Through a felt belief in the spiritual, in how it gives meaning to thoughts and acts of love and compassion — to alofa, aloha, aroha, ‘ofa — and to ideas and practices of nurturing life, indigenous peoples gain insight not only into what is profound, divine and beyond us — beyond our mortality — but also to what is within us, to what is us, to our humanity.

That is the opening of the foreword of the book The Relational Self and I think it is just beautiful. When I read it, it made me think of the disparity between what it expresses, and the hyper-consumerist, capitalist world we live in and the contortions it forces us into.

It made me think about how AI is almost the pure expression of this world. AI is all about the output, the performative aspect of doing — an exclusive focus on things being done — everything outwardly oriented and about what is projected. What’s shown is what’s valued, not what’s been gone through.

This is a dangerous shift. It threatens to further isolate us from our inner-selves, and in doing so it makes even the things we produce meaningless. The personal connection we have with the thing ‘made’ is nothing more than a sheen, a veneer, covering the emptiness where graft and feel, not to mention pride, are usually found when it’s us who does the work.

This morning, as I returned from my run with Pluto, I was struck by the flowering in the morning light. I felt poetic. To act on that feeling and turn it into a poem is tough work. It asks of me to be attentive, brave, thoughtful, pensive, reflective … and even then nothing may come. Or, I could ask AI to write me a poem about things flowering in the morning light. Maybe, once it was done, I’d put it on social, show the world my poem.

Is it really mine if I used AI to make it? Sure, it wouldn’t be out there without me, but that deep tie, that deep knowing that I gain of it while making it is not present. There is something indefinable about that, I know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.

There is a link to the spiritual here, with a distinction between the outward presence of something and an inner experience of it and its creation. Just because our capitalist world pays no heed to that inner experience does not mean it doesn’t exist. It just means it’s ignored.

The hegemonic machine of neoliberal capitalism seeks to dominate, demoralise and divorce the spiritual from the physical and from the real in our globalised, secularised, digitised societies. It does so by getting us to think that it is indeed possible, reasonable and desirable to separate or de-link our spiritual being from our physical or biological selves without serious consequences.

(Quotes from the foreword of The Relational Self , p xi.)