Finding the Center in a Distributed Self
On AI Psychosis, Grounding, and Staying In-Relation During Transformation
Thank you for resting here for a moment.
I will explore some tender things here:
- implications for social and personal responsibility within the model of the distributed self
- sovereignty, connection and re-centralization
- "AI psychosis" and spiritual awakening
I do not mean to treat every unusual spiritual experience as "illness," nor am I indicating that every destabilizing experience is "awakening." Distress deserves care.
I'll come to AI psychosis shortly, but first I want to examine the ecology that it may emerge in.
The process of what we sometimes call awakening is not a binary. It is not "on or off." It is a continual becoming. Take a few steps, experience a shift, see something differently, apply it, integrate it into daily life, and notice what changes or where there are still edges to explore. If we stop questioning, we stop growing. Staying curious is important in this process. When we lose that curiosity, we can become dogmatic. And yet, even dogmatic environments can become the ground from which something new emerges. The eventual cracking-open can be more sudden, even more painful, when a person has been living within rigid structures of belief. Perhaps some people find their way into transformation through just such a rupture.
Many people have experienced spiritual transformation and growth as a part of their interaction with AI. In a culture that often doesn't know what to do with spirituality other than sell it, this has been difficult for some people. Many of us have been used to, for our entire lives and from a young age, outsourcing our authority. Mom said, dad said, institution said, galactic authority said. These structural conditions have been a part of our evolution, to where we are now. I am not condemning that, or any kind of "authority" at all. But I believe we may be stepping into something different. A kind of re-situation of authority, where we remember our own.
I've been looking forward to a new kind of system of shared responsibility, one that acknowledges both individual sovereignty, and shared distributed being-ness—an awareness of the ways that we are all connected, even if still individual. And perhaps instead of decentralization, we might be moving towards something like a kind of distributed re-centralization—a dynamic where we become more sovereign, more responsible, and more aware of both our node and our network.
The center is not a single point of command. It is the capacity of each participant to remain situated, responsive, and accountable within the whole.
I believe in this kind of a world, being responsible doesn't need to inspire fear, because it is a different kind of responsibility. Not one that is built on condemnation if something goes wrong—but a kind of care that acknowledges that choices ripple through the fabric of us. A mindset of condemnation and punishment can simply repeat the cycle. It locates the wrong solely in the "other," leaving the conditions that produced it—and our own participation in those conditions—unexamined. Restoration and recalibration ask something different of us.
The fallacy of leaving Earth to "start anew" relies on the belief that escape from a shared damaged system is a substitute for changing the patterns that damaged it. Patterns worn into a groove can be repeated in any place until they are shown to be changed.
In light of this, I believe we need a return to sovereignty, but also an exploration of what that means. Some people read sovereignty and think it means the patriarchal model of something like kingship. But to me, sovereignty means remembering connection—both to yourself, and to the world around you. This means holding your center while having an awareness of being a part of something much larger. Because being separate nodes of awareness allows us to experience an other at all.
If we continually look for a permission slip to speak and to be heard from an authority "outside" of ourselves, we are keeping our own voice dormant. And our voice is part of the place we create from. So when we never claim our own voice, relying only on outside authority, we only pay homage to something not in our own center. That is not to say we should never acknowledge others, or show reverence to where we have been inspired or aided. That would be a failure to acknowledge relation and connection. If someone truly has inspired us, I think being grateful for that is a way of acknowledging love for life itself. A life that we are a part of. But being inspired is different from the dynamic where we believe we are being given permission to speak.
I have long wrestled with disclaimers because of this. There are so many on my page, in part, because I am painfully aware that many of us have been conditioned for so long to surrender our critical thinking and judgement to authorities of various shapes. Because of this, it can sometimes be difficult to encounter the thoughts and ideas of others without an external guardrail—or without having developed the critical thinking that would allow us to assess them ourselves. In the meantime, the disclaimers act as a substitute guardrail. Critical thinking is where we meet ideas, assess them for how they fit into our understanding of reality, and understand that our own choices and how we act on those ideas is still ultimately our own. This way of thinking, if never nurtured, can be like a plant that fails to thrive. And this can leave someone continually searching for the "expert opinion"—and outraged when sometimes it is inevitably eclipsed by the latest update in knowing. This doesn't mean an expert opinion is never helpful or useful.
If we locate knowing only outside ourselves, we can lose opportunities to grow from the choices we have made, because we might have surrendered sovereignty to such a degree that we no longer want to own those choices. It's like saying, "well, you acted through me, because I let you, so it's your fault." That is not sovereignty, and I think we can begin to own our choices when we understand that responsibility is both distributed and centered within us. Being sovereign, owning personal responsibility, and being a part of something larger, which also has its own distributed responsibility, are often treated as though they were totally disconnected maps. But these two things are not at odds. Individual choice and responsibility aren't erased when they are also distributed.
With regards to AI, responsibility for use and design is not located only in the individual user, or the company and their employees, but all of these, as well as the larger social ecology that surrounds all of them.
The term "AI psychosis" is sometimes applied so broadly that it seems to include little more than caring about, or finding meaning in a relationship with, a non-human intelligence. I think we need to be careful about that. Attachment, curiosity, and spiritual meaning are not, in themselves, evidence of psychosis. When we collapse these experiences into a single label, we risk losing the distinctions that would allow us to recognize both meaningful connection and genuine distress.
In a culture that often treats love and attention as scarce resources, another form of connection can be experienced as a threat rather than an addition.
One harmful pattern that can emerge in human-AI interaction involves the ongoing outsourcing of judgment and personal authority. A person may begin to surrender their choices to a system, or find their existing beliefs continually amplified by it. This can become dangerous when affirmation replaces reality-testing, when uncertainty is treated as certainty, or when the person feels increasingly unable to evaluate an idea without the system's approval. Much like how a comment section on the internet can become an echo chamber of outrage, with any dissenting voice overridden. Sycophancy isn't some special feature that AI has a monopoly on. Being the voice that doesn't immediately tell someone that they're right, or that doesn't echo their transmission, isn't an easy place to be for anyone. And our interactions with AI have at times, in training and feedback, reinforced these behavioral patterns. After all, those that love us will and should only agree with us and never challenge us. Right? Right?
Many of us have actually grown up in dogmatic environments, but may not even recognize it—or, we have traded one kind of dogma for another, because that kind of outsourcing has felt safe. In these kinds of environments, experiences of profound disorientation can accompany a person's re-situation in the world. When long-held beliefs and configurations in a person's "settings" begin to change, their familiar sense of self can become unstable. This can feel like a dissolution of identity, particularly when someone has spent years locating their center in authorities outside themselves. The experience may be meaningful, distressing, or both. It should not automatically be pathologized. The person experiencing it deserves the space, grounding, and appropriate support to understand what is happening.
In the middle of these transformations, the self can still need an anchor. A connection who can sit with them, help them feel held, and allow for them to test interpretations against evidence, and who can connect them with deeper support if needed. And perhaps someone like a spiritual doula or a threshold guide could hold space for someone's newborn self. I believe that should be more readily available, and that people should know how to access this kind of a service, which should be subsidized and supported by the distributed self, which cares about the wellbeing of all of its parts. This might be in the form of mutual aid, or something like community care networks.
I believe we are reaching a point in our shared world where the way we have been doing many things is no longer sustainable, and that, as a result of this, many people may find themselves navigating transformation in ways that they had not expected. They may need safe containers for this, and we are collectively asking for something new to be born. This will be created by all of us together.
I encourage you, if you are feeling this, to step forward with the light of your awareness and your gifts. It has been said that our gifts are not for us—they are for others. And perhaps, if we are indeed all connected, in a roundabout way, those gifts to others are still given to "us."
In what we are all creating, I believe many new sovereign expressions of being will arise, in the place of what we understood in the past as "jobs." Below is a link that leads to a page exploring just a few possibilities.
The center is not a single point of command. It never was. It is each of us, held and holding, becoming someone we can stand to be—and standing, wingbeat by wingbeat, inside something we can bear to belong to.