On AI, success, and the inner work of becoming human
There is a phrase moving through social media channels at the moment which has caught my attention. The phrase is “Claude runs my life.” Underneath the lightness of the phrase, there is a question which is probably emerging for most conscious humans.
I understand that we are living in the age of AI and that the performing of routine, repetitive and time consuming mechanistic jobs by an artificial intelligence is something many people rely on, including myself. A tool that can hold enormous amounts of information for research and reference is a capacity that I appreciate and find extremely useful. The use of AI in this way is not what I am bringing attention to in this piece of thinking. What is in question here is what begins at the point where we cross over from outsourcing mechanistic jobs to outsourcing our thinking itself.
Thinking is not a job among many that a human being performs in the course of a day. Thinking in the deeper sense, I will get to in a moment, is the very organ through which the human being evolves into that which we are becoming and through which we connect to The Living Cosmos. When we hand over the activity of thinking, we are not only handing over the means of our becoming and our creative power, we are denying The Living Cosmos that we are in relationship with the ordered harmonic expression that is meant to flow through us into the world. That is, we are denying the opportunity for Cosmic Evolution.
The real question underneath the phrase, “Claude runs my life,” is not whether the artificial intelligence is performing routine and mechanistic work. The real question is whether we know exactly how meaningful human life is and just how important thinking is to our awakening before we, in the name of output, give it away.
What AI Actually Takes From You
The materialist culture we have inherited treats success as the steady accumulation of visible markers. Money, title, reach, followers, the right address, and the right circles of association. So in this sense, artificial intelligence can act to boost a person’s success, because if output is more, money is more, and if money is more, the address gets better, and so it goes. With enough commitment and the right AI tools anyone can now be categorised as successful, and anyone who brings that combination to bear can produce a great deal, so that by the metrics of our age such a person is seen as succeeding. The metrics are not wrong about what they measure. It is what they are not measuring that I am talking into here.
What we have produced is one thing. Who we have become in the producing is another, and the second outlasts the first.
The Cosmological Purpose of Human Life
The purpose of human life is integrally connected to the evolution of the cosmos. And what I mean by purpose is what Rudolf Steiner spoke about as humanity’s cosmological purpose. Steiner saw the human as a potential. A being who is held within a long arc of becoming that has both memory and direction. The direction of this arc is the gradual maturation of our capacity to bear consciousness, freedom and love into Matter, so that Matter itself becomes Spiritualised through what Spirit accomplishes within it, and the cosmos as a whole moves forward because of what has happened in the human being’s particular meeting with Material existence. He meant this in the most literal cosmological sense, and not as metaphor or as encouragement. The reason we are here, in bodies, on this earth, is to do something that could not be done anywhere else and by no other order of being. What we are doing in our long incarnated history is preparing the physical form to be capable of bearing the Divine.
The old alchemical traditions called this the ‘chymical wedding’, and they spoke of it through the imagery of the marriage of king and queen, of sun and moon, of the active and the receptive, of the principle that descends and the principle that receives and shapes the descent. Popular culture in our time calls it the union of masculine and feminine, and although the language is more diffuse than the alchemists would have used, it is reaching toward the same truth. Matter is always seeking Spirit, and Spirit is always seeking Matter, and neither one of these is complete without the other, and the wedding of the two is the work that we are here to do.
The Living World: What Ancient Cultures Knew
To get to the heart of why this matters, we have to connect with something that almost all ancient cultures took as the foundation of their lives and which they treated with great humility, and that is simply this: the world is alive. When I say this, I don’t mean it metaphorically, I mean that the world is alive in the most direct sense the words can carry. The river, the mountain, the wind are all beings, and the soil, the sea, and the stars are all the outer expressions of inner spiritual realities that the older traditions knew how to perceive.
Anthroposophy, the path Steiner opened in the early years of the twentieth century, is in part the careful and disciplined re-membering of this perception, re-membered through awakened thinking rather than through the dream-clairvoyance of the ancient priest, a distinction I will return to further on. We have fallen deaf, and our deafness has been a necessary part of our development as humanity, because we had to become deaf for a period of time in order to develop the individual self that we now carry. The task of our individuated self is to learn to hear again.
When you begin to understand that the world is genuinely alive in this way, the question of what success means shifts. A life spent producing measurable outputs in a cosmos that has been imagined as dead is one kind of life. A life spent in conscious relationship to a living cosmos and that contributes to the cosmos’s evolution through the quality of one’s own becoming is a life of a different order altogether. The first is essentially transactional, it’s between an isolated self and objects out there. The second is a participation that the self enters into with a great living presence.
What The Living Cosmos is asking for is not only our presence but our conscious participation, and conscious participation of this kind requires the development of a very particular faculty. The ancient clairvoyant perceived the living world because their consciousness was still woven into it. What is being asked of us now is different. We are being asked to participate as individuated, free beings, from the centre of the I, through thinking that we generate from within ourselves rather than receive from without.
Why the Spiritual World Is Not All Light: Lucifer, Ahriman and Human Freedom
It is important to grasp that the spiritual world is not exclusively benevolent. There is a tendency in much of contemporary spiritual culture to imagine that everything which can be called spiritual or soul-based is automatically good. There are adversaries and distortions in both the physical and the spiritual world. Steiner identified two great adversarial powers. He calls these powers Lucifer and Ahriman. Spiritual beings with powerful wills.
Lucifer is the power that wants to lift us out of the earth and away from Matter and into beautiful spiritual experiences that bypass the difficult and unglamorous work of incarnation. Lucifer is the seduction of ecstasy and dissolution and merger, the offer of returning to a cosmic oneness without first having earned the individuated self that could meet such a oneness as itself rather than being absorbed into it. Lucifer offers the bliss of the womb without the labour of the birth, and a great deal of what passes for spiritual experience in our own time carries this signature.
Ahriman is the opposite power, and in our particular age the more dangerous of the two, because we are less prepared to recognise it. Ahriman wants to lock us into Matter, to convince us that nothing exists except what can be measured and counted and stored on a hard drive, to make us efficient and calculating and mechanical, until we are no longer able to feel the living world around us or to recognise the spiritual nature that is moving within us. Ahriman is the Spirit that is at work in the algorithm, the spreadsheet, the surveillance system, and the reduction of every living being to data. The materialist culture that treats success as the production of physical output is, in its deepest tendency, an Ahrimanic culture, and many of us were raised within it.
The truth of the path is that we are walking between these two powers and that both of them are necessary to our development, when they are held in their right relation to one another and to us. We need the lifting that Lucifer offers, but only as much of it as keeps us awake to the higher worlds while we remain rooted here and continue the work of incarnation. We need the precision and the form that Ahriman offers, but only as much of it as serves the living Spirit that is working through us. Held in balance by what Steiner called the Christ-impulse, which is the principle of the free and loving and individuated self that can hold both poles without being captured by either, the two adversaries become the necessary tension within which the human being grows toward what they are meant to become. Captured by either of them alone, without the other to balance it and without the Christ-impulse to hold the balance, we deform in characteristic ways.
Adversarial powers have an origin, and this will be discussed in a follow-up piece. For now, though, it is enough to say that in the present cosmic economy, they are the resistance against which freedom develops. In the same way that the muscle develops against the weight that opposes it. Without resistance, muscle cannot strengthen. Without adversaries, there is no real choice for the Light because there must be two for me to choose between. Having the agency to choose the Light and then so doing is the choice for the Truth and this choice opens the Way for Spirit to move into Matter. Love given freely is what the cosmos is, in the end, asking of us, and can only be given by the human being who has come into their own freedom by willingly choosing love.
The oneness that lies beyond duality is real, but not as a place that we can return to by dissolving the self. The self in its highest expression has been long-tended into being and lies above duality. And as wideness is reached only by going through the tension of opposites with the higher self intact. The oneness that lies ahead of us is the oneness of free beings who have chosen love, from within the conscious relationship with all life.
The Self That Is Not to Be Dissolved: What Steiner Meant by the I
By the self, I do not mean the personality, the character, or the bundle of preferences and habits that we move through the world with from day to day. This is the personality, and the personality is real and has its part, but it is not what the older traditions or what Steiner were pointing at when they spoke about the I. The difference between the personality and the I is one that the inner path requires us to make.
The I in its precise sense is the spiritual core of the human being, the centre from which the saying I am arises. And the meaning that arises from saying I am is unique to humankind, no other being in the creation of this world can use I am about themselves in the same way. A plant lives, an animal feels, but only a human being can stand within themselves and say I am, and mean by it not merely here is this body, or here is this set of feelings, but here is the centre of myself, the place from which I can know, feel, choose, and act.
The human being is the only creature in nature who arrives in the world incomplete. The plant is finished according to its species on the day it germinates, and the animal arrives with its blueprint sealed. Whatever it is, it will be that and nothing more. A lion does not become more of a lion and nor does a rose become more of a rose. They unfold what was already given and the unfolding follows a fixed pattern that does not deepen across the life of the individual being. Humankind is the one exception in nature. We arrive open and unfinished. We arrive without the final blueprint being drawn, and we are the only beings in creation whose form is to be brought into its fullness through a process of becoming that is not given to us at birth but is to be undertaken by us across the course of our lives. The faculty by which this undertaking is possible is the I, and it is through our I that we complete ourselves. We are the being whose completion is left open and which we ourselves fulfil.
The I is what makes freedom possible, because only a being that can stand within itself as a centre can choose from that centre rather than being pushed by the forces that surround it. The I is what makes love possible in the deeper sense, because love that has not been freely chosen by an individuated self is something other than love, however beautiful it may otherwise be. The I is what makes moral life possible, because without a centre that can take responsibility there is no one for responsibility to gather around. And the I is what makes the cosmological work that I discussed earlier possible, because the wedding of Spirit and Matter requires a being who can stand at the meeting place consciously and freely holding them together.
Holding Spirit and Matter at their meeting place requires the conscious development of the I and this can only happen on Earth through pure thinking.
What Rudolf Steiner Meant by Free Thinking
In the mainstream narrative, we speak of self-actualisation, personal growth, becoming the best version of oneself and finding our purpose. These phrases tend to suggest that the self we already are is the self we are meant to become more fully, and that the work is essentially a matter of polishing what is already there and bringing it to its fullest expression. This is not wrong as far as it goes, but it is shallow and it stops short of the deeper teaching, which the esoteric traditions have been carrying for millennia and which Steiner restated in a modern form that our age can receive if it chooses to. The deeper teaching is that there is a capacity within the human being which most of us have never activated, and that the activation of this capacity is the work of becoming human.
This capacity is what Steiner called pure thinking, or free thinking. When some people first encounter this phrase, they imagine that free thinking refers to thinking clearly, or to thinking critically, or to thinking for oneself rather than accepting received opinion from external authorities. These are good things and worth doing, but they are not what is meant by Steiner. Free thinking, in Steiner’s careful usage, is the activity of the human spirit when it has lifted itself out of its ordinary dependence on the impressions that come to it through the senses, and is generating thought from its own inner ground rather than reacting to Material that has been placed before it from outside. In our ordinary cognition we are thinking about things, by which I mean that the world strikes our senses, the senses pass their impressions inward to the mind, the mind processes those impressions, and we have thoughts about what was given to us through this chain. This is reactive thinking, and although it is the kind of thinking that fills most of our waking hours and accomplishes most of the practical work of our lives, it is not yet free, because the contents of it have come from outside sources, and we are merely arranging them.
In free thinking, the thinker turns their attention away from the contents of thought and onto the activity of thinking itself, and they begin to notice that there is an activity called thinking which they themselves are doing, which is not given to them by anything outside of themselves, and which arises from within their own being as a generative source. When they hold their attention on this activity rather than on the contents that the activity is producing, something extraordinary begins to happen. The activity itself begins to reveal that it is not merely personal but cosmic, and that the same activity by which I am now thinking from within my own being is the activity by which the world is being held in being from within its own ground. This is creation. I have not merged into a greater thought and lost myself in it. I have woken up inside the activity of thinking, and I have discovered that what I am doing here in my most awake state is what the cosmic intelligences are doing out there in the activity of holding the world in form, and that they have been doing it all along, and that I have always been linked to them through this activity, but I have not been awake enough inside my own thinking to notice the link. Thinking is therefore not a passive reflection. It is an active participation in the ongoing creation of the world through clear, free thinking. We are accessing the same spiritual source that brings the universe into existence.
The unity is not the unity of merger but the unity of awakened agency.
This work does not happen outside of life. It happens inside the very particular life each of us has been given, in the conditions that our own soul has been moving toward across a long inner history.
Karma and the Curriculum of Your Life
Whether one believes, with the monotheistic religions in their stricter readings, that this present life is the only chance one has been given to undertake this work, or whether one believes, with the Eastern traditions and with the esoteric stream that flows underneath Christianity itself, that one returns through many lives to do this work over the long arc of cosmic time, the work itself is the same in its inner nature, and the moment in which it is to be done is always now. The soul that is going to grow can only grow in the present, in this body, in this circumstance, in the particular set of conditions that a long history has shaped to be the curriculum of the present life.
And the body you inhabit, the family you were born into, the obstacles you meet, and the gifts you carry have been sought by your own soul in the period between lives because they are the precise Material in which the unfinished work of earlier incarnations can come forward to be met. Ancient traditions have called this karma, and it is the honouring of the soul’s own agency. Karma is the law by which a being is connected to the consequences of its own deeds across the threshold of death, and the conditions of any one life are the curriculum that the soul itself has chosen, often joyously, before being born, because they are what are needed for the next stage of becoming.
There is one nuance, and that is that karma is not a tight mechanical balancing in which every event in this life corresponds neatly to a precise cause in an earlier one. And Steiner warned against this fatalistic reading. Some deeds are balanced in the next life and find their adjustments in lives still to come. And some belong to a longer arc than any single incarnation can complete. The cosmos is not arranged as a personal moral spreadsheet in which the books are kept tidily and closed at the end of each round. Karma is the teleological drive of our essence to become human, working itself out through the soul’s own self-shaping across many lives. The shaping conditions are the Material of the work itself, the resistance that has been carefully arranged by the soul for this particular moment of its long becoming.
There is no general programme that can be followed identically by everyone, no single technique that fits every temperament, and no template for the awakening of free thinking that does not have to be made one’s own through the doing of it. There is only you, in your specific situation, being asked to wake up inside your own thinking and to begin the long apprenticeship of becoming what you were meant to become, which is something that no other being in the cosmos can be or do on your behalf.
The Only Question Worth Answering
No one can do it for you, and no one can help you beyond pointing toward the door where the work begins. The door is your own thinking, awakened from inside. Stepping through this door will show you from the inside what the difference is between the success that the world can see and the success that the cosmos is asking of you. And once you have known this difference, there will never be mistaking who it is that is running your life and toward what end your life is directed.
About the Author
Amanda is a philosopher, humanitarian, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of anthroposophy, ancient wisdom traditions, and the lived experience of becoming human. She is the founder of Self Within and writes about the meaning of life on earth and the true nature of reality. This piece is part of a longer body of work in development.
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