{"id":72576,"date":"2026-05-22T14:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T12:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=72576"},"modified":"2026-05-22T14:30:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T12:30:23","slug":"technological-intelligence-spirit-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/technological-intelligence-spirit-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Technological Intelligence: Spirit Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Technological intelligence makes it possible to look at who we are as complex human beings in a new way. John Bloom considers the consequences for our experience of the spiritual world and its guidance of human development.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\n

Movement disquiets space,
forms a wake
whose shape merges in time
Everything incorporates its complement. \u2014 JB<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Nearly all spiritual paths lead an individual to a sense of unity with and within the spiritual and the material world. The ancient principle: Spirit is never without matter; matter is never without spirit<\/em>, speaks to this. Such an encompassing concept raises questions: Through what capacity do we integrate the two realms? How is this unity practiced and applied? What forces might arise through holding a both-and<\/em> consciousness? How do we engage with those forces? The discernment of these forces at work with, in, and through us may help guide us in this vulnerable time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The development of intelligent technology serves as a focal point for examining how spirit and matter cohabit consciousness. The very notion that technology can be considered as intelligent is the fruition of a stream in the development of thinking that reflects the mechanistic view of human thought, reduced to binary on-off sequences. Were we free of such a mechanistic imposition the spiritual world would guide a knowing that supersedes algorithmic formulation and mechanistic logic with its own intelligence. This guiding aspect of the spiritual world is highly individualized, rather than homogenizing, and recognizes inner striving. Such a path is a moral one and cannot be realized in any other way than through individual effort. It is a path counselled by the rhythms and knowing of the human heart in the reciprocal play between self and world in the stream of time\u2014all outside the strictures and structures of intelligent technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Space Becomes Time<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Intelligent technology substitutes time for space. Thought has been replaced by the speed of calculation. The rapidity of results precludes any real inner or spatial-imaginative engagement with thinking. This slight of mind is grounded in electrical impulses arising from the physical-mineral world, though the results appear as if they were derived from the world of thought and spirit. The power and varnish of appearance occlude the empowerment that originates from unmediated experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The very notion of appearance points to a profound flaw in current Western perceptual systems which interpret appearance or representation as substitute for what is represented. What artificial intelligence provides is a rapid a scan of what it has determined as relevant data from its repository. Its results are a catalogue of existing thought rather than the thought itself: thought is a thing to be categorized, recombined, and repackaged as knowledge. It takes no time, but its appearance can take up significant space, and, in some cases, residence in our consciousness. Enabled by this flaw in thinking which substitutes a representation for the represented, the developers of intelligent technology have managed to engineer what appears as coherent thought using coded inputs that are abstracted from direct sensory experience. Such an abstractive process eliminates the value of the real-time experience and further alienates us from the originating impulse of thinking. In a sense, the genius of such engineering has dehumanized the existential relationship between space and time. Such a dehumanizing process has inevitable consequences for the development of consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Development through Inner Guidance<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This abstractive process is quite the opposite of how we think of normal human development. Between birth and three the young child grows into its physical body through its activity. Put in a slightly different way: there is a life force working in, on, and through physical matter as an animating force and organizing principle. The young child learns to crawl, walk, and talk through inner guidance not outer instruction, with the modelling, reflection, and encouragement for that development coming from the people and environment around them. As the children come to be ever more present in the world, they are increasingly formed by breathing and their rhythmic system. In many ways, their senses are breathing in the world and breathing out their individual expression into it. As increasingly engaged participants in the world, they feel themselves part of it, affecting it and affected by it, especially the social world. They learn to recognize the individuality of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This increasingly engaged quality of soul is powerfully formative for their understanding of and connection to the world. Over time, the sense of self emerges along with the constructs of thought and thinking which make inwardly visible a sense of emerging individuality and identity. Along with this formation of ego comes the capacity to transform what was an inner, spiritually guided organizing principle in early childhood into the creative process of thought formation, self-directed authority, and eventually, linguistic and pictorial consciousness. In some ways the rest of life is spent trying to reconnect in full consciousness to that spiritual guidance experienced in our early years. Through this developmental process, the moral world of individual origin and development precede and permeate how one shows up as a social person in the everyday material world, informing also our participation in economic life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow the Money<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, we could look at human development from a perspective brought to the fore by technological intelligence. Imagine that the incarnating process of an individuality descending from spirit has a complementary process in the rising and shaping forces of nature and subnature such as food substance, electricity and the electromagnetic fields generated by it. These are powerful forces that are specifically tied to and rely on matter in a way that has its own lawfulness, different from that of the spiritual world. They are force fields that affect vulnerable matter and touch the deepest cellular aspects of the generation of organs and organisms. Working from the outside in, they unfold alongside and sometimes against the inner spirit-guided formative forces shaping human development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ongoing development of technological science, evolved further by harnessing subnatural and electrical forces, seems almost as if directed by an intention to replicate human development in its capacities of thinking, feeling, and willing. And further, it receives attention, investment, and acceptance the closer it approximates those capacities. The representational imperative, so essential to culture since the anthropocentric achievements of the early Renaissance in Europe, still drives modern thinking. During the Renaissance era individual genius was to a significant degree tethered to the power of religion, whereas today intelligent technology seems tied to the power of commerce and the control of identity; in summary of the latter one might invoke the investigative adage \u201cfollow the money.\u201d There is one paramount distinction between then and now: The religious agenda and content were more out in the open; the agenda now is much harder to discern without going into the deeper structure. The programming and coding needed for technological development is crafted with algorithms designed with a particular intention, and any unsuspecting person is unconsciously absorbing another individual\u2019s or corporation\u2019s intention through the user interface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Substituting External Guidance<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Through constant interaction with intelligent technology, the capacity to author one\u2019s own experience in real time and real space is essentially overwritten and replaced by the visual, auditory, and linguistic functions of the machine. Neural pathways are then governed by these processes and are not left free to form on their own through inner creative processes that later serve creative imagination and intuition. This is not a picture of independent or free consciousness. Rather, consciousness here is an externally programmed or captive product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know from observing formative stages of human development that a mediated or represented experience replaces direct experience of real time and space and, as a replacement, proceeds to condition future development. If one extrapolates from this imagination, then what I identified as ego formation is more governed by subnatural forces as they function through coding than by inherent spiritual guidance, which is a birthright. One result of this replacement is a denial or dismissal of the notion of spiritual rebirth and its reality across time and space, and, instead, a celebration of our binding to matter and its delimiting view of time and space. It is this materialistic view that has contributed significantly to sustaining the flaw in our consciousness that mistakes the representation for the represented, confuses matter and spirit, and fails to recognize the importance of the human soul as the mediator between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three-part Consciousness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In engaging with intelligent technology, we are part of a three-way complementarity\u2014spirit, matter, and the ego consciousness\u2014in which each is distinct yet inextricably connected to the other two. This is the terrain we travel when guided by our moral compass. The principle Spirit is never without matter; matter is never without spirit<\/em> challenges us to bring moral consciousness to our engagement with technology, no matter how complex the technology may be. We need not dwell in a binary dilemma that seems to force us to prioritize matter over spirit, or visa-versa. Rather, we are in a condition where a new three-part consciousness can hold spirit, matter, and soul in a framework of complementarity that is mindful of the gifts, limits, and shadows each brings. Every sense experience is accompanied simultaneously by its inner corollary images. To realize such a tri-part unity requires recognizing the value and validity of this inner experience as equally as meaningful as sense experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important reason to continue to recognize and reconnect with the inner guidance that first moved us through early childhood is to continue to cultivate the deeply human capacities to discern right thinking, right action, and rights words. It is a pathway to inner freedom which these days seems laden with obstacles. The path is there in real time and real space awaiting our collective conscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Image\u00a0<\/strong>Asimo, a humanoid robot developed by Honda, at the Miraikan \u2013 National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, Japan. Photo: Unsplash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technological intelligence makes it possible to look at who we are as complex human beings in a new way. John Bloom considers the consequences for our experience of the spiritual world and its guidance of human development. Movement disquiets space,forms a wakewhose shape merges in timeEverything incorporates its complement. \u2014 JB Nearly all spiritual paths lead an individual to a sense of unity with and within the spiritual and the material world. The ancient principle: Spirit is never without matter; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10452,"featured_media":72266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8838,8788,8809],"tags":[11797,11798,8824],"class_list":["post-72576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-time-issues","category-essay-en","category-digital-world","tag-ausgabe-19-2026-en","tag-english-issue-21-2026","tag-spotlights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10452"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72611,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72576\/revisions\/72611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}