The Interplay of Eros and AI: Interview with Joshua Schrei (The Emerald)

On the power of ritual ecstasy, creativity and cauldrons.

Mar 01, 2024

Earlier this month for our summit A Cry From the Future, I had the opportunity to speak with Josh Schrei, creator of the wildly popular podcast The Emerald.

Each episode is a polished gem that explores many topics & themes from a mythic lens. The recent So You Want To Be A Sorcerer In The Age of Mythic Powers is a must-listen deep dive into understanding AI from a multi-faceted lens.

An excerpt:

With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real.

In our recent live conversation, unfolding on the day dedicated to Fire: Harnessing Eros as the Creative Life Force, Josh and I explore the elemental theme of fire as a symbol of creativity, as well as how intact cultures weave & express this energy through & beyond merely sexual love.

Josh tells the story of the epic battle between Shiva & Kama, and draws parallels between AI and the consequences of birthing non-organic intelligence unbound from the cycles of life and death. He advocates for a more tempered and contained approach to AI development, emphasizing the need for initiation rituals, community dependence, and respect for the primal fire of life to prevent untold destruction and ensure a more balanced and responsible exploration of technological advancements.

Watch the full video interview below, or the embedded audio.

Apologies in advance for the glitching of my microphone. That didn’t show up until I reviewed the recording afterwards.

Speaking of Eros, I have a few in-person immersions coming up. The first for men is Awakening the Wild Erotic (April 5-7, Vancouver Island) and the other for all genders The Nature of Eros (April 26-28, Massachusetts). Join me if inspired.

As for my conversation with Josh, I’d love to hear your comments & thoughts below.

Audio version

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You are also welcome experience the entire A Cry From The Future series, featuring incredible conversations with guests like Stephen Jenkinson, Pat McCabe, Bayo Akomolafe, Jame Wheal, Adah Parris, Charles Eisenstein and many more.

Purchase access here.

TRANSCRIPT

I am Ian Mackenzie, one of the co-producers of this event, A Cry From The Future, as well as one of the filmmakers of The Village of Lovers, which, of course, is streaming now throughout the duration of the summit, which explores the Tamera research project in Portugal. And in particular, this day is based on the elemental theme of fire and harnessing Eros as the creative force of life.

And so we've had two talks so far. Now we're going to move on to a special guest that I've had the pleasure to speak with, actually before as well. I'm a huge fan of his podcast, like perhaps many of you as well, and I'm excited to dive into this conversation with him. So a few words about this next guest.

Josh Schrei is a podcaster, myth teller, teacher, and a lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world. Throughout a lifetime of teaching, study, meditation and yogic practice, wilderness immersion, art, music, and public speaking, Josh has sought to navigate the living, animate space of the imagination and advocate for that world, or for a world that prioritizes imaginative vision. Josh has taught intensive courses in mythology and somatic disciplines for over 20 years.

He is the founder of the popular Emerald podcast, which combines evocative narrative, soul stirring music and interviews with award winning authors and luminaries to explore the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination. And with that, I'm delighted to welcome on our guest, Josh Schrei. Welcome, Josh.

Hey, good to see you. Forgive my sterile studio background here.

This is the studio in, like, your home studio, where you do your recordings.

Yeah, this is where I do recording. Yeah.

Okay. Where the magic happens. Well, welcome. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in today on our day of Eros. I wanted to start with just an open inquiry to you, actually. I went back and looked at all your episodes for The Emerald, and I've listened to many of them, but I didn't see one that was specifically aimed at Eros. Maybe you have, and maybe it was just titled something different. But I'd be curious how you've approached this in the past. I know, because you've expanded on so many different themes and elements, but how would you approach Eros? Or how have you, with this question that we have harnessing life force, energy. What are some of the gateways you found?

Yeah. So I did an episode on longing a while back on longing, and there's a particular sanskrit word, kama, which can be translated as longing. It can also be translated as desire, but it's considered to be, like, right. Very heart of what drives the universe and kama, is synonymous mythologically with Cupid, with Eros.

Kama rides around on a green parrot and is this beautiful deity figure, and carries a bow made of sugar cane, and arrows made of flowers, and draws his bow just like his greek counterpart, and strikes with his bow. And if you get struck with one of those feathered arrows, or those flowered arrows, each of which has a name, one of them is named Fascination, the other one is named Thrill. Right? They have names, each of those arrows. If you get struck with one of those arrows, well, we know the rest. So I have addressed it a bit in that episode, and then one of the things I talk about, because I get asked this question sometimes, like, why haven't you done an episode on Eros? Why haven't you done an episode on sexual energy? And one of the things I say is that I try to distribute it evenly throughout the podcast, rather than isolate it and pinpoint it as its own extracted thing.

And that's something that I think is interesting to explore in terms of Eros and our relationship with Eros in the modern west. Like everything else in the modern west, we tend to want to think of it as a separate thing, like sexual energy is a separate thing. And if we're going to treat that as a topic, then we have to kind of isolate it and treat it as its own topic.

Whereas in traditional visions that I've encountered, say, Eros is distributed, one could say, throughout the body of a culture, it's distributed in fire making activities, it's distributed in storytelling activities. It's not just about sexual energy. Right? It's about an overall fire of creativity and intensity, and what in the Indian traditions is called tapas. And harnessing that is not so much for simply individual gain. Harnessing that is for the collective health and animate flow of the culture at large. You could say I approach it without approaching it, and then sometimes I dip into stories of Kama and approach it a little more directly.

Yeah, that's beautifully said. And I'm not sure if you caught the scene earlier or seen The Village of Lovers yet. There is a scene where we show how at least Tamera holds that Eros, life force energy, and how it is sort of permeating all things, and that expanding it out of sexualized love as the narrow confines of that channel, is vital to be able to both be in relationship to it and also allow it to be.

I think you said the other fire of creativity I'd be curious to. Well, one, I'm going to return to the myth there of Kama maybe we'll stay there, actually, for a second. You brought that up. I would love, actually, to understand the link between Cupid, or Eros as the Greek. Or was it greek as Eros? Cupid is the Roman, I believe. Right. In terms of that. And then, Kama, you're saying, do these share a kind of rooted lineage, do you think, between.

Absolutely.

Sounds quite. They do, yeah. I'd love to hear a bit more about that.

Ancient Indo European roots dating back who knows how long. Yeah. The image of the lover, the erotic, the beautiful, the longing at the heart of creation. And there's a really interesting trajectory within Indian tradition around this word, Kama specifically.

Just to say, I'm thinking Kama Sutra. Just. By the way, is that where the kama sutra comes from?

Yeah, same word. Yeah. The sutra of longing or the sutra of desire. Yeah. Okay. So in the Nasadiya Sukta, which is one of the creation hymns of the Veda, at the very beginning, it asks, what stirred all of this into being? What stirred the universe into being? It's a question. What moved? What stirred, what covered all this?

There's different ways of translating it. And the answer is, Kama, the answer is, that's what moved. That's the primal fire, the primal creative fire that resulted in this universe of turmoil and joy and pain and beauty and tranquility and natural beauties and natural wonders beyond our imagining. All of this was stirred into being in that vision, by Kama, by this spark of desire. And then you see that as Indian traditions develop over years, Kama takes on kind of a different connotation in the buddhist and the more monastic and more austere traditions, in which Kama is not necessarily seen as, like, a positive thing. Right? Like, yeah, this world was brought into being by desire, and that's kind of what we need to get rid of, to summarize it succinctly. And then in tantric traditions later, you see kind of a reclaiming of that word, Kama.

And you have goddesses like KamaKshi and Kamakhya who are recapitulations of this understanding of Kama as the primal fire of creation, the primal energy, the longing at the heart of creation. So, Kama, the know Kama, is said to be one of the pillars of life, the four pillars of life. In the Vedic traditions, it's something that, when you're constructing a good life, it's something that you want right there at the heart of it. And there's always been this tension then, within the Indian traditions that were more like renunciate traditions.

Do I withdraw from this world of desire if I go too far down the road of desire? And this is a tension that I think exists in modern relationships with Eros also, which is that you can see, I think, a history of what you could call, like, victorian repression of Eros. You can see puritan cultures branding Eros the devil and kind of trying to banish Eros. And then you see this great reclaiming of Eros. But I think one has to ask oneself in typical modern western fashion, like, maybe the pendulum has swung, and maybe we overemphasize Eros, and we overemphasize maybe the sexual aspects of Eros, like, we're the only animals in the animal kingdom who don't just kind of follow the rhythms of mating seasons and this kind of thing.

Right? We want all Eros all the time. And if you look at indigenous traditions, or what I would call healthier relationships with Eros, then you see, again an Eros that's distributed through the creative body of the culture, through the ritual body of the culture. So the sexual aspect of Eros has healthy expression, but it's not an obsession. It's the healthy expression of Eros and not the obsession, Kama, really, the word Kama has beautiful ramifications within all this as the very fire of creation itself, as something maybe, that if it gets isolated and taken out of control, can be an unbalancing force.

The Battle of Kama and Shiva, imagined by Dalle

There's a wonderful story of Shiva and Kama, the battle of Shiva and Kama, where Shiva has lost his wife, and so he withdraws from the world. And Shiva, the great Yogi, goes to the top of the mountain and meditates and withdraws all of his energy back into himself. Right? And the gods are really disturbed because in order for the balance of the universe to continue, Shiva has to procreate. This is part of the cosmic balance, is that Shiva has to procreate. So the gods hatch an elaborate plan to entrap Shiva in know web, and they send Kama to spark desire in Shiva.

And so Kama hides and one by one, unleashes his arrows on Shiva. And Shiva uses his yogic and meditative powers to combat each of those arrows that comes his way, until finally, Kama, frustrated, transforms himself into a buzzing bee. Yeah, you've maybe felt the buzz of Eros, right, the buz. And he flies into Shiva's left nostril and starts to try and work on him from the inside. And Shiva expels him through his right nostril, and Kama it's a little pranayama inside joke there, right?

And then Kama resumes his form, and they proceed to have this great battle, legendary battle that happened right over by Kamakya Devi temple near the Brahmaputra river in Assam. That's the site where the battle of Shiva and Kama took place. It's also the site where Shiva and Shakti used to meet for their nightly amorous escapades. So this great battle between that force that wants to restrain and withdraw from the world and the force that wants this expression outwards, right, that wants to create.

And Shiva fries Kama, with his tapas, is built up, a beam emits from Shiva's third eye, and Kama, is reduced to ashes. And then what happens when the very force of desire itself is reduced to ashes?

The world stops functioning. Lovers are no longer wooing each other. Bees are no longer pollinating flowers. Plants are no longer growing. Seasons are no longer right. Desire is essential. It's essential to this life. It's the glue of the universe. Longing, desire. So the gods plead with Shiva, like, look, the world isn't functioning anymore. We absolutely must have Eros. We absolutely must have Kama, right? And Shiva, in the meantime, has actually fallen in love with the woman that the gods wanted him to fall in love to.

So one of Kama's arrows snuck in there and did work. And so Shiva, at her behest, goes over to the pile of ashes, and there's this beautiful telling in which Shiva weeps tears of Soma, tears of lunar nectar over this pile of ashes. And Kama is regenerated, resuscitated, and the world comes back into harmonious functioning again. But there's a condition which is that Kama was too powerful in a body. So from then on, Kama is going to be an invisible force that permeates, harnessable, as you're saying, using the word harnessing, right? Harnessable, accessible, ever present. And that force, like the battle of Shiva and Kama, is really beautiful because it's talking about a force that is all pervasive everywhere, all the time, right?

I'm looking out at some pine trees here and the little tips of the cones, that force of renewal and regeneration and life and sap and the trees, the rasa, it's ever present, it's ever available. It's always there, right? And then Shiva and Kama, it's kind of this beautiful vision of the times when we want to hold that force in and let it circulate within us and withdraw, and the times when it wants to be in full expression, which is, like, seasonal in its cycles also.

And this really is, I think, the question that you could say, like, the practical question in terms of being in good relationship with, you know, as usual in the western world, sometimes, again, we want it to be, like, all outward all the time. All outward all the time. And Shiva is teaching us that there are times to withdraw, there are times not to project outwards. There's times not to lose what we've accumulated to gather and accumulate and build. And then there's times to express freely. There's times to express outward. Right. This pulse between withdrawing and expressing. Withdrawing and expressing, containing and releasing, right? This is a pulse that's very essential to the creative flow.

It's very essential to the communicative flow within relationships, friendships, and love relationships. It's encouraging us towards, I would say, a more balanced, pulsing relationship with Kama, with arrows.

Wow. I love that story. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, of course, too, I'm more familiar with the arrows and psyche, right, as that incarnation of the story. But it's interesting to me to track how, in that story, of course, Eros falls in love with Psyche, who's a very beautiful human woman, and then they go through a series of trials, and he banishes her. We don't have to get into that whole thing. But the way that I always heard the story was by the end of it, when they marry or couple, whatever it is, their child is Hedone, which, again, to me, the root is kind of clear, which is hedonism, or at least that's kind of where we get it right.

And typically hedonism, as it's translated today. I mean, one, it might be a resort in the Bahamas, but it could also be a sense of a selfish oversaturation in pleasure that is sort of seen as kind of keeping one from maybe a kind of responsible participation in the whole. It's like, oh, they're just know. They're just living for themselves. So it's just interesting to me that feels lost in this unification or this marriage of psyche, which is the root, of course, of soul and psyche.

I understand there's air and breath connected through that, too. Like the breath of the soul, perhaps. And then again, Eros says life force, energy. So through that unification, we get Hedone and how it's been distorted, at least in sort of modern interpretation, to mean selfish, kind of a sin, almost. So I'd be curious for you to maybe just unpack that a bit and say, how did that happen? Or why is it that dominant culture in many ways in the west, I'll just say, seems saturated in a kind of freedom, a sexual freedom, right? But it's hyper commodified, kind of hyper distorted. And yet we have this kind of Puritan hangover. Anyway, a lot of things going on, but I'd love for you to track any of those elements.

Yeah, well, I mean, the Puritan hangover is a huge part of it. I'm doing a whole episode on this, but I see the Puritan hangover present in a whole lot of aspects of modern culture, including progressive culture, which likes to think that it stands in contrast to the Puritan period, but unfortunately, sometimes ends up recapitulating it, too. And I see that everywhere across the board.

So the Puritan hangover is a big part of the reason why we have the relationship in the modern west with sexuality that we do. And I think that's really important to look at. If you consider. If you consider there to be a great longing at the heart of creation, like the Indian stories will teach us, if you consider there to be a great life force, a great fire of life, a great want, right? In the Vedas, it also says that the one desired to be many, so the one heated itself up and became many through heating itself up, which has corollaries in the scientific story of the big Bang, too. Right? The one wants to be many, and then what do the many want? The many want to reunite and be one.

And there's this kind of infinite pulse of Kama, this infinite pulse of desire, if we consider there to be a great longing at the heart of all this. And that longing is like. You could call it like a roving fire, right? Like a fire that moves through all the bodies in creation, all the stellar bodies, all the mountain ranges, all the water bodies, all the individual beings, right? There's a great longing at the heart of it. The question for us is how to be what you could call good vessels for that life force to move through. And part of the way in a world. And I'm speaking mostly from the Indian traditions here, in a world that manifests in waves of vibration, part of the way that. That manifests that longing, manifests that fundamental life force.

Energy is impulse, right? We feel impulse. We feel impulse during the different phases of the moon. We feel it at different times of day. The life force, the fundamental prana at the heart of the universe, it moves through us in waves of impulse, right? A lot of the western journey has been about.

Do you deny in India, too, do you deny that impulse altogether. Do you celebrate that impulse and act on every impulse? Because that doesn't tend to work out so well either. Right? And that's a really important part of the story in a time when we tend to value the more free expression aspects of impulse. Acting on every impulse has gotten human beings in a whole lot of trouble for a whole lot of years. Right?

So what does, you could say, ritualized, healthy, ongoing relationship with impulse look like rituals that actually enact that primal longing, that sing of separation, like the devotional hymns do in Indian tradition, that don't try to deny that that longing exists, but celebrate that longing. And you could say, return it to its source. Right? What I am longing for, ultimately, what I am longing for, if the Indian traditions are to be believed, particularly the Bhakti traditions, ultimately what I'm longing for is a connection to the source of that very longing itself, right? Ultimately, every human being carries with them a desire for reunification with source, reunification with the animate flow of creation, right? And I think we get ourselves, or at least in this cosmology, they would say that we get ourselves into some sticky situations where if we try and project another person as the ultimate source of that longing.

Or in other words, the problem that we have in the modern west of over idealizing individual romantic love and saying that person is it. And that person is going to fulfill everything that. Well, you know, according to those Indian traditions, the only thing that is going to fulfill that wave of impulse is turning it back to its source, which is the animate heart of nature itself, right?

So having rituals that allow us to feel intensity, rituals that allow us to feel that creative fire. Rituals that allow us to bring that creative fire into our creative lives. And like you're saying, harness it and not project all of that onto another person and not feel like we have to follow every wave of impulse in a celebration of the pulsation of the universe. This is like an important navigation, right? Like denying it altogether. And I'm someone who was raised for the first part of my life in kind of know, I was in a family, obviously, but I was in a monastic tradition. Denying it all together, I don't think works. And the story of Shiva and Kama is very beautiful in that way. When the gods basically tell is this is part of the overall functioning of the balance of the universe.

This is absolutely vital and necessary, right? Nor does celebrating every single short term impulse that we have that doesn't tend to the question with Eros to avoid the birth of the Hedonic child right. Though I'd be interested, I don't know enough to know whether it had those same connotations in the ancient greek story.

This is kind of what I was saying. For me, Hedone, at least from that unification, feels more like a kind of joyful expression of life.

Right.

Versus what it's become as a kind of selfish indulgence. Right. But I also want to do a link, actually, because you named if it's not harnessed in the right way or repressed. And there was an episode, and again, I haven't listened to it, but this is part of what I've cruised through all of your backlog. But you did one on war, right? War and ritual ecstasy. And for me, this is really fascinating because earlier in the conversation, the guest mentioned the Super Bowl, of course, which just happened as a ritual, certainly of some kind, and also a ritual of harnessing a lot of this Eros in the collective through this display in a way of this battle.

So I'd be curious for you, again, the specifics I'm not as interested in, but more like the function of that kind of ritual as it's alchemizing Eros or playing out a kind of ritual ecstasy of that force. Do you see it that way? But also, again, is that. Well, ironically or not, that there's of course, wars raging, which the US is participating in elsewhere on the planet as they're playing out a war game and a spectacle at the same time. So that to me, is just to. I want to unpack that a bit with you.

Yeah. Well, in that episode, war and ritual ecstasy, I talk very straightforwardly, and a lot of it's based on the work of Barbara Aaron Reich, who wrote a book that I think was called Blood Rights. But it's basically about how war meets the human need for ritual intensity and for men in, you know, a lot for the past couple thousand years, in the way that societies have been structured, war has provided an opportunity for men to actually get in touch with the rawness and immediacy of their feeling bodies in ways that they weren't allowed to do in the culture at large.

And this is something really interesting to look at in terms of war, the horror of war. So the idea is that if we were able to channel that ritual intensity in other places, that we wouldn't necessarily have to go make war on each other. If you look at, and I'll just say right off the bat that there are conflicting opinions about this. But I'll tell you what my opinion is. There are studies that show that hunter gatherer cultures have an extremely different relationship with war than large scale agricultural societies do.

And for hunter gatherer cultures, I mean, there's a lot of things that play into this, right? There's not as many people, there's not as much stuff to own. There's not surplus. There's not all these things, right? But you also find traditions in which the hunt is fulfilling a lot of that need for ritual intensity, a lot of that need for sacrifice, a need to connect people to something primal, that primal Eros, which is not just Eros as we think of sexual Eros.

But there's a moment that I talk about in that episode. There's a moment, if you can imagine the hunt, the ancient paleolithic hunt, and imagine the animal for these people was both the source of life and potential death. It was the thing that could provide nourishment for their family. It was the thing that could take them out of this world. And there's a moment of awe, terror, ecstasy related to the hunt, that the moment where the goosebumps rise on the back of the neck. Right. That's very actually important for human beings. And some scholars have posited that the religious experience comes from this experience of a combination of what you could call awe, fear, ecstasy, Eros. All of it at once.

And again, Eros isn't a little compartmentalized thing. It's this mystifying combination of joy and pain and being taken out of oneself and transported into something larger. And this is an essential human need. Humans need to ritually and collectively transport ourselves into these. You could call them states of Eros. You could call them states of ecstasy. It's been something that we've needed forever.

Again, Barbara Aronreich has another book about that, which I highly recommend called Dancing In The Streets and hunter gatherer cultures, because they live in such immediacy to that cycle and experience that cycle and the Eros is distributed like I've been talking about, through the body of the culture, maybe have less need to take that out on each other in violent acts of know. It reminds me of the old Jane's Addiction lyric from the song 3 Days, where he said, "true hunting's over, no herd to follow." He says, "men prey on each other, right?" It's a very simple lyric in one of the greatest rock and roll songs ever made, in my opinion. That says a lot in that, because we don't have the Eros of the hunt, then it's not until larger scale societies come along that you see large scale sacrifice rituals, either like, the hunt is the sacrifice. And so for hunter gatherer traditions, you don't see these kind of large, grand sacrifices.

And what you can see is that as we kind of moved away from the hunt, we saw that there was still a need for connection to this basic, primal, erotic, ecstatic experience. And then we ritualized it and codified. Yeah. So I think that a healthy relationship with Eros has implications for how human beings treat each other. And I think it's a big part. What you could call the out of balance relationship with Eros is a big part of why human beings make war on each other. Now, within that athletic spectacle. Right? Like festivals. An athletic spectacle. I wish one of my great wishes, when people say, if you had a time machine and could go visit any epoch in human history, absolutely. My first choice would be to go to the Paleolithic and see. I think there was a lot more going on over thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years than we even imagine.

But one of the things I would love to see is an ancient greek festival, because the ancient greek festivals combined. The ancient greek festivals were spontaneous singing and recitation of poetry. There was artistic mask making. There was ritualized theater, and there was ritualized sporting, right? The Olympics came out of sacred activity. It was indivisible from sacred activity. This was sacred, too, right?

So all of these human endeavors, like every human creative, expressive endeavor, from how fast you can run to how many lines of Homer in dactylic xameter, you can spout forth in kind of an ancient rhapsodic freestyle, right? Like all of this is aimed at honoring and channeling a primal energy. All of it, right? So, of course it's sacred, right? It's connecting us to that beauty and free expression.

And if you don't just immediately dismiss athletics and you start to look at the artistry and the energy and the ritual communality around it, you can see why humans do it. It's not going anywhere, right? Sometimes people critique athletic spectacle, and they say, this is pointless. Well, like everything else, it's been compartmentalized and commodified and turned into a giant marketing opportunity and all this kind of stuff. But there was a few years ago when Meryl Streep was kind of she made some comments at the Oscars about how what we do is art, but what those football players do is not.

From the ancient greek perspective, that's kind of silly. It is all designed to connect us to this primal life force, this primal Eros of life, what things get turned into and how things get commercialized is another story. And then, of course, yeah, it can become a reinforcement of militarism, games that are a reinforcement of military might and this kind of thing. And that's something, I think, that the need in our culture to return things to the sacred is very present and very real.

So I did another episode on festivals, and it explored this in great detail. The church, at a certain point, basically made a decision and said, okay, because they couldn't control there were so many festivals, so many saint festivals in which paganism kind of continued, and the church was getting really freaked out because they didn't have control over how the people were celebrating the sacred, right. So they basically said, okay, these few church sanctioned festivals, these are sacred. And everything else that you do is basically debauchery and hedonism. Right. And that bifurcation is still alive with us today. Right. It's present in festival culture, where I see in modern festival culture, like progressive festival culture, that there are people longing, absolutely longing for the sacred.

And a lot of times people don't have an access or a means to access it. So it's like, okay, well, I'll go do ketamine at that particular festival. And that's my way of accessing the sacred and that kind of thing. And that can be amazing. I'm sure people have had great experiences doing that. Right. But it's different than a regular calendar of festive sacred events that are designed to connect us to that primal Eros, to that primal life force.

And this is one thing I love about traveling in India, is that every other day there is some type of honoring festival happening that is designed to anchor that or to harness that creative energy and return that creative energy. So we have this split in the modern west, which is evident all through our conversation between debauchery and sacredness. Right. And the sacred, when polarized too far this way, becomes like empty ritual and religious institutionalism. And the debaucherous, when polarized this way, becomes just like behavior that ultimately doesn't really benefit anybody. Right? But sacred Eros, sacred ritual, like sacred harnessing of intensity, sacred harnessing of that primal fire is deeply important.

Really rich. Thank you, Josh. We have a good 15 minutes left, and I'd love to incorporate now this conversation around AI. Now I know because one, I've listened to [your AI] episode, of course, I think many have. I wonder if it is one of your most popular. At least I have people who write me.

Yeah, they write me and they say, second most popular.

Okay, yeah. Number of people write me at the AI episode. Right. How To Be A Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers. Something like that, yeah. And in that episode, which you can find online, it's fantastic. And you open with the story of the magician's apprentice. Right. Sorcerer's apprentice. And you talk about Fantasia and of course, the Mickey Mouse version as well as the older tale at which it comes from.

But this idea, know, unleashing a magic of know, you don't have the capability of actually calling. You know, it's spooky when I listen to it. I think I might have said in a previous conversation or email that I was listening to it as I went out to visit some friends and we went and saw Oppenheimer that night. And there was a combination of this in that film, a sense of, of course, nuclear weapons unleashing something that all of a know the game theory with Liv prior was talking about how nuclear weapons, it's like once you have them, it's actually very hard to not have them because all of a sudden now you've got everyone jostling for positionality. Anyway. But I wanted to talk about AI because there's a really interesting, I don't know, debate or just really sense of consequence when the relation to generative AI and creativity.

And I watched some little video, I think it was on After Skool. It's the animation element. And it just talked about how the act of being creative tends to carry with it a certain struggle. Right. That's the nature of creativity, is that there's effort. And the case that the video was making, I think it might have been reading Nick Cave's letter, I don't know if you ever saw that it was Nick Cave talking about AI. And he was basically saying, if you rob the struggle of creativity, and maybe I might say of Eros in action of that pouring through you to create the thing, he called that love. He said that that's like the field of love, actually, the act of creation, intentional creation and AI.

And at least if we're talking about generative AI, as many use it now, it saves time. Right now you can just throw a prompt in to chat GTP or something. Hey, make me an image of this and boom, you have it. There's something obviously very powerful about that as this mythic power. But I'd be curious to know your take on the relationship between the necessity or not of the creative struggle as Eros, as this expression and then the kind of cold and distant enactment of generativity now in this new age that we're stepping into and what could that mean? Or what are the dangers? Or what is the kind of be aware of this kinds of consequence to enacting this to the creative spirit in the fire of arrows? That's the territory I'm curious about.

Yeah. The way that human beings actually embody anything is through the repetitive fire of time. The way that we actually come to embody anything, to create, to be a vessel for the force of creativity to move through us, for a song to arrive, or a poem to arrive, or knowledge to actually work its way into our marrow and our tissues so that we can be, like, living, walking examples of it, as opposed to it just living as an abstract idea. The way that that happens is alchemical. That's the fire of time. That's the alchemist's crucible, right? That's the cauldron in which transformation happens.

And that cauldron requires a good container to take it right back to alchemist crucibles and witches cauldrons. The cauldron, it requires a good container. It requires a good fire keeper. It requires tending of the fire over time. It requires some time boiling. It requires some time steeping. All of these things are absolutely essential to the process of, you can say, the creative process, but really to the process of being a human being seeking to embody anything, right? So, like I say in the episode, if all of that is just handed to us on a plate, we could easily see a scenario in which we have all of the information in all of the universe at our disposal, and we can't do anything with it, right?

Because we can't even pay attention for more than five minutes. And this is a real, like, all the studies that have been done with kids and social media and phones and this type of thing. And I'm glad there's, at the very least, been congressional hearings happening in the United States around this, right? But they're finding kids now have skyrocketing cases of vertigo among kids, like, just a propensity towards dizziness. And there's a link between that and just seeing a continually changing, shifting stream of imagery as our primary kind of focal point, as opposed to taking the kids to learn how to make a fire the old way and learning how to make that fire the old way takes an hour or two of concentration.

More than that, if you're asking them to go out and find the right kind of wood for the hand drill and this kind of thing, right. The deep, attention rich activities require repetitive fire. And, yeah, there's a struggle aspect to that too, because that's the fundamental friction of attention is that the waves of impulse, the mind wants to wander, and we harness it, and we bring it back to center. And then the mind wants to wander, and we harness it. And that process is what alchemizes and embodies and creates actual enactable change.

Prometheus bringing the heat. Generated with Dalle

So we're faced with a situation. Know, one of the headlines, when Oppenheimer created the bomb was about a modern day Prometheus. The Promethean fire, right? The fire that Prometheus delivered to human beings. The fire of insight. And know, the word Prometheus means forward thinking. And so we want that forward thinking fire, Prometheus, right. With the forward mind. We want that forward thinking fire because it's essential to the creative process. But yet we look at modernity, and modernity is trapped in relentless forward thinking. Forward thinking. What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? What's next?

And you can see this, obviously, in our want for endless economic growth, and you can see it in our technological innovation. You can even see it in the anxious urgency we feel to save the planet right now. You can even see that there, right, like this relentless forward seeking energy. What happens to Prometheus? How is he punished? He's punished by being chained to a rock. And it's like, no, you're not going anywhere. You're going to sit here and be part of the cycle of nature, right?

And in one way or another, that forward roving impulse gets anchored back to reality because the earth always counterbalances. In other words, if we unleash all of these kind of forward roving imaginal intelligences, at one point or another, they're going to unlock something that is going to take us right back to the beginning again and say, okay, well, we got to start over with this, and we have to approach it in an entirely different way. So we need container. We need rhythmic fire tending. We need to tend the cauldron in a way that I don't see us exhibiting any of that kind of behavior in our rush to find general intelligence, which is this kind of overarching, vague term for something that we don't even understand what it is or what its implications are.

Thank you. Yeah. There's so many threads I still want to go on. Maybe the last thing I'll ask, too, before a couple more minutes, is my curiosity around this idea of an intelligence birthed not of organic life and that consequence. And I know the last conversation Liv talked about the myth of Moloch. I think it was right this sense of one that sacrificed their own sort of on the altar of self gratification or need is sort of interpreted there.

There's also that I think Rudolph Steiner talks about the rise of sort of like the Antichrist sort of energy or this kind of thing. And it's just fascinating to me that this seems to be also the debate that's going on as well. Like, what is the consequence of birthing non organic life? Or an intelligence not bound to compost and to death and to the infinite game. This is something that also came up in other days, even as this kind of like the foundational kind of necessity or way of this universe, I guess, of organic life is to live and then to end again. And that's what keeps the game going. At the same time, we're kind of birthing this intelligence sort of unbound from its organic limitations. And again, is this something, just the same trajectory we've been on, or is this something categorically now beyond, well, everything?

As I understand it, everything in nature is part of an overall cycle of existence and demise. So there is a death cycle built into it somewhere. We're just not aware of what that death cycle looks like. That death cycle could be that it fries all of humanity, and then it doesn't have any power to run on anymore, and then it's extinguished. Right, but there will always be a death cycle. But, yeah, it's computational intelligence, right? It's not even the full range of what I would call intelligence. It's very specifically computational intelligence.

And that computational intelligence unmoored from the body, which is where we actually learn things and put things into practice. And I actually want to bring it back, as you mentioned, like the Moloch myth and everything. I want to bring it back to our conversation on Eros, because the Eros drive. The drive for that moment of Eros is also a drive for death, right? These two things, like scorpionic sex, death drive, right? What the ancient Greeks called telos, which is the desire for obliteration, like the desire for the individual at last to be subsumed into something greater, like that moment between lovers where one is no longer oneself, but has merged into something greater.

This is a fundamental human drive, and it's a drive that, at a certain point in human development, has been recognized as something that needs appropriate kind of what you could call ritual container around it. And this is a lot of why rites of passage exist in traditional cultures. The rite of passage is to instill in people an experience of that culminating moment, that telos, that death moment in which one is who one was, is obliterated and one is born into something new again. Right?

In the absence of that, there is what I would call a really real death drive behind AI. It's not just like, oh, we're doing helpful things for humanity, and maybe I'll make a billion dollars in the process and everything there is what I could call adolescent and predominantly male fascination with blowing things up, with what's going to happen if I mess with this. That is part of the erotic cycle that needs to be tempered ritually, traditionally. And there's a reason why adolescent guys, and this is true across genders, obviously have initiation rituals, right? Because that needs to be tempered. And yes, there needs to be an experience of that, but you can't just rush right towards that moment without any tempering, right?

So I see a lot of misdirected errors in the AI drive. And if you want to get into kind of classic stereotypes, a lot of times it's the computer programmer so focused on this world, free of kind of interrelational social interactions, that could provide them with the tempering that they could use off on this kind of like, solo quest. And destruction is a huge part of that quest, right? Destruction is a big part of what that longing is looking for. So recognizing that and saying, this is something to be tempered and contained, rather than something to just be celebrated, like that roving intelligence. And I'm using the example of guys because like 90% plus of AI coders are guys, right? That drive, celebrating, that want to say like, hey, look, if I mess with this, this happens. And check this out and saying like, yeah, great, mess with it and let's monetize it. And everything that's exacerbating a drive that for many cultures, for many, many generations, was seen as potentially harmful and that needed to be reined in. And this is also why a lot of initiation rituals are painful. Because at a certain point in development, one needs kind of, you need to have that experience of being dependent on the community.

You need to have that experience of that kind of spiritual experience of being subsumed into something greater. And you need to be reminded of something. You need to be reminded of the basic, that you're not the one calling all the shots and you never will be. Right?

So what I see with AI is we haven't reached what you could call the healthy adolescent developmental phase with it. I think it's very much an unhinged adolescent exploration at this point. And this is part of intricate work with Eros, work with Eros, in my view, isn't just like, hey, let's all celebrate creativity and freedom and this kind of thing. Work with Eros is also like work with the primal fire of life that, if unchanneled properly, can bring untold destruction too. This is part of it. So this is like respecting fire. I love the use of the fire element in the name of this gathering.

Fire is warmth and its beauty and its illumination and its ideas and its imagination, and it's the spark to create and its generation and its birth. And it's also that thing that needs a really good container around it or it gets out of control and burns everything.

The there's an episode on Fire that's coming up in a few months, so we'll get to go into it in a lot more detail then.

Stay tuned.

Yeah.

Josh. Yeah. What a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, bringing this beautiful conversation as you have on this day of Eros, harnessing the life force. Thank you so much. And again, people who haven't seen it yet or listened to it yet, you will now. It's the Emerald podcast. You can find it at many places, and yeah, everyone is such a beautiful polished gem. So thanks for your work with that.

Thank you.

END.

Dispatch From the Future

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