I’ve been in several conversations about AI and ChatGPT recently. A therapist friend shared that one of her clients had asked ChatGPT for help and found it compassionate. In supervision we talked about how clients might record sessions and play them to ChatGPT so that it might “learn” responses that sound like their therapist or coach. A part of me is curious to try this to see what ChatGPT imagines I might say. What will I make of the “me” it portrays? Might I improve based on these insights? Another friend advised me to ask ChatGPT what to do with a dilemma. I was unsettled by this suggestion and began to examine what it is that I’m uncomfortable with.
Then I read an article by Dr Otto Scharmer that speaks to the part of me worried that we are delegating what is fundamentally human about us to a machine.
Jungian analyst Marion Woodman wrote:
“A computer may be able to vomit out the facts of my existence but it cannot fathom the subterranean corridors of my aloneness, nor can it hear my silence, nor can it respond to the shadow that passes over my eyes.”
Scharmer builds on this and illuminates something about our deeper human capacity:
“AI and related language prediction machines like ChatGPT are brilliant at synthesising (and mirroring back to us) the knowledge that we have accumulated thus far – in other words, the knowledge of the past. But what is it that these machines can’t do? They can’t do radical deep sensing….they can’t let go of predictions based on existing patterns in order to let come what wants to emerge from our deepest Source..…. They can’t create from nothing, no thing. That’s the “blind spot” of AI.”
AI can only respond based on what has already happened and what already exists. Humans have a capacity for deep sensing. We can, if we are open to it, sense into a future that is yet to happen and feel into what it is that wants to emerge through us. We can also act from that emerging future now. This capacity, Scharmer refers to as “presencing”.
He writes:
"What we need most of all is a different quality of presence and awareness that is grounded in:
- An Open Mind: the capacity to access our not-knowing (deep listening)
- An Open Heart: the capacity to be vulnerable, to be touched (co-sensing)
- An Open Will: the capacity to act from stillness, to create from nothing (presencing).
He argues that, in our divided world, facing multiple ecological, political and cultural breakdowns, our educational focus needs to be on building this deep (human) capacity to co-sense and co-create the future as it emerges. He shares examples of communities across the globe where this is already happening. They bring together diverse, often conflicting groups, and open up spaces of collective responsibility; spaces where the head and heart and hand can be awakened. In these spaces, people move from a cognitive understanding of problems to an embodied awareness, openness and felt sense of how they need to transform in order for the necessary external shifts to happen.
Scharmer asks “What’s the question looking at you?” after reading his article. He invites us to listen to our responses in the space he creates.
As I do this, I reflect on my work in all its guises, I try to create holding spaces that give permission to people to be still, to unfold, meet and know themselves. I recognise what Scharmer describes as the future that wants to emerge in this work as I witness unimagined possibilities begin to form.
This work often feels individualistic. Developing myself for the sake of myself and my wellbeing. And sometimes it is. But often, it is also a process where we figure out how we belong; how we are shaped by the system of which we are part; how we find our inner voice that has been quashed by that same system; how we can truly be ourselves in the collective; how we can honour the stories that are ours, not in an egotistical way of “look at me” and hear how special I am, but in a way that says “my story has a place here too, alongside all of yours….let me tell it”….and then “let me hear yours”. And I believe that any work that helps us develop our capability and capacity to awaken together is invaluable.
Having said that, I’m also coming to realise that some work can only be done in the collective. When we share our personal stories, then we acknowledge that we have a shared story; that we are not so alone; that there is support for me and us in this web of life.
The relationships are where we are forged and we need practice at being with difference to move beyond our binary perspectives. If we can support each other, then there is the possibility that each of us can be transformed and that we might activate wider transformation together. Or at least move one step in that direction.
This reminds me of Peter Levine, founder of the Somatic Experiencing approach to trauma, who claims that whenever we experience trauma, a healing vortex is created, balancing the trauma vortex. In therapy he advocates moving between the two vortices gradually – back and forth – “as if they were being unwound”. With this image, I picture the collective unwinding of the world’s traumas – environmental, social, political and spiritual. As the fear and hatred grab hold, I wonder what healing vortex can be activated as we tend to each part of the story, welcoming all into The Guest House of Rumi’s poem:
……”grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
I feel the potential for transformational change in the world right now. And as Scharmer points out, I also see that there are not enough “enabling structures” to support the development of this potential. The gap between knowing and doing.
So in writing this piece today, the question I’m looking at is “What’s my part in providing more enabling structures? How can I enable a shift from individual thought and action to collective awareness and agency?"
I wonder what’s the question looking at you? The one that ChatGPT doesn't have the answer to?
