Soryu, the head Zen teacher at Maple Monastery—is unlike most Zen monks—who tend to spend their time meditating, working with Koans, and raking leaves. He is engaged in a massively ambitious social project: to create a God—or what he calls a “cyborgregore”—which is a fancy way of saying the same thing. The logic is: if the enlightened don’t create so kind of cyber deity of wisdom and compassion, someone will create the opposite, which will—to put it bluntly—kill us all. Terminator-style. To paraphrase the philosopher Martin Heidegger, only God will save us now.
Note: I’m writing this because I recently visited Maple and observed Soryu’s community and social experiment (although the man himself wasn’t present). Maple is not a traditional Buddhist lineage, as Soryu points out—no traditional religion can deal with what is coming and the power of what’s next—so new syncretic forms must be created. In Soryu's innovative Zen monastery, there are Native American rites, Tibetan deities, and weightlifting—on top of early morning zazen. His students are creating ‘data’ and learning about AI and how to make technologies that help you meditate and pray.
Soryu’s central thesis is that the AI problem is a spiritual one that requires spiritual intervention. While our technological overlords—the 200 or so autistic geniuses of silicon valley—are good at making machines, they don’t have the spiritual wisdom or training to deal with the coming apocalypse. While they may even be good people with good intentions, they are unwitting, creating a gnostic death cult, Soryu tells us. Human beings, combined with powerful technology, will only be ominidestructive unless religious ethics and practice are integrated.
We should first look at Soryu’s definition of religion, which is any sufficiently large-scale value system. This includes not only animism, monotheism, and Eastern religion—but materialism, humanism, and the newest and most dangerous religion of all, which he calls “dataism”. Today we are turning everything—our bodies, souls, and intimate experiences—into data. That which isn’t quantified data doesn’t exist in this new religious paradigm.
However, the paradox is that only people who can work outside the Matrix of data—monks, for example—whose souls have not been fully consumed by the data moloch—can transform the matrix. This doesn’t mean escape from the Matrix—but rather deeply understanding and transforming it. The unwise and asleep will fall back on unconscious human nature, which is the Freudian pleasure principle—eros turned into death drive—fundamentally. It is not that human beings are bad per-say; it’s just that we are unconscious, and our destructive capacities are intensifying. Soryu’s cyborgregore is Neo in the Matrix—or the new enlightened being writ large—but with one difference: the new Neo is a collective spirit, a dividual rather than an individual, a collective consciousness.
At best, religion is the perennial collective consciousness. At its best, religion creates community, wisdom, and spiritual innovation. At its worst, it generates gnostic cults of fantasy based on dualism and two-world mythology. Religions are double-edged swords. We become more powerful but also destructive with each religious innovation, so it is worth looking at the history of religions.
Early religion wasn’t a picnic, but it didn’t create world-existential-risk. Hunter-gatherers and animists may have practised human sacrifice regularly; however, they did not have the technology to destroy the world. Monotheism made endless holy wars, increasing both our capacity for mass murder and social organisation. Finally, contrary to the new atheist belief in progress, the “secular religions” have been the most powerful and deadly.
Humanism and liberalism led to colonialism, global capitalism, and industrialism—two world wars, the concentration camps, the gulags, and the atom bomb—along with the pill and the automobile. With the atom bomb, we entered the era of world existential risk. And, with the advent of AI, we now have Soryu’s dataism—the most dangerous religion we have yet come up with, therefore, the most potentially destructive. Soryu—who took the movie Terminator 2 very seriously in his youth—would like us to be very afraid.
Is Soryu’s project crazy wisdom or madness? Chogyam Trungpa defined ‘crazy wisdom’ as the ultimate form of sanity—definitely what we need today. As we move into strange times and create our new Gods, we do need some proper sane lunatics like Soryu. We will need to tame whatever powerful God we are creating. That doesn’t mean more hippy pseudo-shamans on mushrooms or tech nerds—but trained and skilled religionists from various lineages to counter the death cult on the doorstep of our minds.
In history, only the outsiders, provincials, and lunatic shamans have been historically capable of sufficiently breaking the frame and getting the needed life-generative information to bring us through fire to a new Aeon. I agree with Soryuy, that AI, beyond anything else, is a spiritual matter above all. And that these are truly apocalyptic times. But also, with the advent of apocalypse—which means to uncover and reveal—comes the possibility of redemption.
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