May 2023 Soul Notes
Photograph by Stetson University Newgrange Spiral; the threshold stone to Newgrange
I’ve been in several conversations about AI and ChatGPT recently. A therapist friend shared that one of her clients had turned to ChatGPT for help and found it to be compassionate. In supervision we talked about how clients might record their sessions and play them back to ChatGPT so that it might “learn” to provide responses that sound like their own therapist. I have to say part of me is curious to try this to see what exactly ChatGPT imagines I might say….what will I make of the therapist it portrays? Might I improve my interventions based on these insights? But I digress…. Another friend advised me to ask ChatGPT what to do when I presented a dilemma. I felt quite unsettled by this suggestion (delivered in earnest) and began to examine what it is about this undoubtedly incredible resource that I’m uncomfortable with.
Then I read an article by author and action researcher, Dr. Otto Scharmer that spoke to a piece of my concern; the part where I worry that we are delegating what is fundamentally human about us to a machine.
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.”
Dr. Scharmer builds on this and illuminates something about our deeper human capacity. He writes:
“AI and related language prediction machines like ChatGPT are brilliant at synthesizing (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 do sensing. But they can’t let go of predictions based on existing patterns in order to let come what wants to emerge from our deepest Source. In other words: They can’t do deep sensing. They can’t sense from the Source, from the future that wants to emerge. They can’t create from nothing, no thing. That’s the “blind spot” of AI.”
AI (at the moment, at least) can only respond based on what has already happened and what already exists. However, the gift we have as humans is the 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, Dr 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. In his detailed article which is really worth reading, he shares examples of communities across the globe where this is already happening. In these projects, they focus on bringing together diverse and often conflicting groups, and opening up spaces of collective responsibility; spaces where the head and heart and hand can be awakened. In these spaces, with a supporting infrastructure, the gap between knowing what to do and doing it, is bridged. People move from a cognitive understanding of problems to an embodied awareness, openness and felt sense of how they too need to transform in order for the necessary external shifts to happen (see the vimeo link at the end of the newsletter for an example). The leader of such a programme in Latin America says:
“we could create a container and cultivate the soil for each of the participants to open up to their own transformation and to create the conditions for societal transformation.”
Scharmer further points to ways in which human agency can be activated and writes of our responsibility to each other to share our stories with this in mind. Telling his own story of a visiting professor’s impact whilst he was at university, he reflects:
“Meeting and seeing that one person doing something different in a traditional institutional setting, the university, was enough for me to change my life’s trajectory. His approach sparked a flame within me that nothing in the world can ever extinguish. “
Stories. Deep listening. Presencing. Generative dialogues. All create an underlying support system that strengthens our inner capacities and enables us to take individual action, arising out of a shared awareness.
Dr. Scharmer asks “What’s the question looking at you?” after reading his article. He invites us to resonate with his stories; to listen to ourselves and our responses in the space he creates. I’ve found myself vibrating loudly in response! Feeling an urgency and a desire to co sense, co presence and co create more generative spaces.
As I reflect on my work in all its guises, I try to create holding spaces that give permission to people to be still, to meet themselves, to unfold and be able to describe themselves “like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time” in Rilke’s words.
Sometimes that happens in a collective setting; more often it is as an individual. I recognise what Scharmer describes as the future that wants to emerge in this work. When we can really be still and listen to ourselves, then new unimagined possibilities begin to form. When we share our personal stories and listen deeply to those of others, then we acknowledge that we have a shared story; that we are not so alone after all; that there is support for me and us in this web of life.
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. That for a shared awareness and collective agency to emerge, we need to be together with others. The relationships are where we are forged. I may be calm and meditative and “awake” in my quiet space but what about when I’m facing someone who believes that the world’s resources should be the preserve of an elite few? Do I then have the capacity to be present and alert to what wants to emerge through us both? Likely not. For this, I and we need practice. And support for the practice. So that we can move beyond our binary perspectives and understand both what the whole is, and what it is we’re holding for the whole. If we can support each other in that, 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 that balances the trauma vortex. In therapy he advocates moving between the two vortices gradually – back and forth – “as if they were being unwound” so that the trauma energy and healing energy are released and integrated back into the patient.
I’m reminded of this analogy right now as I imagine it as a dance between the two vortices, back and forth…back and forth….and picture a similar movement as we come together to unwind the world’s traumas – environmental, social, political and spiritual. As the fear and hatred grab hold, I wonder what healing vortex can be created as we are present for each other in that. What response might emerge as we tend to each part of the story, welcoming all into The Guest House of Rumi’s poem of the same name:
……”grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
I see and feel the potential for transformational change in the world right now, both the wider world, and my own smaller world of family, friends, clients, colleagues and connections. I acknowledge this. And as Dr. Scharmer points out, I also see that there are not enough spaces, not the “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 and where/for whom? How can I enable a shift from individual thought and action to collective awareness and agency?
I’d love to hear any responses you have to that question and to all of this. And I’d dearly love to know: What’s the question looking at you? The one that ChatGPT doesn't have the answer to :)
With much love, as always,
