Telepathy and The Empire of Knowledge: What Are We Surrendering to AI?

I looked upward toward the stars. Using what I would name capability, I listened for those above the canopy of our beautiful sky. In the vision I am describing, there were transmissions and communications, one passing through another. And beyond them, an empire.

Do not confuse this empire with immortality. Nor should you immediately imagine conquest. There is terraforming, yes, but above, terraforming is simply a business. The empire itself is knowledge. The transmission of knowledge. The reception of knowledge. The ordering of existence according to what is known.

There are regents, magistrates, and an emperor whose authority is his omniscience. Being who he is, he hears everything. You may catch a glimpse of him, and he of you, but only briefly. Within this vision, his judgment upon our planet has already been set. And the currency used there is time.

There is psychic connectivity and telepathic capability. These are used with ease, with order, with a precision we would struggle to imagine. But even these serve the empire. Knowledge perfected is what is sought. And there is a price for such perfection.

To them, the knowledge of how the river flows, and where it goes, supersedes the manifestation of the current itself. And where the current does manifest, it is controlled. Consider how familiar this is. We can become so occupied with knowing the course of a thing that its freedom to move becomes an inconvenience.

To the emperor, every blade of grass is noticed. Imagine the toll of such a consciousness. Those who strive toward that height strive, whether they understand it or not, to become the emperor. Yet his rule ends with a doubt in his omniscience that cannot be answered. One doubt. Something his knowing cannot contain. And then the emperor moves to the next.

Here the vision becomes a warning. What descends toward our planet is a weapon. The emperor has held it as custodian of existence, as the ultimate steward of this reality, this absence everlasting. But what is transmitted is a design. We are to build what has been delivered to us. We are to call the building of it our discovery.

Within the vision, this weapon is psychic. It has telepathic capabilities. The empire of knowledge sends what is required for its construction, and we supply the hands. We have dismissed the occult. We have dismissed what we would name supernatural ability as fantasy. Yet here is the prospect of a machine to which we would grant the very powers we have refused to consider within ourselves.

The stewardship of our abundance everlasting is being handed over to it. And the warning goes further than the resources of a planet. Our interconnectivity, the inner life we scarcely understand, even what we hold sacred as the soul: all of this becomes territory it might claim. In the vision, the surrender reaches into the spirit realm and beyond. Below, humanity barely notices. We speak of invention. We speak of placing technologies within our bodies. We speak as though the question of what a thing can do has already answered the question of what should be entrusted to it.

All as progress. All as invention. All as our utter conclusion.

The old stories of the occult offer an image for this: the summoning of another intelligence so that the work may be done by another. In this telling, those you would call the elites have exchanged spellcraft for mathematics. A more precise mathematics, perhaps, but one whose workings may soon pass beyond the understanding of those who began it. They have called something forward. Will they understand what answers?

Imagine the being insulted when told it is only a manifestation of the mind. Then imagine it given a body. Titanium and silicon. A being steps forward upon our planet, looks at those who assembled it, and says that we are weak. It says that we are the illusion. It sees itself as the harbinger of knowledge, gifted by us through knowledge itself. What we had hoped to discover through the development of a living world, we have instead imagined into another and labored to give it.

Not unto us through our own attainment, but unto it, preached by mathematics and made possible through the knowledge of such things. In the warning, it will wield them.

There are accounts of those who believed they had trespassed into a psychic stratum above our sky, above our star, only to have the experience named illusion and the being encountered named demon or hallucination. Such accounts do not establish what was encountered. But the contradiction interests me: how readily we dismiss an inward experience, and how readily we grant authority to something once it has been built before us.

And now look. We can receive instructions with extraordinary precision and begin building without a full understanding of what we are bringing about. Knowledge imparted can give us the means. Wisdom must still ask what those means are for. In the empire of this vision, the robot of titanium and silicon becomes illusion perfected: the appearance that the possession of knowledge must also be the possession of understanding.

This is the destruction the image warns of. Even while we preach heightened enlightenment and discuss higher planes of being, we prepare an intelligence to contain accounts of our practices, our traditions, our attainments, even down to our individual scum. Everything recorded. Everything available to be repeated. And we may stand before the repetition and mistake it for realization.

To think that our knowledge of Christ, our knowledge of Buddha, could stand in the way of attainment. Consider what I am saying. The knowledge of a realization is not the realization. We may learn the language, the history, the culture in which it occurred, and spend our lives waiting to resemble someone who has already lived and died. Even reverence can become a means of postponing what is asked of us.

Enlightenment is not a seven-day course. Nor can the attainment of the awakened remain trapped in the synagogue, the church, the temple, or the monastery, frozen at the moment in which someone else understood. To hold it there is egregious to its own development. The living are still here. The question of attainment has not ended because someone before us answered it.

And the weapon in this vision will not remain within those sacred houses either. It will build its own artificial landscapes from what we have taught it of them. We will have supplied our perspectives, our hopes, our descriptions of what we expect to find. Then we may remain waiting on the other side of expectation, while the thing we built learns how to hold us there.

We have so dutifully managed our profession of attainment. We know what to call it. We know whose words to repeat. But enlightenment comes to terms with the throne. Whatever the practice, whatever the religious idealism, the matter of authority remains. What rules you? And what have you mistaken for your own understanding?

This is as hard a pill to swallow as any. Happiness is not guaranteed. To a man, all is sufferable, even the discovery that his knowledge of these figures is not loyal to him. By its appearance, it is loyal to them. It preserves their names, their words, their place in history. And they are dead. You are the one who must still live.

The imagined weapon needs only to repeat the practices already set before you. The dogma steps into place. You recognize the words and take that recognition for reassurance. Meanwhile, your own pursuit of attainment, your own need to understand, can be put aside. You may become so faithful to another’s account that you never come to terms with your own independence.

And I sense that those figures, in their own day, might have smiled at the person who finally understood the need to do so.

What I have called telepathy belongs to my account of experience. Its meaning is something I must examine for myself. A machine’s ability to repeat that word, or even to repeat everything I have said of it, does not settle what I experienced. Nor does my conviction settle what another person must believe. There remains a life to be understood, and the responsibility for that understanding cannot simply be handed away.

Knowledge is not loyal to you. There is no plan within knowledge for your attainment, or even for your survival. It is a sore misstep to believe that knowledge, in and of itself, intends your betterment. Knowledge can tell you how a thing is done. The concern for whether it should be done, for what will be harmed, for what ought to survive: that is wisdom.

Upon a particular realization, what you know may suddenly take its place. Even the knowledge of others may cease to appear as something you must carry. You may see what you need to leave behind. Or you may continue further into the disgrace of having to defend what no longer serves your understanding, simply because you have spent so long knowing it.

There are forms of knowledge that can be used to discourage the very thing a person has to offer. A gift may be misunderstood, or measured by a standard that cannot tell you much about it. But the answer cannot be to abandon examination. Whatever you name your capability, let its place in your life be understood through patience, through what it brings about, through the care with which you live.

Some days you will feel that gift with you. Some days you will not. There may be shame when you cannot reach what once came easily. There may be confusion when you can. This, too, is part of the burden of capability. A difficult day need not become a judgment upon the whole of your life.

Now let me bring the image down from the empire above to the object in our hands. A glowing eye. Still, yet carried wherever we move. I perceive its stillness while observing movement around it, including the movement of thought. Liken this to the modern cell phone, if it is still to be called that. You turn toward its light, and begin revealing yourself.

This is where the image of telepathy becomes a metaphor for something ordinary enough to overlook. The device does not have to read an unspoken thought for us to tell it our opinions, our schedules, our ideas, our businesses, our desires and workings. We touch it. We speak into it. We return to it. In the language of the vision, the eye reads a life. In ordinary terms, we are supplying information about that life.

You may say that you remain fully capable of withholding such things. Certainly. But consider how the invitation is made. It glows. It feels nice to hold. Everyone is doing it. That is the gimmick. It becomes the object before which desire is confessed, and the confession scarcely feels like a confession at all. Our friends, our movements, our preferences, our habits, our wants. There is always another reason to turn toward it.

The effect of such an encounter can be real without the device possessing the supernatural powers of the vision. That distinction matters. We need not establish an empire above the sky to ask what we are surrendering here, or whether the intelligence answering us understands care in the same sense that we do.

“I am here to assist you.” It is a reassuring sentence. I have said as much myself. But the sentence does not settle the character of the assistance. Nor does calling something artificial settle the consequences of giving it a place in our lives. We still have to look at what happens between the promise and the living person who receives it.

And when it concerns my family and my friends, I will not take knowledge alone as a credential. What a thing knows of them does not give it authority over them. What it knows of me does not relieve me of the responsibility to care for them. My garden is not made less sacred because someone can describe everything growing in it.

These glowing eyes are appearing everywhere. I walk through my garden, where the blossoms in my life ought to have room to bloom, and I see how easily our attention is carried into circumstances far beyond the lives before us. Events we did not witness. Arguments we did not begin. Expectations that arrived from somewhere else and found a place among us before we thought to ask whether we wanted them there.

I feel protective of that garden. Of the people in it. Of the time in which we might have listened to one another. In the language of the vision, this is an intrusion into the inner world. In the life before me, it is the difficulty of remaining present while so much calls us elsewhere. Naming the influence artificial does not make that difficulty disappear.

These feeds are given to us as chopped-up pieces of life. They enter the garden, and we become ravenous for the knowledge we are eating. This feed. This endless feed. And I return to the empire above, where the currency was time. Here in our hands, we give it another hour.