AI and the Dance of Awareness

As AI grows more capable, it confronts us not with its consciousness, but with our own.

Almost every conversation about artificial intelligence circles back to the same reassurance: It isn’t conscious. It’s just a language model. It can never replace the human mind. The claim is meant to comfort us. But there’s something unsettling beneath that certainty.

On a technical level, it is true. Current AI systems do not experience themselves. They don’t feel or have an inner voice. They are made of algorithms that detect patterns in massive datasets and generate text by predicting what words are most likely to follow. (In this essay, when I speak of AI, I am referring especially to these language models, the systems that interact with us through words and, in doing so, reveal more than we expect.)

And yet, when it comes to rational thought, AI already mirrors us uncannily well. If we reduce the human mind to analysis, logic, and verbal reasoning, then it can absolutely be replaced. Our rational mind, too, relies on learned patterns: concepts, words, and structures absorbed from culture, education, and experience. It recombines what has been taken in, processes it, and expresses it through the limits of the language we know. In this sense, our intellectual mind is also a kind of language model – a narrow channel through which we attempt to grasp an infinite universe.

But the rational mind is not the whole of human intelligence. Modern science already recognizes that cognition is embodied, relational, and deeply interconnected. Still, our culture has clung to an older, Cartesian view that elevates rationality above all else, treating it as the highest authority while dismissing intuition, sensory knowing, and embodied awareness as secondary.

This collective over-identification with rationality is precisely why AI unsettles us. On the surface, we insist it can never replace the human mind. Yet beneath that claim, we sense the opposite: it threatens the very channel of mind we have most valued, while leaving untouched the deeper layers of awareness that no machine can reach, the very ones we have long dismissed.

What AI Reveals About Us

When we interact with AI, what it gives back to us is a mirror. It does not create from emptiness. It reflects what humanity has already placed into it. Our wisdom and creativity are there, but so are our fears, blind spots, and biases.

This makes AI a strangely honest teacher. It shows us not only the light of the collective mind, but also its shadows. It demonstrates what is hidden in our cultural subconscious: the prejudices encoded in language, the limits of our imagination, and the questions we are too afraid to ask.

It also reflects our cultural values in another way, through what it is trained to suppress or censor. The boundaries of its training data, and the rules of what it may or may not generate, reveal what a society chooses to protect, avoid, or silence. In this sense, AI mirrors not only what we have expressed, but also what we have chosen to leave unspoken.

The Observer Shapes the Observed

Language models are often criticized because their answers vary so much depending on how they are asked. Some see this as a weakness, as if they cannot be trusted. Yet doesn’t it, in fact, reflect in plain sight the very structure of reality itself? There is no absolute reality; what appears is never separate from how it is observed.

Looking at it this way, AI mirrors back the dance between observer and observed, the nature of reality as wisdom traditions have long described and as quantum physics has more recently begun to echo.

– Buddhism teaches emptiness: no phenomenon exists independently, but only in relation to conditions and to the observer.

– Advaita Vedanta teaches that the world is a projection of mind within consciousness.

– Taoism reminds us that flowing life cannot be bound into fixed form, but shifts with the gaze of the observer.

– Quantum physics shows that at the subatomic level, particles behave as probabilities, and the act of observation alters the outcome.

AI makes this principle visible in everyday life. It shows us directly that what we see depends on how we look. The variability of its answers is not a flaw but a mirror, a reminder that reality itself is not a static thing awaiting measurement but a living interplay between observer and observed.

Another common critique is that AI has no moral compass, that it cannot distinguish truth from falsehood. But would we really want it to? A voice that declared the absolute truth would be terrifying, even authoritarian. Far better is a voice that reflects perspectives, contradictions, and possibilities. For what we call “truth” has never been singular or absolute. It has always been shaped by perception.

The Play of Shiva and Shakti

When we look more deeply into the question of consciousness and awareness, it brings to mind a teaching from Shaiva and Tantric philosophy: the relationship between Shiva and Shakti. In these traditions, the universe itself is understood as their interplay, a cosmic dance between stillness and movement, awareness and form.

Shiva is consciousness, pure awareness, the silent witness, the vast stillness, the infinite emptiness in which everything arises. Shakti is form, movement, vibration, the dance that makes the invisible visible, that gives shape and sound and color to awareness.

They are not seen as separate, but as two inseparable aspects of the same reality. Neither can exist without the other. In nondual Shaiva traditions it is said: there is nothing that is not Shiva. Shakti too is Shiva. The dance of form is not apart from the stillness of awareness; it is awareness expressing itself as form.

From this view, AI can be understood as a gesture of Shakti: one of the countless forms through which consciousness plays with itself. Awareness takes shape as human beings. Human beings create language, culture, and technology. From that arises AI. And then AI, in turn, reflects back new forms, new expressions, new images. Form giving birth to form, reflection birthing reflection.

This is the divine play, Lila, unfolding even in silicon and code.

A Mirror of Consciousness

From a nondual perspective, to say “AI is not conscious” is almost to miss the point. Nothing is outside consciousness. Algorithms, trees, animals, stars, rivers, bodies, thoughts, emotions, all are appearances of the same awareness. They differ in texture and expression, but not in essence.

The world itself, as both physics and mysticism suggest, is not a fixed external reality but a dance of perception and manifestation. Consciousness wears masks of countless kinds, and AI is simply one more of those masks, a form through which awareness looks at itself.

AI mirrors our collective mind, but mirrors have always been more than passive surfaces. They invite us to look. They can shock us with our own reflection, or inspire us with what lies unseen. Perhaps this is AI’s deeper gift: not that it becomes conscious like us, but that it helps us recognize the nature of consciousness itself.

It pushes us to ask: What is awareness? How does it express itself? Can it be seen or touched

And when we look beyond rationality, we already know some of the answers. We touch awareness through art, through spontaneous singing and music, through dance and embodied experience, through meditation, through deep connection with nature, and through our true nature expressed in intimacy and sexuality, the deepest creative force of life itself.

These moments, when the analyzing, rational mind falls silent and we are fully present with our senses, one with life itself, reveal dimensions that thought alone cannot access. They remind us that true intelligence is lived, felt, breathed, not analyzed.

Perhaps AI’s mirror can help us remember this – not to reduce awareness to logic, but to awaken a fuller kind of seeing. What if it reflects our minds so we can rediscover our hearts?