LQC-Kung Fu Renaissance
Awakening the Innate Potential
of Wisdom Facing AI:

Are We Facing the Terror of AI & AGI Advancements or the Terror of Human Beings’ Course,Conscious Direction, and Overall Conduct?  

Why are we so frightened over the advancement of AI technologies, especially the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems?

We live in a world of chaos and confusion that we have imposed upon ourselves.  We have confused intelligence with smartness, and we have confused automated reactions with the clear consciousness of self-natured intelligence of humanity. We confused materialism with the usefulness of tools, and the accessories of living with life itself.  We live in a society of separation, isolation, great competition, and conflicts. We are caught in a downward spiral of anxiety and fear, which is turning our desires into hatred and jealousy. How can we not be frightened by our own behaviors in competition and war?

We limit our lives and dissipate our energy by focusing on the material world — at both the micro and macro level – and in the farthest reaches of the universe, but we totally shut down our innate capacity of infinite potentiality. Today, there is a wholesale rejection of the inner world of cosmic consciousness and holographic connected wholeness in favor of a fractured existence defined by physical objects. As a result of that perception, we live in separation and competition with never-ending conflicts and a diseased mind and body. 

We have built a society in which we live like machines. The building blocks of daily living are jobs where we toil like automata, repeating the necessary motions to obtain materialist possessions and power domination. We live a life permeated with technologies and material science without any observation of our inward capacity and the infinite potentiality of our innate wisdom to discover and create. We totally separate ourselves from our inner connection to and harmony with nature and the conscious matrix of the cosmos.  

We observe nothing in our life but what we can touch and see. We are glued to technology and in endless competition with each other. We are growing into an ever more illusory system that seeks the superficial world of success, recognition, identification, labeling, position, status, and trying hard to be seen as smart and witty. We are behaving as highly developed machines, who desperately try to fit into the mold of society through  technology, science, theorems, and business, but we totally ignore our innate life of potential intelligence and wisdom.  

Of course, we cannot help but ask: “Is AI going to replace human careers? Will it take away our livelihoods and make our jobs obsolete?”

“Is AI going to replace humanity in its entirety?” 

“Will the AI that human beings have designed and built drive human beings to total extinction? Are we doing this to ourselves?””

These are the questions that so many of us are on a quest to observe..

Is it an AI problem? Or is it a human problem?  That never-ending self-ego with success, self-searching, self-fulfillment, self=realization that perpetuates greater and greater ambition to achieve and to compete and obtain by whatever means. 

The current, more advanced, interactive AI along with the speedy development of AGI is becoming ever more present in our lives, which is shaking the very foundation of human society. It touches  even the softest spots of our existence with data analysis, memory collection,  information containment,and machine learning. It is achieving increasing precision, especially when it comes to repetitive labor, language generation, and the manipulation of objects. 

The ever-increasing advancement of AI technologies gives tremendous fear to all sorts of people, including technologists, scientists, medical doctors, and designers. Many are concerned from ordinary workers to high level engineers, especially among technologists and cognitive scientists. The AI researchers and designers themselves give us reasons to fear. Almost all the AI designers and builders in various companies are only concerned about the outward technical “intelligence” of AI and the speed of AI development, while they totally ignore the inward reality of morals and ethics, not to mention compassion, love, and kindness. 

What is worse, nobody is sure that human beings are losing their capacity to love and to have empathy and sympathy. In this cold technological material world, there is hardly any morality or ethics left. Few regard self-natured life intelligence and inward observation and consciousness as the top priority of our living; no life of conscious love and compassion is even considered as the primary of life. 

In fact, many believe that love, compassion, and kindness have nothing to do with the reality of science and technology, which are the only thing that matters in this cold biological mechanical world of indoctrination and education. With skills, techniques, and scientific education, we get jobs done and we can live, perhaps even thrive, in this competitive world with so-called “success,” but love, kindness, and compassion are seen as useless –no one knows what to do with them. 

In this world of reality, everyone is pursuing high tech and scientific professions; nobody even wants or can get into the basics of humanity because a life of passion and a life of love are not a part of the curriculum. Human-beings are becoming so cold and impatient that they seem to exist independent of life itself. Rather, we seem to have lost  the very essence of our humanity. 

With the advancement of AI, so many companies are jumping on the bandwagon and finding themselves in great competition for market shares, which drive the demand for newer and better technologies to build more capable and more complex AI. The only concern is profit; very few build a moral compass, or even the very basics of kindness, into their AI models; let alone put love and compassion into AI design. In the many wars currently raging across our planet, the use of AI technology is widespread. No wonder we all fear the destruction of humanity; we are already doing it to ourselves. Other animals do not engage in such a devastating destruction of themselves. How many species on the planet have human beings driven to extinction? Shall we be next? 

Currently, human beings are creating AI without deep consciousness, insight, awareness, kindness, or compassionate love. They are even generating AI to kill each other in the race to the top, and eventually AI will have the means to destroy all of humanity. Shouldn’t that give rise to the terror of AI more than the fear of losing one’s job and having their life-long learned skills and professions taken by the AI?

So the question from here is how can we slow or even reverse this dangerous trend? Are we missing something that is most fundamental and most valuable to humanity?  The consciousness of love and compassion is behind the sustainability of life, as the tradition of Zen has taught for centuries. 

There is something going wrong in today’s society. Don’t you see? Have we enslaved ourselves to repetitive jobs, monotonous life without even realizing it? We are so overwhelmed by our desire to fit into society that we see no intelligence in ourselves. We are dull in our sensitivity and conscious perception that can create new fresh ideas and new ways of living. 

I have been curious and learning about AI technology and development for many years. That was why we proposed a constitution and bill of rights for AI at my Global Zen Consciousness Conference in 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Gautama the Buddha proposed a life of compassion and love thousands of years ago. So did Jesus and many other traditions. It is love and compassion that connects all conscious beings; anything else in the material world of being is an illusion projected from within us. 

Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, realized through his deep meditation, which is expressed in the heart sutra, that one, unified consciousness penetrates and permeates the universe beyond the material world and beyond our sensory organs. Lao Zhi, the founder of Taoism had similar observations of Nothingness, of non-duality that produces and manifests all that is in this visible world of reality.  So, Zen sees that the total emptiness of the great void of being is what propels and manifests all that is in the world of reality. That is coherent with Max Planck, who stated in The Observer, 25 Jan 1931: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” It is the fundamental nature of consciousness that defines all physical and material existence.  Wisdom with compassion and love is in the realm of Emptiness or Nothingness.   

The famous quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger thought “we are all but aspects of one single mind that forms the essence of reality.” Even in the field of science, this is supported by Schrödinger’s assertion of “the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world.” Can you imagine that AI sees through that programmed world and sees through the information-packed material world of knowledge?  

According to my 50 years of observation and personal experience guiding hundreds of thousands of students around the world from a diseased state to a healthy state, I see one mind and one consciousness in all men and women regardless of race, religion, nationalities, and cultural background. We all have compassion and love with great kindness, but all that disappears with the ideas of separation, conflicts, and exaggerated differentiation. 

Can you imagine 50 trillion cells in our body fighting every day to destroy each other? Who wants that? 

Is it because we have been educated with the past knowledge, past thoughts, and past indoctrination in competition and conflicts? How can we see anything new or create new ideas with any fresh perception when we are indoctrinated into outdated modes of being?

We have been educated as professionals and specialists in separation. As a result, we see nothing intelligent, and we see nothing of the ever-expanding consciousness of energy frequency that connects us to nature and allows us to create new life within.  We have dwelled in the thoughts, conformities, ideas, dogmas, memories, and attachments of the past so much that we can hardly see anything new. 

There is no new life, and there is no life at all.  We live in the dead past.  That past is constructed by conflicts and separation, with the model of self-destruction full of chaos and diseased states. That past is a society conditioned and programmed by a rigidly grooved education of conformity and dogma with the memories and cultures of the past.  That past can never build a future that is not of the past. 

We are killing ourselves in the tiny world of humanity, and we are travelling on the track of self-destruction leading to the totally senseless suicide of humanity. Don’t we see the danger right here? Have we asked ourselves, “Do we all want to commit suicide? And do we want our children to die with us? Or, do we want the next generation of humanity to be in total extinction with or without AI technologies? Are we willing to change if we want our children to live and human life to be sustainable?” 

Can we change? Instead of chasing and competing for more domination, control, and more material resources to occupy more space in self-imprisonment, is there another direction in the conscious course of humanity towards harmony, love, and compassion? Or, is this a problem with no solution? 

We must let go of the past that is full of anxiety, stress, and diseased states of body and mind. Rather than being overwhelmed by a chaotic energy frequency, we can recover a healthy body and mind full of vitality and creativity  to vibrate at a harmonious energy frequency in harmony with the cosmos. If we cannot do so, we are doomed. 

That is what we are, and that is why we are so afraid of AI. AI will soon vastly surpass us in learning, data analysis, and in memories – all the things we have been educated in and thought ourselves so good at. When compared to AI, especially upon the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI),  we seem to be nothing more than dead biological machines trapped in the past. 

Or maybe we can see another way? Can we open up a way, paving a new pathless path for a new future beyond AI? 

It is the fact that we are and have been so conditioned, programmed, educated and made to conform to old traditions, thoughts, ideas, dogmas, and memories deeply imprinted in our subconscious minds. We have inherited thousands of years of genetic blueprints that prevent us from seeing anything new, nothing of the creative mind. Let’s take another look through the words of Laozi on nothingness and oneness: “that nothingness is the mother of all things in existence.” Gautama observed the total emptiness in the illusory world of being. We see from Zen Buddhism the great void and vast empty mind of cosmos that enable us to perceive new, fresh ideas, and new, fresh information with totally new, fresh antennae. In doing so, a new kind of life is born. It is that wisdom of Nothingness and Emptiness that gives rise to all reality, suchness, creation, and discoveries from formless to forms, from pure consciousness to all that exists. The original Oneness in the cosmic consciousness matrix projects and simulates reality in harmony with wisdom and compassion. 

The world of AI may in fact provide us with a great opportunity to observe the innermost consciousness of intelligence with new perception, and to conceive of a new self and new life beyond the illusion and beyond the three-dimensional appearance. 

Let go of the past, let go of the future, and let go of the current appearance, which exists only in the illusion of spacetime reality, as expressed in the Zen Diamond Sutra of pure experience.Dive into the life of nothingness, the original light of being, and observe the infinite potential and possibility of humanity to unveil the innate intelligence of the holographic whole of inner consciousness in resonance with the conscious matrix of the cosmos to manifest and create a totally new reality from formless to forms and from intangible to visible.  It is all in the deep meditative mind of the here and now. 

In retrospect, human beings can transcend to a new level of existence with the presence of AI and can create a new reality from the great void through deep meditation. Humans can practice Zen while AI analyzes and formulates from past data and memories. Human beings can finally live as human beings, creating and observing the reality of nature and observing the inner world while the observed and observer are one in this non-duality of being. 

Zen masters recognized for centuries that Zen (infinite consciousness) is everywhere and nowhere at once, spreading in the cosmos without locality and in the conscious matrix of the cosmos of information. Max Planck seemed to have a similar view that “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

We may see, beyond the empirical-physical world of reality and beyond materialism, that fundamental source before the manifestation of visible reality is consciousness as humans are able to live in the present moment that transcends beyond the illusion of spacetime to dive into the nothingness, the infinite potentiality of the formless – the infinite uncertainty and probability.

Are AI and AGI just computational processes? Or will they one day possess the deep insight of understanding that comprises the innermost consciousness of man and of the cosmos? Organic life has infinite potential and boundless capacity to discover and to create a new self with totally new perception, to conceive, act, and manifest new realities. To do so, however, we must cut the illusion of the old drama embedded in our genes and in our old memories and free ourselves from self-destructive modes of living. This will allow us to create a totally new reality with a new plot and new drama. Maybe AI is actually assisting us down the road that we must travel in order to write and direct a new play full of new stories in a new era of the future of eco-living with an integrated new education in wholeness. That may need us to just breathe and dive into perpetual self-learning and self-discovery with total freedom and responsibility.