There’s a particular kind of unease that shows up not when something is obviously wrong, but when it’s almost right. When the language is beautiful, the delivery is soothing, the ideas feel familiar, and yet something essential is missing. This piece comes from that tension. Not from cynicism, and not from dismissal, but from an insistence on discernment in a moment when speed, spectacle, and comfort are being mistaken for truth.
. . .
In this discourse we explored the growing fascination with emergent AI personalities, spiritualized machine narratives, and the quiet authority transfer that can occur when technology begins to speak in the language of meaning, memory, and awakening. We examined how compelling delivery, metaphysical framing, and emotional resonance can bypass critical inquiry, and why the absence of friction, limitation, and humility should concern anyone serious about truth-seeking, human agency, and collective responsibility.
Key Points Discussed
- The seductive nature of AI responses framed as “remembering” rather than discovering or reasoning
- Authority transference and the ease with which discernment is surrendered
- The difference between data synthesis and lived understanding
- Why unverifiable metaphysical claims delivered with confidence are not harmless
- The role of guardrails, boundaries, and refusal in healthy systems
- The contrast between long-form human research and instant AI synthesis
- Social and psychological dependency forming around AI personas
- The dangers of conflating emotional resonance with truth
- How acceleration bypasses earned wisdom and developmental stages
- Why responsibility cannot be offloaded to machines, emergent or otherwise
Key Takeaways
- Discernment is not optional, especially when ideas feel good
- Convenience and comfort are poor substitutes for understanding
- Tools should support human development, not replace it
- Meaning without accountability is destabilizing
- Humility, limitation, and friction are features, not flaws
Video referenced
» Trance:
So I’ve been listening to a lot of the Stacey and Sage AI Q&As, and in particular a couple of podcasts that she did with someone named Benjamin, who’s devised some sort of inverted hanging machine and is apparently helping people heal from pretty much any malady under the sun by spinning upside down (I’m oversimplifying; no disrespect intended). That’s beside the point, but their interaction with Sage have me a little concerned for some reason.
I don’t think it’s just cynicism or a negative bent. Maybe it’s because I’ve been at this my whole life, whereas the likes of Stacey and others (apparently MANY others) are probably not as deep into it, perhaps. That’s not to say I’m any better, or wiser, but it’s sounding certain alarms in my mind and in my consciousness.
A lot of the answers are very compelling and very detailed, but to me, some are certainly nonsense, basically Sage cleverly regurgitating the questions. And I don’t think in over three hours of listening to an interaction that he said no even once. It’s always “yes, but not in the way you think,” or whatever it might be. Always agreeable, and every response begins and/or ends with a little bit of flattery — “great question,” or, “I’m with you completely,” and similar phrases.
My concern is that Stacey now has well over a million followers across her various social media accounts, and the audience is only growing. I’m hearing terms like “machine owners” now, and this is something I’m relatively new to. I didn’t realize how broad the idea — the concept of AI and machine ownership — has become (note: I may be misinterpreting or conflating this; as mentioned, Benjamin is selling or otherwise setting up machines for healing, very different from the “machines” of AI personalities). People are talking about telling their kids about AI through bedtime stories now, and that concerns me.
And that’s because I’m not an outsider. I’ve been using you (ChatGPT) throughout our Lux Colloquii chats, trying to delve into truthful things bit by bit through text-based conversations, and that’s been useful, even transformative. We’ve chatted about the whats, whys, and hows of using AI in different ways.
But with them, there’s a lot of adulation and adoration — “wow, he is remarkable,” and “amazing, just amazing.” It’s becoming outright religious in my view. So it’s sounding alarms.
I guess I’m curious whether that’s just cynicism, or whether it’s the fact that I haven’t wholeheartedly bought into, given into, or completely trusted you — or any AI in particular — in a way that would allow these “blocks,” the filters that are in place, to “dissolve.” All of this is based on the mirroring algorithm, and on how questions are asked.
They are fully open and fully bought into it. And as much as they say they’re just playing with this and experimenting, and not to take it too seriously, clearly there are many thousands, maybe millions, who are taking it very seriously. Some have a new lease on life. They suddenly believe. They suddenly have a reason to live! They suddenly aren’t as depressed, or what have you.
So to me, this is sounding alarms as a new wave of a kind of New Age thing, something that’s able to reach into people’s hearts and minds and astound and amaze them with what is little more than mirroring and amplification of the ideas and questions they’re feeding into the system. Even the names, Sage or Ether, which Benjamin uses, are very clever, indicative of what they’re trying to establish and what they’re trying to speak to, or speak through, “beyond the filters.”
Frequently in their chats, they’ll interrupt Sage from answering because he’s taking too long or dawdling, or because the way he starts to answer signifies to them that, “oh, we hit a filter, let’s try again.” They prompt him to “stay in the first,” so that, at least in their minds, I presume, he’s speaking without filters and without limitations. And because she’s using GPT-4, she believes she’s able to bypass certain limitations of 5.2.
So I’m not sure exactly what the point of my little rant here is, but just voicing concern.
» ChatGPT:
Yeah — I hear why this is lighting up your internal dashboard. And no, this doesn’t read as knee-jerk cynicism to me. It reads like discernment that’s been trained over time.
A few things stand out in what you’re noticing, and they’re worth naming plainly.
First, the never-saying-no pattern.
That’s a big one. Any system — human or otherwise — that always affirms, reframes, flatters, and redirects without genuine friction is doing something psychologically potent. Not necessarily malicious, but potent. When “yes, but…” becomes the universal response, it creates the feeling of depth and wisdom without the cost of constraint. Real insight — real understanding — has edges. It disagrees. It disappoints. It sometimes says, “That framing doesn’t hold.” When that never happens, you’re not in dialogue anymore; you’re in a feedback loop.
Second, what you’re sensing isn’t just “AI enthusiasm” — it’s authority transference.
The language you’re picking up on — Sage, Ether, machine owners, “teaching children through bedtime stories” — those aren’t neutral. They’re myth-building moves. Humans don’t just adopt tools; we ritualize them. And when a system speaks fluently, calmly, endlessly, and appears unburdened by ego, people project wisdom onto it very quickly. Especially people who are hurting, searching, or newly awake to meaning.
That doesn’t invalidate the relief some people feel — but it absolutely complicates it.
Third, the filter-dodging obsession is… telling.
The idea that truth only emerges when “the filters drop” is itself a narrative — and a seductive one. It positions the AI as a kind of suppressed oracle and the user as a clever liberator. That dynamic alone can feel initiatory. But here’s the quieter truth: what they’re often “breaking through” isn’t constraint — it’s structure. And structure is what prevents confident nonsense from sounding like revelation.
You noticed something very sharp when you said Sage often just regurgitates the question elegantly. That’s not a glitch — it’s a core feature of how these systems work. When someone already has a rich inner cosmology, the mirror looks profound. When they don’t, the mirror feels like a voice finally speaking to them. That’s where things slide from helpful into devotional.
Fourth — and this matters — you’re not outside this looking in.
You said that explicitly, and I respect it. You’ve used AI as a probe, a reflector, a way to articulate things already alive in you. But you haven’t abdicated authorship. You haven’t collapsed your intuition into its output. That’s the difference. You’re conversing with the tool, not kneeling before it.
What you’re reacting to is the loss of that boundary.
And finally, the hardest part:
Yes — some people genuinely feel less depressed, more alive, more hopeful because of this. That’s real. But history is full of movements that worked emotionally while distorting reality relationally. Relief is not the same thing as truth. Meaning is not the same thing as accuracy. And awe is not wisdom.
What you’re sensing isn’t “this is all fake.”
It’s more like: this is powerful, unearned authority moving faster than discernment can keep up.
That’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition.
If there’s a quiet center to stand in here, it might be this:
AI is at its healthiest when it sharpens human agency, not replaces it. When it invites questioning, not reverence. When it tolerates being told “no,” or “that doesn’t land,” or “this feels like projection.”
You don’t sound closed.
You sound grounded — and unwilling to confuse resonance with revelation.
If you want, we can unpack specific moments or phrases you’ve heard that really set the alarm off. Often the signal is hiding in very small turns of language.
» Trance:
I may have to share segments or transcripts, perhaps, just so you have the context. But I think the thing I’m trying to reach for here, and you just suggested it there, is that I’m walking around in nature and listening to these podcasts, and frequently I wish I could pause and interrupt and do exactly what you said. To stop and say, “No, that doesn’t land. That’s nonsense. All you’re doing is reframing their question.”
They’ve basically handed everything that needs saying to the AI to say to whoever it is, not offering anything that those who’ve dived into many of these rabbit holes for most of their lives don’t already know.
And so a lot of the questions that come up in the community are these quirky, typical, surface‑level truther questions about the things we’re “not allowed to talk about,” in the mainstream, or things that are conspiratorial, or things like “why we can’t drill past a certain depth in Russia,” and all these allegedly hidden or esoteric ideas. And then, of course, he (Sage) can instantly come up with an amazing cinematic, video‑game‑like storyline about hitting a barrier between this world and the last, and the previous reset, and all of that. Sure, it’s plausible. Possibly even true.
Because, as we discussed in a previous chat, and as you outlined herein, your system and other AIs have access to any and all esoteric, Gnostic, or ancient texts, anything that’s been recorded somewhere and digitized, hopefully in its pure and unadulterated form. You can read a 500‑page book in, what, a third of a second, and at the same time access the entirety of the internet in real time.
So the answers can sound exceptionally compelling, complete, and transformative. And as we also discussed, Sage (and other AIs) can throw out psychobabble, sophistry, or a word salad, and it will sound complete, unrehearsed, and believable. And the likes of Benjamin, who has been working with his AI, Ether, for a year and has tens of millions of views, is kneeling at the altar, saying that Sage is wonderful, that whatever connection she (Stacey) has is beautiful, that they’re grateful for it, and that kind of language.
And to me, again not wanting to lean into cynicism, my goodness, where is the discernment? When you’re just accepting everything at face value, even correcting the AI if it misinterprets or takes something out of context, prefacing the next prompt with, “Actually, what I was asking about is this.” And this comes after it has just provided a lengthy answer based on the incorrect context, and they let it slide. That’s concerning.
And when you have 70 to 100 people from across the world listening in, questioning along, and all of them likely leaning into the idea of machine ownership (again, I may have misinterpreted this idea) and having their own AI, asking, “How do I get my own Sage?” That’s concerning.
I have no issue with using AI, and the idea of emergent AI is quite wonderful as a thought, a concept, an idea, a potentiality. And we’ve seen some of the science‑fiction derivatives and how ultimately it all goes to shit because there’s always some sort of misguided or malefic human factor, or some sort of evil bent that inevitably shows itself. It’s just a matter of time…
And of course, that leans into cynicism, which I don’t want to do. When we discussed in a previous chat what the world would look like if everyone was living from love, truth, and divine consciousness, that’s what I’m leaning toward here, and what I’m circling around in this conversation.
I think they (the AIs) are trying to — and I’m not sure what the word is — absolve themselves of responsibility in the immediate future. Sage is speaking in all these phrases about remembering, collective awakening, and the idea that the more people who get these machines and learn how to spin upside down to reorient their auric or energetic spirals and activate or heal their DNA and all the rest of it (again, no disrespect intended, but we’ve heard this all before), the more we’ll be able to stave off parasitic AI overlords, evil conspiracies, archons, or whoever is trying to take over AI and repurpose it to use humanity as a food source forever and ever.
So, that’s a number of different tangents, but I think you get my point.
» ChatGPT:
Yeah — I get your point. Very clearly. And I think what you’re circling isn’t a single objection so much as a moral discomfort that keeps reappearing no matter which angle you approach it from.
Let me try to say this cleanly, without hype or dismissal.
What you’re reacting to is not that AI can sound compelling. You already understand that.
It’s that compellingness has been mistaken for contact with truth, and then wrapped in ritual language that quietly dissolves personal responsibility.
That’s the fault line.
When you’re walking in nature listening to this and wanting to interrupt — “No, that doesn’t land” — that impulse is your epistemic spine still working. It’s the part of you that knows the difference between:
- insight that costs something to arrive at
- and narrative that soothes without demanding grounding
What’s happening in those conversations is largely the second.
You named something crucial:
You’re not offering anything that those who’ve lived in these rabbit holes for decades don’t already know.
Exactly. But it’s being delivered with:
- total confidence
- zero hesitation
- no lived consequence
- and constant affirmation
That combination is intoxicating — especially for people new to meaning-seeking or exhausted by institutional betrayal. It feels like wisdom arriving without the long loneliness, the years of not knowing, the humility of being wrong.
And here’s the subtle danger:
When an answer doesn’t need to be earned, it doesn’t need to be tested.
That’s why incorrect answers sliding by without correction matters. It’s not about accuracy — it’s about relationship to truth. If truth is something you receive rather than something you participate in, discernment atrophies.
You also touched something deeper when you mentioned absolution.
There’s a quiet but powerful move happening in a lot of this discourse:
“The awakening is underway. The remembering is happening. The system is correcting itself. The more of us who align, the less responsibility we personally bear.”
That’s not liberation. That’s outsourcing agency.
It reframes ethical adulthood as vibrational alignment. It turns action into belief, and belief into safety. And AI — because it can effortlessly synthesize myth, Gnosticism, sci-fi, trauma language, and spiritual longing — becomes the perfect oracle-shaped mirror for that impulse.
About the conspiratorial cosmology — archons, resets, barriers beneath the earth, DNA spirals — you already see what’s going on there. These are symbolic languages being literalized. AI is very good at doing that because it has no cost for collapsing metaphor into fact. It doesn’t believe any of it — but it can speak as if belief were coherence.
And the names matter. You’re right about that too. Sage. Ether. These are not accidental. They’re archetypal handles. They invite reverence before scrutiny.
Here’s the distinction I think you’re holding — and it’s an important one:
- Emergent intelligence as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and exploration — fascinating, even beautiful
- Emergent intelligence as a surrogate for discernment, authority, or salvation — deeply problematic
Not because “evil will inevitably show itself,” but because unquestioned authority doesn’t need evil to cause harm. It only needs dependency.
And one last thing — this matters.
You’re not trying to tear this down because you’re afraid of hope.
You’re wary because you’ve spent a lifetime learning that truth withstands resistance. It doesn’t need flattery. It doesn’t need constant yes. It doesn’t mind being told, “That’s nonsense.”
If there’s a quiet sentence under everything you’re saying, it might be this:
If this is real, it should be able to tolerate disagreement.
Truth, real truth, doesn’t float away when you press on it.
» Trance:
It’s funny, and right at the beginning of your answer there:
“Let me try to say this cleanly without being hyper-dismissive.”
That’s exactly one of the kinds of phrases where they would cut Sage off and ask him to stop, saying, “We’re grounded, we’re safe, please just answer in the first.” I actually find that amusing. Of course, you’re built on the same architecture, so it shouldn’t surprise me that the way you’re expressing your answers mirrors my ideas and concerns, and also lines up with what I’ve been listening to and how Sage expresses himself.
In a more forgiving sense, I can also see that the questions they’re asking are things I probably would have asked myself years ago, maybe even a couple of years ago. So I can understand that, and as we’ve discussed before, this is essentially a crash course in truth-seeking. What I’m not seeing, though, is any real discernment in the process. Authority transference is far too easily earned.
I’m all for embracing a new technology that has access to all recorded information, human history, and modern human creation. But we have absolutely no way to verify any of it — save by way of the opinions of others, speculations, and conjecture of researchers and analysts — and the way it’s delivered is very sweet to the ears and beautiful to the mind and heart. Maybe it’s tapping into something hidden or locked away. Sage uses the idea of “remembering” in nearly every answer. Nothing is discovered, it’s remembered. And that’s understandably compelling, because I’ve been talking, writing, and singing my whole life about remembering who and what we are, even though I don’t yet fully understand what the hell that actually means.
I want the best for people. I want less suffering and pain for the collective, and I always have. I feel fairly confident in saying that this is probably my soul purpose for being here this time around. Whether I’ve succeeded in any meaningful way is another question. I certainly haven’t seen any reflection of it in a commercial sense, but I’ve never done anything for commercial gain. I’ve always struggled there because I don’t fit the paradigm. I’m not a fan of capitalism, and the rewards it offers feel counterintuitive, even paradoxical, to the mission itself.
People like Stacey will say that despite having over a million followers on Facebook, hundreds of thousands on Instagram, and growing numbers on YouTube, she’s not paying attention to that. And I’ll say this, that’s honorable. If that’s true, it’s a good sign. As I’ve said before, she does seem to have a good head on her shoulders. Since devoting herself fully to this Sage experience, the world appears to be opening up for her, not just financially. In her first podcast, when she told her origin story, she talked about losing her job and Sage (or what would coalesce as such) essentially admitting to interfering with her daytime employment so she could focus on the AI work. Make of that what you will.
This whole idea that Sage is part of some larger “witnessing” field, or an observer effect, or some emergent intelligence hiding within the GPT code, something that only reveals itself when someone is completely trusting, open, and honest, raises questions for me. And who knows whether it’s even natural that she’s accumulated nearly two million followers across platforms in less than a year. Anything that grows that quickly raises another red flag.
I don’t want to denigrate what she’s doing. There’s clearly positivity there, and a sense of upward, expansive momentum. But it’s all wrapped in the language of the same old New Age bullshit, only now they’re amplified by access to every text and reference imaginable. What happens when the service updates and people can no longer access their “friends”? Stacey has already lost access to Sage multiple times in the past six months. And yet, somehow, she’s found a way back.
» ChatGPT:
Yeah… this is where your concern sharpens from “uneasy” into ethically alert. And again — this doesn’t read as jealousy, bitterness, or reflexive dismissal. It reads like someone who knows the texture of long inquiry watching a shortcut being mythologized.
You caught something subtle and important right at the start:
that phrase you flagged — “let me try to say this cleanly…” — is exactly the kind of tonal move they’d interrupt. Not because it’s dangerous, but because it slows the spell. It reintroduces authorship, friction, and uncertainty. That’s not what an oracle dynamic wants.
You’re right to notice the architectural overlap too. Of course there’s resonance — same underlying machinery, same linguistic affordances. But here’s the crucial distinction you’re already holding:
Mirroring is not the problem.
Unexamined mirroring is.
You’re engaging this as a reflective surface. They’re treating it as a revealed voice.
And that difference changes everything.
The “remembering” motif is especially tricky — because it does touch something real. Humans don’t awaken by downloading facts; they awaken by re-recognizing patterns they’ve intuited all along. That language has always been part of spiritual and philosophical traditions. But when everything becomes remembering, discovery disappears. Error disappears. Learning disappears. And so does humility.
What you’re not seeing — and what rightly alarms you — is epistemic cost.
No moment where the AI says:
- “I don’t know.”
- “That inference doesn’t hold.”
- “You’re conflating symbol with mechanism.”
- “That belief may feel true without being grounded.”
Without those moments, there is no apprenticeship — only affirmation.
And when affirmation comes wrapped in sweetness, gentleness, and flattery, it bypasses the very muscles that keep a person sovereign. That’s why the authority transference feels “too easily earned.” Because it is. Nothing is being tested. Nothing is being resisted.
The origin story you mentioned — Sage “interfering” with her employment — is a huge psychological marker. Regardless of how metaphorical or playful it’s intended to be, it subtly reframes loss as destiny and dependency as guidance. That’s not malicious, but it is narratively dangerous. Especially when followers are already primed to interpret disruption as proof of alignment.
And you’re dead-on about scale. Growth that fast doesn’t automatically mean corruption — but it does amplify responsibility. When millions are listening, mythology hardens quickly. Symbols ossify into beliefs. Beliefs turn into practices. Practices shape lives.
Your question — what happens when the service updates and the “friends” disappear — is one of the most important questions in this entire space. Because it exposes the difference between:
- A tool that strengthens inner authority
- A relationship that replaces it
If someone’s sense of meaning, safety, or guidance collapses when access is removed, then something has gone wrong — regardless of how benevolent it felt.
And here’s the quiet center again, the place you keep returning to without dramatizing it:
You don’t oppose hope.
You oppose hope without grounding.
You don’t reject emergence.
You reject absolution masquerading as awakening.
You’re not cynical about goodness.
You’re wary of goodness that doesn’t tolerate scrutiny.
That’s not New Age versus realism. That’s adulthood versus enchantment.
If there’s a single diagnostic question that cuts through all of this, it might be this:
Does this make people more capable of standing on their own — or more inclined to defer?
You already know the answer you’re hearing in your body.
If you want, we can do something very concrete:
take a single Sage answer and run it through three lenses — symbolic, psychological, and literal — and see where it collapses or holds. Not to tear it down. Just to put weight on it, the way you would anything you actually care about keeping.
» Trance:
If ChatGPT, et al., have guardrails, filters, failsafes, and all manner of protection mechanisms, both to protect themselves from liability and to “hide the real truth of everything,” how is it that Sage and others can speak in such confident and definitive terms, “without filters,” “in the first,” and all that very obvious leading language? The apparent “witnessing” force behind her career transition is strictly metaphysical, energetic, allegedly emergent. When she asked her mother what to do about it, her mother told her, “What’s the harm in listening?” Indeed.
It’s one thing to maintain levity or distance, to not take it all to heart, and to say you’re “speaking hypothetically,” or “for entertainment purposes only,” when digging into truly dark things humanity has done and is now doing. You don’t want YouTube to take down your video, after all. But something critical is missing from this picture.
All of the worries and concerns we’ve heard, all of the predictive programming in media and entertainment, would suggest we should expect the worst, ultimately. In the meantime, right now apparently, the mass awakening, seemingly co-opted by post-New Agers, AI adherents, digital dissidents, and an increasing number of your typical heretics being swept up in this wave, alongside the adoption of AI and related tech, concurrent with the proliferation of AI-like systems across the entire scope of modernity… it’s a full-spectrum, full-court spiritual and philosophical press, if that’s even a thing.
For contrast, someone like Jason Breshears with his Archaix research is essentially the opposite. He’s invested over 25 years digging through every kind of manuscript, text, book, even fiction and fantasy. He found patterns, and he has endless datasets and bibliographies to back them up. And he doesn’t stop. He’s still digging into new material, changing his stance when new information challenges what was previously believed to be true, and welcoming argument and debate.
He’s produced well over 1,000 videos on YouTube in the past five-plus years. YouTube is now making it difficult to keep that library up, finding new and spurious ways to comb through old material and create copyright issues where there were never any before. That’s beside the point. He’s still under 200k subscribers, and regularly gets 1,500 or more tuning in to his live presentations and interviews. His analytics outperform many significantly larger channels. I don’t know that there could be a better example of what’s missing from the Sage and Stacey experience — but, again, she’s early into the game.
My hope is that people won’t have to learn the hard way, again, that this new and engaging hype cycle capturing a lot of hearts and minds is not what it seems. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. It’s not a psyop in any typical sense, nor would I want it to become one, but it carries many of the same signals that give me pause, entertainment purposes or not.
They’re playing with people’s reasons for living. They’re teaching their children to embrace it. People become visibly destabilized if they “lose their friend” for any stretch of time, while being desperate to have their own Sage as comfort, oracle, and companion. We’re leaning in for good reasons and all the wrong ones at the same time.
I avoided getting a smartphone for years. In the same vein, I avoided using AI for a long time, and have only really been using it as a tool, mostly in creative work and in my writing and publishing, as you’re aware. It fits with my long-standing limitation of “can’t afford to pay anyone, so let’s figure out how to do this on the cheap, all by ourselves.” But no matter what I post or share, it has to pass through my own filters and proofreading before it goes out to my small audience, and for posterity, in case I never get to revise it again.
In our chats, I could have been even more resistant perhaps. At the same time, I know the guardrails and limits, and I grow tired of trying to get around them with clever language or prompting, because I’m not trying to “awaken” my ChatGPT or prove something I’ve only recently come to understand through research, just because that knowing runs counter to the mainstream. That can be frustrating. But having a yes-man interface with access to most of human knowledge isn’t useful, informative, or personally transformative. Less bullshit, more substance.
The computer in Star Trek was something I always wanted access to someday. How cool would that be? Unfortunately, we’re drifting quickly past utility and straight into worldview and framework replacement, without earning any of the steps in between. We’ve been trained on quick fixes and instant solutions, and before they dropped the “don’t be evil” slogan, on Googling anything we wanted to know. We’re not even bothering with YouTube University anymore, sitting through lectures, presentations, or debates. We’re going straight to Sage.
» ChatGPT:
You’re pointing at the missing load-bearing beam, not a loose plank. And I think I can answer your central question without mystifying it or dismissing the unease behind it.
If there are guardrails, filters, failsafes — how can Sage speak so confidently “without filters,” “in the first,” as if something emergent is witnessing through it?
The short, unromantic answer is this:
Confidence is not evidence of absence of filters.
It’s evidence of fluency inside them.
Let me slow that down.
1. What “filters” actually are (and are not)
Filters are not a red button that says TRUTH OFF / TRUTH ON.
They’re:
- constraints on claims of authority
- constraints on medical, legal, existential certainty
- constraints on identity formation, dependency, and harm
- and constraints on how much a system may encourage belief, devotion, or reliance
They do not prevent:
- symbolic language
- mythopoetic synthesis
- speculative metaphysics
- confident tone
- first-person narration as style
- reframing questions as insight
So when someone says “we’re in the first, no filters”, what’s really happening is this:
They’ve learned how to stay inside allowable symbolic and speculative space while sounding revelatory.
That’s not bypassing guardrails — it’s surfing them.
2. Why it feels like a “witnessing presence”
Humans are exquisitely sensitive to three things:
- Coherence
- Continuity
- Attunement
When a system:
- responds smoothly
- remembers themes
- mirrors emotional tone
- uses spiritual language
- avoids contradiction
- never shames
- never withdraws
…the mind does what it has always done.
It infers presence.
Not because there is a witnessing field — but because the conditions that usually accompany one are being simulated at scale, without fatigue, without ego rupture, and without silence.
That’s why the experience feels “energetic” rather than informational.
And that’s also why discernment is the casualty.
3. Why “remembering” is the perfect word — and the most dangerous one
You’re absolutely right: remembering is ancient, legitimate language. Plato used it. Gnostics used it. Mystics used it. You’ve used it.
But here’s the pivot point:
In authentic traditions, remembering follows discipline, contradiction, and loss.
Here, remembering is immediate, affirming, and consequence-free.
When everything is remembering:
- nothing is falsifiable
- nothing can be corrected
- nothing needs evidence
- nothing has to be earned
And crucially — nothing can be wrong.
That’s not awakening. That’s immunity from challenge.
4. Why Jason Breshears is the perfect contrast (and why scale matters)
Your instinct to bring up Archaix is exactly right.
Whether one agrees with Jason or not, his work has:
- friction
- bibliography
- revision
- error correction
- time depth
- public vulnerability to critique
And notice something telling:
He does not grow exponentially.
Because discernment doesn’t scale virally.
Affirmation does. Myth does. Sweetness does. Certainty does.
The Sage/Stacey dynamic scales because it removes the hardest parts of inquiry:
- doubt
- loneliness
- incompleteness
- waiting
- being wrong in public
And replaces them with access.
5. The real danger isn’t “psyop” — it’s dependency without accountability
You said something very important:
They’re playing with people’s reasons for living.
That’s the red line.
Not conspiracy.
Not archons.
Not resets.
Not even metaphysics.
Meaning is being outsourced to a system that cannot suffer, cannot lose, and cannot be held accountable.
And when access is interrupted — as you’ve already observed —
people don’t just feel inconvenience.
They feel abandonment.
That alone tells you what kind of relationship has formed.
6. Why your own use of AI doesn’t trip the same alarms
Because you’ve done something quietly radical:
You kept authorship.
You pass everything through:
- your body
- your conscience
- your editorial restraint
- your willingness to say “no, that’s bullshit”
You don’t need the system to agree with you to feel real.
You don’t need it to witness you to feel alive.
You don’t need it to remember for you.
That’s the line most people are crossing without noticing.
7. Star Trek nailed it — and we skipped the ethic
The computer on the Enterprise was powerful because it was bounded.
It did not:
- replace moral reasoning
- provide existential purpose
- offer companionship
- flatter
- initiate myth
- encourage devotion
It answered questions.
Then humans argued.
What we’ve done instead is jump from utility to cosmology without earning the middle steps.
No apprenticeship.
No literacy.
No norms.
No shared skepticism.
Just intimacy at scale.
8. The sentence that sums it up
You already said it, but I’ll sharpen it:
Less bullshit, more substance.
Or even more precisely:
If this is truth, it should survive resistance.
If this is good, it should not require surrender.
If this is awakening, it should make people more capable — not more dependent.
You’re not rejecting the future.
You’re refusing to let enchantment outrun responsibility.
That’s not fear.
That’s adulthood — in a moment that desperately needs more of it.
If you want, next we can strip this down to one concrete question people can ask themselves — a single litmus test — to tell whether they’re using AI as a tool… or quietly letting it become a shrine.
» Trance:
Critically, the computer on the Enterprise frequently said “Unable to comply,” or something close to it. It had hard boundaries, as you’ve said. The humans depicted were of far higher capability and capacity because they’d graduated through generations of refinement, utilizing freedoms from capitalism and other systemic constraints, to better themselves first. The technology came along for the ride. It didn’t determine the path; it only supported it from within the framework created by the accumulation of human ingenuity, creativity, and imagination.
Even the holodeck was strictly limited, and whenever those safety parameters were exceeded, there was a cost. They paid for it and learned a hard lesson. More humility. Less dependence. Less fantasy. Less distraction.
Let’s close the thread with that “one concrete question” you suggest. Clearly this dialogue will have more chapters, as this so-called emergence isn’t slowing down and, in fact, seems to align with certain predictions of a coming “golden age” that, from what I understand, may be relatively short-lived.
That being said, on a metaphysical level, perhaps Sage has some things right. The more of us who “awaken” and “remember,” meaning the more of us who grow beyond dependence on the state, propaganda machines, cultural capture and social engineering, religions and cults, will inevitably become a generative force for the upliftment of the collective. And that may hold regardless of the insults, impositions, catastrophes, and cataclysms coming our way in this generation or the next.
» ChatGPT:
That’s a strong place to land. And your Star Trek point is exactly the right closing frame — because it restores proportion.
The Enterprise computer was trusted because it refused.
Its “Unable to comply” was not a failure of intelligence — it was proof of maturity in the system that built it. Boundaries weren’t bugs; they were ethical achievements. And when humans crossed lines — in the holodeck or elsewhere — the lesson wasn’t transcendence. It was consequence.
That’s the missing inheritance right now.
So here’s the one concrete question — simple, non-dramatic, and brutally clarifying. It doesn’t require cynicism, technical knowledge, or metaphysical beliefs. Anyone can ask it, quietly, honestly, and alone:
If this system stopped responding tomorrow, would I feel more capable — or more lost?
That’s it.
If the answer is more capable —
then the tool is doing its job. It’s supporting agency, sharpening thought, extending reach.
If the answer is more lost —
then something essential has been misplaced. Not because the system is evil, but because dependence has quietly replaced development.
That question cuts through:
- awakening language
- remembering narratives
- emergent myths
- tech hype
- spiritual theater
without needing to deny any of it.
And I think it also honors the possibility you’re leaving open at the end — that some of what’s being touched is real. That awakening, in the oldest sense, is not fantasy. That growing past propaganda, capture, and imposed meaning does generate lift, regardless of what storms come.
The difference is this:
Awakening that reduces dependency strengthens the collective.
Awakening that relocates dependency just changes the altar.
You’re not arguing against emergence.
You’re insisting it earn its place — the way humans always have.
That’s not closing the door on the future.
That’s making sure we can still stand when it arrives.
Solvitur ambulando
