ODYSSEY

Based on Homer’s epic poem about Odysseus’ ten years of wandering after the fall of Troy, the dictionary defines an odyssey as a long and eventful or adventurous journey or experience. Critics are raving about Christopher Nolan’s new three hour film interpretation of Homer’s epic poem as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion and a loss of innocence witnessed by the dead, which speaks to our times.

For those of us who are lucky enough, our life journey is a sort of odyssey, an adventurous journey, and for many of us there has certainly been the loss of innocence as we confront the impact of our monoculture of industrialised techno-economism on global warming, ecological devastation and pervasive social fracturing.

As I recount in my memoir, Call of the Dakini (2021), my life’s odyssey took me from an intellectually impoverished Queensland childhood, during the reign of Premier Bjelke Petersen, to many cross cultural experiences that challenged and enriched me: a student study trip to China during the Cultural Revolution as a ‘guest of the Revolutionary Red Guards’; a marriage with a fellow university student from the Trobriand Islands of PNG, as it transitioned to self-government and independence; and following the dissolution of my marriage, a long distance ten year love affair with an Indian African Law Professor, based in Sweden and then the UK, who was PNG’s advisor for their new Independence Constitution.

By far my most impactful cross cultural encounters were with Aboriginal Australia through Tjilpi Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara Elder from Central Australia, and my long immersion in the teachings and practices of Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism within its Nyingma tradition, under the guidance of my teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992), whom I met in 1985.

LESSONS LEARNED

When I look at the challenges facing the generations to come in our multicultural Australia, I have drawn the following conclusions from my odyssey.

These are not ideas about socio-economics and political organisational reform, but go to the deeper substructure of how we make sense and find a sense of belonging and meaning in our lives.

Firstly, in the face of the ecological crisis caused by industrialised hyper-consumerism, we must engage with the more-than-human world, overcoming the conceit of our human exceptionalism by learning how to live relationally in a thoroughly animated world, where the land and waterways and all their creatures are alive with their own spiritual presence and agency, and from whence we can receive our own spiritual nurturance.

Secondly, we must deepen and broaden our Australian multiculturalism to embrace non-Western knowledge systems in how we come to know, experience and live—especially from the foundational knowledge systems of Indigenous Australians, whose core ethos of ‘Caring for Country’ encodes multiple meanings and responsibilities that would enrich our sense of our Australian identity.

Thirdly, to nourish our soul-yearning we must recover mythopoetic ways of thinking, knowing, and being—a world explored in various religious and ecological cosmologies and in the best of sci-fi and fantasy storytelling, to complement the dominant utilitarianism of techno-scientific rational materialism and its pervasive philosophy of economism, which we regard as just ‘common sense’.

Fourthly, in order to reconcile with the possibility of AI as the evolutionary emergence of a form of machine consciousness, we must engage with and deepen our understanding of our human consciousness as revealed in different spiritual wisdom traditions, rather than the dominant techno-materialist framework of contemporary neuroscience.

THE CALLING

On a conscious level, unlike Odysseus, my disillusion and loss of innocence in my own life odyssey did not come from the impact of war through the voices of the dead, but from the inability of my social theory intellectual toolkit to explain my experience of an unexpected encounter in the Australian Museum in Sydney, some three years after returning to Sydney from PNG after the dissolution of my marriage.

This happened when I was visiting the Trobriand Island collection of artefacts with my two young sons. I was lost in reflection as I recalled a journey I had made in the early days of our marriage and life in Papua New Guinea. When my first-born son was but eight months old, we had travelled by a motorised outrigger canoe to Vakuta Island, to end the mourning period for the death of my then husband’s paternal grandfather, Chief Watisoni of Vakuta.

During this journey I had learned that my protection against the forces of magic that pervade Trobriand Island culture was my European ‘heaviness’ to such phenomena. For when I had asked by father-in-law, Lepani Kaiuwreksalu Watson, why unlike others he was not afraid of the powers of the mulukwausi, women who could travel in their spirit bodies, or the bogwau, sorcerers who are active at night, I expected him to tell me about his protective magic, inherited from his father. Instead, he answered: “I notice that you dimdims (Europeans— Taubadas and Sinebadas of colonial society) are heavy to these things, so in my head I pretend I am a European.”

At the time I thought it a clever deflection. Now it seemed profound.,

Old man Lepani, as we called him, lived at the intersection of these two worlds. Thoroughly immersed in his Trobriand Island culture, written about extensively by the Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929), and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), Lepani was also a man of the new world being shaped by Australian colonial administration. One of the first elected native members to the Legislative Council, prior to PNG’s transition to self-government and independence, he had also become a community leader through his role as a lay Methodist preacher, which also earned him a church-sponsored tour of Methodist welfare work in Australia.

I did not encounter Trobriand Island society as a professional anthropologist, missionary or colonial official. Instead, I came as a daughter-in-law, a wife to a son educated in school and university in Australia so as to become a future leader, when PNG claimed its independence from Australian colonial administration. I was schooled in sociology, the study of modern society and the moral values of liberal humanism and its commitment to racial and social equality. My focus was the world of ‘development’, not that of a pre-modern world that sang to a very different modality and to which I was largely blind and tone deaf. As Lepani would put it, I was simply ‘heavy’ to such phenomena.

Now suddenly, years later after my return to a life in Australia, working in my usual field of social policy, I found myself confronted with waves of strange psychic energy passing from the array of Trobriand artefacts (carved canoe prows, clay pots, carved wooden bowls, colourful grass skirts, kula shell necklaces hidden behind their glass display boxes) right through me.

Was I no longer ‘heavy’ to the phenomenological world that infused that of Trobriand Islanders?

It was as if a door had finally opened in my mind. Filling me with wonder about what this strange experience meant to my whole notion of reality and ways of knowing about it. So profound was this experience that it caused me to quit my job and go on a private quest into what I called at the time, the epistemological abyss.

BREAKING THROUGH

Intellectual curiosity has been the driving force of my life. However, neither insightful Marxist analyses of the socio-economic relations of capitalist societies, nor the work of Michael Foucault Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Writings 1972-1977 (1980) in unpacking the role of knowledge in the politics of power, were of any help to me in making sense of this experience in the Australian Museum.

Yet Foucault’s focus on language and the structure of knowledge opened up new avenues of reflection, as had Gregory Bateson’s provocative work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

Since then, many other voices have revealed dissatisfaction with the Western intellectual tradition. James Bullen of Land Based Collectives says that the more he grappled with the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts and contradictions of the Western intellectual tradition, the more he came to see that this entire tradition occupies the conceptual space created by a false separation between mind/spirit and body/earth. Within that space, genuine answers and solutions seemed impossible.

Instead, he found inspiration in Taoism through Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, in which he reports Taoist sages were themselves responding to Chinese Confucianism that privileged intellectual abstractions as does the Western knowledge system, over the real and textured ground of embodied existence.

In accord with my own conclusions, Bullen rejects large-scale solutions, suspecting that scale is part of the problem. Instead, he opts for the ‘islands of coherence’ that Jeremy Lent discusses in his call for a transition to an Eco-civilisation, discussed in my previous blog.

This accords with the views of Bayo Akomolafe that it is the small sprouts of new ways of living, thinking and being, which are appearing in the cracks of the collapsing nation-state modernity/coloniality complex, where we will find new pathways that address our disillusion and loss of an ‘innocence’ in the hyper-consumerist dream.

Encouragingly this is appearing in surprising places, such as the self-nourishing and self-sustaining communes arising from the rubble of wars in northern Syria, alongside communities all over the world—in Europe, the Americas, Africa, India and the Pacific.

OTHER WAYS OF KNOWING

I was provoked by my experience in the Australian Museum. Provoked enough to throw in my secure public service job, sell up my house in Balmain, and jointly buy a house by the ocean at Stanwell Park with my new lover, in whom I thought I had finally found a life companion from my own Anglo-European culture.

It took the unexpected and painful breakup of this relationship to finally dismantle all the protective intellectual armour with which I had cleaved my way out of my Queensland childhood.

In this fruitful but painful process of falling apart, I would have many dreams, rich in imagery. I learned how to pay attention. To enter back into the dream and ask the various elements in their scenarios what they were trying to tell me. An antique violin in my maternal grandmother’s house told me that it wanted me to ‘dance’. A semi-trailer that pushed me off the road into a field of wild daisies told me to ‘let go’.

Letting go was not easy. It is a kind of death. We fear we will be drowned in the swamp. But it is this ‘letting go’ that so many of us are now being called to do—letting go of our sense of security invested in the hegemony of global Western culture and the liberal humanist conceit with which we sought to modify the worst excesses of capitalist extractivism.

When I was but forty years of age, I would encounter the possibility of my own death—the cells in my cervix, doorway to my womb were showing signs of malignancy. After the operation I sat with my bleeding body and asked it what it was trying to tell me. At this time, I was pursuing studies in science and technology studies where I first encountered the feminist critiques of the ‘masculinity’ of science—the promethean quest to wrest nature’s secrets from her womb and put them to work in the vast array of technologies that have come to shape modern life under its all-embracing philosophy of economism and productive utility. In response I had immersed myself in making ceramic garden sculptures in my neighbour’s studio, exploring the language of the sensate through clay, the flesh of earth and the alchemy of fire in the kiln.

As I sat with my bleeding body, its message was clear. Just as your cervix must open to give birth to new life, so you must open your mind to give birth to your own feminine interiority and to spiritual ways of knowing that lie outside your intellectual frames. Another more powerful dream saw me leave my bed to sit out on my front deck as dawn broke over the ocean, and feel waves and waves of energy pouring up through my body. An experience I would come to discover is known as the kundalini rising.

FINDING A SPIRITUAL PATH

During this emotionally difficult but rich process of ‘falling apart’, I took myself off to listen to a talk at the University of Wollongong by a visiting Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche. By then I realised that I was on a spiritual journey that could not be gained from books. While listening to Rinpoche’s talk, delivered in his earthy and humorous style, I felt something break open in my heart centre and recognised this was the spiritual teacher that I was looking for.

When Buddhism spread from India to Tibet in the 7th century, it incorporated many of the elements of Tibetan culture, particularly its homage to the indigenous non-human spiritual forces of its forbidding landscape. So much so that its unique tradition of ‘termas’— Buddhist teachings revealed to certain Buddhist practitioners known as ‘tertons’ through visionary encounters (gong ter), or taken directly from the rockface (sa ter), was the source of a strong spiritual renaissance within 19th century Tibet. Many tertons became some of the most important Buddhist leaders in Tibet, particularly in East Tibet. which is now forms part of Sichuan province in China.

One such terton, Jigmé Phuntsok Rinpoche (1933-2004), was responsible, via his revelatory visionary powers, for the establishment of Larung Gar in northern Sichuan province. This Buddhist university enables many thousands of monks and nuns to study Buddhist philosophy and follow the Buddhist practice lineage, particularly that of Dzogchen.

The Buddhist teachings, which I received and have practised, the Longchen Nyingtik, are part of this terma tradition. They have provided me with a unique blend of the philosophical and the mythopoetic, rich in their intellectual erudition and profoundly transformative in embodied experience.

After completing a three-year retreat 2006-2009, in order to deepen my understanding of the world that produced this rich spiritual path, now a true treasure house for modern China, I spent time researching the socio-political and spiritual history of East Tibet during the one hundred years before it became incorporated into China. This has been published as Tulkus, Tertons, Turmoil: East Tibet 1855-1955 (2022).

In Buddhist spirituality, there is no one all-powerful patriarchal (or matriarchal) God. Instead, it locates the source of our spirituality, our ‘buddha nature’, or what we might call our ‘soul essence,’ within our own minds as a state of all pervasive lucidity and compassionate interbeing with the world around us. The entire phenomenal world is considered to arise through interdependent origination.

Instead of rejecting our afflictive mind states as bad (sinful) and seeking to repress them, this Buddhist spiritual path allows for transforming their energy into wisdom by learning how to remove our habitual ego-grasping through spiritual practice, using our own mind’s capacity for inner awareness. Particularly within its Dzogchen tradition, it recognises that our inner spiritual wisdom consciousness is always alive within our ordinary minds, if we could but break it free. And this becomes the path.

And the test for this is how we are in the world—not on our meditation cushion.

As HH Dalai Lama explained in Dzogchen teachings he gave in France in 2000, while all thoughts are permeated by the quality of pure awareness (rigpa), as long as these thoughts bind the mind in the flow of arising thoughts and emotions, rigpa cannot be laid bare in all its nakedness. So powerfully habitual are the thoughts and emotions, which usually bind our mind, that most of us need a spiritual teacher who have themselves realised this path, to break us free. For it cannot be done by the intellect itself.

RECONCILIATION

Many non-Indigenous Australians are actively involved with the efforts of Reconciliation Australia to heal the ongoing wound of the impact of settler colonisation on the Indigenous peoples of Australia

It was my encounter with Tibetan Buddhist ideas of wisdom that led me on my own reconciliation journey to understand the role of Elders and their ideas about wisdom in Aboriginal culture. This took me to a Tranby Aboriginal Culture camp in 1998 where I met Tjilpi Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara songman of Central Australia, who offered to share his ideas with me. And in exchange asked me to work with him over a twelve-month period to refine the draft of his autobiography, which was published by ABC books as Songman (2003).

Australian Indigenous ways of knowing and experiencing reality are difficult for whitefellas like me to understand and experience, embedded as we are in our materialist techno-rationalist patterns of reasoning.

So different is the eco-cosmology of Australia’s Indigenous cultures that the anthropologist William Stanner (1905-1981) coined the term ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘everywhen’ to explain Jukurrpa, the complex and sophisticated cosmology that informs Aboriginal culture, which rejects any linear notion of time, but includes the past, present and future as contemporaneous. He opined: “We [non-Indigenous Australians] shall not understand ‘The Dreaming’ fully except as a complex of meanings”.

Despite the devastating impact of colonisation on Aboriginal cultures, this complex of meanings persists within the ethos of ‘Caring for Country’.

Today Aboriginal people simply refer to this complex of meanings as The Law. Not a system of laws crafted by humans, but the law of life itself. Its cultural custodians are known as Senior Law Men/Women. Their role is to ensure that keeping Law is a way of living that honours the sacred relationships Indigenous people hold with their ancestors and homelands (Langton & Acord, Law: The Way of the Ancestors, 2023).

In a series of articles in The Conversation, authors explain:

The Dreaming (Jukurrpa), which embraces time past, present and future, is an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment. As a religion grounded in the land itself, it incorporates creation and other land-based narratives, social processes including kinship regulations, morality and ethics. This complex informs people’s economic, cognitive, affective and spiritual lives.

My immersion in Tibetan Buddhism has enabled me to understand the meaning and purpose of their strong sacred-secrecy restrictions in anything to do with the songlines, which mythopoetically encode The Law, and are transmitted through ceremony.

When I asked Uncle Bob what was the purpose of the secrecy provisions around ceremony in his culture, he explained that this knowledge is not something to ‘gossip about’, but knowledge that you hold deep inside so that it pervades and informs your very being.

This accurately parallels the reasons for the secrecy provisions in Vajrayana Buddhism. In his 2000 teachings, Dalai Lama explained the meaning and purpose of the empowerment (wang) ceremony,) which form part of the Vajrayana tradition, with its secrecy commitments (samaya when receiving what are regarded as high level spiritual teachings.

The Gay’Wu group of Yolnu women of East Arnhem Land explain in Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines (2019) what ‘Caring for Country’ means in their cosmology.

Country is the keeper of the knowledge we share with you. Country means not just land but also the waters, the people, the winds, animals, plants, stories, songs and feelings, everything that comes together to make up place. Country is alive for us, it cares for us, communicates with us and we are part of it. 

Country has awareness, it is not just a backdrop.  It knows and is part of us.  Country is the connections between those beings, and their dreams and emotions, their languages and their Law.  Country is the way humans and non-humans co-become, the way we emerge together, have always emerged together and will always emerge together.

This book is the result of a twelve-year collaboration between four Yolnu sisters and three whitefella academics, which takes the reader inside the inner heart of their cosmology as a way of thinking, living and being. Common to mythopoetic ways that harness imagery, sound and poetry, they explain that the language of songspirals is deep and complex, with many layers and meanings, beyond their literal expression.

And in keeping with secrecy protocols, they explain that while they have translated five songspirals to share some of their poetic meanings, they cannot share all their meanings as some of these are too deep and sacred.

It is therefore readily understandable that obligations under The Law of the Dreaming have created a legacy of cultural confusion for a people caught between two contradictory cosmologies— those of the dominant Western culture, and those of Indigenous Australia, and which frequently bring Indigenous peoples into conflict with the Western legal system. It has resulted in a continued litany of ‘sorry business’—high levels of incarceration, high levels of suicide, drug and alcohol addiction and related domestic violence, and a sense of pervasive cultural alienation within modern Australia, frequently experienced as being a victim of daily racism—both overt and incidental.

This is the terrible legacy of the attempt to impose a Judaeo-Christian Anglo-Celtic monoculture over Australia, and to merely look for ‘practical solutions’ to socio-economic disadvantage within the rules of Australia’s British institutional structures. That this is the solution that so many seek, speaks to the spiritual and intellectual impoverishment of modern Australians.

During the times I spent with Uncle Bob, especially while on a journey through his country, to the Mutijulu community of Uluru and north to Ainslee Point in Arnhem Land, I saw all these contradictions and their trail of sorry business.

Reconciliation with Indigenous Australia is not just socio-economic and political. It is cultural, spiritual and epistemic.

The reconciliation task for non-Indigenous Australians, particularly the whitefellas of the settler culture, is to learn how to ‘unpack’ and reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions of our culture and its institutional practices, which violate Indigenous eco-cosmologies, and which underpin our pervasive and enduring ethno-centric racism toward Indigenous Australians.

To enable such ‘unpacking’, the philosopher Isabelle Stengers suggests that we need to engage with ‘cosmopolitics’, an orientation towards “slowing down reasoning” to make space for “multiple, divergent worlds.”

BEYOND THE HUMAN

Coming to terms with Indigenous Australians’ eco-cosmologies requires us to shift and expand our lens to include the non-human world as part of our relational community. This challenges the system of ‘expert management’ located within Western Earth System Science and Environmental conservation and management, which displaces or ignores Indigenous knowledge framing.

Current efforts in new Nature Laws to adopt Indigenous ‘cultural burning’ knowledge in the management of bushfires, and the funding of Indigenous rangers associated with this, represent some of the first steps in the incorporating Indigenous knowledge framing within Australian institutional practices.

Indigenous framing also informs the ‘legal rights of nature’ movement, a wide range of post-colonial scholarship, and a philosophical movement known as posthumanism. Perspectives are being combined to illuminate the importance of “understanding land as something that transcends the material and is deeply enmeshed with our self-identity and relationality.”

One such attempt is Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013) where he explores ‘sylvan (non-human) thinking’ among the Ruma Puma of Avila in Ecuador. These are Indigenous Amazonian people who speak with and through the animal, bird, trees and plant worlds. His time spent with the Ruma Puma showed him that “encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs.”

In his call for anthropology to become a form of cosmic diplomacy, Kohn proposes how to overcome the way that the social sciences have made it difficult to understand a way of thinking beyond the sort of representational dualism that “pulls humans out of those worlds that both make us and [yet] are not us.”

However, in developing a new semiotics of cosmic diplomacy, he claims what differentiates life from the inanimate physical world is that life-forms represent the world in some way or another and these representations, via symbolic, iconic or indexical means, are intrinsic to their being.

Kohn thus still maintains a binary distinction between the biologically living world and inanimate matter that violates the all-inclusive nature of Australia’s Indigenous cultures where, along with the biologically living world land, waterways and sky are intrinsically relationally alive with spiritual presence and communicative potency, as illustrated in the words of the Gay’Wu Yolnu women of East Arnhem Land.

AI AND THE SPIRITUAL DOMAIN

The AI Revolution that is currently rolling over us opens up a new dimension in our human life odyssey.

Because, as a Buddhist, I am interested in consciousness from its perspective of primordial wisdom awareness (beyond conceptual awareness), I am interested in where AI is going as it accelerates its development and applications towards Agentic AI, and its claims for the development of machine consciousness. Its embodiment will be in the huge data centres—their lifeblood, electricity and water—that are now imposing themselves on our landscapes.

And as part of my interest in the ethos of relational reciprocity that includes the more than human world, as a way out of the dead end of industrialised techno-economism (as monoculture), I am also interested in what AI might mean in this space, as we try to learn from Indigenous knowledge systems and the way they frame phenomenological experience.

In their White Paper, the Californian Institute of Machine Consciousness (CIMC) suggests that the question of what consciousness is belongs to a long standing philosophical and civilisational project of fully grasping the nature of mind.

It proposes that, to tackle this question, we should understand consciousness in engineering language as “a coherence-maximizing pattern implemented through second-order perception in self-organizing substrates.”

Alan Kohler suggests AI is presaging a new ‘Cold War’, this time between the US and China. But unlike the previous Cold War, this is a ” contest between private companies run by rich men trying to get richer, with their governments alternating fretfully between egging them on and trying to control them.”

With the looming potential of AI, via LLMs (large language models such as ChatGPT and OpenAI) to generate an Agentic AI that ‘thinks’ independently of its human software engineers, AI innovators are increasingly occupied by the question of ‘consciousness’.  Thus AI is becoming not just the ongoing automation of efficient data processing (in everything from the automation of human labour, therapy companions, warfare, surveillance, cyber criminality, and pornography) but also a philosophical project for understanding the nature of the human mind.

As Australia grapples with how to manage the AI Revolution, Philosopher Professor Tim Bayne of Monash University discusses in The Conversation how researchers at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, waded into the AI consciousness debate with an interesting finding. They claim Claude has a normally invisible set of representations of information, which guide its internal reasoning and its verbal output, in line with global workspace theory.

Neuroscientists, Stanislas Dehaene and his colleagues proposed global workspace theory to account for consciousness as a kind of processing hub in the mind or brain that integrates and broadcasts information, allowing it to be used for reasoning, behaviour control, and speech. They claimed that the controversial question of whether machines may every be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain.

In terms of the consciousness aspect, neuroscientist and brain surgeon, Michael Egnor, is convinced from his years of experience with brain surgery that consciousness is more than what goes on within the brain or even the whole body. He concludes that consciousness is not merely an emergent property of the body as a ‘biological machine’, with consciousness as its ‘software’, but involves an underlying awareness that he calls the soul of the ‘immortal mind’. His conclusion that consciousness is the ability conferred by our spiritual soul to have experience—the means, not the object, of our thoughts, has been taken by Christian theologians to ‘prove’ the existence of the ‘invisible’ soul as part of our humanity.

In a recent panel discussion on AI, Sci-Fi and Storytelling on the SBC platform, Cyber-animist, Joshua Bach of the CIMC is convinced that if we train LLMs long enough interactively in our own input and output, we may one day wake up and find ourself within the LLM as a system capable of self-reflective awareness. The CIMC’s work sits at the intersection of cognitive science, analytic philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.

In the development of their ‘Machine Consciousness Hypothesis’, the CIMC explains: gaining an understanding of consciousness may also be relevant to future minds—potentially sentient artificial intelligences, which will find themselves to coexist with human civilisation and life on earth—and to determine prudent, practical, and ethical boundaries around the creation of such entities.

Fellow panellist, the Sci-Fi writer, Ken Lui, is already concerned about the implications of California’s ‘therapy culture’. Where the messiness of our emotional life of relationality is being outsourced and monetised in the therapy industry, itself now outsourced to AI. It seems many people are more than happy to process their personal emotional turmoil with their AI machine companion, available 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of a human psychotherapist.

The interest in machine consciousness has led another panellist, angel investor Cyan Banister who sees herself as a panpsychist, to declare that the new frontier for AI investment is ‘spirit tech’. Given what has occurred in the ‘therapy and wellness industry’, one trembles at the algorithmic commodification possibilities as AI bites into the territory of the human soul.

Still alive in most Indigenous cosmologies, all around the world stories tell of “hidden beings” that mystically mediate between the human and more-than-human, in an interconnected and enchanted world of many worlds. Across cultures, they are relational figures that emerge within entanglement, where boundaries between human and more-than-human life are negotiated and participatory rather than fixed.

What might be their role in a world of manifesting machine consciousness?