The Pricelessness of Existence
Don’t ask ChatGPT
“Without the sacred, all is cash value.”1
I don’t know how we got here, but I fear we’ve been here too long.
Society is unmoored. The institutions that used to ground us…are dissipating.
And some will say “good riddance,” and understandably so. Many have been hurt by the power structures that be, especially with those with any hint of spirituality attached.
But when these spiritual institutions crater, and we lose the practices that grounded us for centuries, along with it go many important but unforeseen things.
The sense of the sacred is probably the biggest victim. In its wake, a profit-driven culture, designed to distract us from our deepest selves, has taken over.
What happens when we lose the sacred? When everything just “is” and we miss the deeper things? We’re missing something, and I suspect much of the cultural rot we’re undergoing is connected to these deeper questions.
When we lose our balance, we cling to the next best thing that gives us solidity, meaning, and purpose.
In a profit centric world, it makes sense for we poor humans to mistake “success” with money. But our external selves (the ones that the get the money, fame, attention) are not our whole selves. They’re only part of us. It’s missing an entire dimension of our being.
Unlike Scrooge McDuck, we cannot swim in our money pit. Nor are we merely reducible to how much we make, like feathers adorning ourselves. We are far more.
There is something about this world that is mysterious, and we in the West, with our pointy pencil people who can tell you precisely down to a decimal point how much humidity is in the air, or how much the GDP grew by in the first quarter…miss the deeper reality.
What Edmond Burke called the “unbought grace of life:” Is there a price for the orange and purple hews that color a sunset? The smile of a newborn? The wag of your dog’s tail…
These are things you cannot buy…and before I hear a naysayer suggest otherwise, recall what Oscare Wilde said, that the cynic is “one who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”
I fear for Generation Z especially, the first group fully reared in a digital ether. Like crack babies, they’re predisposed to favor the false to the real. I’m sure we will be fine as a species (eventually), but this period will still be hard to get through.
How do you hold on to these mysteries of life, in humility and gratitude, with our technological progress? It’s hard to pin down, but something about this development is shortchanging the sense of the sacred.
The balance is a conundrum and it will take time for us to figure out. But both are needed, East and West, Mystery and Progress. We cannot ignore one over the other, but the problem of the present is looking at technology and development over and even against the deeper things.
Who are we? Where are we going? These are questions ChatGPT could never answer, at least not in a satisfying way. These are human questions, questions only a being, who is born and who dies in this world, could answer.
I’m sure AI will spit out words on a screen for you to read, as if it wrote something. But knowledge isn’t wisdom. Some things can only be known by experience.
ChatGPT cannot die, so it cannot live either. It cannot tell us from its own experience what it’s learned, because it has no experience. It just is a vibe of embodiment. We are the incarnation. ChatGPT is the caricature.
The price of everything, but the value of nothing. When we lose any sense of the mystery that surrounds existence, everything descends into a game of dollars and cents.
There is no price for your child. There is no dollar amount for that sunset. There is no way to put a price on that wagging tail that greets you. There is just a grace, received with open hearts. You cannot buy it. You can only experience it. It’s love, in physical form.
Existence is a precious gift.
Will you receive it? With an open heart?
Don’t ask ChatGPT…it has no heart to answer with.
Robert Nisbet, The Present Age