So today we're talking about how to be smarter than artificial intelligence.
And this is something I am so passionate about.
And in many ways I believe it's a huge reason that a lot of us are here on Insight Timer right now.
Years ago,
I don't know,
I was reading something by Tony Robbins,
I think,
And it was very interesting.
And he was recommending this other author,
Or he had co-authored a book with someone,
And the book was called The Singularity.
Now when I teach Tantra,
I talk about the singularity,
But I define the singularity as God space.
Whatever you understand that to be,
If you imagine there's duality here,
You and me and the computer and me and the dog and the bone or whatever,
This is duality,
That we're experiencing each other.
But then there's also the singularity that we also exist in.
Whether it's the quantum field,
God consciousness,
The universal galaxy,
Whatever we want to call it,
There's something magical about the singularity.
The singularity is where we come to when the masculine and feminine come together.
And I'm not talking about gender.
But when those polarities come together,
Magic happens.
We enter the bliss state.
So the singularity that I understand is a bliss state.
Well,
This other author that Tony Robbins had talked about had written a book called The Singularity.
I was so excited.
I was like,
Oh my gosh,
Oh,
Someone's written a book about this thing that I'm so fascinated by.
So I ordered the book on Amazon,
Plus a few more books by this guy,
Because I thought,
Oh,
I found another teacher that I want to really learn from,
And I'm so excited.
And I get this book,
Because I had no idea that what they were calling the singularity was the moment that artificial intelligence surpassed the human.
And I have to tell you that I was sick inside.
It hurt something inside of me so deep that I can't even explain the darkness I felt inside that people thought this was possible,
That there were people out there consciously trying to create artificial intelligence that surpassed the human experience.
I actually threw the book in the garbage,
And the other books were the same kind of thing.
And I just,
I was,
I can't even explain how it lit a fire inside of me that made me wild.
It just made me crazy.
Then I got really thinking about it,
And I thought,
Well,
What if the problem really is,
Is that AI can surpass us if we don't act like real humans?
If we reduce ourselves to nothing more than computers,
And not particularly bright computers either,
Right?
A computer has nearly,
Not it is an infinite,
But phenomenal capacity to just simply chunk out data,
Much more than we're going to be bothered with living actual lives.
So compared to that,
If that's all we are,
Is something that chunks out data,
Regurgitates something we've heard,
Clip clops through our life based on the conditioning that we learned as our,
In our families,
Or our education,
Or our workplace,
If that's the life we're going to live,
Then AI easily can surpass us.
Because why would we ever want to have the capacity of some trillion terabyte computer system?
But that's not what it is to be human.
We're not just computers regurgitating information.
We're not just conditioned lab rats.
We're more than that.
Human beings are more than that.
We have intuition.
We are divine beings.
And that's when I realized we have to really look at that.
What does it mean?
You know,
When we say that we are spiritual beings having a human experience,
When we say that the world is a magical place,
When we say that I want to hear divine guidance,
I want to have multi-dimensional experiences,
What does that mean?
Really?
And are we living that way?
Or are we living like computers?
It's something so important.
I remember Thoreau talked about this.
Henry David Thoreau,
Henry David Thoreau,
When he wrote Walden,
Because he watched people,
And this was hundreds of years ago,
He watched people just sort of entering this machine of the workforce,
Believing they had some kind of freedom.
And he was like,
You have no freedom.
He even went so far as to say that if a person was,
If he was gifted,
Or if he inherited land to farm,
That he was less likely to truly expand in his human dimension than if he was abandoned as a child and raised by wolves in the wild.
He would be more likely to actually tap into his true human self than if he had inherited land to farm,
Because all you did was become a slave to the farming,
To the land.
Thoreau decided,
You know what,
I'm just going to go and live in the woods.
He was really good friends with Emerson,
And Emerson had this big property.
So he went and lived down on a pond on Emerson's property and built a house out of nothing,
Like out of old scraps from other houses,
And grew a little bit of vegetables.
And he just thought to himself,
Okay,
How little would I have to work to survive,
Actually?
Like when we think of Henry Ford created this five-day work week or whatever,
And 40-hour work week,
What if that's not what humans need?
What if we all,
Living collectively,
Without sort of the greed of just sort of making money for somebody that owns this big company and creating all of this extra consumerism and all that,
What if we only had to work an hour a day?
What would we do with the rest of our time?
We have been so conditioned that work is everything.
We even believe our education system is about work.
You have to take the right courses,
Go to the right schools,
To get the right job.
Everything is about work.
So all of a sudden,
If I said to you,
Did you know that you could only work one hour a day,
And that's all you had to do to contribute to the village,
What would you do for the other 17 hours that you were awake that day?
Would we sit and watch Netflix?
Would we scroll on Facebook?
We have actually lost the connection to our creative selves.
We've lost the connection to the human ability to play,
To explore,
To create.
And it's really an interesting thing because those other aspects,
The way we would spend those 17 waking,
Unstructured hours,
That's what makes us human.
That's what sets us apart from the computers,
And we've lost touch with it.
So it's really interesting to think about how do we get that back?
Because unfortunately,
Because the less we do that,
The less we play,
The less we release ourselves from the conditioning that we've been raised in,
We actually start to devolve.
Devolve.
That we don't evolve at all.
We're going backwards.
We have no unstructured time,
And if we do,
We spend it watching things that a computer algorithm is showing us.
Don't get me wrong,
I use social media,
And I like to sit and watch TikTok and whatever,
You know,
Get a bit mad at myself sometimes if I waste too much time on it.
This isn't about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But being really aware,
Are we actually spending time as humans?
Or are we nothing more than a computer chunking through the day,
Reacting to people in perfectly conditioned responses?
That person,
That parent,
That father,
That mother,
That partner,
That child,
They know that if you say this,
If they say this,
You will react in this way.
They can guarantee it every time.
Like a computer,
Just programmed in.
How much time are we spending not being that?
In Buddhism,
Some of the practice of mindfulness in Buddhism is things like brush your teeth with the opposite hand.
Do things in a different order than you normally do.
Why?
Why would the Buddhists tell us to brush your teeth with your opposite arm?
Why would they do that?
Well,
Our conditioned responses,
Well,
Because we have a lot of habits that we need to get out of these habits,
And then we become kind of mindless,
And we just sort of TikTok through,
You know,
And it's again,
We have a conditioned response.
But what's really going on?
So in Buddhism,
They don't really believe in God,
Perhaps.
And again,
Just to forget about the words,
But there is the desire to connect with shunya,
Zen,
Air quote nothingness,
In many ways,
The singularity that I call it,
The unlimited potential of life.
How do we do that?
By breaking out of the conditioning that separates us from that by actually every single thing we do in the day,
If you actually look at our life,
What do we do every day,
Constantly,
Constantly,
Constantly.
Even if we shake it up,
We probably constantly do the same thing.
Why?
So one of the places that we can really look at is how often in our life do we actually reduce ourself to not only just a three dimensional being,
But a two dimensional being.
This goes along with this de-evolving that one of the things that makes us human makes us interesting or makes us divine,
Or that activates the upper chakras,
Is that we live in a multi-dimensional world beyond three dimensions,
Four dimensions,
12 dimensions.
AI can't touch that.
AI can't really touch three dimensions.
It can do two dimensions probably.
And this is what we do when we reduce ourselves to an avatar on a computer,
In social media.
We present ourselves with our smiliest face.
And don't get me wrong,
I put a nice picture on my profile.
It's not like I take a picture of myself rolling out of bed or something.
But we just have to be careful that in our own hearts,
We aren't two-dimensionalizing our life and trying to present ourselves as this two-dimensional life.
Because this is us de-evolving.
It's like going for a walk and not taking our phones because we're not going to take a picture to post on Instagram.
We actually go for a walk and if we see something so mind-bendingly beautiful,
We actually sit down and have a multi-dimensional experience with this,
Whatever it is.
We don't try to find the right light.
We don't try to take 25 pictures on our phone.
That's two-dimensionalizing our life.
And again,
I'm not saying never take a picture.
I'm just saying sometimes if we get too attached to our Instagram or our Facebook or whatever it is you use,
We literally walk through our life looking for ways to replicate it in two dimensions.
And even we start missing the third dimension,
Let alone the fourth dimension or the fifth dimension.
We're not hearing the birds singing in this beautiful picture.
We're not smelling the earth.
We're not realizing how relaxed we are.
We're not allowing ourselves to have thoughts and new ideas.
The idea of mind-bending.
Viktor Frankl,
One of my favorite people who formed so much of my thought.
If you don't know Viktor Frankl,
He was an Austrian Jewish psychologist,
Psychiatrist who ended up in Auschwitz and Dachau and he was in four different concentration camps in the Second World War.
He wrote a great book called Man's Search for Meaning and he developed a psychology modality called logotherapy.
And that what it means is healing through meaning.
Because one of the things he found was in the concentration camps,
The people who were most likely to survive were those who were oriented towards there being meaning in what they were experiencing.
In the darkest,
Most inhumane experiences,
Something in them said there was something they still needed to accomplish in life.
And these people,
They somehow survived it.
In logotherapy,
He defines three different aspects of the human.
So two were normal,
Like they would always consider the physical body.
You know,
The physical body has needs or reactions and responses.
And then there was the psyche,
Which is really the brain.
This is where we can be conditioned for responses.
This is where we can amass data,
Information,
Knowledge,
Whatever.
But then he had this next part and he called it the nuos,
Which meant mind.
And from there,
He called it the noetic dimension.
N-O-E-T-I-C.
This is the noetic dimension of man.
Some people also call it the spiritual dimension,
But he didn't want it to sound religious.
He said it's not religious.
It's something that transcends us or transcends even that.
And what's interesting is some people call it the mind,
That the psyche is like the brain,
But the noetic dimension is the mind.
And in a lot of ancient Chinese teachings,
The mind and the heart are actually one.
And they're very separate from the brain because in the mind,
We have wisdom.
In the mind,
We know things.
In the mind,
We have conscience.
We have integrity.
We have humor.
We can love.
We can feel human connection.
We can be empathic.
None of this is in the psyche.
They consider it to be part of the mind.
And so what's funny is,
You know,
So we go back to our scenario where we're going for a walk and we have some experience that is mind-bending.
Truthfully,
I think they're referring to the brain,
That it's breaking the brain and we're having to actually experience it with something else.
So one of the interesting things about Viktor Frankl,
And again,
It's what's wild,
Is in his time,
He was saying that the noetic dimension is what separates us from the animals.
Because I mean,
In the 40s,
He wasn't exactly thinking that computers were going to be the ones that we were actually going to be rising above.
But the noetic dimension,
And the noetic dimension,
It's conscience,
It's integrity,
It's love,
It's the will to meaning,
To actually have meaning in life.
It's the ability to self-transcend,
Which basically means the ability to actually step back and observe ourselves.
That witness mind.
He also included something called existential analysis,
Where very often,
When people were struggling with psychological issues,
Whether it was anxiety,
Depression,
Sexual dysfunction,
Addictions,
All kinds of things,
He said none of these,
The problems actually didn't lie in the body or in the brain.
They weren't just because of conditioned responses or chemical reactions in the body.
These were actually existential issues.
The soul was not on their path.
They had no meaning in their life.
And you can work on the conditioned responses all you want,
But until this person matters,
Until they have that I am moment,
And I don't just exist,
But there's a reason I'm here.
And it's unique,
And it's not about why you're here.
It matters.
I have a soul's calling.
And it could just simply be to have joy in your very specific way.
It doesn't have to be some savior archetype.
But I know that I matter,
And you know what?
You're not the boss of me.
I am a real person.
And so this is where he said,
He goes,
You know,
We can analyze people all we want,
But until they have meaning in life,
They may not survive.
This makes us stand out from the computers.
This is what makes us different.
But in order to do this,
We have to have unstructured time where we're not interacting with algorithms,
And we're not filling our minds with other people's ideas that we want to regurgitate or whatever.
We need to have that time sitting in nature,
Sitting by the ocean,
Just relaxing,
Playing with dogs,
Doing whatever we need to do to get out of that conditioning.
A few years ago,
I got to study with a number of the people who were friends of David Bohm,
Who was obviously my favorite quantum physicist.
And one person was Leroy Little Bear,
Who is a Blackfoot elder in Canada.
And he was so interesting,
Like we got to be on a Zoom call.
He was talking about,
And he was very good friends with David Bohm,
And they used to talk a lot about blending Native spirituality and Native science with quantum physics.
And he was talking about,
So in physics,
They have four major forces that basically create the universe.
One is gravitational force.
Gravity has a lot to do why we're all actually able to sit here.
We're not just flying all over the place,
Or how the planets move and things like that.
Then there's electromagnetism.
And then there's strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.
Well,
One of the things that was really interesting is,
He got talking about,
So strong nuclear force is what brings neutrons and protons together to actually create this physical being.
Strong nuclear force is what makes all these atoms actually get close together,
This force.
It's not electromagnetism,
It's not gravity,
It's what they call strong nuclear force.
And what was really interesting is he said,
I don't know,
We were talking about life and death or something.
And he said basically that the reason that we are alive,
The reason that the cells in our being actually attract each other is because of this strong nuclear force.
But the reason that this being named Katrina or named whoever,
The reason that strong nuclear force exists is because of my will to live.
And as soon as that will begins to decrease,
Then the weak nuclear forces take over and allows those bonds to start to fall apart.
And the body starts to decay and the body starts to atrophy and it stops sticking together.
So that's sort of the decay cycle.
This will to meaning,
This will to live,
This desire,
This feeling that I matter.
I'm not just a set of conditioned responses.
I'm not just here to make money.
I'm not here to make you happy.
I have purpose.
This is more important than we would ever imagine.
This is literally the core of the strong nuclear force that keeps our cells active and alive and makes us exist on the planet.
So if you imagine all of us here right now,
For some reason,
There is a soul,
An entity,
Whatever we are,
Whoever we are,
That will to be here on planet earth has caused this strong nuclear force to bring these elements from the quantum field together to create this being.
And we don't have to explain it.
We don't have to be able to describe it with our brains.
This is one of the weird things we learned in education in school,
Is that if we can't explain it,
It's not real.
Or if I can't explain it to you,
Then maybe I don't understand it.
That's not true.
The greatest things in the universe we can't explain.
Osho used to say that if you've ever had an experience that you cannot describe,
Then you have had a true human experience.
These are the things that really make us human.
Now I have this fascination with satya.
Satya,
Truth.
And truth isn't just,
Here's what I think,
Here's what works.
Truth connects us to that shunya,
That singularity,
That truth on the planet,
Transcendent reality.
Truth is what guides us,
Not as a computer.
Truth guides us as a human.
That's why it doesn't make sense to everybody.
When we stand in our truth,
Satya graha,
Gandhi,
This was Gandhi's big thing,
Right?
To stand in your truth.
Graha just means to stand in satya,
Stand in truth.
This is not a conditioned response.
This is not something that I figure out from a pros and cons list or a spreadsheet where I've balanced all the data and optimized the solution.
This is that for some reason I know this is my path.
I know that I'm going to succeed.
For some reason I know this is my path.
And I stand in that truth.
I stand in that conviction.
This is a human quality and it cannot be understood and it cannot be controlled and you cannot erase it.
So the importance of listening within,
The importance of listening to that truth within you that is your connection to the divine,
To whatever gives your life meaning,
That is what makes our life different than a computer.
This is what says,
Okay,
Which way am I going to turn?
I'm going to turn right.
Why?
Why am I going to turn right?
I don't know.
It just feels right.
It's the same thing as,
You know,
I just started teaching yoga in this new space and it was so interesting because again I had just put out this little Facebook ad.
The response was different.
Something inside of me knew something's different in the wind.
What's different?
And then of course someone comes into my life and says,
Katrina,
I've got this beautiful new dojo and I really want you to teach there.
And something inside of me says,
I'm supposed to do that.
And all of a sudden I see crowds of people doing Kundalini yoga in this tiny little town of 8,
000 people.
And I keep stepping forward and I keep stepping forward.
Do I know this is true?
Should I be getting this great big auditorium to fill with people?
I don't know.
All I know is that I know,
But I can't explain it to you.
And so last night we had our first class filled with beautiful people,
Filled with magic.
It was a magical night.
Even the chanting,
Like it just rang through your soul like something else was happening.
It was absolutely off the charts.
I didn't know that.
That didn't come from some important process that I went through.
And this isn't beyond human.
This isn't superhuman.
This is human.
When we think of these upper chakras,
Our lower chakras,
Yeah,
That's what governs the world.
First chakra,
How do I fit in the world?
And the second chakra,
Interacting with people.
And the third chakra,
Who am I in this world?
Everything beyond that is beyond what artificial intelligence can program us to do.
Love in the fourth chakra?
This is literally unending love for the universe.
This is receiving love from the universe.
This is just everything.
The seventh chakra,
What's this really?
Do I really believe that I'm connected to an infinite consciousness and infinite wisdom?
A galaxy filled with,
I don't know,
Beings and all kinds of interesting things?
Do I really have intuition that will guide me beyond all the conditioning and expectations of others?
The wild thing is I like conditioning.
I once was a very easily conditioned person.
I was the firstborn.
I wanted to do the right thing.
I wanted to be the good girl.
I wanted to be the good child.
I wanted to be the good student.
I excelled in school because I wanted to.
I wanted to get the A.
I wanted to get 100%.
So I was so easily conditioned for you to make me do whatever you wanted.
As long as I could get an A,
As long as I could be,
As long as I could excel,
You could probably make me do anything you wanted.
Well,
That road eventually ended up,
You know,
Marriage and children and what have you and eventually in great despair and depression.
Because of course I wasn't living my life.
I was living a heavily programmed life.
I literally,
My university degree,
I have a Bachelor of Mathematics and my specialty is combinatorics and optimization.
That's actually what my degree is in.
Combinatorics basically is when you take a great big system,
You create an algorithm for it and then you optimize it.
You write a program to optimize that system.
Like if you imagine taking an airport and you take all the planes and the fuel and the people and the stewards and the pilots and the passengers and the food and the da da da da da and all the different destinations around the world.
You create this algorithm.
I write the program to optimize it so you can just sort it in a button push.
This is what my brain digs so much.
So very,
So honestly this makes me so easily programmed because I'm already wired like that.
So here's me going through my life doing all the right things.
Marrying a good man and having two children and buying the farm and going organic and having foster kids and growing all my own food and just I'm going to do everything perfectly.
Perfectly according to who?
According to the computer program?
Like according to what?
I was a highly efficient computer but whatever the great big computers were at University of Waterloo where I studied,
They were probably smarter than I was just because they had more storage capacity.
So of course I crashed and burned,
Ended up with breast lumps and sickness and but the universe is magical.
Just at the right time a man enters our life who is initially just simply our mentor to shift our farm to organic.
But of course he has healing abilities and he is a true teacher.
Why?
Why was he a true teacher?
Because in 1987 he was electrocuted.
He was carrying an extension ladder and he hit a hydro wire,
A power line and he was electrocuted.
He basically died but when he came back there was no more conditioning.
He was living in Shunya.
He hadn't studied.
He didn't study under a guru and get certifications and x number of modalities because everything we'd ever want to know lives in the singularity.
This is what the movie The Matrix was showing us.
They showed it in that you know the scene where she needs to be able to fly a helicopter and she radios up to Tank and says I need to be able to fly a helicopter and bam the program's downloaded into her now she can fly a helicopter.
And this is what they're showing us.
All we have to do is access the singularity and we can do anything we want.
All true wisdom is already out there.
This is what makes humans amazing and that's what Jim had.
He had it shocked out of him and all he had was all the wisdom of the universe at his fingertips because the conditioning was gone.
There's nothing for any of us to learn.
It's all inside of us if we can get rid of the conditioning.
So the wild thing is a lot of my journey to heal was to release the conditioning which is why Jim always said to me you have got to learn to shut off your brain.
Your brain is what keeps you back which was impossible but luckily when you're afraid of dying my mama just died of breast cancer four years before that and her mom and all that so I was suitably afraid so I was willing to try something different and eventually I could turn my brain off and as soon as I could turn my brain off I could hear other little nigglings other that said call this person and of course my brain wants to jump in and say why that doesn't make any sense you already talked to them that's ridiculous but that little voice and this is where we start to connect with satya.
We start to connect with something else other than our brain other than the conditioning that we've been given and then you start to do those things and then all of a sudden something different happens all of a sudden something really cool happens and then you start to do those things all of a sudden what we would call miracles start to happen because they don't make any sense a miracle is simply something that is not explainable by science or what we've already understood of course historically they would say oh well it was from a divine source or something like that yeah the singularity shunya god consciousness the quantum field however you want to call it it does come from there and the hilarious thing is my life changed almost instantly not instantly over the course of the of the healing journey over a number of months or whatever and after that that little voice would say something and i might have i might have argued with it a little bit but i still knew what it said and eventually i would follow it and my kids and watch it and they'd be like the things that happen in your world katrina or mom and to this day if i choose to do something my kids are like yeah of course that's what happens in katrina's world but that's what happens when humans act like humans can you imagine if all of us listen to that all the time can you imagine what an amazing world we would live in and then suddenly computers i love computers i love technology i was a computer programmer for years i think computers are brilliant as long as we remember that we're human and computers help us have conversations like this with people around the world they help us do complex mathematics they help us do amazing beautiful graphics and great things very efficient leaving us time to really explore other truly human endeavors i love computers but it's really important to remember who is the human here who is the bigger entity the other big thing i want to mention is i remember when so when i was sick i was trying to understand why some people heal and why some people don't this is actually what i researched after when i started writing my book what if you could skip the cancer one of the things that this is where i first started discovering quantum physics and chaos theory non-linear systems theory things like that because our medical world and the science that we understand doesn't actually map the human experience it maps what a car does or how a plane flies or how to build a bridge but it doesn't map why did this person have a spontaneous remission why did that person die what's going on here it doesn't explain the human condition but when i started playing in chaos theory and things like that and victor frankel the whole very fact that what happened that you no longer are connected to your the meaning in your life and suddenly you figure that out and all of a sudden the cancer goes away why why does that happen and this was really really interesting to me and what's interesting is so they have these this idea that a linear system is like a car if a car and a track you push it at this speed it go you can totally calculate it it's easy peasy change the fuel change the air pressure change you know it's easy you can do all that but we are not we are non-linear systems we don't even have a word for it all we can say is it's not linear we are infinite systems we are chaotic systems and what does chaos mean chaos does not mean crazy wild out of control well it does mean out of control it means not controlled not negative it's just not controlled and chaos is fascinating fascinating because chaos is also where we feel alive where we feel human so for example right now you guys were mentioning that where you live you know you're having unseasonable temperatures in some places that have never ever experienced snow like living in the desert in new mexico suddenly they're calling for snow and that it's balmy and warm in scotland right now well what are we going to do with that what are we going to do with these chaotic elements of our life do we complain about it because this is not according to the conditioning we are accustomed to this is causing a glitch in my system is that what we're going to do with it are we going to analyze it and blah blah or are we going to sit quietly make an entirely different choice chaos upsets the environment the structures it upsets the conditioning and it lets us access something we maybe didn't even know was there in 2011 we had a big tornado come through goddridge i loved it and i know that sounds weird but to experience human beings in chaos felt so real even though we were traumatized even though we were hurt even though things were crazy and we had no power or gas or anything we had to eat on the streets together people would bring us food and it was just a nightmare we were constructed the militia was here and they'd closed down the town and we couldn't it was one of the highlights of my life to experience humanity in chaos like you really connected with people you had real conversations there's no small talk everything's real it was okay to sit on the side of the street and cry you really found out who was helpful and who wasn't you really found out who was ingenious and who had came up with good ideas who could think in this in the moment and it also threw lots of people right off the deep end but how important is that because those things that threw them off the deep end were already there they were just quietly eating away at their soul from the back end and now they were all on the front lawn the power of chaos is incredible and this is something that computers cannot replicate so they'll even do something like they create random number generators because they try to replicate chaos because they understand that sometimes this is needed but of course they can't do it they still have to write a program to do it but they can't do it it's not possible a computer cannot create chaos and the wild thing wild thing is even what they call chaos isn't chaos because it's fake chaos so for example they'll create if you if you put your music on shuffle theoretically this is a random number it's based on a random number generator and then it kind of picks out different things in your playlist but of course it actually isn't random because they've realized that human beings don't want to hear the same song twice so it's randomized unless it picks the same song twice and then it goes to the next one and you can't so it's actually full of rules it's not actually random at all and what's crazy is sometimes we will do the same thing in our life that we will actually create false chaos just to upset the apple cart but this also isn't really chaos it's false chaos it's kind of like when we rebel against our parents or we rebel against the school we're not actually acting out of chaos we're just creating fake chaos to upset people so that we can have a bit of freedom true chaos is when you sit quietly and you ask yourself what is the truth and you make a different choice and it comes out of the nothingness it comes out it doesn't come out as rebelling against the system it doesn't come out as false randomness it actually is untethered you know it's that that book the untethered soul if i do something simply against my parents they're still totally in control i'm not wild i'm not chaotic i'm just reacting to them i saw this video by jordan peterson all about something called chat gpt and apparently it's this artificial intelligence program that you can just say i want a 3 000 word essay that is written in the spirit of taoism cross-referenced with the king james bible and all this stuff and it'll create this essay that is grammatically perfect and sounds very intelligent because of course it's just based in reams and reams and reams of essays and books that have already been written so it's very easy to sound intelligent when someone just regurgitates a bunch of stuff that other people have said it's not very interesting really and it was really interesting watching it because of course he's sort of what talking about it like you know it's a real doomsday thing and this is nothing about jordan peterson it's just this is my response to what he was saying because the response is kind of like oh my god they're really taking over like the essays that i see online they were probably written by a computer ah right there's this sort of panic that ensues but to me what's interesting about that is it asks us to step back and say okay so what if everything i read on the internet or in a book because you figure people could write entire books with this thing and sound very intelligent and i'm sure people are going to do it i have no doubt that they're going to be huge books written by this chat because the thing can write you know some 3 000 word essay in three seconds so people are going to jump on that but what's really interesting is what it does is it drives us into our true human state because artificial intelligence cannot replicate true human wisdom what is human wisdom not intelligence not the accumulation of knowledge what is wisdom the interesting thing about wisdom is wisdom is a combination of life experience truth connection to the void compassion love integrity like all these things that victor frankel described in his noetic dimension of the human when you sit with a wise person you're not waiting for them to repeat something they read in a book they will not repeat something that could have been generated by the chat gpt true wisdom doesn't come from there true wisdom is when you're sitting there like it was funny when i was in this class with leroy little bear who i mentioned earlier he had said something we were talking about how the difference between structure and chaos and how in science in classical science the belief was that the world was structured but the human being was chaotic so if we could just create enough math and science to actually map the order of the universe we would feel safe if we would delete the chaos in the human then we would be fine whereas in the in the native ideas their assumption is that the world is made of chaos and mystery because we are made of spirit and so then they do regular rituals every at a certain time every year to create a structure to allow for the perpetual renewal experience of being human within this chaos and so i'm listening to this and i'm like thinking oh my god i've done the same thing with my spiritual life because it was all but the beginning of the whole covet experience and i was really having existential crises about what was going on and i realized so i put my hand up and he listened to my question i was so lucky and he i just said i feel like i'm doing the same thing with my spirituality that i'm looking at the same thing that i'm looking for this ordered god or something i'm looking for this ordered answer in the universe but not allowing the very basis of our our life to be chaos and learning to swim in that or something i don't know exactly what my question is so here leroy little bear sits there and he kind of thinks for a minute then he came in from the side and started talking about strong nuclear forces and how they're connected with our will to live that was his answer to this question i had about structure and chaos and spirituality and physics it was exactly what i needed to hear even though it didn't directly answer the question he answered it from a wise place from a deeper place he waited and something rose up to respond to my soul's question that's wisdom why do we sit at the foot of gurus why did we do that i think it's the time the time of gurus is over but because they're not caught in the conditioning that we are caught in so we'll ask them a question but they won't give the conditioned response they don't even know that there is conditioning anymore because this is the crazy thing is as we release the conditioning it's not like we even know it's there we have after a time you forget that it even exists you forget that there even was a box you're not outside the box you don't know there is a box the last thing i want to mention is another big teaching of victor frankel was he used to talk about again this newogenic or a new edic dimension of living had a lot to do with the tension in our life between who we are right now and this meaning in life that's sort of out here this thing that i i want to accomplish i want to do this thing and it could be small it could be something that you simply know that you're meant to live a different way or you're you might simply even have a funny goal that doesn't go away it could be running a marathon or it could be it could be running a marathon or it could be taking a cooking class it could be anything it doesn't matter it doesn't have to be big and interesting but for some reason you're not doing it so there's a distance between me now and this this soul's calling that's out here and he said the tension between where i am now and this meaning in life this thing that's being called that's calling me that is the tension of life and it is so important that we feel this energy that makes us alive computers aren't doing that like this is the human experience comfort is not the goal the goal is this tension in life between ourselves and this soul's calling that we want to follow the north star that we want to keep inching towards all the time i'm gonna put my glasses on and if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer them how did i learn to switch off my brain that's a fantastic question there were many many ways and i actually can't remember because again i was working with someone who spoke from a wisdom place so i would i remember one time for example i was sitting at his house and i was kind of my mind was just flying like i was like yeah well what about this and what about this and well you know and there's just and then this person you know oh you know and i was like going back and forth and back and forth and all of a sudden jim just sort of sat there and he's just sort of staring at me staring at me he said hold on a minute he goes upstairs he comes downstairs and he had been creating paper models of all the platonic solids the cube the pyramid the duo decahedron these are all the solids that are the building blocks of the universe and as he played with these icosahedrons and he's like just kind of holding these up and he's saying do you see this and how this folds into this one and when these in go on like this this is actually the earth breathing and he started just playing with all these platonic solids he said katrina you don't have to keep thinking the world is perfect the world is beyond your the world is beyond your comprehension and it'll be just fine whether you're thinking about it or not this is how perfect the universe is i think that was the journey of turning my brain off there were a lot of things there were a lot of experiences that i talk about in my book what if you could skip the cancer about realizing that my intuition took me to more interesting places than my brain did you know and every time i would trust my intuition and do something and something really interesting and different would happen suddenly my brain i started to realize that's not what my brain is for my brain is for doing the math and driving a car and but it's not for making decisions and that really helped a lot everyone always says to dress trust your gut but if you can't hear your gut what if you can't hear your gut very well what practices help you connect with intuition if you're not as in touch one of the things that i do is i play the opposite game so let's say i'm invited to go to something and i can't quite figure out whether or not i really want to go or not and i've analyzed it and i've overanalyzed and i don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but oh is it really such a big deal and maybe i should go and i have no idea anymore like i've just chewed it up far too much then i ask myself if it was canceled would i be relieved or disappointed and that one always works for me if you're given an opportunity if someone asks you if you can do something if they withdrew it would you be relieved or disappointed and that often will help us start connecting with it and again whether or not we actually make the choice that's in line with our truth or not at the time it's not that's not the important part the point is that we start connecting with it that we just start to feel what it feels like what that truth feels like inside i feel excited about ai as a programmer myself human intelligence will be useless what do you think will happen to the whole western colonial education system driven by intellect and memorizing useless shit personally i think it's i think it's falling i actually believe that our current education system is designed to fit people into a caste system that i believe exists all over the world do you belong in are you to be a doctor or a lawyer or this are you to be a merchant are you to be this are you to be a manual wallet worker are you to do this and it's all just based in this curious ability to regurgitate nothing and don't get me wrong i love education i love education i love technology i love all these things i'm an education nut but the way the education system is designed isn't actually to teach people it's to categorize them based on your ability to regurgitate information so it's it's a curious thing right it's not the people themselves the children themselves are not humans they're just being the workers are being sorted and i mean that may sound really dark but and within that system don't get me wrong there's great people teacher who are teachers my both my parents were teachers but it's not child oriented it's not human oriented but i believe that those other schools that are more human oriented are just simply going to organically rise everywhere where they actually say this like for example learning mathematics right i love math i love math the biggest challenge i've ever seen in math and and i used to tutor people in math when i used to own a train station that i'd renovated into a wellness center so i used to have free tutoring after school because i knew so many kids were struggling with especially math and so one of the things i saw so often was that in math if you miss building blocks if you're in grade three and you're learning this much math grade four is based on everything you learned in grade three it's one of the few topics that we learn in education that actually you if you didn't learn your times tables in grade three you can't do division in grade four but unfortunately because the whole system is really just about categorizing you it's they don't actually stop and say well then you actually can't go on to learn division until you've mastered your times tables you actually need to have a hundred percent in grade three in order to do grade four because everything in grade four is based on a hundred percent of what's in grade three and i genuinely believe this is a big reason why many many many people hate math is because somewhere along the line they had a bad experience with a teacher they maybe only got 50 of grade three so then in grade four the most they could ever have is maybe 30 and then all of a sudden by the time they hit grade seven they literally just feel stupid the only thing that happened was they never should have continued until they had a hundred percent and it doesn't make them less intelligent it just means their mind is multi-dimensional and interesting and they need different ways of learning it so then all of a sudden if you created a math program based on everybody learning everything all the way along math would be easy so that would create an entirely different child-based system and i think it's happening and i think it's happening in very genuine ways i think i mean i pulled my son out of school for a year and homeschooled him in grade seven because he again he had just done the same he just fallen through all these cracks and one day he just said i was helping him with his homework and he said mom i'm just stupid he said just give up and that was it i just pulled him for the past 20 years meditation and quiet time has been used in schools but for most of that time it was kept for problem children it's been kept quiet i believe in the human potential i believe that as each one of us kind of wakes up to something and we make a little change in our life a little change based on our personal humanity there is a ripple effect that then allows for an organic change in the world and those i believe are the real changes it's not about creating a new system it's about this very gentle organic shift like oh it must have been 10 years ago one of my yoga students who was a kindergarten teacher she asked me if i would go and teach kindergarten teachers how to bring yoga and meditation to their kindergarten classes so one day i was in this huge auditorium with 50 kindergarten teachers and we did yoga as if they were kindergarten kids and we learned meditation and everything one little thing 10 years ago 50 teachers all in different schools that is what's happening and if we get really depressed about everything that's going on up there we're gonna get too depressed and we're gonna lose our own sense of meaning when we really know that each one of us is a node that we each every one of us all that matters is that we're acting from our soul we're acting from that human place and it'll just have this beautiful ripple effect and then that one will activate and then this will and even on the outside it might not look like much but it is you know look at us we're having a conversation there's 184 people and we're having this interesting conversation about what's really possible and what's also really interesting is it's different in different countries so taylor my daughter she went to finland for a year on exchange and in finland their education system is very different where the kids are not tested until they're like 13 or something i may have that wrong for anyone here from finland so can you imagine learning with no testing all that matters is that the children are always learning and then it's not until perhaps i don't know whether they get tested again to go into the different high schools because they have all kinds of different high schools that are really focused in the arts or computers or science and that kind of thing things are happening and i mean even that even the the experience of my daughter going there having this having this experience coming home telling me i'm telling you and plus the hundred other people i've told over time little seeds planted so thank you so much for being here and i hope you have a wonderful day
