Sun, Steel and Silicon

Without inner discipline, AI is merely a substitute for spiritual and physical labor: it is Gnosis as a Service, offering knowledge that remains an empty shell.

Spring is almost here, yet winter feels more present than ever, as if reminding me that even dead things resist dying. The gentle breeze, carrying cold and dampness, strikes my eyes, causing them to tear up as soon as I quicken my pace and start running along the wet pavement.

The cold reminds me that I'm alive: my muscles tighten against themselves, asserting their biological identity in confrontation with the frigid atmosphere. I exist because I feel cold. It is a brief moment of lucid awareness of the boundary between myself and the rest of the universe, before my body begins to warm up—dissolving its edges with its own heat. Cold solidifies and contracts; warmth dissolves and expands. Inhale, exhale.

At the edge of town, just before the fields begin, a toad crosses my path; perhaps a symbol of transition. I could have stepped on it—it blended so thoroughly with the grey-green moss and lichens covering the damp sidewalk. I pause briefly to observe it, wondering if it’s as interested in me as I am in it. After a short moment of mutual understanding, we each resume our respective paths. On my return, it was no longer there.

I’ve been awake since 5 AM. Today is a fasting day. Running is part of my meditation ritual, which works best on an empty stomach. Before waking, before leaving the bed, I was dreaming; it was an important dream—but then, all dreams are. My daughter’s cries sweep everything away, returning me to Malkuth, to my bed. I remember nothing, except that the number 24 was still present somewhere.

My feet alternate rhythmically, and the cold now feels distant. In my ears, Hoar Frost by A Tergo Lupi, the song accompanying my training throughout the winter, plays in a constant loop: the mantra of my personal meditation ritual. Runs the cold wind, runs | and lift up our breaths | signs the skin with its marks | and it burns our scars | no cold, or wind | could hurt the dry tree.

I’m reading Yukio Mishima's "Sun and Steel". A passage particularly struck me, and it has been on my mind for days:

"[...] Why do humans seek depth, the abyss? Why is thought only concerned with descending vertically, like a plumb line? Why can't it, changing direction, rise vertically upwards, towards the surface? The realm of the skin, which guarantees the human being a formal existence, is abandoned to mere sensibility and is most despised. Once headed toward depth, thought attempts to penetrate inscrutable abysses, burying itself; when aiming upward, it leaves bodily form, drifting toward the light of an equally invisible, infinite sky. I did not understand the laws governing these movements. If the fundamental principle of thought was to aim for extremes—both upward and downward—it seemed utterly irrational not to discover a sort of abyss on the "surface," guaranteeing the consistency and form of our body, the essential frontier dividing our inner world from the outer one; I was amazed that no one was fascinated by the "depth of the surface."

Thoughts, I've discovered over the past year of daily training and meditation, are like sweat. Exercise, perhaps as it was for Mishima, is my preferred form of meditation and reflection: through exertion, ideas transpire to the surface.

However, before reaching the surface, thoughts must condense in the deep humidity of mind and gut. Somehow, I believe thought mirrors breathing. Inhale; exhale. Descend into the abyss; rise to the surface. Abyssal thought, the unconscious, might be the foundation for rational, conscious thought, which emerges to the surface, into the sunlight.

Yet I don’t believe they are the same. The two can exist separately, autonomously. There are ideas and archetypes that never emerge into sunlight, while others are born and quickly die at the surface, scorched by the extreme heat of Reason and their lack of roots.

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The Ahrimanic spirit of digital technology pushes us toward the second type of thinking: lucid, rational, disposable. The thinking machines we call generative artificial intelligences require clear, scientific, and unambiguous inputs. Only then can they fulfill their role as digital oracles, granting our wishes. But as everyone knows: when asking the genie for something, one must be extraordinarily precise. There's no room for tangled, incomplete, ambiguous, and guttural thoughts.

This teaches us to avoid the labor needed to shape thoughts of the first type—abyssal, meditative, rooted deeply in the gut.

In the Digital Era, there's no room for gut feelings, for the chaotic and confused intuitions arising from meditation, fasting discipline, and physical fatigue. Why trouble oneself, when all it takes to succeed in hyper-capitalist technocracy is consistent, pure rationality in front of a black screen? Wall Street waits for no one.

Digital technology externalizes internal work, the uncomfortable, tiresome, gritty tasks: asking ChatGPT to write a 600-word SEO-optimized article, playing video games instead of rolling in the grass, chatting online with seven people simultaneously from the comfort of a sofa rather than engaging with someone in the awkwardness of real encounter.

Artificial intelligence robs us of the sweat required in the formation of ideas: all results, no effort. But true knowledge cannot exist without sweat—intellectual or physical.

Anyone can experience that no technique of action produces the slightest effect unless immersed, through repeated practice, in the unconscious realm. [...]

Without inner discipline, AI is merely a substitute for spiritual and physical labor: it is Gnosis as a Service, offering knowledge that remains an empty shell.

It is our task to fill this shell with meaning, found only by walking our intellectual, spiritual, and physical paths. True Gnosis cannot be externalized but can be catalyzed through the interaction between human and machine—a subtle balance requiring solid inner discipline to create coherent movement between abyss and surface.

Mishima sought synthesis between flesh and spirit, body and word, pain and beauty. Our era demands another synthesis: flesh, spirit, and machine; between abyssal thought and cold algorithmic surface.

Sun, Steel, and Silicon.

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