Your Mind is an AI

You can't think your way to purpose and joy. The mind is the wrong tool. The answer can only be found through IA, your heart.

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It’s human nature to look to the mind to answer life’s biggest questions:

• Who am I?

• Why am I here?

• What is my path?

However, the mind is the wrong tool for these questions. In fact, it’s like relying on ChatGPT to guide your life because the mind essentially runs like an Artificial Intelligence model.

In order to find the answers you want, you must shift your focus from the mind (AI) to the heart, which I call IA or Intelligent Awareness.

Your Mind is AI

Modern Artificial Intelligence is made in our image, and operates the same way our minds do.

Take today’s most popular AI’s: large language models (LLM’s). They are built on a vast digital archive of humanity’s creations, both the good, true, and beautiful, and the not so good or untrue.

When you ask an LLM a question, it searches this library of the past and returns its best answer based on how you asked your question and how it interpreted your intent.

Since it can only reference the past, AI could also be called Archived Intelligence, because that’s what it is. The past. It is also not 100% reliable because (a) it’s based on human “stuff” and (b) AI can “hallucinate” and return wrong answers that sound convincing.

This, too, is the nature of the mind. It is a large language model that runs on a vast library of concepts, thoughts, beliefs, and memories that we have compiled over time. Whenever we're trying to figure out what to do, we're looking to the past, the Known, for an answer.

But what if what you want is not the Known? What if you want something new and inspired? Something Unknown? How do you access that?

This is the domain of the heart, what I call Intelligent Awareness or IA.

Your Heart is IA

Intelligent Awareness is the creative, intuitive source within all of us. Anything and everything that has ever been created first originated in Intelligent Awareness as inspiration, and then eventually came into the 3-D world through expression.

The heart, or IA, is the creative principle of life.

The mind, or AI, is the organizing principle.

Inspiration originates beyond the mind. Where exactly it comes from no one can say. For millennia, artists, sages, and inventors claim inspiration is the divine spark. The word literally means “that which comes from being in-spirited.”

Inspiration is often a pre-cognitive felt-sense, a hunch, or image that hasn’t yet been conceptualized through thought or organized through form.

Imagine you have fallen in love. Your body hums with sensations and deeply felt emotions. The sensations are too big for the mind (or words) to hold. Philosophers call that inner humming, which is beyond words, qualia.

Qualia are the “language” of our inner experiences, whether love, awe, anger, or grief. Qualia are private and individual, the dynamic movement of your inner life, which I cannot experience firsthand. I would have to step inside of you and become you in order to experience what it’s like to be you.

The only way I can begin to understand your experience is if you try to express it to me through language or by creating something tangible. This is where the mind is helpful.

You might write a song, poem, or simply talk about what it’s like to feel the way you do. You seek to express that which is before language. No matter how eloquent you are, however, the words will always fall short of the actual felt-sense experience inside of you.

Still, it’s worth doing.

Becoming IA Inspired

Intelligent Awareness is the where the Unknown begins.

The mind (AI) simply re-mixes the past. The best it can do is recognize patterns and re-organize the Known into different expressions. There is still a kind of creativity involved, but novel, paradigm-shifting discoveries only come through inspiration.

The mind operates in probabilities.

The heart operates in possibilities.

The mind thinks.

The heart knows.

How do you begin to move beyond the mind then and trust your own intuition? Last week, I shared a simple practice I use to quiet the mind and pay attention to inspiration. You can read it here.

Essentially, you must learn to quiet the mind. There is no one way. Some are drawn to meditation, others to daydreaming while walking nature, and others find “quiet-mind” while lifting weights.

As you quiet the mind, you make space for inspiration to filter through into your conscious awareness. Then, as you become more attuned to hear its whispers (and sometimes its thunderclaps), you can begin to make new conscious choices, bring new things into your life, and have a loving impact on the world.

So, do not ask the mind (or ChatGPT) who you are. It cannot tell you. Do not ask it why you’re here and who you are to become. It has no more idea than the screwdriver in your toolbox does. For those answers, you must go to the heart, and I hope you do.

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