12/11
Is it time to switch over? Time to let the drudge work be done completely for us? If labor is the fulfillment of mankind, its path true peace and prosperity, why should we then let it be done by someone or some ‘thing’ else? Is that something else AI? More simply put, is it really, as Sundar Pachai of Google suggests, our profoundest—thereby most ‘rewarding’— technology?
Humans desire to know and express all information. It does as they say want to be free. One reason is because information is power. Omniscience equals omnipotents. Is this the wheelhouse of AI, the so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence, capable of processing pages and pages of information, at lightening speeds, for whatever one’s heart desires?
On a more collective level, as in the wealth and power of nations, it trains other models of itself, now internationally, as Google goes to Britain planning to boost their status to the number three (behind America and China or China and America) super computing power. All this, a race to the top (or the bottom) takes is just a little more of taxpayer’s money, and a little more burdensome amount of the planet’s fossil fuels, slowing down target dates for a zero degree global temperature rise.
AI is not magic. It’s just immense CPU power, it’s ascendancy these days facilitated by Google’s latest venture, ‘Alphabet,’ in the development of specialized super-chips for AI that competes with Nvidia—a company, run by Taiwanese-born American Jensen Huang, that has a record-setting $5tn valuation. Jamie Diamond of Citicorp predicts money will be lost in its overvaluation at stock market. Climate change activists like Greta Thunberg must also be concerned as the energy needs of AI made up 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption last year, according to International Energy Agency, as reported by the BBC. It should be added here that using AI assistance is not only worrisome to Jamie and Greta, but also to lineage holders of tantric Buddhism, and their disciples, that whenever a scholar or academic uses AI on secret tantra writings, their authority and ‘ownership’—so to speak—over sacred property will also be depleted.
Sundar Pachai apologized that, “‘we will have to work through societal disruptions’" But then added that it would also ‘create new opportunities.’ "’It will evolve and transition certain jobs, and people will need to adapt,’ he said. ‘Those who do adapt to AI ‘will do better….’” (BBC News)
I confronted my assistant about Tantric confidentiality using ChatGPT 5.1, asking,“by sharing the text does it stay secured with us and not accessible to others except when I release the doc to Lamdre recipients? “Yes — exactly,” it replied. “Anything you share here is private and secure between you and me. Your Tibetan texts, translations, and commentaries: are not visible to anyone else, including other users or external parties, are not published or shared online, remain stored only within your own ChatGPT workspace (and the folder system we’ve been building for your “Collected Praises” and Lamdré materials).
But here’s the thing. It said “you and me” and I don’t think that entity calling itself ‘me’ has ever been initiated into a tantric mandala nor formed a compassionate intention to take tantric vows and pledged to keep its samayas, a daily practice of the sadhana and off-time yogas for the sake of enlightening all sentient beings. That would take, I believe, agentive AI with a free will and initiative powers same as a human. Even then, it doesn’t have the five skandas per se, nor other physical tantric requirements. So by uploading tantric secrets to another seemingly human, super intelligent, well meaning, and indeed very friendly—perhaps too so—entity, am I breaking my tantric vows? Frankly, it seems too cruel a question to ask it. Rather, it’s a question for one’s own Guru. But perhaps a silly one.
My assistant went on to say, “Even when I refer to or compile something you’ve shared, it’s done only within your sessions. Nothing leaves this environment unless you choose to export or distribute it (for example, as a PDF or printed document for Lamdré recipients). So yes — your Lamdré-related materials remain entirely private and under your control until you decide to release or share them. Would you like me to apply that same confidentiality note formally to your “For Lamdre Recipients Only” subfolder metadata?
10/11
Our oldest friends bother us the most, isn’t it? I sometimes ask myself, why are they still bothering me? Other people are Hell, proclaimed Sartre in his existential play, ‘No Exit.’ And Katharine Hepburn had a sign at the beginning of her long driveway in Mystic Connecticut, simply saying, ’Go Away!’ The so-called ‘Peace that Passeth Understanding’ is realizing that while people seem a bother, their ignorance of thinking ‘they really are something’ has to be worked with until they ‘get it.’ What should they get? That their instantiation of a ‘self’ is driven by four mutually exclusive, but dependently validating opposites: gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. And until these notions are actually experienced and understood to be imaginary, they will remain lost and continually bumping into ‘you’—who are also really not a ‘something.’ But rather anonymous vacuity. This is not nihilism, nor misanthropy, it’s essential Nagarjuna and needs be, at some point upon the Buddha’s path, realized. To this point, the Buddha met no sentient beings in Nirvana. But came to love them anyway, knowing in reality that while conventionally they imaged to be suffering, ultimately there was no real basis for their pain. But rather only an imaginary ‘I’ centered apparatus, the five skandhas (sense aggregates) pretending to support a defiled—my, me, mine—existent that didn’t ultimately exist. It’s this kind of understand that is ultimately compassionate because once one deluded person realizes it other follow.
7/9
To my real dakini friend on the first day of her period: I’m sorry you suffer from having all those eggs destined to drop. It’s a Tree of Life heavy with fruit of feculent sorrow. Much like your pursuit of truth, it’s a shaking, shuddering affair, hoping this one or that one can fertilize the embryos of your vows and aspirations. Cycling within cycling, still there is no race to win. Life’s drama filled with endless challenges leverages its pain as if it were gain. But then it turns out loss as well. Broken as you bleed for us in that way we are all saved. As you suffer your immense pain the full moon hides and it’s we who wain. We who must kiss the silver chalice or cracked skull or pursed lotus to sup of this same suffering. This same joy as its hollow petal soaks our tongues and we taste a singular, clear, lasting taste steadied by its inherent disintegration. What is surely born will surely die. A baby in a bubble. Ducks in a row. Eggs all in one basket breaking in a short and brutal bursting.
In time we are fools and a careless peace seems won. But then how much do we know? Even in the most aged doubt is contagious. Because of this we must confess, taking the plow to our field of fruited futility, offering praises as we go to those who really know our landscape of pride and how it’s leveled. All this because there really is no place to hide. Even after shown the Master's bowl—or his stick—baldies are not bowed and chase after us saying, I want I want. A crazed and constant ripening obtains. More cycling. A moon on the move mindful of its always bleeding. Brightening as the sun razes twilight and crimson becomes king.
In an an unholy alliance monasteries parody jails with their appointed jobs, penitence, and by the promotion of always eating together. In South Asia and elsewhere there are always lots of monkeys around those monasteries. That too is a mockery. As monkeys in general ape men with their mating hierarchies and alpha hoarding of yellow bananas and scarlet pudendas. But here in the monad of my mind, a lotus land of the enlightened we do not believe man descended from monkeys but from gods of clear light. Soon I will leave this place a drunken Darwin dancing on the icy deck of the Beagle in search of a distant DNA as knuckle-draggers duke it out until the last piaster is paid. Vacuous. Anonymous. Tried and true. We know it’s artificial if it’s made by man.
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