IS YOUR MIND SPINNING Part II:
Breaking the Night

We used to read the sky to understand our life, follow the dramas around the polar star, track the planets in their wiley journeys, attend to the Moon phases, wait to see what constellation was rising before dawn. Now we look into a liquid crystal light screen and read AI for our answers. Touch, ask and know more without generating a single thought, without tracing a single movement. This is the greatest seduction of all: to know everything, effortlessly, immediately—or so it appears, and avoid the sacredly pregnant tensions of the unknown. Where does the evolution of thinking go from here? Rudolf Steiner had his own futurist visions. On May 13, 1921, he gave a lecture in which he stated (paraphrased text to follow):

Starlink Array

In the future, the Moon and the Earth will unite again, and from the Earth there will spring forth a horrible brood of beings resembling automatons with an overabundant intellect of great intensity. This development will spread over the Earth covering it like a network web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom who will be entangled with one another in outward movements. They will imitate everything most cleverly, but in a frighteningly evil manner.

Human beings will have to unite their being with these ghastly mineral plant-like spider creatures. They will have to dwell together with these spiders.

Will this happen? Will the Moon unite with Earth? For now, the world wide web of intelligence is just the beginning. And this needs a lot of power. We see with Reflect Orbit and project Eärendil-1, a new artificial zodiac in the making (see Part 1), how starlight now shines down to earth so our screens can glow at night like the Moon. What does it mean to dwell with AI, give our focus to the stimulating high energy blue light that makes us want to return compulsively, disrupt our sleep and separate us from our Self? What is happening to our relationship with our own thinking? What does its inherent evolution look like?

How can our thinking guide us?

In the context of Western culture, where did thinking even begin? In the old Vedic traditions of India, a practiced meditant could leave their body and dream into what was known as the Akasha, a field of information like an archive containing all human experience in a realm outside the mind. The Akasha existed in an all-pervading element of ether forming the foundation of the physical universe.

Later, this morphed into what ancient Greek philosophers of the 8th century BC (time of Homer) called ‘νοῦς’ or Nous, a general World intellect of good sense which would shine down into us through our developed intuition. The intellect had become something more active, a cosmic element outside the head permeating the world and bestowing order on everything—but this time bringing ‘thought’ into the mind.

Following the Renaissance, the intellect was regarded as something we carry within ourselves that we develop on our own by virtue of how we comprehend things, by the questions asked. Knowledge, or the domain of pure information, was attainable from the experience of “phenomena” itself through the bodily senses and instinct.

And what does our time say now about the next morphology of ‘knowing’, as we abandon our own thinking for the machine? A few days ago on September 7, 2026, Jacob Coxon, a researcher for Anthropic, resigned because he said “AI is at a point where it could elude human control”, and possibly become the one in control. Will we be trapped inside the machine’s processing, by the illusion of its thinking? Or is there something else going on within the human being that could lead to a different path of development? What guiding light is deeper than AI’s mirror reflections, deeper than a human concept, deeper than the dream, even deeper than a star? What did J.R.R. Tolkien see in his legendary hero Eärendil that would inspire him to write a whole new world? (see Part 1).

The Silmaril

Eärendil is part of an important origin story in which he sets sail on a long journey, gets lost in a place called The Night of Nothing, then his wife comes to his rescue giving him a Silmaril—a magic stone that lights up the darkness, and fastens it to his brow. After many adventures in a fairy land of elemental wonders and dangers, he sails the ship right into the sky above the Sun and the Moon as a beacon to guide his people from danger carrying the Silmaril as an eternal wandering star around the solar system, "till moon should fade", signaling the end of the world.

Where is our Silmaril?

The Simaril stone is special because it represents the original forces of life. Tolkien’s legend tells us there are 3 of them made to preserve the sacred blended light from the two trees of Valinor that once were the illuminating sources before the Sun and Moon existed: one silver, Telperion, representing the male and night, and one gold, Laurelin, representing the female and day. Together they create quite the juicy fuel pack. Where is our true Silmaril to guide us through our Night of Nothing? Surly it is more than a solar mirror reflecting light back to break the literal night on Earth.

How do we engage the magical world and fly into the stary sky of our own cognitive life? Steiner gives some indication. We have to synchronize with the spiraling vortex of the cosmic world (Milky Way), follow the tempo of the universe by becoming a double spiral of vortexes ourselves—one spinning inward and the other outward. The inner vortex is made by the attention we give to our whole life experience. We create the outward vortex with the spin of all the lessons we learned by examining our life experience in the light of the cosmic world. This personal life-research in the scope of the whole galactic cycle is the next source of knowledge beyond the AI shadow box.

Cosmic Spirals

At the end of Steiner’s famous spider lecture he says:
We are dealing with the question of whether humanity will resolve to grow gradually into what benevolent spirits bring down from the universe, or whether mankind will seek its continued Cosmic existence in the gradual entanglement in the spider brood of its own merrily Shadow thoughts.

It’s a tricky territory. Before you can look into the pages written by your life through the perspective of this new cosmic light, you have to face the darkness guarded by the Guardian of the Abyss, The Night of Nothing. There it stands at the threshold between the sensory and spiritual worlds. You have to let go of what your senses experienced and enter a much farther-reaching dynamic of connections. To do this requires an act of magic, a certain feeling that is necessary for it to work in the right way. You feel a strengthening movement propelled by a far distant time come through your limbs, renewing you with a kind of transcending courage to face that annihilating abyss. “And with anxious seeking you turn your soul to that light that takes its strength from darkness.”

By Kohei Sugiura

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~Wendell Berry, “To Know the Dark”

And how might the imagination be that stage for new lights to turn on so that we do not end up merged with the shadow thoughts of the automaton? Where are these new forces and interiors of connection and how are they different from what we’ve seen in the past? Every day we bring questions to our lives. How might our ability to qualitatively form and direct questions evolve our thinking? Can we be satisfied with sustaining the energy from our own questions…holding them until life itself brings the answer, until benevolent spirits bring down the answers from the universe?

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