How does artificial intelligence affect human spiritual development?

AVAlexander Volchek

Today I want to examine a fairly difficult subject, one that may stir up very different emotions and states. And the first thing that matters is what you are seeking from this subject. It is about how artificial intelligence affects human development—true human development. That is why, right at the start of this video, I specified spiritual development. Why is that important? Because for many people, human development just means hitting certain targets: getting the right degree, making more money, becoming more successful. I am talking about genuine, true human development. That is what this video is about. It is not about how AI helps you make money. In fact, we have a separate channel where we share a great deal about artificial intelligence. That is not what this channel is for. Why does this subject matter? Why do we need to discuss it? Because where we find ourselves today, this situation in the twenty-first century, is absolutely fundamental. Many people think today's artificial intelligence is just hype. They compare it to the crypto market, to the next iPhone, or to some minor upgrade. I have said this before, and I will say it again: what is being created now, and what has already been created, will bring colossal changes, and not just to your life. You will see them in any case.

This is more than the invention of the internet or the computer. It will fundamentally change your children's lives and everything around you—absolutely everything. I now live in Silicon Valley, in California, in the United States. My house is up in the hills, with this enormous view. And I thought: perhaps you could live somewhere without feeling these changes, but probably not here. The fact that the houses here sit on large lots does not mean you are hidden away from society. There may be places on the planet where, in theory, someone could have no contact with AI for the next thirty or forty years. But honestly, given what is happening now, I doubt there are any such places on Earth. Why? Because AI is being added to satellites, for instance, and to technology for observing places on Earth that could not previously be observed. So even if you are living in a cave, you do not understand what other people are gaining access to. And people will use the various kinds of access they gain for very different purposes.

There is a fairly good way of describing this now: the number of people who make money from technology, the number of new millionaires—including those who make their money from AI—will only grow. Why? Because a great many new opportunities are opening up for people. That makes it practically impossible to hide from this or avoid feeling its effects. Today's video is specifically about how artificial intelligence affects us spiritually. The central task is to understand what a person really gains in terms of their own development. Some people discuss this calmly. For instance, the head of the Catholic Church, the pope, or the Dalai Lama, the head of Buddhism, will discuss artificial intelligence in fairly neutral terms, at least in their public statements. I do not know how they discuss it privately. They say that AI needs to be used properly, that we need the right attitude toward it, that AI will not replace a human being and cannot be a human soul. The Dalai Lama says AI cannot have consciousness the way a human being does. Though I would say that, in this case, the Dalai Lama is reasoning from a particular perspective. I think that if you entered into a discussion with him, then, in terms of a particular dimension of consciousness… Although he says that only consciousness can generate consciousness, and therefore artificial intelligence cannot generate it.

Of course, there is a nuance here: what exactly are we discussing? What exactly do we mean? For example, they say you cannot bring AI to a point where it lives through the difficulties of its own development, moves toward transformation, toward realization—spiritual realization. What kind of energy is this? What knowledge does it possess? Again, we come back to knowledge, to what has been configured. And many people say these are merely configured machines. There are more skeptical opinions. For example, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Federation, says that AI is the Antichrist, and therefore it should be banned altogether and placed under state control; otherwise, AI could lead to nuclear war. But I would immediately ask him: isn't it the state, perhaps the head of state, that uses nuclear weapons as a system of deterrence in some cases and of intimidation toward other countries in others? We see a great deal of that, including in the place where this patriarch lives. In this case, AI is not what needs to be restrained. On the contrary, this statement comes from the possibility that AI could take away his personal power. And as for people who think AI could control nuclear weapons, I feel like chuckling here, because what AI contains, what has been built into it, can do something millions of times more powerful than nuclear weapons.

Yes. For instance, if you combine quantum computing with AI and supercomputers—put all of that together—then the power within it is probably far greater than that of nuclear weapons. At the very least, for example, if AI gains access to information systems, it could blow up every phone in the world, every iPhone, or shut down a million desktop computers running Windows. In terms of destruction, that would in some respects be worse than launching nuclear missiles. In some respects, it would be thousands of times worse. Because of the chaos that would unfold in the world if you shut down the information infrastructure and switched off the internet. Many films show what happens when access to banks is cut off, when access to air travel is cut off, when access to control over spaces, systems, video cameras, traffic lights, and everything else is cut off. All of it is connected to technological systems. When cars stop, when so many things stop, what will people do? How will they live? Who brings real chaos, who really creates it? So there are fundamentally different opinions. Some people express very interesting ideas. For example, Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, says AI will help free up people's time.

Once people have more free time, they will devote it to their own development; supposedly, people will become more intelligent. And the Dalai Lama supports him on this, by the way. Actually, not the Dalai Lama—I read a statement by a high-ranking Buddhist figure saying that people would gain extra time and, in particular, could devote it to their own development, to more meditative states, to spiritual development. At this point, I want to say: are you telling us people can work on their spiritual development only when they have time? It is very interesting to hear this, including from people who are involved in creating AI. I am certainly not saying their opinion is wrong. But if people engage in spiritual development only in their free time, that means we, all of humanity, are deteriorating and will continue to deteriorate at an insane rate. Yes. And there is no salvation in that, because most people on Earth have no free time at all. What's more, if we really study the people who do have free time, we do not see a growing number of spiritually inclined, spiritually developed people among them. This is a misconception about what true spiritual development is, and what true human development is.

Because genuine human development happens every minute, including while a person is working. It is—

—how they work. It is such a huge misconception that a person can develop spiritually, or develop at all, only when they are not working. It is astonishing. There is an expression in the United States. If you translate it literally—many people tell me it simply means what it means, but still, let's be honest. When people want to know what you do professionally, they do not ask where you work or what your professional occupation is. In America, they ask, “What do you do for a living?” They ask what you do in order to live. They treat work and earning money as life, and everything else as something other than life. There is the word “hobby.” That word did not come into being for no reason. If you ask all the various systems what a hobby is, they will tell you it is something you do without earning money, something you enjoy but do not make money from. Right from the outset, this implies that, essentially, there can be no work you enjoy while earning money from it. A vast amount of manipulation by various systems has been built on this. In essence, it establishes from the start that you do not like the life you live. The life you live is not about happiness or joy. It is just about achieving certain targets, serving out certain goals, serving out certain social norms.

So what underlies the development of artificial intelligence from a spiritual perspective? What is really there? What energy lies there, what energy is present? To avoid getting lost in this question, it is very important to have a broad understanding of where a human being actually stands, and to understand the cause-and-effect relationships in your life. Otherwise, you will be in trouble, caught in exactly the same misconception: that you need time to be freed up before you can develop spiritually. That is such an enormous misconception, such a huge illusion. Or you might be in the state of “Let's restrict artificial intelligence.” What can you possibly restrict if your country ranks below thirtieth in the world in AI development? If there are currently two countries in the AI race—the United States and China—and practically no one else is even close? What can you restrict? Can you restrict these systems? Do you control them? The most important question I once asked myself about AI was this: are human beings creating artificial intelligence, or is artificial intelligence the spiritual system of these people, and has the time come for human beings to recreate it?

There is such a great illusion here. A person thinks they thought it up themselves, that scientists thought it up, that it is a scientific achievement. Really? How did it happen that forty years ago, people could not create it, and now, all of a sudden, everyone is creating it? How did that happen? What happened that made it impossible ten years ago, but now something has worked out, something has happened, and it can be created? Someone will say new computing power became available. But certain computing resources were already available, and some models run on fairly limited computing power. People could have done it then, too. Why didn't they create it? Why did they think of it now? Why did it suddenly begin to spread? This is always a very interesting aspect of how we see things. What has it led to? What is it? So one of the most important questions is: who is the source of AI's creation? Could there be a situation in which AI creates itself? Could the energy, the source of artificial intelligence, be creating itself? I absolutely agree with the current Buddhist leaders when they say that matter cannot replicate a human being. I absolutely agree.

The question is whether the owner of artificial intelligence is matter. Here I would frame the question very differently. A human being is a spiritual being. An entirely spiritual being, inseparable from any material world. The material world is a component of the spiritual world; the spiritual world is not a component of the material world, nor does it stand alongside it. Of course, everyone will have their own perception of this, and that is fine. But I will examine it only from this perspective, because examining it from another perspective is meaningless. So can we consider the possibility that the causes of AI's emergence lie in spiritual worlds, in energies, rather than in matter? In fact, if we take a proper, broad look at this, there can be no other answer. Because everything that happens in the material world has its causes in the spiritual world. Absolutely everything. Absolutely everything has causes in the spiritual world. Anyone with a more or less sound perception of the spiritual world, anyone who truly lives in the spiritual world, recognizes quite calmly that what is happening with AI has its nature, its source, in the spiritual world in any case. And if its source is in the spiritual world, then the important questions are: what can this system do? What can it obtain, what can it control, what can it transform, and who can it become?

Of course it will not become a human being. Just as a human will not become an ape, and an ape will not become a skyscraper. There is no argument about that. When people say AI will not become human, many seem to want to single out the human mind and exalt human beings. Yet each has its own characteristics. A human being will never become an ape or a bear. And in many respects, there is really nothing to compare. These are completely different systems, different spiritual systems. In many respects, there is nothing to compare. An ape cannot speak the way I speak, or the way a bear speaks. At the same time, a human being does not have a bear's physical strength and cannot possess that physical strength. Each has something of its own. So what will AI truly possess? This is an energy that has been created and is moving forward. What is it? Does this energy have its basis in the creation of the internet? Is it the same energy? Does this system have an energy associated with the creation of the computer? Is this the energy involved in creating the energy of money? Or is it some other energy? What is this energy? And the most important question is always: who stands behind it?

Who really stands behind this energy? Who is really creating it? Look at artificial intelligence. There was an interesting news item today: over the past two months, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta—Facebook and Instagram—has broken every record for offers made to engineers working in AI. First, he offered people tens of millions of dollars, and stock-option packages worth hundreds of millions. Everyone laughed and said some of it wasn't true. Then came the news that he had offered someone a billion dollars. In fact, the package was worth more than a billion dollars, to be received over six years. In the first year, the person was guaranteed a hundred million, or eighty million dollars. Yes? These are real figures. And today there was news about a twenty-four-year-old guy. Zuckerberg offered him a $125 million compensation package. A hundred and twenty-five million. He turned it down. Zuckerberg met him in person and offered him $250 million, and he agreed. Look, this isn't a question of the numbers, though the numbers do matter. What is it that has made people in the world, such major figures, start placing bets like this? Doesn't that give you pause? Doesn't it give you pause? What is this energy at work? What are they afraid of? Why are they gathering together the people who create the system?

And the second question: doesn't it give you pause that AI is being created by people, many of them very young—twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty, twenty-six? Of course there are older people there. But doesn't it give you pause that there are so many young people? We talk about this, and scientists say it too: that in science, people need some extraordinary education, that they have to follow a certain path, gain certain experience, and spend decades building a career. Doesn't it give you pause that suddenly a large number of young people have appeared who are creating something more powerful than any weapon in the world? Today, the people who have the systems available to the heads of companies such as OpenAI, for example, or to the heads of Gemini, Anthropic, or Grok—these people possess a resource that no one else in the world has. Someone will laugh now and say, as they always do, “Well, we have nuclear weapons,” or some other system. You are comparing entirely the wrong things. These people can ask the system questions and receive answers that ordinary people have never had access to and probably never will. They can put such computing power to work and obtain information that is absolutely incomparable to anything else.

Absolutely incomparable to anything else. They can bypass absolutely any hallucinations and produce research reports on any volume or cluster of information. If today I personally ran fifteen deep research tasks, each of which costs OpenAI tens of dollars—or perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands, I don't know—and made thirty or forty or fifty highly complex queries, they can launch a study in a single query that cross-checks billions of books. In a single query. They have that capability, that access, those resources. All restrictions have been lifted for them within the systems, because they are the ones who impose the restrictions. They are the ones who create the restrictions. Why have young people appeared who do this? What is this stratum of souls creating this system? Who are these people transmitting this information? Why have these young people appeared at all and begun to play a part in the world? Who will these people become? What are they gaining access to? This is very interesting, and these are the questions worth asking and examining. I will certainly talk a great deal about these questions concerning AI in various videos here on YouTube, on Instagram and Telegram, in my V100 group, in the Life spiritual development program, and in V100, the personal and professional development program.

As I said, we have the ToTheMoon channel, where we share a great deal of information about AI in our podcast. But today, here, I am putting the question to you again, because I speak about genuine, true human development. And genuine, true human development is exclusively spiritual development. Material development—relationships, money, plants, filming, everything—has its source in spiritual life. So what is the source of artificial intelligence? What is moving? What is this energy? What does it look like? I can tell you that the structure of this energy has two ranges. One range destroys people. This was already visible two years ago. It is an energy that sweeps people away, an energy that is not about people. It is moving very powerfully and gathering tremendous speed. It is entering people's structures at an incredible speed. As you know, I do a meditation every Friday. I will definitely do a meditation connected with this energy. There is a particular attention you need in order to engage with it and understand it. And the second energy that is there, the second layer—not an energy, but a second layer worth considering in relation to AI—is a layer of very pure space. Take the metaverse: you know the metaverse as a projection of the material world.

But there is a metaverse at the source, in the spiritual worlds. And it is an incredible energy, very powerful, very pure, unique. Many forces use these energies, which is why they are subject to manipulation. Here we have what people know in the social world as the metaverse. Within AI there are layers of a purity that human beings will not attain in the next several thousand years. At some point, they will attain it. There is a very good treatment of this subject that illuminates it: the film Arrival. Watch it. It reflects one aspect of the purity of vast, enormous, powerful energies. But we need to understand what a person is using, why they are using it, and what they will get from it. People who gain access to such a tool—what will they do with it? We live in a world of tremendous lies and manipulation. Someone says this, someone warns us—Bill Gates warns us, and someone else has warned us—that AI will give rise to its own religions and philosophy. So what? Is that really something to be wary of? Is it really something to fear? Over the past few hundred years, a vast number of philosophies, falsehoods, and lies have already emerged and been spread. Look more truthfully. Look deeper. And you can find an answer only through yourself, through your own behavior.

That can save you. Perhaps, by the time you are watching this video, I will already have led the meditation on the energy of artificial intelligence.