I was 22 when someone handed me The Nature of Personal Reality and told me it would change my life. It did not change my life. I tried to read it but Seth was speaking a language I could not understand. I put the book on a shelf and let it gather dust for over a decade.

Cut to now. I keep opening Seth and going OMG. So much is about what is happening right now. The AI thing, the design thing, the twilight zone world thing. I think I just needed to live a little before the words could actually land.

who is seth

Quick context for anyone new: Seth was a "non-physical entity" channeled by a writer named Jane Roberts from 1963 until her death in 1984. wait, don't leave!! if you can ignore the woo of it, the content is so important for all humans to read. So she'd go into a trance, her husband Rob would transcribe, and out came thousands of pages about consciousness, reality, time, and how thought literally creates the physical world. You create your own reality, that famous phrase everybody quotes? That was SETH, the OG in the 70s.

The material is wild and dense and reads like it was downloaded from somewhere genuinely outside our timeline. Which according to Seth, it was.

the gadget quote

Here's a quote that broke my brain this week. In 1974, Seth said:

"Gadgets will, ultimately, teach you nothing about the dimensions of your own consciousness. When you use them even to attain alterations of consciousness, you are programming yourselves, stepping apart from yourselves… unless the ideas behind objective science are altered, then gadget-produced altered states will almost certainly be used to manipulate, rather than free, consciousness."

He was talking about biofeedback machines. In the 70s there was this whole craze where people put electrodes on their heads thinking the gadget would shortcut them to enlightenment, ESP, creativity, etc. Life Magazine covers. 16 different "alpha monitors" you could buy by 1975. People truly believed the machine was the thing.

Seth basically said: BRO. The machine is not the thing. You are the thing. The machine can only show you what was already inside you. And if you forget that, you'll end up programmed by the gadget instead of freed by it.

now read it again with AI in mind

Gadgets will, ultimately, teach you nothing about the dimensions of your own consciousness.

ChatGPT is not the source of your ideas. Midjourney is not the source of your taste. The model is a mirror with a really, really good memory of everything humans have ever made.

When you use them even to attain alterations of consciousness, you are programming yourselves, stepping apart from yourselves.

Every time we go I can't write this caption without AI, I can't ideate without AI, I can't see what I think until the model tells me, that's the stepping apart. That's the gadget becoming the pivoting point. By the way, I am guilty of feeling this way as well. It's become hard not to run to AI with every single question.

Unless the ideas behind objective science are altered, then gadget-produced altered states will almost certainly be used to manipulate, rather than free, consciousness.

This is the part. The technology inherits the group think of the people building it.

so what do we do with this

I am not anti-AI. OBVI. I literally call myself an AI designer on my linkedin 😂 But Seth's warning is the thing I keep coming back to: the gadget can only show you what's already possible inside you. The minute we treat it as the source instead of the mirror, the magic dies and we're just being programmed by something somebody else built.

So how can we use the AI but stay the protagonist? The amazing, weird, unique stuff of your own consciousness is not in the model, it's in you, and the model is just one of many ways to see them reflected back. Seth knew this FIFTY years ago. We're just catching up.