SUZANNE SEGAL¹

I am going to end this chapter with the examination of one of the more interesting cases of No Self. This comes from Suzanne Segal, known for her Paris bus stop story. It is fascinating because she describes the confusion of No Self from having no one around to explain to her what was happening, or worse, feed her false ideas about what this all meant. There is a twist in her story, one that makes it even more important for us to examine.

Ten years after her experience, she wrote the book Collision With the Infinite. Following that publication, she began teaching on various satsang circuits, because so many teachers she had met told her that she was enlightened. When she began to have doubts about what had happened to her, a history of childhood abuse began to surface. This was in enough time to get her to view here entire experience very differently, but she would live a short life, diagnosed with a brain tumor that soon killed her at age 42. During these late in life challenges, she supposedly wrote a second book that presented her experience very differently than in her Collision book. The claim (that we will get to) is that her publisher refused to print the second book. While her first book I found somewhat useful, there is almost no doubt that her second book could have been one of the great spiritual texts of our generation, and I am looking to see if a draft of it still exists anywhere.

We will begin with the standard presentation of her life based on what was presented in her first book. Segal was born in 1955, though she never provided a birthplace. She also did not include much about her early life until she was 18, where she became a member of the Transcendental Meditation Movement. Of this organization, she recounts the very strange training and intense pressure that was placed on everyone, and also some examples of abuses she witnessed. She claims that she joined the group to seek enlightenment, but she left before such “perfection” occurred.

I have to admit I found it odd that the first 18 years of her life seemed almost to not exist (and this is a clue). In fact, her parents’ names only appear in the acknowledgments at the end of the book. About the only thing in Collision that Suzanne lists of her early life is an odd exercise that she did. We will come to that.

Her account in the book goes on to then one day while living in Paris in 1982, after getting married and while carrying her first child, she was about to step onto a bus, when her ears “popped.” Immediately after, her awareness left its normal vantage point (from a mind seeing out into the world via the eyes) to a position of being an external witness of both the body and mind, from behind and just to the left of it.

"I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called 'me' was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. 'I' was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body's eyes."²

The new awareness, she claimed, was placed just to the back and left of her head. As such, it does not seem to me that it was an OBE, for her consciousness was not able to move around or examine her body. Just that the awareness had moved outside of her head where it normally felt centralized. This external witness stayed with her for a few months, and then sort of dissolved. No sense of regular self ever returned. The identity (Suzanne) that had been there all of her life was not there.

“The personal self was gone, yet here was a body and a mind that still existed empty of anyone who occupied them. The experience of living without a personal identity, without an experience of being somebody, an “I” or a “me,” is exceedingly difficult to describe, but it is absolutely unmistakable. It can’t be confused with having a bad day or coming down with the flu or feeling upset or angry or spaced out. When the personal self disappears, there is no one inside who can be located as being you...The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone — there was no one who thought, no one who felt, none who perceived. Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function unimpaired; apparently they did not need an “I” to keep doing what they always did. Thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking, all continued as before, functioning with a smoothness that gave no indication of the emptiness behind them.”³

She said that pretty much from the moment her ears popped at the bus stop, this "cloud of awareness" she was describing as her new moment to moment awareness, brought her constant fear. A fear that even continued while she attempted to sleep or rest. I never experienced such a specific shift of the central point of awareness after my experience in the canyon. The change most noted was more of a comforting watcher that was both “here” and “not here.” The best I can say though is because there was a death for me, in that I felt as though the old me was dead, and the body-mind that was functioning now was a new thing that would operate in a new way. I can in a sense understand what Segal was describing, but it was not the same as my experience.

After several weeks in this confused state, she finally told her husband, who suggested that she see a psychologist, which she did. The only advice given on her first meeting was a prescription for a light anti-anxiety medication. For me, that presents a major problem, the covering up with drugs of a phenomenon which may be real and valid. The drugs try to “fix” a problem that may not need to be fixed because it is not actually a problem, but rather a condition that needs to be understood and eventually embodied. She went to various psychologists over several years, but none ever helped, just mostly prescribing drugs. She was in time given the diagnosis of depersonalization disorder, and that diagnosis might have been both correct and incorrect. There are two things that can seem the same. One is the ego's reaction to a trauma (or memory of a trauma) that causes it sort of disengage from its normal way of functioning to protect itself from the experience or memory. Then there is the Realization of No Self, who is a seeing of how reality actually IS. One can also be presented an honest Realization of Emptiness, but not be in a stable and clear enough mental place to fully handle it, and thus can spin off into very dangerous and messy areas, which a depersonalization diagnoses can be pointing to. My sense is that all of these things might have been going on at the same time for Suzanne, making it very difficult for her to get a clear picture of what was what. My sense is that she was stuck between the two sides of the realization which makes her story such a useful tool for others on the path.

She long tried to explain that there was nothing in her past that could have been a catalyst for what had happened. “Do not make the mistake of reading the story of Suzanne Segal searching for the childhood events that caused to subsequent dropping away of self. There is no linear causality at work here.”⁴ We shall see there were elements from her childhood that she blocked off until right near the end of her life. The only bit of childhood that her first book touches on was a very odd exercise that she did when very young. From the time she was around seven years old, she would sit on her bed and simply say her name over and over again.

“After crossing a threshold, a vastness appeared. The name became a word only, a collection of sounding pulsing in the vast emptiness. There was no person to whom the name referred, no identity as that name. No me. Then fear would come, my heart pound in my ears, I would struggle for air...I would stop, get up, walk around, force myself back from the vastness and into the identity. It was too frightening to bear for someone so young...but later that day I would return to the couch and sit again and start to say the name.”⁵

Interestingly she was not only having a type of experience of No Self, which would cause her great fear, to which after she had returned back into her normal self, would then do same the exercise again. At the Paris bus stop something similar happened but without any saying of her name, only this time awareness fully pulled away and she was not able to bring it back. The question which she never answered is why would she be doing this as a child?

In the Paris experience, the work she was doing at age seven got revisited in the most intense and immediate way. Nothing else for over a decade triggered any ideas or connections between the two. When her memories of childhood abuse came back to her, there was much more to present what may have been going on. This exercise she was doing is similar to what is called a disconnecting of a part of self during a trauma to be able to survive the experience, but often this “part” does not fully returns (what people like Sandra Ingermen have labeled as the needing what she called a soul retrieval).

After almost a decade of struggling with the aftermath of the bus stop, Suzanne began to bump into several non-dual Advaita teachers of the day. They convinced her that because of her experience, she was enlightened. I already mentioned this as being one of the traps of No Self, to elevate the experience on the spiritual ladder. I do believe her experience at the bus stop was genuine, and that fear is something that can come in the aftermath of an un-integrated realization of No Self. It is why I suggest many times that if this should happen to you, taking quiet time alone is important to better understand what has happened and allow some adjusting to take place.

Another recommendation which comes with the realization of No Self is to not drop titles like “specialness” or “enlightenment” on yourself. Because such ideas are just pre-made traps to try make the Realization mean that you the person are special and important, rather than the experience itself. Suzanne was close to giving birth to her first child when the experience occurred, so it was likely very hard for her to take any time to examine exactly what happened for many years. Life often never does things the “perfect way.” Just like my fall into the canyon, it was both a blessing and a curse at the same time. To clarify, an experience of Emptiness does not make one enlightened, besides that word is mostly misused and misunderstood. Emptiness is just a step, albeit an important one, on the further journey up the spiritual ladder.

As time went on, the idea that she was told she was enlightened (which had been the goal of all of her earlier TM work), so at first this presentation become a calming experience for her. She had an explanation that fit her wishes from over a decade prior. One day while driving, she had a shift of awareness to where she could see all (the car, road, trees, Suzanne) as herself. She called this being “in the Vastness,” which is a term she also used in her 7-year-old experiences. She had made the shift from the nothing side of Emptiness to the everything side (which is the more fun and calm side). This is an important part of the overall integration, as one needs to experience and integrate both halves of the Emptiness. Like everything, the work is to learn how to be perfectly between both sides of duality, but one first has to know both sides of duality, so as to know what they are between.

With her new calmness, and belief that the Advaita teachers had been correct about “enlightenment,” she began to teach to a small group that started to form around her. Not soon after she began teaching, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and a short time later (1997), she died. In the aftermath, many have suggested that her experience was due to the tumor. More importantly was the fact that she never fully believed the teacher's suggestion that she was enlightened and really wondered if she should just stop talking about her experience. It was at this point that memories of severe childhood sexual abuse began to be recalled, and now she wondered if all of the No Self, Vastness, and whatnot were just a physiological defense mechanism to wall her off from her traumatic memories. That was the story as I knew it from when I first read her book around 2008.

In the spring of 2024 when I was doing a bit of extra research for Empty the Cave, an interesting revelation occurred based on a comment placed on the Spiritualteachers.org website in 2017 by someone with the user name “Java.”⁶ The commenter claimed that they were very close to Suzanne just before her death, and that she wrote a second book which was going to completely overturn all she that had been presenting in Collision with the Infinite. I cannot quote the entire comment in its entirely, you can see it at the footnote, username Java posted on November 5, 2017 at 5:08 pm.

In a nutshell, Java claimed that her new book would have described how she never saw her experience as a spiritual awakening, but more of a curse. And that it “was not until someone, (a misguided spiritual teacher), told her that it was a spiritual awakening ‘that she just didn’t understand’ that she finally felt some relief and began to teach and ‘describe’ it in this framework.” Yet there is also the question of the labeling of depersonalization disorder that was likely connected to the childhood trauma. And this was supposedly all to be presented in her second book.

Java also commented that once all of these memories were fully revealed by Suzanne and “integrated” (the commenter used that word) that “she finally knew peace and freedom, in the sense of feeling ‘whole’ once again, before she passed.” An important point is that “not feeling like a real person” is not the same as the experience of No Self. It is rather just a small part of a bigger totality. Eventually (to still function in the material reality), there has to be a re-coming together of a self (albeit one you no longer really believe in), which can then be used to follow the idea of Controlled Folly. For Suzanne, it seems that once there was no longer any need to put the experience in any sort of frame, nothing needed to be any longer hidden, and she could move on to the next phase of it all.

Java claimed that her new book was meant to help others not fall into the traps she fell into, “She felt very strongly that she owed it to the world to tell the truth about her experience, so as not to lead people astray (as she felt she was led astray) by concluding that the experience of ‘no-self’ was actually enlightenment. In fact, in her case, this was really a state of profound dissociation. She even described it quite accurately, as at first; she felt she was looking at herself from behind and to the side.”

Nothing that she had tried could help her because she was cut off from the underlying trauma that was in some part a doorway to what was the experience actually was. When she accepted the idea that she was enlightened, Java claimed Suzanne could relax because she no longer saw something as “wrong with her,” but rather that something special had happened to her. One could suppose that it was a sort of inner denial. “This didn't really last very long, however, before she fell into a deep depression, and that is when her real work began.” Thus the depersonalization disorder part of the experience, was both a hiding from the past, and at the same time, a call to go looking into her past.

Once the tumor was revealed to her, there could have been a sense of “no more time” left for games, and she got down to uncovering what had been hiding all this time. Java suggests a great transformation for her finally occurred, “propelled by her vigilant and deep desire to truly heal and know herself, along with a deeper knowing... Prior to that, she was attempting to frame her experience to fit into the model of ‘awakening’ she had been led to believe was true...For her, this was joyous, not the fabricated and superimposed ‘joy’ she describes in her book, but the real joy of being able to just be, without all these concepts that were merely masking a deeper suffering.” Can you more and more see why I think this second book could have been one of the great spiritual classics if it was published, and perhaps at the same time, put a whole bunch of spiritual teachers (then and up to today) out of business. This book could have shown first hand that much of what others claim as “spirituality” is just a whitewash covering personal trauma, confusion, pain and suffering.

This “spirituality” term is a carrot on the stick of endless happiness and importance, and is an obvious draw to one who has been living their life in confusion and pain. The problem of course is that 99% of what modern “spirituality” is does not really heal any of the underlying issues, and just creates a calming wall between them, which is what most people want. A wall that the egoic mind often builds into a new persona, the spiritually awake person, which of course is as fake as any previous persona that existed before.

I feel that Suzanne's experience at the bus stop was genuine, but her body-mind had not done the work prior to be in a position where it could smoothly deal with what came of it. We have to see our human life story clearly, even when later we see it all as fictional. Without uncovering that story fully, the egoic self can never “heal” its fragmentation. As only a non-fragmented ego can be left behind.

The experience of No Self is a calling, leading you to Totality. It is not in itself Totality, and it will trick you if you have a spiritual ego trying to make you feel important, or if you have a lot of un-dealt with trauma. I myself was tricked in this way for a while after the incident in the canyon. Eventually I snapped out of it, but not after a dose of years of illness that took its toll on “me.” If there is not much of the hidden personal self that is hanging on, then the integration afterwards can go quite smooth. If someone has not got their “house in order” and cleaned up their life story, then the experience of No Self is going to be very difficult. If un-dealt with trauma is left hiding in one’s past, then No Self is going to run all over you. For one cannot go where No Self leads if one is held down by cement-like weights or iron chains of the past. These past tethers are designed to keep our experiences deemed to be real because of the continuous suffering and anxiety they continue to create in the present moment.

Suzanne needed someone to tell her after the bus stop incident that she likely had a real experience of No Self, but there also must have been unresolved issues in her past, which is why she was getting stuck in the fear and a type of depersonalization disorder. This understanding right from the beginning could have helped her to start bringing up an examination of her unresolved past. If the walls covering and hiding the past are still intact, then the unseen stuff will just continue interfering. All of that from the past wants to be seen, for it can not be transformed and transmuted while still hidden.

Awareness is a light that shines on what is hidden, and, when seen, can no longer influence from the shadows. As an aside, I am curious what might have happened for Suzanne if she had found out about Richard Rose after her Paris experience, and been able to have a consultation with him. His response to her in this situation would have been valuable, not just for her, but for all of us as well, to see what Rose's suggestion might have been.

This is an article I plan to post on my blog tomorrow, but I wanted the opinion of my “community” and your reaction and ideas around this before doing so, in case I see there are things that need to be added or revised. Such is putting things out to the masses, it is good to get an overview from “real world friends” first down in the comments. Thanks

The AI of Human Interaction

The next of my weekly blog series is to look at the changes AI is creating within this simulation, which is AI to the core, but that is another story.

Generally when the fast moving influence AI on our world is being presented, the article will discuss how AI will take jobs from humans, or track and monitor humans, make decisions for governments, or create fake photographs in order to try to give proof to a fake history. All that is true, and has been going on for a long while. Not that much is being said how this will, and is, affecting actual human relationships and interactions. While chat GPT might be getting the main headlines, there are some other areas to touch on with this subject.

A few articles caught my attention recently and so I will share them with you as a starting point for this discussion. The first was an online “ASMR” youtuber who has decided to launch a new virtual chatbot girlfriend for men. These are starting to pop up everywhere, artificial woman that men can pretend to be on dates with. You can already see the trouble this is going to cause.

Real people are not screens, or AI chatbots. And so how does a young man who is connected mostly to a screen at some point learn how to interact with someone who is a real physical form? The obvious answer is they can't. Only by interacting with people can we learn how to interact with them. Granted this is just not a young men problem. Young women have developed another series of issues that distances them from human relationships as well, as they focus on their screens in different ways. For several hundred years the plan was to subvert and invert femininity. In the last 40 years or so, that has shifted to doing the same to masculinity. Now it is all one giant confused mess. And there is no surprise, certainly to someone who has any knowledge of ancient cultures and how they structured their societies, that as this area has broken down, so too has just about everything else broken down.

A sad part of our world is that AI has really infected the male psyche. Over the last twenty years this has been in the explosion of video games. Some of the highest rated channels on youtube are of young men playing video games. Millions of young men and boys are not just playing video games, but they are watching other guys play video games. The point is that there has begun to be a disconnect or young men between interacting with the world, and interacting with their computer screen. The screen is winning. The average time for those spent playing video games in 2022 was almost four hours per day. That is 28 hours per week, or over one complete day in seven spent staring at a screen playing a video game. But when you add that people a similar age are also spending the same amount of time watching television, and more than that staring at a screen for various video clips, entertainment and social media interactions, one must ask just how many total 24 hours days per week are spent by most people just staring at a screen?

Another bizarre article is of a Spanish female artist who is claiming to become the first to marry a hologram-AI.

https://medium.com/@martareyessuarez25/this-spanish-woman-will-be-the-first-person-to-marry-an-artificial-intelligence-3f68afc3c9ed

I have not really found any detail of how she made this hologram or projects it into her apartment. The claim is that she made a hologram of a male, and there is video she made of her interacting with “him.” The strangest of the lot is and video of the hologram guy in the kitchen doing dishes. The end result of course would be, the woman has to do the dishes because a hologram can only give an image of something, not actually doing it. At first I wondered if this artist wedding is just some sort of publicity stunt to showcase the woman's art, which it may well be but given how strange things are getting now, who knows. Another Japanese guy did something similar, marry a hologram a few years ago, but then for some reason there was a power outage and he could no longer “access” his virtual wife. I mean really how insane is this world getting? As this AI girlfriend technology gets better, and more “lifelike” more and more will be drawn into that world.

In my search on AI and its impact on relationships, I came across an odd realization. Do a search for something like “beautiful woman” for example. The go to the images section. You will notice that half of the images are directly AI generated,. Half of all the images that the search brings up are not even photographs of real people anymore. And look at the detail they provide, you have to look real close to even get a sense that it is not an actually photograph, especially when they add background parts to it. It is almost at the point of “can't tell the difference.” For years women have felt they have to compete with “models” (recall the word model defines as “a three dimensional representation of a person, typically on a smaller scale than the original). These models of course have professional makeup, lighting, and clothing applied so they appear different than they normally would. I don't know how many of you have known models or spent time around in them in normal day to day life. They don't look like the images of them. This happened once for me around 25 years ago when a woman I was dating was used in a poster for something (maybe the city newspaper). I was with her every day, and she was a “high maintenance woman” so she spent a good hour on her looks before we went out anywhere, yet she never looked as “perfect” as she did in that poster. It was “her,” yet not “her” at the same time.

The explosion of AI images on the internet has caused women to feel even more insecure about their appearance than previously. Now women have to compete with AI perfected images. I wonder if the current models and actresses realize they are soon going to be phased out, no longer needed, because they will not be able to compete with a computer generated image. And certainly not as cheaply produced as AI- the model and Hollywood actor-actress will be one of the first job casualties.

This is not men's fault, this is the overall plan of the controllers of this place, to make the ability for the masculine and feminine to connect in a healthy way difficult. Why? Because in nature, the connection of the masculine elements and feminine elements are what keeps somewhat of a balance to the natural world.

When you ask the average person if they could define the words feminine and masculine, they may try, but generally will be stereotypical results such as masculine is active and female is passive. Most of such stereotypes are not really true, and neither false, but a type of distortion. False is hard to get people to believe, but distortion (the way of the spiritual marketplace) can be sold for generations. It will get more confusing if you ask people, how is the best way for the masculine and feminine to co-operate and interact with each other most effectively and powerfully? Mostly you will just get stares or a shrug of the shoulders. The main co-operation and relationship the majority of people have to day is with their phone, not with people anymore, so it begins to make sense why so few have ever even thought about this subject.

For the last 50 years or so, women have tended to be judged first on how they look, then secondly how enjoyable they are to be around. Men have tended to be judged first on how much money they make, secondly how they look. Many may try to say that is not the case, but I have seen this play out time and time again. This however is a distortion of reality. And it is one that has been conditioned and programmed (mostly from television “programming”). The distortion is that a main trait women would look for in a man would be in a more ancient setting, does he create safety for me, either by being kind around me, and being able to defend the village from any outward attack. With no outward attacks, and women seemingly been conditioned not to expect kindness anymore, these traits are pushed only into the size of a man's wallet. And men tend to know, if you can't fork out the cash, you won't get forked. On the other side, in a more natural state men are not looking for what a woman looks like per sey, he is looking for the state of a woman's sensuality. By this meaning how connected to feeling and nature is she, how much life does she inject around her, how playful and fun is she to be around. Men in a sense learn sensuality from a sensual female. And a sensual woman always looks better, more vibrant. But this draw to real sensuality has been dropped down to simple base appearance. I went on a few dates in my day with very attractive women, who had a sensuality meter of about 2. Time with them got boring real quick.

If the distortion was seen through and lifted, a lot would change in male-female relations, as looking to “who someone is” would become more important than “what they look like” or “how big are their wallet, penis, boobs” as a main attraction point.

Then there is even the question “what is direct beauty.” I recall reading when doing study on sacred geometry that studies had been done that showed the more an object contained the Golden Section, the more the object was found to be beautiful. The human form is layers upon layers of Golden Sections. The finger joints are Golden Sections, as is the hand to the forearm, the navel to the whole body, and the face might have the most golden sections. Dr. Steven Marquardt even added the relationship of the face with a dodecahedron. The closer these ratios come to 1.618, the more the person will be thought of as beautiful.

Bringing this back to AI here comes the catch. No one out there, even those deemed “stunning” do not have 1.618 for any measure, that would not happen in nature, so one face measure might be 1.619, another 1.6172 etc. Close. With AI making the face, they can make every measure of that face an exact 1.618, check the dodecahedron layout or any other layout the AI sees fit. A real life human, which will never turn out mathematically “perfect” in any area of their construction, is now going to be compared to AI versions of people that look absolutely lifelike and realistic. Side by side most would likely say the AI version and the real person are both real photographs, which means again, real people will now be getting compared to a computer “model.”

I mentioned this all stems from television and movies. Go back and watch a few TV shows in the 60s and 70s. First off Hollywood wanted to make sure that all the women looked good, but the men could be chosen based on the role so looks were secondary. Female actresses did not have that luxury. But go to local bakery or library or service station, people in normal life don't look anything like they do on television. There also for a long while played out the notion of the male having to come save a “damsel in distress” which was again programming for women to act and seem weak, so a man could come and save them.

It got worse with two key genres of television that became overly popular in the time, soap operas and crime dramas. The soap opera was set up for female housewives to distract from a boring day of house routine. And these programs were mostly insane, everyone was manipulating, lying and cheating to everyone all the time. This is how women were taught to think that life should be like, so is it any wonder that family lives began to get more bizarre as the 70s and 80s continued when this (mostly subconscious) programming was being projected into the world. The opposite was the crime drama, real messy situations and nastiness played out week after week, portraying the world is violent and that led to its own level of projection into the society via the subconscious.

I can not think of one television show of the era that showed stable sane people, interacting with each other in clear, harmonious and co-operative ways. Don't think that is some sort of accident, or that would make boring television. If stable and sane is thought of as boring, that tells a lot about the day to say world people are expecting around them.

As I was finishing this article I came across another odd AI website, this one called “insert face.” It is a strange concept. Images are there of men or women in all types of various outfits, be they wedding dresses, golf shirts or Renaissance gowns. The idea is to upload your face, and the allow the site AI to “superimpose” you into the image (to see how you would look in a variety of outfits. Of course I am sure that by uploading an image of your face into the website, that it will definitely be well secured and looked after (sarcasm alert). I was trying to get to the draw of this for people. I mean someone could say, well I was thinking of buying a new suit, and so this way I get to try it on without having to go to a store and try it on, or I wondered how I would look if I was captain of a pirate ship, now I can know. Ok, but you can kind of do that by just taking a photo, and then one of your head and placing over the head in the main image. It won't have the perfect seamlessness of such an AI site, but it would give the “idea” one says they are looking for.

So it can't be that, there must be some other draw for the site.

This is an even bigger problem for young people. Someone 25 or under, has not lived a day of their life where a computer has not been in every home. At least those over 35 have spent some time dealing with life per-computers- having to call a librarian if you had a question you needed an answer to, the need to check a newspaper or tv channel to get a weather report, have to give your friend a phone call or drop by their house to talk to them. And you had to talk to people in some way, no text message quick responses. Just to ask a friend if they were still coming over noon, meant you have to call them or at least leave a voice message on an answering machine. You did not do your banking online, you had to go to the bank and speak to a teller. You tended to get used to one you liked, so yourself up in line to wind up chatting with them every time you went. Little interactions were built in this way in day to day living.

Good luck calling most large businesses today and even getting to talk with a real person, you chat with an AI bot or are forced to send an email.

And this is again not by accident. As the population becomes more mobile, very few people are say 40 years old and still living in the same city, and it so, the same area they grew up. Everyone is moving constantly and as such there is little feeling of rootlessness. No one has 30 or 40 years of interactions and connections, knowing just about everyone you pass on the street, and can share a chat with just about anyone if you feel like it. People feel like aliens wherever they are, have no feeling of roots, and know just about nobody they pass. It makes sense that under such circumstances the AI word would set itself up as way to draw in these people feeling lost in their day to day world, and pull them into what everyone wishes they have (a community of sorts where they feel heard and accepted). That was part of old village or tribal lifestyle. It almost no longer exists now.

That is what the screen and the AI has done, replaced his normal human need for community, interaction, conversation, and just simple belonging. The screen has become a replacement activity, friend, and now in some cases even partner. The blame does not go to the AI developers itself, it is on all the elements that have gone into the splintering of human society and community, to a place where the majority are feeling lonely, alien, misunderstood, ignored, stressed and confused. This advancement of AI is not the cause of any of this, one might call it the next phase of the process of fragmentation.

The only way out of it, is for individuals to in a sense “unplug” from most of it, and begin to go out and seek real world friendships, with real world people, real world communities of like-minded people, and then foster and strengthen them. You can never let go of something (even if you find it negative and addictive) without something healthy ready to replace it. Otherwise the very thing one wants to turn away from, will just get you to circle right back to it, and begin the same process all over again.

This area of discussion is part of an upcoming chapter in the new Exit the Cave 2 book that I am currently completing.