AI and Mental Health: How Technology is Quietly Rewiring the Human Spirit
AI and Mental Health
The Rise of the Digital Mental Health Crisis
The use, or overuse, of smartphones and internet-based video is endemic across the world.
It has created a pandemic of mental health, negative image comparison, addiction, depression, suicidal tendency, and lasting emotional problems.
AI is about to put this on steroids.
This is not only a mental health problem—it is a big economic problem. Trying to “solve” this issue is costing governments across the world billions. Some individual cities are spending billions, scaling down to millions depending on the size of the city and scope of its government.
I’d venture to say every township with a population of 3,000 or more has some kind of program to address this phenomenon. There is little evidence that any of these expenditures and efforts are working or bringing about any resolution.
A Crippled Mind, a Crippled Society
A crippled mind leads to a crippled economy leads to a crippled society.
There are 7 million young, able-bodied men who not only do not work at a job, but never plan to work, ever.
This would have been unthinkable and undoable before the Internet and Social Media Age. Life at home would have been too boring, too restrictive, too blasé.
A person would want to get up and go out to see and interact with the world. That was also where you found friends, adventures, romances, higher purposes, forward new building.
The smartphone and Internet, with big media and big tech, changed that. The larger-than-human 3D World, uniting both nature and culture, now had competition on a scale never before imagined or possible.
The Rival World
The old 3D world of nature and culture now faced a rival world. It too was a larger-than-human world, which meant it would have mass effects, as well as mental and local ones.
This rival new world, once it crossed a certain threshold of being broadly communicated, offering many services, and influentially powerful, began to siphon energy, creativity, workforce, real production, forward new building, and hope-bringing from the 3D nature-plus-culture old world.
Imagine the seven streams up in the high mountains dried up or greatly cut off their flow from a major river. That river cut into the Midwest plains. Its waters are necessary to causing high growth on both banks and in any type of field.
Now that river had its strength significantly evaporated. What’s left of that river moves much slower, diminishing hydroelectric power.
Since the river waters refer first of all to a central energy flow, in and coming out of a person’s being, significant lowering of that energy flow leads to deepening mental and emotional health problems.
Too Much Image-to-Image Blur
Too much video image-to-image blur is NOT good for the human heart or psyche.
Once the central energy flow is also one’s stream—or river—of singular life force and specific identity-giving, all identities in nature, or 3D reality involvement, have and give singular life force.
When that ebbs, it creates weakness, and if that continues, it creates death.
Or in people, it makes them want to die.
All beings in nature, or 3D reality, have and give highly specific identities. These are language-using and conversation-sharing identities.
The Language of Attention and Identity
The common root of love and honor is attention giving.
Love is giving special attention, and honor is giving undivided attention.
There is one thing everyone loves — special attention. That happens best where there is one-to-one sharing, eye contact, direct game.
Where there are living streams of attention, there too highly specific identities come to stand out to us. These are language-identity-using people. These are two-way, conversation-generating people.
This language is highly specific and also highly peculiar.
There is a natural and unbreakable bond between one’s singular life force and one’s highly specific identity.
The Creative Flow
When a creative person learns his or her creation really resonates with and pleases other people, the creative juices within them rise, quadruple, and flow. They don’t feel maxed out—they feel revved up.
Creative content or artwork tends to be highly specific. The effort is to create a singular art piece, work, experience, or completion. That effort is singular life force pouring itself into relations, tasks, and challenges.
These creations are highly specific identities. The less they are highly specific, the more they are just machinery or mere technology.
Once these are only machinery, technology, or artificial replicas, they no longer speak the same language as our energy-flow core.
Our energy-flow core only hears, takes in, is awakened or stimulated by, then lively converses with, that language which is highly specific to them, or people or things that are important to them.
Non-Specific Language and Numbness
When humans are fed a diet of non-specific language, it puts them to sleep instead of waking them up—and bores them instead of stimulating them.
Most of us know the story of how the young King Arthur, as a boy, pulled the sword from the stone which the sword was locked inside.
He pulled it out and lifted it straight up in the air, vertically, for all to give attention to as he made its identity STAND OUT.
It operated as a singular identity that got into the hearts and minds of every person, in a way that touched or awakened each individual’s central energy-flow.
The young person, the circle of participants, the sword, the stone, the impossible challenge, the one-of-a-kind victory—all feed into giving us a highly specific language identity.
The Sword and the Stone: A Living Word
It is a living word to us. It is a language identity plus incarnation—but it is still first a word of life to us we are called to pay attention to.
It is an act of singular life force breaking out of being stuck and stopped by a strong and sizable mass.
But the sword does get out.
Something highly singular is happening. It is worthy of note. It is worthy of our own energy-flow center to respond by being fully awake and alert, giving both special attention and undivided attention.
The crowd is, as we and readers are, witness to the FREEDOM MOMENT—both the sword and the people involved are set free from being stuck and “inertized” in the lifeless stone.
The Vertical Connection
The first purpose of language identities is to make identities stand out from the general background—from chaos, from machinery, from being taken out of the game of life by tyrannical forces.
When the sword is freed, its meaning is not about the strictly material sword.
When the singular sword is lifted above all other things, so it stands out to each one, the group there, all for all time to come, its meaning is not about the strictly material sword.
Note too that the sword is held up in a VERTICAL fashion.
The sword and event are a “living word with a highly specific meaning”: it is humans—it’s human—it’s all humanity envisioned, freed from the stone, lifted high above all things in creation, and in a head position over the challenges and opportunities they give.
The vertical also stands for the internal life of a person—of their heart and mind. It stands for the place where their central energy stream (or river) and highly specific language identities are alive to each other.
Light, Fire, and Mental Health
In depictions by artists, the sword is always silver and always shines.
A light gleam covers it.
This light with fire quality precisely stands for “being that comes when the central energy flow and a highly singular (specific, also creative) identity are in union, are undivided.”
Where this happens, the human heart, psyche, feeling center have heightened happiness, concentration, energization, focus, wellness—excellent mental health.
When humans—whether as singular, as groupings, as a society or culture—lack this inner energization and mental aliveness, they suffer mental health issues, addiction, suicide tendency, depression, and lasting emotional problems.
Think of energy flow as an energy stream in which language identities are “language fish” and your whole being is such a “fish.”
If a person is not connected to their energy flow—their central current—they become like a fish flopping on a bank, gasping for breath, feeling misery or trauma.
We’ve Stuck the Sword Back in the Stone
I can tell you why there are such great mental health, addiction, depression, and suicidal tendency problems in the world:
We’ve stuck the sword back in the stone.
In some cases, the sword is stuck for individuals.
In some cases, the sword is stuck in a grouping.
In some cases, the sword is stuck in economics, society, culture, or education.
If it were just individuals, the bodies of people were largely not stuck but strong in the human life in relations and work—and there is still a lot of help and a place to go.
If likewise society, culture, education, and communications are still strong vertical plus horizontal plus sphere-building enterprises, there is a lot of hope and many places to go.
When Everything Gets Stuck
If both individuals and your groups (whether local or extended) are stuck—but if at least society, culture, forward new building, and most influential communications are unstuck—there is still much hope and people who can and will help.
Of course it works the other way:
If your culture (including spiritual centers) are moribund, stuck, not hot—if there is a lot of freedom and forward movement in both groupings and in individual lives—out of these can come great hope and people/groups with a calling to help.
If both your culture-society and your group involvements are paralyzed, then all eyes are on help that arises from great energy and innovation, inspired thinking, and passionate effort in individuals.
But if all three strike out, most pins are going to be flattened.
More and more individuals will feel flattened or exhausted from efforts that don’t create enough headway. This is a great cause of mental health problems.
More and more human groupings in relationship and work will wax dysfunctional and wane in hope. Relational and work lives will flatten. If you find yourself in a pit, it is hard to see a vista of hope.
Flattened Spheres, Lost Wholeness
More and more humans involved in the major spheres of society—whether economic, cultural, educational, spiritual-religious, communicational, or health—will find themselves in air balloons using uplift and mobility.
Sphere-involvement, cultural involvement, are both by nature well-rounded. This is critical to having and giving wholeness, or also fullness, fulfillment, full flower, fruit-bearing.
All this roundness will be replaced by being flattened.
Now we have a compounded problem to face.
It’s already bad enough to bear a sense of being stuck, or crippled—even if cripple means slowed down so your gains are too little for your efforts.
The problem is compounded when your life in the human body of relation and work is also stuck or sucks. You can’t get much trust, few friends. You don’t make enough means. You are in debt. Genuine two-way, life-giving conversations are rare. Having a house may not seem attainable.
When Systems Collapse
The problem is thoroughly compounded when the society—its spheres, its unities of talents with opportunities, its bureaucracies, its communications, its destabilization of small businesses or startups—are also ingrown, moribund, not “letting you into the game.”
The situation is akin to the American government’s system of checks and balances: the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are each distinct but linked.
If one is truly stuck, the other two are supposed to keep on, and keep things going until the other one catches up.
If two are truly stuck, the last one must carry on, and hopes all three will come back to upwards life.
But if all three are truly knocked out, then the whole system is about to be flattened.
This will affect every person, group, and sphere.
Similarly, in the lives of persons suffering or on the edge of suffering mental health problems, being additionally stressed by poor relationships or weak workplace conditions—mental health problems greatly increase.
If the spheres and institutions (public or private) also lose their light, substantial body, and gift development and employment, mental health problems again surge.