Listening for What’s Emerging: On consciousness, creation, and the sacred human in the age of AI

Spring arrived this year with a sharpness I didn’t expect.

New York City, waking up from winter, felt like an organism stretching back to life. The cherry blossoms lining the brownstone streets from the West Village to Fort Greene erupted overnight. Parks were full. People were smiling. It had been a long winter. I was still wearing my pink spring coat into mid-April.

Mirroring that thaw, there was a creative energy surging through the city—an urgency, a buzz, almost too much to hold at times. Conversations, ideas, innovations, and re-evaluations were happening everywhere. I began the year quietly reckoning with my own transitions—both professional and personal—while also tracking political shifts and questions of belonging. In what felt like a blink, the external world erupted into motion. AI was accelerating at the pulse of consciousness itself, and the velocity of change made even those on the frontier feel like they were already behind.

The Noise and the Undercurrent

I’ve spent the last few months living inside this tension: the visible surge of activity and the invisible undercurrents shaping it. I sense it in the ways we talk about technology and leadership. I sense it in the exhaustion many people are feeling caught in the endless noise we didn’t always ask for but can’t seem to escape. One eye blinks open to glance at Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube, and the onslaught begins: bombarded with information and no end in sight to successfully consume all of it.

All this urgency without the wisdom.

At the same time, I sense something more tender, less articulated: a longing among friends, colleagues, and the strangers I’ve met lately for a different way of building. A different way of being.

Many of us want to feel more rooted, more real, more alive, and more connected to the sacred aspects of being human that AI cannot replicate — at least not yet.

It’s clear we’re living through a season of rupture. The old structures are fracturing—attention economies, traditional leadership models, extractive industries, and the inherited myths of success.

And while it's tempting to race toward the next big idea or fix, I keep wondering if the more important work now is learning how to stay truly present in the unknown.

Not just present in ourselves. I’m talking about how we cultivate the skills to actually listen for what’s emerging, even when we can’t name it yet.

Rethinking Intelligence

At the PolyOpportunity gathering in New York—a gathering of artists, entrepreneurs, technologists, and researchers—this question surfaced again and again: What kind of intelligence are we building into our world? And what kind of world is it building in return?

The conversations asked us to consider intelligence not as a technical capacity but as a relational one. Felix Zeltner challenged us to examine the metaphors we use when we speak about intelligence. Wakanyi Hoffman reminded us that artificial intelligence is ancestral—it carries forward the patterns, biases, and unresolved dynamics embedded in our systems.

Power, too, was redefined. Larissa Conte described it not as dominance but as "the capacity to move energy through systems." Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz spoke of true freedom as something that arises when our shadow parts are no longer steering the wheel.

And Sophie Strand kept us grounded with an ode to the chaotic, natural human: "We are not meant to remain intact. We are meant to burst into bloom after ruination.”

Regeneration, not perfection, is what life seeks.

In spaces like these, I began to weave together threads from other rooms I had been in— technical discussions at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for Deep Tech Week on whether machines could become conscious, exchanges on the future of education at Tibet House with Jon Kabat-Zinn and Bob Thurman, and community gatherings centered on ecological repair and technological design.

Despite the different vocabularies, the same undercurrent kept appearing: we are fundamentally re-examining consciousness. No longer viewed as an abstraction but as the ground from which we lead, relate, and create.

At the Navy Yard, quantum physicist Suzanne Gildert demonstrated a robot designed to operate through quantum information processes. Stuart Hameroff discussed how consciousness might not be generated by the brain, but revealed when certain material conditions allow. The great philosopher Joscha Bach described the mind as a loom, reading its own patterns: “The question isn’t just whether AI can perform intelligence—but whether it can experience it.”

What Machines Reflect

And that question about consciousness, AI, and experience keeps surfacing. David Mattin recently wrote, “We don’t really know what we’ve made.” In his framing, large language models may resemble human thought more than we care to admit—not because they think like us, but because we too might be built on predictive, pattern-based processes.

Principle Scientist at Google Deepmind Murray Shanahan, in a podcast interview, put it more bluntly a line that, for many of us, captured the quiet sense of rupture we’re living through: “Every single child today—they’ve never known a time when machines can’t talk to them.”

The implications of that fact are enormous—not because AI is conscious (at least not within any standard definitions), but because they are now part of the architecture of our consciousness. They shape how we relate, how we learn, how we think. And we don’t yet have a cultural grammar for these new mind-like entities that live between the realms of the algorithmic and the animate.

That same urgency appeared at Tibet House, where Bob Thurman reframed the Buddha not as a prophet, but as an educator. Someone who didn’t hand down answers, but invited clarity. Jon Kabat-Zinn reminded us that the Latin root of "education"—educare—means to draw forth. Not to stuff people with knowledge, but to midwife their own wisdom into the world.

In a world of infinite content and collapsing attention, that feels less like philosophy and more like survival.

The New Fatigue

The exhaustion I’ve felt this spring isn’t just from overexposure. It’s from a deeper hunger—one I see mirrored in the broader cultural fatigue. As one writer put it, the internet has shifted from a space of curiosity to a space of compulsive consumption.

In Ivaylo Durmonski’s must-read article “I Suddenly Lost My Enthusiasm for Interneting”, his “three S’s” of modern life—scrolling, shopping, and shallow entertainment—no longer feel like distractions. They feel like symptoms. He writes, “We used to go online to explore; now we go online to escape.”

But this isn’t collapse. Or rather, it is collapse, but of the kind that clears space for something else. Influence is shifting. Not from person to person, but from reach to resonance.

Sinead Bovell recently wrote in her substack that the influencers of tomorrow won’t be the loudest. They’ll be those who can hold the deepest signal. In a world where AI personalizes everything, the new currencies are trust, precision, and relational depth.

Influence will move from performance to presence.

I don’t know about you, but this how I want to relate with my influence and power. This is how I want to write. To live.

And in uncovering how I want to take up space in this conversation, I’m drawn to the writers and thinkers who are creating without obsession over metrics. Those like Ivaylo Durmonski or Sophie Strand who trust that the right people will find the work when they need it. That kind of coherence feels more lasting than any viral reach.

My own question is how can we become precise in our signal?

I want every single one of us to learn, in this age of AI, to radically cut through the noise by remembering who we are.

Creation Beyond Contraction

Living through rapid change activates our survival instincts: move fast, brace for impact, stay ahead. But creation doesn’t thrive in contraction.

When I operate from fear, the work might get done—but it rarely nourishes. Creativity rooted in urgency often carries the residue of panic and incoherence. And I’m learning to notice that taste.

Dreamwork has been one of my most expansive practices in this realm. I’m learning that the subconscious doesn’t deliver on command. How it unfolds in layers, revealing slowly what we are ready to receive. In that sense, my dreams are a masterclass in emergence.

I don’t study dreams to decode them neatly. I study them to give shape to an inner architecture of attention. To create space for something to speak through the noise. To let the work emerge at its own pace.

As D. Graham Burnett’s article in the New Yorker, “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” recently warned, what’s coming may not be just an attention economy, but an intimacy economy—where every glance, pause, and longing becomes data to be extracted.

But even in that bleak forecast, there are moments of sacred, perfect clarity. One of the author’s students, reflecting on the scale of AI, said: “It’s huge. A tsunami. But it’s not me.”

The machines might be accelerating—but the singularity isn’t about “them” waking up. It’s us.

We are waking up to the sacredness of being human—our questions, our contradictions, our capacity for presence.

Systems reflect what we build into them.

Entrepreneur and Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake once observed that early platforms like Flickr were designed to foster connection and curiosity. But when newer systems began optimizing for engagement and profit, user behavior changed to match.

Design choices are moral choices. Structure shapes culture.

We cannot bolt kindness onto systems designed for extraction. We cannot add relational intelligence to frameworks built for scale and domination.

We have to start with the consciousness we want the system to amplify.

Staying with the Mystery

One of the most powerful moments of this spring came in a conversation about consciousness, where after hours of sharp debate, the speakers simply said different versions of: "We don’t know."

I didn’t see this as a point of resignation. Rather it’s a moment of presence and reverence towards the mystery.

Real intelligence asks us to stay in the question far longer than we’re usually comfortable. To resist the urge to patch up uncertainty with the illusion of mastery.

As the old structures fall away, we can rush to replace them, or we can stay in the generative tension of not-knowing long enough to truly be ready for what wants to emerge.

A New Spring

I feel the new season working in me too. Spring is not at all orderly. It does not unfurl according to our human timelines. Some things bloom quickly; others remain dormant. Some seeds flourish; others disappear unseen.

And so it is with culture now. Our most essential task is not to force emergence.

Rather to trust the life that moves beneath the surface.

I think of Sophie Strand, who wrote in one of her recent essays, “I want to live towards love. With however long or short I have. There is no time left for anything but love stories.”

There is an urgent devotion in those words.

And that, too, is a form of sacred intelligence worth building toward.