As a kid, I used to watch the television series, "Have Gun Will Travel". In this age its "Have phone will travel." True with a phone, you can go places with Google maps and Waze. You can cover many places, and document stories too. But as Nada asks on his channel "Awaken Insight" if "AI can Replace Human Insight and Experience?", one has to live the life to actually know. Yes, Carl Sagan says of a book,
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
And music and a particular song can bring us to that past moment in time, and photos and family videos, too, remind us of such wonderful moments. But yet experience shall be the best teacher. When I brought Tavayogi to Banting, when he was in Malaysia many years ago, where he was to officiate the opening of a new Peedham, he surprised me when he asked that I speak about the Siddhas. I was an infant back then. What did I know about the Siddhas, to speak on them? Even today, I do not know them. What I know is what everybody has read and heard about them. Many years later, Agathiyar asked me to shift the mode of my writing to that of sharing the internal transformation and changes taking place. I could write on this because it was my experience. AI cannot bring us this human experience.
Nada says,
"... spirituality, philosophy, and psychology are three branches of knowledge that are deeply rooted in human experience. The insights that I share here and the insights that other human beings share. It comes from having lived. It comes from having struggled and suffered and grown. It comes from experiencing all the messiness of being human. But AI doesn't have any of that lived experience. AI has never experienced joy or sorrow. It's never fallen in love or had its heart broken. It's never felt lonely or anxious or depressed. It's never felt anything. It doesn't have emotions. It doesn't feel or perceive. It's not conscious or self-aware. Regardless of what some people might speculate, AI is not as complex as some people imagine. It doesn't think in the way that people think it does. All it does is process data. It scans through vast amounts of information, detecting patterns, and then generating responses that resemble organic thought. But there's nothing organic about it. It's just drawing from a storehouse of recorded human knowledge. And it can pull from the words of all the great spiritual teachers to produce something that sounds incredibly profound. Yet there is no real understanding behind it. No realization, no awareness. AI has no real wisdom or insights of its own. All it has is access to everything that human beings have said about life, about love, about pain, and purpose. And so even when AI is talking about the meaning of life or how to find inner peace or explaining the nature of consciousness, no matter how profound it may sound, it's just an imitation. It's just repeating ideas expressed by human beings without genuinely understanding them. Because, how can you understand what you have never experienced?"
So go out, take a walk, and meet real people. The Aunties and Uncles in the neighborhood who peer out of their windows, watching people, vehicles, and moments go by. Take your kids to the park and just for once leave the phone aside and watch and listen to them play. This is true bliss.