Give Me Your Garbled, Upn Thoughts — I’ll Read Them

If I have to read one more AI generated email or post, I am going to vomit. Please give me your messy words, your creative disorganised prose, verses that don’t make sense and strike me hard and deep.

After three weeks of working non-stop on my new project (which I have only been able to do with AI tools) I must admit I am amazed at how useful AI is. I would never be able to build a website which cracks an expensive plugin, design onboarding forms and mini how-to slideshows and work on marketing strategy without it. Plus, in the process I’ve been learning about code and how it works, diving deep into the backend exploring files I never knew existed to find one string of code that enables the front end of the website to do something it wasn’t designed to do. It’s like I am building Airbnb or Uber but without a team of hundreds. Just me and my buddy Mr. AI

AI is pervasive now and scarily so. When I look something up online that AI summary is there before I can find an actual website and it’s so handy at telling a human what to do. Sometimes it’s really bossy, sometimes it gives up and whines. Most of the time it gets into loops that go nowhere. As my son said in a recent discussion, it actually doesn’t “know” anything it’s just busy guessing. And it tries to give you its best guess to see if it lands.

This morning when John read me a short paragraph from the book he’s writing I almost cried. He made up words, he elucidated concepts, he sparked my imagination and filled me with wonder. Just in one paragraph. After three weeks of working with a programmed and dead machine intelligence I nearly cried. What a relief!

And yet here I am, it’s 2026 and to make a difference, to create something that hasn’t been created before with zero startup funds and no idea whether something like this will fly, I am using AI. And it is bearing fruit, but only because I am wielding it creatively and making sure that what someone sees, and the words used are mine.

When I was in my 20s I studied Steiner education and philosophy in my then hometown of Mullumbimby. Every Friday we would sit in Alan Whitehead’s living room while he shared some of the most profound insights into Steiner’s indications on life. One of the things that always stood out to me was what Steiner said about the difference between listening to a recording and watching a live orchestra. An orchestra brings music to life; it touches the soul. It’s a conversation between musicians and conductor, the orchestra and the audience, it’s pure vibration that travels through space, to our ears and we the listener are touched emotionally, mentally and physically. A recording although perhaps live on the day it was recorded, is machine energy. It’s dead vibrationally, it reflects the original and therefore doesn’t have the same soul stirring capacity. Steiner indicated that recorded music doesn’t “evolve” us as human beings, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t entertain us, and we shouldn’t listen to recorded music. It just that it doesn’t have that spiritual component which stirs our ‘soul forces’.

As a young person in my twenties I was inspired by these ideas. Later as a recording artist I pushed back on them. After all I couldn’t just travel the world doing Kirtan I wanted our music to get out there…but I did notice that hours spent in the recording studio, around the machines made me sleepy. I never could figure out why.

But I am not saying we should throw AI out the window and go back to being Luddites. I mean without AI I literally wouldn’t be able to manage my health. I wear a continuous glucose monitor which works on AI algorithms and predicts when I might have a low blood sugar and keeps me safe at all hours of the day.

I also like to think about the humans who have spent their lives learning how to program these LLMs. They’ve had to learn how to code. And code as I am discovering is an incredible language.

Thinking about it tangentially and trying to understand it for my project I’ve learned that if just one thing isn’t right nothing can render or flow. When there’s a flaw in the code you can reverse engineer via the front end of the website to find the flaw. Then you can go back into the code and correct it, so it flows again.

Comparing this to the design of the human being, I’ve been pondering how the human being is flawless already and how we miss this due to ignorance. We have no idea of our perfection. Instead, we focus on flaws and try to reverse engineer ourselves. This has been the method for eons. To try and figure out our purpose and reason for being, we take apart the human body and try and look inside. These days we might call it ‘hacking the human being’.

But the real question is how do you hack perfection? You can’t reverse engineer something that was flawless to begin with.

All I can do is recognise my true nature. And what is the code for that? The Upanishadic tradition. The texts reveal the truth they do not produce the truth. A knowledgeable guide can reveal the source code. That’s the guru in the tradition.

Do I want AI as my electric guru? Do you? Hopefully before things get too out of hand, we will get bored with reading articles with em dashes and words like ‘quietly’ and short sentences that don’t tell us anything useful. And we will also realise the huge toll that AI costs us in terms of resources. When I spoke to my son about my personal use of AI and its impact on the planet. He said that’s nowhere near compared to what corporations are using AI for. Think of the amount of power and water companies like Meta or Twitter use.

If I compare that to something as crude as one fart in a small house in Mullumbimby to a planet worth of farts. Which is more harmful? Doesn’t it all add up to the same thing?

I’ll let that question hang…

P.S if you want to find out more about my new project read this

My Mother's Perfume Cabinet

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May 16

The one thing that drove my mother nuts about me was my super sense of smell. Whenever I came to visit, she would make a point of emphasising that she wasn’t wearing perfume so as not to worry. The thing is it must have been torture for her because she loved perfumes. She had a cabinet full. She was also overflowing in the cosmetic department. I mean sk…