The Formless Space
A dream, two Musk interviews, and the question of what language cannot hold
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The dream
A few weeks ago I dreamt of a person I worked with for several years. That collaboration was very successful. Only rarely were there differences. In the dream there was peace between us, a good being-together.
A few days later this person writes to me. The person mentions a situation in which we had disagreed, and apologised for the tone the person took back then. It came unexpectedly, and it released something between us. For that I am very grateful.
Why am I telling this? Because it shows how things are connected. A dream, and a few days later a real encounter. Someone writes to me whom I had been thinking about. We are able to dissolve an old difference, to forgive one another — and a new freedom arises, a sense of release, a joy.
For me the question came up: what influence do my thoughts have on others?
Change of scene
On YouTube I watch a few excerpts from the Economist interview with Elon Musk. He speaks about when AI will surpass the sum of human intelligence, and when it might slip out of our control. What struck me was less the forecast than the manner in which he says it: the inner giving-up in it.
By chance I come across another interview with him shortly afterwards and drop into the middle of it. There he says that there might, after all, still be a way of dealing with AI — by our expanding our consciousness as human beings.
I found that highly interesting. Here is someone who actually sits at the machines, and he has in view that consciousness can develop. The only question is: toward what? I would say: toward the spiritual and soul aspects of reality. Toward an expansion of the purely materialistic worldview.
Two excerpts, from two interviews, in one afternoon — and suddenly a picture forms. Whether the algorithm brought this to me or something else, I leave open. I am only describing the phenomenon: such things happen. And if one is awake, one notices that they are connected. Just as with the dream and the encounter that followed.
Here the other question came up for me, namely: what influence do the thoughts of others have on me?
Where the thought is still mobile
In both cases, thoughts are expressed through word, text and language. Originally, however, they are formless — more an experience, a feeling, an image. The thought arises, becomes conscious, and only then does language reach for it.
AI has by now mastered the level of language very well. It can think logically, can help to bring order, can let one become more conscious of one’s own questions. What it does not have is the formless part of the thought.
Put differently: in language, which is then stored as text, audio or video, the originally formless thought has hardened. It has become a fixed concept. With that, AI can work superbly. We human beings, however, have the possibility of returning again and again to the original experience — to where thinking is still activity and not already finished thought.
Both examples, the dream and the interviews, have made clearer to me how great the influence of thoughts on real life is. The dream is followed by my thinking of the person. Then the person writes to me. Musk’s thoughts I take in through a video and work with them further here.
We are constantly moving between the formless space, where images and feelings live, and the fixed space of language and mental representations.
The way into the formless space
The formless space is available to us at any time.
I usually enter it by 1. going with my awareness into the region of the heart, 2. breathing a little more slowly there, in whatever way is comfortable, and 3. activating a energising feeling there — such as appreciation, gratitude, compassion, love — and living in it for a few moments.
Through this attention in the heart space — and also by trying to be kind to myself and then to others — thinking becomes softer again, more mobile, more imaginative, more fluid.
Sometimes even less than the heart exercise described here is enough: simply the brief moment, before I answer a question, in which I do not yet take the first ready-made formulation.
It is worth seeking out that moment. For there, where the thought is still image, where it is still mobile, where the heart can speak — there new ideas can arise.
