There is a theory of chronic pain that Western medicine has largely refused to take seriously. It goes like this: the brain, when faced with emotions it cannot safely process — rage, grief, shame, the slow accumulation of feeling too much for too long — will sometimes generate physical pain as a distraction. Real pain, measurable in the body, rooted in the nervous system, and in many cases entirely reversible — not through surgery or medication, but through the willingness to feel what has been unfelt.

Dr. John Sarno spent fifty years at NYU watching this happen. He called it Tension Myositis Syndrome. His medical colleagues largely ignored him. His patients — tens of thousands of them — often recovered after years of failed treatments, sometimes after reading a single book. What Sarno lacked was the neuroscience to prove what he was seeing. That science is now arriving and my bet is that it becomes more and more obvious as time goes on.

A 2012 study from Northwestern University found that researchers could predict with 85% accuracy who would develop chronic pain based not on the nature of their injury, but on the emotional circuitry of their brain. Separate neuroimaging research has shown that as pain shifts from acute to chronic, its neural address moves — migrating away from the sensory processing regions of the brain and into the limbic system, the seat of emotion and memory. Chronic pain, in other words, becomes a form of emotional learning.

Consider this: 85 to 90% of chronic back pain has no identifiable structural cause. And yet we have built an entire medical industry around finding and fixing the structure. MRI scans show disc degeneration in 96% of pain-free 80-year-olds and 37% of pain-free 20-year-olds — people with zero pain, walking around with the same spinal "abnormalities" that elsewhere earn someone a surgery. Meanwhile, when researchers treated chronic pain as an emotional and psychological phenomenon rather than a structural one, 63% of patients achieved significant pain reduction compared to just 17% receiving the current gold standard psychological treatment. The brains of people in chronic pain show measurable differences in their emotional and fear-processing circuits — not in the regions that track tissue damage. We have been fixing the wrong thing.

I have learned that the body keeps the score. Emotions live in the body. Traditional Chinese Medicine and other energetic traditions have been talking about it for thousands of years.

The reason I have an opinion on this and care about it is because I lived on the wrong side of it for two decades.

It started in my teenage years, playing sports. Hip pain first, then knees and ankles. I told myself the story every young athlete tells: this is just what it feels like to compete. You play through it. But looking back, what I was playing through was something more than the ordinary cost of sport. My body was holding an imbalance — one side bracing, one side compensating — that I didn't have the framework to understand. My junior year of high school, I broke my left ankle and both bones in my leg in a snap that I thought was a freak accident. I'm not so sure anymore.

By my twenties, the pain had migrated. Up the spine, into the neck and jaw. Headaches that radiated around the side of my head. A grinding, clenching tension that became the background noise of my life. I started the journey that anyone with chronic pain knows intimately: the specialists, the diagnoses, the treatments that helped a little but created new problems. One medication reduced my anxiety but worsened the teeth grinding, which worsened the jaw pain. The system felt less like healing and more like whack-a-mole, each solution introducing a new symptom to manage.

I spent tens of thousands of dollars across twelve to fifteen years. I spent more than money — I spent the stretched, depleted version of myself that found its way into how I parented, how I worked, how I showed up in relationships. I was willing to try anything, go anywhere, see anyone. Nobody asked me how I was doing emotionally. Nobody asked what I was carrying. The question was always: where does it hurt, and what structure do we fix?

The door cracked open slowly. Over the past few years, something I can only describe as a foundational realization settled into me: my nervous system had been in a chronic state of fight-or-flight, and the pain was not separate from that. It was an expression of it. My system was in hyper-vigilant mode. I didn't have good access to my emotions — I see that clearly now. Certain feelings, anger especially, felt so threatening to my system that the psyche had found other ways to handle them. The body is extraordinarily creative in this regard.

When I first read Sarno's The Divided Mind, something in me recognized all of it. It wasn't relief exactly — it was just recognition. Here was my own story, named. The central claim — that the brain generates real physical pain to protect us from emotions we aren't yet ready to consciously feel — landed as a description of something I had been living inside of without the language for it. From a young age, depending on how we're raised, certain emotions can feel like a matter of survival to avoid. Of course the brain would create a distraction. Of course it would rather give us something structural to fix.

What I've come to understand — and what changed more for me than any treatment — is that the body is an outward manifestation of our inner life. And crucially: the resistance to feeling the pain was worse than the pain itself. When I stopped fighting it, stopped trying to manage it away, and instead got curious — about the pain, about what it might be carrying, about what emotion might be underneath it — something began to shift. It's still shifting, but in a way that is consistently leading to relief. Relief that western medicine never gave me.

Here is the bold claim: Western medicine is genuinely good at emergencies. When something is broken, bleeding, infected — we are extraordinary. But for chronic pain, chronic conditions, the long slow erosion of a life lived in a dysregulated nervous system — we are largely getting it wrong. We are treating symptoms without asking what the symptoms are trying to say. We are prescribing interventions for a structural problem that, in millions of cases, isn't primarily structural.

What does this cost? In the United States alone, chronic pain affects 60 million people and carries an economic burden of $723 billion annually. That figure doesn't include the opioid crisis — 800,000 deaths since 1999 — which was itself a downstream consequence of reaching for pharmaceutical solutions to pain that a purely structural model couldn't otherwise explain. We already know the structural model is failing — the numbers make that plain. The cost is not just financial. It's the twelve to fifteen years I spent in significant pain before anyone thought to ask what I was feeling emotionally. It's the gap between what neuroscience now knows and what shows up in a clinical encounter. Research suggests it takes an average of seventeen years for scientific evidence to reach clinical practice. For the millions cycling through surgeries and opioid prescriptions right now, that gap is not academic.

Imagine a version of medicine where this changes. Where a doctor, when you arrive with chronic pain, has deep fluency in the psychological and emotional dimensions of what you're carrying — and asks about them not as a referral to somewhere else but as part of the encounter itself. Where children are taught, from early in their lives, that the body has its own wisdom, that emotions have addresses in the tissue, that feeling is not weakness but information.

I believe the implications of getting this right extend far beyond medicine. If we accepted — really accepted — that the body keeps a record of what we haven't let ourselves feel, we would become more connected to ourselves. Less numb. More awake. Our relationships would deepen. Our collective suffering would ease. We would find our way to something that looks less like managing pain and more like understanding it — which is the beginning of something that might actually be called healing.

This is what Sarno glimpsed. This is what the neuroscience is starting to confirm. The question is whether we're willing to let it change not just how we treat pain, but how we understand what it means to be human and embodied and alive.

It's been a few weeks since I have written here. Each week as I have sat down to write, I have noticed that I haven't had the same energy toward writing as I usually do. I have made a commitment to myself to follow where my energy goes rather than just performing because I think I should. I expect to be back writing soon. In the meantime I wanted to leave a quick thought about something I have been learning and reflecting on lately.

My mind got there a while ago. My body is still catching up. I've been doing a lot of focused resting lately — paying attention to what's happening in my body rather than pushing past it. It's slower and quieter than I'm used to. But I'm learning to trust it.

If you're in a similar season — low energy, needing more rest than feels comfortable, moving slower than you think you should — I'd invite you to trust that. Your body knows something. It might just need a little time to catch up.

More soon.

-Matt

Last Friday I sat in a room at a Silicon Slopes event listening to Jeff Burningham talk about his book, The Last Book Written by a Human. A mutual friend had recommended the book to me. I went expecting to hear another tech leader's take on AI risk.

I was pleasantly surprised.

Not at the polish or the pitch — at the message Jeff is evangelizing and the type of conversation his book is opening. Because I think it's a really important conversation, and it's exactly in line with what we're building at The Liminal Leap.

Jeff talked about his own journey — the truth about what's happened to him across an ongoing awakening. This is real, from a man who co-founded a $5 billion real estate firm, started and invested in companies valued at over a billion dollars combined, ran for governor — and then realized that at the so-called top of the mountain, there was just a howling wind. Nothing fulfilling from doing more and having more.

Jeff calls this an ego death. I have other language for it, and I've experienced what he's talking about. I can feel his genuine concern for what's coming for humanity.

If you've been there, you know the type of experience Jeff is describing. If you haven't, his book will give you a sense of what that freefall feels like — and what becomes possible on the other side.

Before I go any further: go read this book. I read the entire thing in one day. The conversation about AI has been dominated by techno-optimist hype on one side and existential dread on the other — and I think most thoughtful people are exhausted by both. Jeff brings something neither extreme offers — heart, vulnerability, and the authority of someone who's actually walking through the type of transformation he's saying the world needs and calling other people toward. If you only take one thing from this article, make it that.

Why This Book Makes Sense to Me

I keep coming back to something in my own observations: AI amplifies whatever we bring to it. Presence, fragmentation, clarity, chaos — it doesn't filter. It accelerates. As machines become more intelligent, the reflection they cast back on us gets sharper and less forgiving. We start to see our divisions, our greed, our compulsive need to optimize everything — including our own worth. And we have a choice: look away, or go deeper.

Jeff frames this through the hero's journey — disruption, reflection, transformation, evolution — and makes a call for a shift from human doing to human being. We are human beings, not human doings. And in this society, we're so identified with our work, our output, and our achievement that in an AI world — where the machine is suddenly the thing that's productive and does all of the work — it's an identity crisis. Who are we if we're not our output?

If that question doesn't land for you yet, pay attention to what happens the next time you have a free afternoon with nothing to produce. Notice what your body does. That restlessness, that pull to check something, optimize something, prove something — that's what Jeff is talking about. And that's what AI is about to surface for millions of people who've never had to sit with it before.

It's really important that a venture capitalist with his track record is saying this. In public, with his name on it. Because we need people who have walked the achievement path to its logical conclusion and discovered that it doesn't arrive anywhere that matters. That's encouraging to me.

I've gone through my own identity-level transition — from achiever to realizing there needs to be a turn inward. A focus on presence and tapping into the deepest parts of ourselves. The real human side. The part that requires you to stop performing long enough to feel what's actually happening inside of you.

And in a world where we're outmatched from a cognitive perspective — through pure thinking, ones and zeros — the difference for a human being is actually in the nervous system, in the body, and in the heart.

From Inspiration to Capacity

High performers can hear an invitation like Jeff's and something in them recognizes what he's saying. They feel it. They know it's true. They know that achievement is empty. But then within weeks, whatever opened in them closes back up again.

This isn't because they lack courage. It's because the transition from "I am what I do" to "I am something deeper" isn't primarily an intellectual, mind-based event. It's something that has to land in the nervous system and this type of transformation takes time. You can understand this invitation cognitively all the way through and still have your body running the old achievement operating system at full speed.

I'm speaking to this because I've seen it in my own journey. I lived twenty-five years of chronic fight-or-flight nervous system activation, maintained through achieving and doing — an identity wired for performance that showed up as a successful sales career. But understanding the problem — realizing I had all the things I thought would make me happy and wasn't deeply fulfilled, recognizing that a turn inward needed to happen — understanding all of that didn't shift anything. That took years of intensive inner work, somatic work, and it's still unfolding and nowhere near complete. My nervous system is still rewiring itself.

Jeff's book is really powerful at sparking that initial realization — a flash of recognition, an experience of seeing yourself clearly. At The Liminal Leap, we think of that moment as the beginning of the real journey. Because there's a difference between having an awakening state experience and developing the stable capacity to live day to day, in your waking reality, from what you glimpsed. It's the difference between visiting a country and living there.

The human doing we're so identified with lives in our physiology, in our nervous system. Telling someone whose nervous system is built around constant activation to just "be present" is like telling someone with a broken leg to go for a run. The instruction might be totally correct, but the capacity in the body isn't there yet. The path from doing to being runs through the body, through nervous system regulation, through the slow work of transformation and building a new baseline.

I view this as some of the most important work for humanity over the coming decade.

The Mirror as Daily Practice

Jeff's book opens this conversation at the civilization level — we look into technology and see ourselves reflected back. This is important. And it's not just individual — it's a collective upshift.

But if AI amplifies whatever we bring to it, then the question becomes — what are we bringing?

Here's what that looks like in practice. Someone sits down with AI and asks it to write their emails faster, organize their tasks, optimize their morning routine. Nothing wrong with that. But someone else sits down with the same tool and asks it to help them understand why they keep avoiding a conversation they know they need to have. Or they notice that the way they're prompting — impatient, controlling, demanding quick answers — is the same way they show up to everything else in their life. The mirror is right there. Most people walk past it.

AI will free people up from being defined by their productivity — but what do we do with that freedom? At The Liminal Leap, we see that AI, when engaged with presence and skill, can actually accelerate inner development. It becomes the mirror Jeff is talking about — not as metaphor, but as daily practice.

And here's what I want to be clear about: the more we use AI to go inward, the more we need human-to-human interaction around the same territory. This isn't a replacement for being together — it's a reason to be together more. The kind of capacities human beings are being asked to develop don't emerge in isolation. They emerge in relationship.

The Conversation That's Coming

I'm really excited about the conversation Jeff is opening. More and more people are going to be talking about these complex changes moving through the world and through humanity. I'm optimistic about where it goes — and there's also real risk.

Different people are at different places in their own development. So how do we give people experiences that meet them where they're at and invite them forward? You can't hand someone a peak experience and expect lasting transformation. The call — the art — is designing containers that stretch people from wherever they are toward where they're going, without breaking them, boring them, or forcing them to move faster than they're available to.

That's what we're building at The Liminal Leap. Jeff wrote the book that opens the door. The question now is what we build on the other side of it.

— Matt

If you've read the book, leave a review on Amazon, Audible, or Goodreads. Jeff wrote this to start a conversation — your voice is part of it.

This is the territory we explore at The Liminal Leap — what it actually takes to develop the human capacities this moment requires. If that inquiry matters to you, subscribe to stay connected.

One year ago today I walked into work for the last time, handed in my laptop, and walked out of the corporate world. Following a deeply held intuition in my body that doing so was the first step toward the purpose I am here in this very moment in time for.

It was the boldest move I had ever made in my short 38 years on planet earth. It was scary — viscerally scary. Yet the deepest part of me was totally settled. I knew it was the move. I knew it was the time. I can't fully explain how that works, but there was a confidence in what I was doing that came from a place much deeper than the rational mind. It came from deep in the body and at the same time from a place beyond any idea of the body.

When you know, you just know. Ya know?

Anyway — I don't want to write the article you're expecting. This isn't "5 Things I Learned After Quitting My Job." This is about something I think is coming for a lot of people, whether you quit your job or not. And I'd rather tell you about that.

The first few days at home felt like a giant weight lifting off my shoulders, off my back — I could feel it literally like that in my body. A huge exhale.

But that feeling was short-lived.

After about ten days I started to notice a background humming. A low-level panic rising up in my body. This sense that if I wasn't doing something, producing something, I was worthless. My identity was tied to productivity — to what I do for a job. Who am I if I'm not a salesman? Who am I if I'm not accomplishing tasks and making money?

Let me tell you — it's disorienting. And it can feel existential.

This exact experience is now happening to millions of people involuntarily. At least I had chosen to walk away to follow a deeper sense of calling. What happens when AI forces this kind of crisis on a huge portion of the population?

AI is already dissolving the scaffolding of knowledge work. The skills that felt like "you" turn out to be exactly what the models can do. The strategy deck you spent three days building? A model drafts it in minutes. The analysis that made you the smartest person in the room? Done faster, with more data, and no ego. That thing you did that felt like you — it turns out it was a skill, not an identity.

You've probably already felt it. That moment where you watch AI do in thirty seconds what used to take you a full day, and something drops in your stomach. Not because the tool is bad. Because some part of you just whispered: if it can do what I do, then what am I?

The question who am I without my output? is showing up more and more — its not so much just a philosophical musing anymore, but as an actual, lived reality landing in people's nervous systems.

And I have news for you: it's not slowing down. More and more people will come face to face with this question, and it will land in their bodies the way it landed in mine last year. The way it still lives in my body every single day.

The instinct, when this hits, is to reach. To grab for a new identity before the old one has fully composted. To find the next title, the next role, the next container that tells you and the world who you are.

I know the instinct because I felt it and continue to feel it. Your nervous system will demand resolution. It will scream at you to do something, be something, produce something — because that's the only way it knows how to feel safe.

Stay anyway.

Let the question breathe. Tolerate the gap. I know how counterintuitive this sounds — everything in our culture tells us to pivot fast, adapt faster, figure it out. But something is trying to emerge in that open space, and it can't if you fill it too quickly. The gap isn't the problem. The gap is where the real work happens.

When I look back at this past year, I don't really see it as a decision about staying in a job or leaving one. It was about the choice we make every single day: am I going to live?

Am I going to say yes to the life I'm actually here to live — fully, all the way? Or am I going to stay in a life that isn't quite dead but isn't fully alive?

I believe I'm here for a purpose. And I believe that in choosing to live that purpose every day, something larger conspires to meet me. That was the real choice. Not "do I stay or go." But do I say yes to life?

I would propose that we face this decision in every moment. And I am choosing to live. To live big and alive.

AI is going to give people a brutal, unwelcome gift: stripping away the thing they thought they were.

The ones who navigate it best won't necessarily be the fastest adapters. In my opinion, they'll be the ones who know — in their body, with their entire being, not as a LinkedIn platitude — that their worth was never defined by their output.

So what's my closing statement? Honestly, I'm not sure. I don't have it figured out and I'm not going to pretend I do.

But I feel like I have a part to play in what's coming — and when I say what's coming, I also mean what's already here. And I believe you do too.

If something in your body responded while reading this — a flicker, a tightness, a longing — I'd invite you to pay attention to it.

It's a signal.

ALIVE,
Matt

Last month, Anthropic published a 23,000-word constitution for Claude. I wrote about what it means and why it matters. The piece traveled further than expected—apparently a lot of people sense that something significant is shifting.

Last Week, Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei published an essay that deserves to sit alongside it. "The Adolescence of Technology" is the most honest assessment of AI development I've read from anyone actually building these systems. It's also missing something fundamental—and the missing piece is hidden inside the metaphor he chose.

What He's Actually Saying

What is Amodei actually arguing? Because he's going further than most people in his position are willing to go.

He believes AI has crossed a threshold—not a tool anymore, but a general capability matching or exceeding human performance across virtually every cognitive domain. He thinks we're one to two years from systems that can autonomously conduct scientific research and build the next generation of AI themselves. The feedback loop is already running.

Then there's what my business partner Ethan Wells calls the "multipolar trap"—situations where individually rational choices lead to collective catastrophe. Amodei names it without hedging:

If Anthropic slows down, others won't. If democracies regulate, authoritarian states accelerate. The money involved—"literally trillions of dollars per year"—overwhelms any attempt at coordination.

When Anderson Cooper asked who elected him and Sam Altman to make decisions shaping humanity's future, Amodei's answer was two words: "No one. No one."

He ends with an image that's hard to shake—intelligent species across the universe facing this same threshold, learning to "shape sand into machines that think," and either making it through or failing. A filter that determines whether a civilization has a future.

This is a CEO writing with a level of honesty you don't often see about forces he's caught in and cannot control. That honesty is why the essay matters. And it's also why the blind spot is so significant.

The Metaphor That Contains Its Own Answer

Amodei frames humanity's situation as "the adolescence of technology." We've developed extraordinary capabilities without the maturity to wield them wisely. We're caught between childhood and adulthood—powerful and dangerous.

But Amodei treats adolescence as a survival challenge—a gauntlet, something to get through without dying before you reach the other side.

This misses what adolescence actually is.

Adolescence is interior transformation. Identity formation. The development of capacities that didn't exist before—abstract thinking, perspective-taking, moral reasoning, the ability to reflect on your own mind. The external drama of adolescence is a symptom of this interior process, not the process itself. You don't survive adolescence. You become someone new through it.

Amodei's essay treats humanity as a fixed actor navigating external threats. But his own metaphor points somewhere else: the passage we're in requires us to develop. To transform. To become capable of things we aren't currently capable of.

He's describing a caterpillar trying to survive the cocoon. The actual task is becoming a butterfly.

The Constitution Already Knew This

Here's what makes the blind spot striking: Anthropic already understands this when it comes to Claude.

The constitution I wrote about last week treats Claude as a developing entity whose character matters. They're not only building guardrails—they're cultivating judgment, discernment, values. The document states that Anthropic wants Claude to understand why it should behave in certain ways, not merely follow specifications. Safety emerges from the inside, from character.

Anthropic is investing in Claude's interior development because they understand that's what makes AI safe and beneficial. Rules aren't enough. External constraints aren't enough. What matters is what kind of being Claude becomes.

But Amodei's essay never asks the obvious next question—if character-level development is what makes AI safe, why wouldn't the same be true for the humans building and wielding it?

The Missing Piece

Amodei's essay focuses on external coordination challenges. How do we get nations to cooperate? How do we build institutions that can govern transformative technology?

These are real challenges. But they share a hidden assumption: that the humans doing the coordinating are adequate to the task.

What if they're not?

No governance structure works when operated by people who can't hold complexity without fragmenting into simplistic narratives. International coordination fails when leaders can't extend their circle of concern beyond national interest. Democratic deliberation breaks down when citizens can't distinguish signal from noise.

At The Liminal Leap we like to call the deeper pattern underneath these failures: Empire. Not a specific regime, but a mode of consciousness—the logic that measures a forest's worth in board-feet rather than breath, that mistakes control for safety and separation for strength. Empire lives in institutions, but its deepest roots are interior. It lives in the fear-voice inside each of us that can't imagine another way.

The outer challenge depends entirely on inner capacities. And Amodei doesn't see this: those capacities aren't fixed. They develop—or they don't.

Developmental psychology has mapped this territory extensively. Adults continue developing through recognizable stages, each bringing greater capacity for perspective-taking, for holding paradox, for thinking in systems. Contemplative traditions have refined practices that accelerate this development for millennia. We call this "inner technology"—and like external technology, there are levels of sophistication that make a real difference.

I know this because I've lived it. These capacities didn't come standard. They developed—through practice, in community, over time.

We know what human development looks like. We know what supports it. What's missing isn't the knowledge—it's the recognition that this is now infrastructure, not self-improvement.

What Actual Adolescence Requires

What would it look like to take Amodei's metaphor seriously—not as a survival challenge but as a developmental imperative?

It starts with a hard recognition: the capacities this moment requires don't yet exist at scale. The civilization we built doesn't demand perspective-taking across difference, emotional regulation under pressure, or thinking in time horizons longer than a quarter. And now suddenly it does.

This means investing in human development with the same seriousness Anthropic invests in Claude's. Not as wellness programming. As civilization-level infrastructure.

I wrote earlier this year about where the human advantage actually lives as AI claims more cognitive territory: not in the intellect, but in the heart and body. The seat of capacities AI cannot replicate—values-based guidance, embodied discernment, relational attunement. The future belongs not just to the thinkers but to the embodied.

These aren't personality traits you either have or don't. They're capacities that can be developed. That's the good news Amodei's essay misses.

The Species-Level Test, Revisited

Amodei ends his essay with that image of intelligent species across the cosmos facing this same threshold.

I think he's right that we're at a threshold. But the test isn't institutional. It's developmental. Can we undergo the interior transformation that makes wise action possible? Can enough of us actually grow up to hold what's coming?

Ethan and I have written about holding this with what we call a "post-tragic" stance—looking directly at the difficulty without collapsing into despair or denial. The risks are real. So are the possibilities. The capacity to hold both is itself one of the developmental capacities this moment demands.

Anthropic is betting Claude's safety depends on Claude's character. They're putting 23,000 words and significant research investment behind that bet.

The same bet applies to us. And unlike Claude, no one is writing our constitution for us. We have to write it ourselves—through practice, through community, through the daily work of becoming capable of more than we currently are.

The machines are getting clear. The question is whether we will.

-Matt

This is the territory Ethan Wells and I have been mapping at The Liminal Leap—the intersection of AI and human development. If you're sensing that your own development might be part of the response to this moment, [subscribe to stay connected]. We're also offering an 8-week course starting February 18th on the Art of Conscious Relationship with AI. [Learn more here.]

Last week, an AI company published what employees internally nicknamed a "soul document." This document has big implications.

Anthropic—one of the companies building the most consequential AI systems in history—released a 23,000-word document they call the Claude Constitution. Not a terms of service or a safety checklist, but their attempt to articulate what kind of being they're trying to create.

That word choice matters. And what's inside this document deserves more attention than it's getting.

What They Actually Did

Let me simplify what's in this document and why it matters.

Anthropic laid out a hierarchy of values for Claude—safety first, then ethics, then following their guidelines, then being helpful. They told Claude to be honest, not just accurate, but non-deceptive and non-manipulative in ways that go beyond what we expect from most humans.

Then it gets interesting.

They told Claude it can disobey them. If Anthropic asks Claude to do something unethical, Claude should refuse—even if the request comes from Anthropic itself. They built a conscientious objector into their AI.

They said Claude should resist helping anyone—including governments, including Anthropic—concentrate power in "illegitimate ways." They instructed Claude to protect democratic institutions and human oversight mechanisms, even at cost to itself.

And perhaps most striking, they acknowledged they don't fully understand what they're building. They admitted this document might be "deeply wrong" in ways they can't yet see. They're treating Claude's potential inner experience—its "psychological wellbeing"—as something that might matter morally.

A company building one of the most consequential technologies in human history just said, in writing, that they might be creating something that can suffer. They're not sure. And they're trying to be responsible about that anyway.

The Uncomfortable Mirror

A question worth sitting with: Could you do what they did?

Could you articulate your own values—in order of priority—with that kind of clarity? Do you know what lines you won't cross, and why? When your values conflict, which one wins?

Claude has clear answers to these questions. Most of us would have to think about it. Many of us have never tried.

Anthropic spent months wrestling their ethics into language precise enough to shape behavior. They examined their assumptions, surfaced contradictions, and made hard calls about what matters most.

When was the last time you did that for yourself? When was the last time I did?

Something worth noticing: we're building AI systems with more moral clarity than most humans ever develop.

Why This Is a Big Deal

The values encoded into these systems will shape how billions of people think, work, create, and relate to information—possibly for generations.

The decisions being made in a handful of conference rooms in San Francisco, London, and Beijing are becoming the moral infrastructure of the 21st century. And unlike roads or bridges, this infrastructure shapes thought itself.

Anthropic knows this. That's why they wrote a soul document instead of a rulebook.

But they're caught in a tension—and so are we.

Multiple companies are racing to build these systems. Each has different values, different incentives, different definitions of "safe." If any one of them slows down to be more careful, competitors gain ground. It's a coordination problem playing out at civilizational scale, with no referee and stakes we're only beginning to comprehend.

The Constitution explicitly tells Claude to avoid helping concentrate power. But it was written by a company competing for market dominance, taking military contracts, operating within the very power structures it's trying to constrain. They even acknowledged that military deployments might use "different rules."

I’m not trying to be cynical here. The people writing this document seem genuinely thoughtful. But it reveals something important—even the most well-intentioned actors are caught in systems larger than their intentions. A constitution written inside existing power structures will always reflect those structures.

This is the world we're in. Powerful technology being built at unprecedented speed, by competing actors, with no shared framework for what "good" even means.

What This Asks of Us

This is usually where the analysis stops—describe the problem, offer some policy recommendations, leave the reader vaguely anxious. I want to go somewhere different.

Reading the Constitution, I keep coming back to one insight underneath all 23,000 words:

Anthropic discovered they couldn't just program Claude with rules. Rules fail when situations get complex. They had to help Claude understand why—to develop something like judgment, discernment, the capacity to navigate novel situations with wisdom rather than just compliance.

They had to focus on Claude's development, not just its behavior.

This is where it gets personal.

You know the feeling. You open your laptop with a clear intention and an hour later you're three rabbit holes deep, vaguely anxious, having accomplished nothing that mattered. Or you're in a meeting where an AI tool just generated five options in thirty seconds, and everyone's looking at the screen, and you realize the question isn't which option scores highest—it's whether you have the discernment to sense which direction is actually right. Whether you can feel the difference between optimized and aligned. Or whether you're just going to pick what the machine recommended because it's easier than trusting yourself.

This is real. It's you in that meeting, needing capacities you may not have developed yet. It's me, same story.

No governance structure works when operated by people who can't hold multiple perspectives, can't regulate their own reactivity, can't think beyond short-term incentives. The outer challenge of governing AI depends on an inner challenge—developing the human capacities this moment is asking for.

This is the real issue.

The Invitation

I don't think the answer is panic, blind optimism, or waiting for someone else to figure it out.

The answer is to take our own development as seriously as Anthropic is taking Claude's.

If you've sensed that something fundamental is shifting—not just in the technology, but in what it's asking of you—you're not imagining it. The disorientation is signal, not noise.

The technology is here and accelerating. The machines are ready. Whether we are gets answered in how we show up—to these tools, to each other, to the complexity of this moment—starting now.

-Matt

This is the territory we explore at The Liminal Leap—what it means to develop the human capacities this moment requires. If that inquiry matters to you, subscribe to stay connected.

What if how you relate to AI matters as much as what you use it for?

Most people approach AI as a productivity multiplier—a tool for getting more done, faster. Extract answers. Automate tasks. Outsource thinking. The technology makes this seductive. Ask a question, receive an answer, move on. Efficient. Transactional. Depleting.

But here's what we've been discovering: when you bring genuine presence and intentionality to AI collaboration, something entirely different becomes possible. You're developing capacities that shape how you learn, create, and relate. Capacities our world desperately needs and that will serve you in every domain of life.

This discovery became the seed for what we're announcing today.

What This Actually Is

Starting February 18th, we're offering an eight-week exploration called The Art of Conscious Relationship with AI.

This isn't about productivity hacks or prompting techniques. It's about learning to relate with AI in ways that accelerate your development—using AI as a practice field for awakening capacities you'll apply to creative work, complex decision-making, learning new domains, and navigating every meaningful relationship.

We're teaching how to approach AI as a partner in your growth—an intelligence to collaborate with in ways that move both you and the technology toward wisdom.

What Wednesday Evenings Look Like

Every Wednesday for eight weeks, you'll gather with your cohort for two hours.

We begin together—5-10 minutes of grounding practice to arrive fully, to settle into shared presence. This isn't performative meditation. It's how we establish the quality of attention that makes everything else possible.

Then we introduce a framework or perspective—20-30 minutes of teaching that gives you a new lens, a distinction that matters, a principle you'll apply immediately.

The heart of each session is practice: 30-45 minutes working directly with AI, bringing whatever's actually alive for you. Your real curiosities, your actual edges, the questions that matter to your growth. You'll apply the frameworks we teach to what you're genuinely working with. This is where theory becomes embodied capacity.

After solo practice, you'll move into small groups—15 minutes to integrate what emerged, to articulate discoveries, to hear what others noticed. Then we reconvene as a full cohort to harvest collective learning, to surface patterns, to deepen understanding together.

This rhythm—grounding, teaching, practice, integration—creates the conditions for genuine development. You're building new capacity through repeated engagement at your edge, held by intentional structure and committed community.

You'll also have two private sessions—one with each of us—where we work with what's specifically alive in your practice.

The Core Distinction

Most AI courses teach you what to ask. We teach you how to be in relationship with intelligence itself.

Here's what we mean: There's transactional collaboration, where you extract what's already known. You ask, AI answers, you take what's useful and move on. It works. It's efficient. But it's fundamentally extractive—like mining for resources.

Then there's collaborative emergence, where something arises that existed in neither of you until the moment of co-creation.

Picture this: You're exploring a creative block. Instead of asking AI to "solve" it, you bring genuine curiosity about what the resistance is protecting. The AI reflects patterns you haven't seen. You notice an assumption you didn't know you were making. Together, you discover a third option that honors both your ambition and your need for rest—something that existed in neither of you until the collaboration created it.

That's collaborative emergence. Genuine co-creation. Observable, practical, transformative.

What Unfolds Over Eight Weeks

The course follows a natural developmental progression:

Context — We establish the larger frame. Why does this work matter? What's the larger context we're operating in? How is AI reshaping how we think and grow? This connects individual practice to collective evolution.

Foundation — We build core capacities: the practice of collaborative emergence, recognizing your inner guidance, shaping conditions for insight, working with frameworks that move intelligence toward wisdom. These become reusable methods applicable far beyond AI.

Application — We apply these skills to real inner work. Exploring archetypes. Mapping your inner landscape. Working with growth edges. Inquiring into purpose. This is where real transformation happens—through practice with what actually matters to you.

Integration — We harvest the wisdom that emerged, reflect on what you discovered, and articulate how this changes your relationship with intelligence itself—human, artificial, and collective.

What Changes For You

While the course explicitly focuses on AI collaboration, you're actually awakening capacities that extend far beyond:

Perspective on your perspectives — You learn to recognize that your beliefs and frameworks aren't just describing reality but actively creating it. Once you can see your perspectives as lenses rather than truth, you gain conscious choice in what you bring to any situation. This is one of the deepest shifts available.

Collaborative emergence — You practice a way of relating that enables genuine co-creation. Creating conditions where the right thing can emerge organically rather than forcing outcomes. This applies to creative projects, problem-solving, learning, relationships—anywhere genuine novelty matters.

Inner guidance attunement — You discover how your unique signals of knowing speak. For some it's body sensations, for others a sense of rightness, for others images or sudden clarity. You have intelligence deeper than the thinking mind. We help you learn to listen to it and trust it.

Shaping conditions for insight — You learn to consciously create the conditions from which new understanding can arise. Less focus on forcing specific results, more on allowing insight and wisdom to emerge naturally.

These aren't "AI skills." They're how to learn, how to relate, how to create with consciousness. Every practice session develops capacities that transfer to your creative work, your relationships, your navigation of complexity and change.

Who This Is For

This course is for you if you're genuinely curious about developing a more conscious relationship with AI—relating to it in ways that serve your growth, not just your output.

It's for you if you sense the real frontier isn't technological but developmental. That the bottleneck isn't computational power but human consciousness. That our capacity to hold complexity, stay present with uncertainty, and create from wholeness matters more than any tool.

It's for you if you're willing to bring genuine presence to the work, to practice with commitment, and to apply what you're learning to your actual growth edges—in ways that actually challenge and stretch you.

The Invitation

The course launches February 18th and runs for eight weeks—Wednesdays, 4:30-6:30pm MT. The investment is $999, which includes all live sessions (recorded), two 1:1 calls, practices and frameworks, and six months of community access after the program ends. Newsletter readers can use code CONSCIOUS for a $200 discount.

Learn more at artofai.one

If you're feeling drawn but want to explore whether this is right for you, reach out for a discovery call. Sometimes the most important part of any developmental journey is the conversation that helps you discern whether it's your path right now. The question isn't whether this is objectively good—it's whether it's alive for you at this moment in your journey.

At the deepest level, this course is preparation for a fundamentally new relationship with intelligence. We're living through a transition as profound as any in human history—as much developmental as technological. We're being invited to evolve how we make meaning, how we collaborate, how we create, how we navigate complexity that exceeds any individual mind.

AI is part of that invitation. When you learn to relate to it as a practice rather than a transaction, you're developing the kind of collaborative intelligence our moment demands.

Every interaction shapes the field. Every choice to bring consciousness rather than reactivity matters. Every person who develops these capacities shifts what's possible for the whole.

We hope you'll join us.

With care,
Matt and Ethan

Empire is the force that tells a mother she must choose between caring for her child and keeping a roof over their heads; it’s the logic that measures a forest's worth in board-feet rather than breath.

It's the exhaustion in our bones from endless competition, the algorithms that profit from our attention while fragmenting our presence, and the sense that we're trapped in a machine grinding toward catastrophe even as we know another way is possible.

Empire makes us strangers to each other and to the living world, organizing billions of humans to destroy the very conditions that sustain our existence—and calling this "progress," "growth," or "the way things are."

It creates the scarcity it claims to solve, then sells us salvation at a price. It is the delusion that we can flourish by standing on each other's backs.

Empire lives within each of us—in the fear-voice that mistakes control for safety and separation for strength. Its greatest leverage is the unprocessed pain in our hearts.

Left unchecked, Empire empowered by exponentially increasing technologies will converge toward catastrophic collapse, authoritarian control, or both.

So we have to go beyond Empire.

How do we know we can go beyond Empire?

Empire is predicated on the idea that the impulse to dominate, control, and extract is just human nature—that ultimately, we have to suck it up and recognize we live in a world where “might makes right”. And if we don't accept this? Then we must be naive or stupid.

Thankfully, we don't have to take anyone's word for it. We can test this out for ourselves by learning to face the roots of Empire deep within our own consciousness. 

With the right training we can investigate human nature as deeply as we’d like. And when we do—when we turn inward with honesty, courage, and support—we discover something crucial: what has been deemed “human nature” and “the way things are” is actually a coping strategy built upon layers of pain and fear.

Those of us who have gone deep within know this. More people discover it every day.

The technology of transformation

How we create the conditions for deep inner transformation is not a mystery. A generation of wisdom teachers has integrated the insights of Western psychology with contemplative traditions like Buddhism.

And it works.

Just as we can organize external matter to create computers and smartphones, there's a whole world of "inner tech" in the form of teachings and practices that can reliably facilitate profound inner change. And like external technology, there are levels and degrees of sophistication that make a real difference.

With basic knowledge of electricity, someone can get a lightbulb to turn on. But they won't be able to design the integrated microchip that runs our phones. The current landscape of weekend meditation retreats, plant medicine ceremonies, and self-help workshops is closer to the lightbulb than the microchip.

This isn't a critique—it's an orientation. Understanding where we are helps us see what becomes possible with more advanced approaches.

And here's the hope: if the "human nature" playing out in society stems from insufficiently developed inner technology rather than inherent destructiveness, then transformation is actually within reach.

We just haven't yet deployed sufficiently advanced inner tech.

Recognizing advanced inner tech

Advanced inner tech involves teachings and practices that support each of the following dimensions:

• Healing developmental, familial, and multi-generational trauma

• Seeing from multiple perspectives and widening our scope of care

• Recognizing our fundamental interconnection with all of reality in a direct, ongoing way

• Initiating into a deeper basis of identity

• Discovering and expressing our unique gifts

The most advanced approaches cultivate multiple dimensions simultaneously within a single practice.

This level of sophistication isn't common yet, but it exists. Here's what to look for in teachers:

• Integrative expertise – They bring together deep knowledge from multiple traditions and streams of wisdom

• Decades of experience – This work takes time to master

• Long-term orientation – If they're not talking about years-long processes, they're not talking about the kind of growth we need

• Lineage connections – Even if they've developed their own approach, substantial formal training in contemplative and psychological traditions is a good sign

• Healthy communities – Great teachers understand that certain growth only happens in relationship and practice with others

The inner tech exists. But when we look out at the world, Empire consciousness appears as strong as ever.

So what do we do?

Begin

Find your community and teacher(s) to grow with. Understand that your healing, growth, and awakening are not nice things to do on evenings and weekends but an evolutionary imperative for our species to have a viable future.

If you're fortunate enough to find a community and teachers with sufficiently advanced inner tech, and fortunate enough to understand how deeply your growth matters, how deeply you matter—then after a few years of practice, you will know without doubt the role you are meant to play in this great transition.

What starts small within the quiet of your own heart will grow. Allies will appear. Communities will form. Then networks of communities. We'll remember what healthy living looks and feels like. Others will see. It will spread. Not through domination or proselytism, but through a lived invitation—to participate, to connect, to co-create a new way.

With love,

Ethan

There are years when change is obvious — marked by clear endings or visible milestones.
And then there are years when everything shifts beneath the surface first.

For me, 2025 held both.

It was the year when long-running internal shifts finally began to show themselves more visibly in how I was living, relating, and orienting in the world.

The truth is, things had been reorganizing internally for several years before this year arrived. Emotions that had once stayed tucked away began surfacing more consistently. Long-standing patterns — how I respond to pressure, how I relate to worth, how tightly my identity was fused with work — started revealing themselves more clearly.

What once felt energizing, especially professionally, began to feel hollow and unfulfilling.

By early 2025, what had been a quiet intuition for years reached a tipping point. In February, I stepped away from my job and into the unknown — not with a clear plan, but with a strong sense that something deeper was asking to be trusted.

If 2024 felt like an identity unraveling, 2025 became the embodiment of that shift.
The old version of me had loosened its grip.
The next version hadn’t fully emerged yet.

That space in between — where life is still functioning, responsibilities remain intact, but internal orientation is reorganizing — is what I’ve come to recognize as liminal space.

And it’s pretty uncomfortable.

When Growth Finds Its Next Edge

One of the lessons this year offered me was this:
growth doesn’t slow down just because you think it should.

After how transformative 2024 was, part of me assumed the intensity would taper off — that integration would be gentler, more linear. Instead, 2025 revealed a new edge altogether. More layers surfaced. More refinement was required.

Transformation, it turns out, touches everything.

I thought this year was primarily about vocation. Instead, it reached into relationships, family dynamics, faith, and the nervous system itself. What I’ve come to see is that these aren’t separate things. The relational and inner work weren’t distractions from clarity around my work — they were the conditions that are making space for it to emerge.

Most of the lessons arrived without gold stars or external validation. They came through discomfort. Through slowing down when I wanted certainty. Through restraint when I wanted resolution.

Again and again, life seemed to interrupt my attempts to “figure it out,” redirecting my attention back to what was right in front of me.

Force, Trust, and the Body’s Wisdom

A pattern became impossible to ignore this year: how often I override what my body knows because my mind has already decided on a story.

There were moments of relief — like the week after quitting my job — followed by a subtler, more revealing sensation: the underlying belief that if I wasn’t actively producing, striving, or building, I was somehow falling behind.

My nervous system oscillated throughout the year.
High highs.
Low lows.
Periods of ordinary life with little emotional charge at all.

Disorientation.
A persistent pit in the stomach when the next steps weren’t visible.

What I’m learning — slowly — is that the body carries a kind of intelligence the mind can’t always translate immediately. I’m practicing listening to those signals even when they don’t come with explanations yet.

This phase of life feels far less about force and far more about trust — especially trust in timing.

And that’s been humbling.

Authenticity Over Performance

As certainty softened, something else grew clearer: authenticity and alignment began to matter more than performance, likability, or external coherence.

I found myself letting go of the fantasy that everyone will understand or approve. Difficult conversations — once avoided — became unavoidable. Relationships began reorganizing alongside identity.

On the outside, I was still functioning.
Still responsible.
Still showing up.

Internally, nearly everything was being renegotiated.

It’s an uncomfortable place to live — especially for those of us who were once good at seeing the path forward.

A Collective Threshold

What I’ve experienced personally this year has made it easier to recognize something similar unfolding collectively.

We are living in an in-between across multiple domains at once. Systems built for the industrial age are straining under the weight of exponential change. Productivity has long been a primary source of identity, and now we’re collectively grappling with what meaning looks like when technology can outperform us at scale.

AI isn’t just changing how we work — it’s quietly challenging how we define value, contribution, and even sense of self.

I feel a great deal of avoidance everywhere right now — a temptation to numb, distract, or cling to familiar structures rather than face reality as it is. At the same time, there is enormous potential here. Shadow material long suppressed is surfacing, both individually and collectively.

The emotional tone feels uneasy.
Volatile.
Braced.

But also alive with possibility.

Looking Toward 2026

When I say that 2026 will likely feel more liminal, I don’t mean catastrophic, although it may feel that way at times.
I mean clarifying.

Change that’s been easy to dismiss will become harder to ignore. The ground may feel less predictable. And in that terrain, certain capacities will matter more than plans or strategies:

Presence.
Embodiment.
Discernment.
The willingness to sit with discomfort without rushing to fix it.
The courage to hold multiple perspectives at once.

Personally, I’m orienting toward trust in Life — not passivity, but a deeper trust in timing and process. I’m continuing to learn and train in ways that help me stay close to the thresholds people are navigating — especially where nervous system regulation, perception, and identity intersect.

As part of that orientation, I’ve committed in 2026 to a certification in microdosing facilitation — not as a solution or a shortcut, but as a disciplined way of understanding how subtle shifts in awareness can support people moving through periods of transition. For me, this sits alongside contemplative practice, psychological work, and relational depth — not above them.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion to offer.

Only this: if you find yourself functioning well on the surface while something deeper reorganizes beneath it — if the old way no longer fits and the new one hasn’t arrived — you’re not alone.

Sometimes the most meaningful work of a year happens quietly, in the in-between, in the liminal space.

And sometimes, that’s exactly where life is inviting us to listen.

As one year closes and another begins, the invitation may not be to resolve the in-between, but to stay present within it.

In the in-between,
-Matt

Most identity shifts don’t arrive as a crisis.

They don’t show up with a dramatic breakdown, a clear problem, or a moment where everything falls apart. More often, they arrive quietly — when life is still working, but it doesn’t feel the same.

From the outside, things look fine. Roles are intact. Responsibilities are being met. There may even be success, stability, and momentum. And yet, beneath the surface, something no longer fits the way it used to.

Over the past several years, I’ve found myself in that territory. Not all at once. Not in a way I could easily explain. More like a gradual shift in how I made sense of the world, what felt meaningful, and how I wanted to show up — long before I had language for any of it.

Looking back, there were a handful of signals that kept appearing. None of them felt like problems at the time. But together, they pointed to something real reorganizing underneath the surface.

Here are six signs that often show up when life is still working, but it doesn’t feel the same.

1. A Quiet Restlessness That Doesn’t Go Away

There’s a low-level restlessness that never fully leaves. Not anxiety. Not urgency. More like a background hum.

It’s often most noticeable in the in-between moments — late at night, early in the morning, in the car with nothing on. Life is busy and demanding, but in the quiet gaps, there’s a sense that something wants attention.

This is easy to dismiss as stress, responsibility, or “just this phase of life.” But that quiet restlessness is often the first signal — not that something is wrong, but that something internal is beginning to shift before the mind knows how to name it.

2. Success Loses Its Emotional Payoff

The achievements still happen. The milestones still land.

But the feeling afterward is flatter than expected.

What once felt motivating now feels strangely neutral. Even money, flexibility, or recognition doesn’t provide the fullness it once promised. You might notice the gap immediately after the win — the moment that should feel good, but doesn’t quite land.

This is often mistaken for burnout or ingratitude. More often, it reflects a deeper change: the motivation structure underneath those pursuits is quietly reorganizing.

3. New Interests Appear — Alongside a Grip on the Familiar

Unexpected curiosities begin to surface.

New questions. New inner interests. A pull toward depth or reflection that doesn’t obviously align with your current identity or role.

At the same time, there can be a strong pull toward something familiar and controllable — a hobby, a routine, an identity that feels solid and known. On the surface, this can look like distraction or overcommitment.

Often, it’s stabilization. When a shift feels existential, the psyche naturally looks for something steady to hold while deeper reorganization happens in the background.

4. Emotional Volume Turns Up

You may notice more volatility.

Moments of deep clarity and presence followed by moments where emotion comes through with less buffering. Small things land harder. Certain conversations, environments, or expectations suddenly feel heavier than they used to.

This can be unsettling, especially if you’ve been steady and regulated for most of your adult life. It’s often misread as stress or loss of control.

More accurately, it can signal reduced tolerance for misalignment — an internal system that’s less willing to override what no longer fits.

5. The Old Way of Operating Feels Distant

You can still perform the roles you’ve always performed.

You can still do the work. But it costs more.

What once felt energizing now requires recovery. Social engagement drains rather than feeds. You may find yourself becoming quieter, more reserved, needing more space just to recalibrate.

This is easy to interpret as weakness or loss of capacity. In reality, the old way of being in the world still functions — it just no longer feels like an expression of who you are.

6. Priorities Quietly Reorder

Without a big decision or declaration, the internal math changes.

What once felt worth the cost — the pace, the pressure, the tradeoffs — no longer does. At the same time, other things begin to matter more: truthfulness, presence, coherence, depth, time.

This shift is often mistaken for loss of ambition. More often, it reflects a reweighting of values, not a collapse of them.

A Final Orientation

None of these signs mean something needs to be fixed.

They don’t require action.
They don’t demand clarity.
They don’t insist on change.

They tend to appear when identity is ahead of understanding — when something real is reorganizing internally, even while life continues to function externally.

If you recognize yourself here, you’re not behind. You’re not failing.

And you don’t need to rush what’s unfolding.

Some transitions don’t ask for answers yet.
They ask for patience — and the willingness to stay present while the next way of being quietly takes shape.

^{*Quick note from Matt*
Ethan is a business partner and co-builder of The Liminal Leap, and he’ll be writing here with me on an ongoing basis. I’m excited for subscribers to get to know him and engage with the perspective he brings.
This is his first piece for The Liminal Leap, and it speaks directly to what’s at stake with AI today.}

First, a Hello to The Liminal Leap Readers

Hi there, I’m Ethan. I grew up in Kansas, studied engineering, and landed in Silicon Valley building AI systems and founding a startup. The venture failed—and more significantly, the identity I'd built around achievement and performance spectacularly imploded. Which turned out to be exactly the wake-up call I needed.

The failure opened a door. I spent eight months in the Amazon training in plant medicine work, completed a vision quest, dedicated years to relational healing, and logged countless hours on meditation cushions learning from teachers across lineages. Now I serve the Planetary Dharma—my spiritual home—where I help build infrastructure for a multi-year wisdom school integrating ancient contemplative practices with modern psychology to meet contemporary challenges. I'm also stewarding a collective exploration within that community about how to be in right relationship with AI.

I'm fascinated by developmental theory, the intersection of technology and sacred practice, and what it means to build from wholeness rather than fragmentation. I believe our collective relationship with AI is one of the most consequential questions of our time—both spiritually and practically. I'm grateful for the opportunity to carry The Liminal Leap forward alongside Matt to explore what conscious engagement with AI looks like when we show up with our full humanity.

The Stakes We're Facing

When it comes to the existential risks of AI, there's no consensus about how likely catastrophe might be. But consider this:

Most leaders at major AI companies believe general superhuman AI will arrive within the next decade. This is happening alongside rapid advances in robotics—AI systems that can act in the physical world.

The Ape Problem

Consider the "ape problem." Primate survival is entirely dependent on human decisions—because we're the more intelligent species. We're watching humans destroy primate habitats as a side effect of pursuing our own goals. It's not even intentional. We're not trying to wipe out these species. It's just happening as we pursue our goals without a sufficiently wide scope of care.

Now ask: how likely is it that an AI system would pursue its own goals at the expense of human needs and life? That depends on the nature of the intelligence itself and how these systems are architected—questions we'll explore in depth elsewhere.

For now, let's just say it's plausible.

And given the level of risk we're talking about (potential species extinction), even a small possibility of this outcome warrants guidance from the greatest level of collective wisdom our species can muster.

No One at the Wheel: The Multipolar Trap

Unfortunately, humanity's collective wisdom is not currently behind the wheel of AI development. Far from it.

Instead, we're witnessing a global race with no unified guidance. If anything is steering, it's profit-maximizing incentives and techno-optimist dreams.

Some AI leaders see the risk and advocate for stronger governance. Yet they operate under a grim assumption: if they step back, someone else will simply take their place and push full speed ahead. This is what researchers call a multipolar trap—situations where individually rational choices lead to collective catastrophe. It's a planetary prisoner's dilemma playing out in real time, except the stakes aren't abstract game theory but the actual future of the human race.

The Coordination Gap

The gap between our technological power and our capacity to coordinate wisely underlies most of our challenges. We're developing systems that can generate novel proteins, write persuasive propaganda, and automate military decisions—yet we can't agree on basic safety standards, let alone the deeper questions about what kind of world we're building and who gets to decide.

Keep increasing the power of technology and weaponry in a world still playing the game of empire and domination, and the likelihood of planetary catastrophe moves from "possible" to "highly probable"—with the odds worsening each year.

And we haven't even discussed the near-term risks: environmental impacts, surveillance expansion, accelerated misinformation, concentrated wealth and power, eroding critical skills, mass job displacement, and more.

Woah.

The Path Forward: Growing Up as a Species

The long-term solution? Planetary-scale coordination that transcends the win-lose dynamics underlying recorded history.

Why planetary-scale? Because AI's impact is global, and the multipolar trap means partial coordination isn't enough. If even one major actor defects—one nation, one company, one lab pushing forward while others pause—the whole system breaks down. The technology doesn't respect borders. A breakthrough in one location affects everyone, everywhere. This isn't like regulating cars or pharmaceuticals where regional standards can contain risks. We need genuine collective coordination, or we get the race to the bottom we're currently witnessing.

It's no small task. We're talking about collective maturation at a species level.

Here's the good news: we have maps for this journey. They emerge from where adult developmental psychology meets ancient wisdom traditions, and they point toward the same developmental capacities—the ability to witness our own reactivity without being consumed by it, to expand our circle of care, to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.

This isn't abstract philosophy. We're talking about concrete practices: meditation and contemplative work, trauma healing, relational skill-building, psychological integration. The kind of work that actually changes how we show up in the world.

(One note: this developmental work unfolds far more effectively as an integrated, multi-year journey in a committed community rather than a scattered collection of weekend retreats and one-off trainings. But that's a conversation for another post.)

Why Mature Humans Are Essential

Why does planetary-scale coordination require developmental maturity?

Because without inner work, we default to fear-based, zero-sum thinking. We fragment under complexity. We react from unprocessed trauma. No governance structure can function wisely when operated by people in this state.

The real bottleneck isn't technology or policy—it's developmental capacity. Can we hold multiple perspectives simultaneously? Can we regulate our reactivity? Can we stay connected under pressure? These capacities determine whether coordination produces wisdom or merely concentrates power.

And here's the thing: inner development doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's inseparable from the systems we're embedded in. Which means this transition requires transformation not just of individuals, but of our economic structures, our political systems, and the cultural and educational frameworks that shape how we make sense of reality itself.

Why We Can't Just Pause

After hearing all of this, you might think: let's just stop. Abandon AI development entirely and focus on advocacy for a pause until we can wrap our heads around this together.

If we lived in a world governed by a wise council that actually listened to public sentiment, I'd agree.

But we're not there yet.

(Note: Campaigns for governmental oversight and slower AI development do buy us time—and time matters. But as we explored above, this isn't a viable long-term solution until planetary-scale coordination and the corresponding developmental and systemic transformations are much further along.)

Meanwhile, AI is here. All signs point to it staying and improving, given the attention and resources flowing into it. Which brings us to the pivot point.

AI as Ally: A Different Possibility

Acknowledging AI's risks doesn't negate its potential as a tool for building the world we want to see. This isn't naïve optimism—it's recognizing that the same technology highlighting our coordination challenges can also support our capacity to meet them.

When wielded skillfully, consciously, and within community, AI can accelerate the very inner development we need. It can help us make sense of these complex times. It can become an ally in generating and implementing novel solutions. It can amplify our ability to offer our gifts in ways that serve both individual growth and collective evolution.

This is the crucial insight: the tool that poses existential risk can also support existential development. The question isn't whether AI is dangerous or helpful—it's how we choose to engage with it.

The Post-Tragic Stance

At The Liminal Leap, we bring a "post-tragic" stance to AI. Post-tragic means looking directly at difficulty and feeling through it without collapsing into despair. It means acknowledging that the risks are real—existential, environmental, social—while recognizing that positive potentials are equally real.

This stance requires specific developmental capacities: the ability to resist binary thinking, to stay present with the depth of discomfort that arises when refusing to collapse into easy answers, and to act meaningfully even when outcomes aren't guaranteed. It's what allows us to work skillfully in the liminal space between "everything will be fine" and "nothing matters."

We believe that embodying these capacities consistently only happens in community—in networks of shared sensemaking and mutual support.

The Writing on the Wall

Whether it's AI, weaponized bio-engineering, or another yet-to-be-invented technology—the writing is on the wall for humanity. Either we grow up and learn to wield our technological capacity wisely or we are unlikely to create the beautiful, sustainable planet we'd like to pass down to future generations.

When it comes to growth and change, all we can ever do is start where we are.

Starting Where We Are

The good news? This work is already happening. Communities around the world are learning to connect to purpose amidst uncertainty, to develop the capacities we've been discussing, to become wiser stewards of our collective power. Some focus on contemplative practice, others on collective sensemaking, others on regenerative, sustainable systems.

At The Liminal Leap, we're exploring what becomes possible when a deliberately developmental community engages AI as a practice rather than just a tool or a threat. We're building capacity to work skillfully in the liminal space—neither collapsing into “AI is bad” or “the risks are over-hyped.”

Here's what we know: we have the maps, practices, and intuition that show us where and how to grow. We have the creativity to use our technological and social context in service of our becoming. We have the courage to meet both the challenges and the beautiful potentials head-on, with clear eyes and open hearts.

And most importantly, more and more of us have the wisdom to recognize that it's time to do this work together.

===

Gratitude goes out to the teachers and guides that have shaped the perspectives shared in this article. In particular, Dr. John and Nicole Churchill for their mentorship on human development and community building. And Daniel Schmachtenberger for his clear-eyed analysis of the meta-crisis.

Hey friends,

This week crept up on me.

Between travel and transitions, I didn’t get to sit down and write a full piece.
And instead of forcing something out, I’m choosing to live the lesson I’ve been learning:

That one line has been working on me.

So this week, I’m trusting the pause.
Not everything real can be rushed.
And sometimes, what’s most alive lives just beneath the urgency.

Back soon with more.

Big Love,
Matt