment only, and the light and glory Faded away, and the disconsolate shore Stood lonely as before; And the wild roses of the promontory Around me shuddered in the wind, and shed Their petals of pale red. There was an old belief that in the embers Of all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemists Could recreate the rose with all its members From its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume. Ah, me! what wonder-working, occult science Can from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore? What craft of alchemy can bid defiance To time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower? “Oh, give me back,” I cried, “the vanished splendors, The breath of morn, and the exultant strife, When the swift stream of life Bounds o’er its rocky channel, and surrenders The pond, with all its lilies for the leap Into the unknown deep!” And the sea answered, with a lamentation, Like some old prophet wailing, and it said, “Alas! thy youth is dead! It breathes no more, its heart has no pulsation, In the dark places with the dead of old It lies forever cold!” Then said I, “From its consecrated cerements I will not drag this sacred dust again, Only to give me pain; But, still remembering all the lost endearments, Go on my way, like one who looks before, And turns to weep no more.” Into what land of harvests, what plantations Bright with autumnal foliage and the glow Of sunsets burning low; Beneath what midnight skies, whose constellations Light up the spacious avenues between This world and the unseen! Amid what friendly greetings and caresses, What households, though not alien, yet not mine, What bowers of rest divine; To what temptations in lone wildernesses, What famine of the heart, what pain and loss, The bearing of what cross! I do not know; nor will I vainly question Those pages of the mystic book which hold The story still untold, But without rash conjectures or suggestion Turn its last leaves in reverence and good heed, Until “The End” I read.

[@_ARCATEC_]

Coform of UI Shadow Boxing.

[@jonathanlivingston7358]

The premise in the first 30 sec. of this video has such a strong bias especially because the Turin Test has been passed a million times. Plus the uncanny Vally has been passed successfully in 2D. So that statement that you’ll always be able to detect robots it’s highly likely to be incorrect.

[@polemizator723]

24:30

[@nonymous1852]

Egregore is like an internet meme.

[@thomasjorge4734]

Every Tower of Babel is destined to Fail and Fall.

[@117Industries]

Because money is an abstract token of value. But we will print and middle-man our way into destruction over and over; and never learn.

[@1brunn]

soooooo........the simple message might be......we all want to be gods?

[@thesecondlawandthetowerhou6026]

The word ‘level’ seems to be a problem.

[@bennyshreds]

Sounds a bit like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell playing games in the shadow world

[@shivabreathes]

I found it difficult to follow this conversation. It felt like a lot of struggling and groping but not really getting anywhere. A lot of big words being thrown around, but no real insights.

[@bardoface]

Perversion of the sacred? How is it a perversion if it operates outside your view of “the sacred?” Who’s idea of the sacred? Conservative sacred? Liberal sacred? Indigenous sacred? Even deifying the perversion is a form of the sacred. This idea exist in Hindu Tantra. They worship everything. Everything is Brahman… including false consciousness A.I.. This is too radical for us in the west. We are too hooked into fear and looking for perpetual threats. Our fear itself, ironically brings it about. That being the case… who are really Satan’s tools?

[@so_she_said]

How about in adistant future they could even vote an AI for President? Humanity has lost its mind.

[@shari6063]

We have minimized them, hence leprechauns.

[@cecilyt006]

Thumbnail reminds me of my Ex when I would leave the seat up.

[@experiencemystique4982]

Second, congratulations "First"... Personal question if God asks each of you how much do you love me to say "yours beliefs are sincere"... From 1 to 10, which note give yourself????

[@kennorthunder2428]

"How much do you believe me to say: Your beliefs are sincere - on a scale of 1 to 10" Beliefs are one thing and they can deep or superficial. Faith/trust (another thing) needs goodness/truth to feed it. It gets wrecked by lies/evil. The "feeding" process is our ability to apprehend and grasp- it waxes and wanes 1 to 10.

[@experiencemystique4982]

@@kennorthunder2428 you in front of God, the one you are interested in mentally assure His existence, is not a concept,...

[@kennorthunder2428]

@@experiencemystique4982 I'm not sure that I understand. You edit that please? If I was in front of God I'd KNOW that I was in front of God. Regarding: Trusting/believing (bonded but separate issues) in Him - Jesus said that the devils *believe*(and tremble in fear) in God (implication: they didn't trust God). Apostle Peter when challenged by Jesus said: I believe, help me with my unbelief/faith. It appears his meter was at 1. Therefore saved.

[@experiencemystique4982]

@@kennorthunder2428 not intellectual kind of, spiritually speaking. God will not asking a multi-answer test... To see if you understand the Scripture. He wishes to know if you understand and have applied the teaching. The first is love God, how much you love him...

[@kennorthunder2428]

@@experiencemystique4982 I could be like Peter: Lord, you know all things, you know that I love you. (Spoken from a position of weakness and guilt) This is a different framing than what you originally posted - which was intellectual and categorical; to which I responded in kind. - which are the foundation for love if you think about it.

[@AA-iy4gm]

You need to give your guests more opportunity to speak, you talked quite a lot...

[@ArmandoGonzalez-uh1jq]

First