color, stereo, 4:35
2021

At the dawn of the machine learning age we are collectively bumbling forward in our attempts to integrate AI technology into a philosophical or ontological framework. There’s a murmur from Silicone Valley claiming that tech execs are in the process of attempting to build AI gods to worship. This news item was a conspicuous notch in the annals of humanity’s ever unfolding techno-spiritual history. This is the backdrop to the point in time that initiated Vedic monk, Raghunath Khe, has disclosed a memory from his life as a creator whose spiritual and artistic output has precluded and prophesied this discourse. The memory in question is the mirror-double of the AI-god news item, the antithesis of the techno-dystopian doom conjured by Silicone Valley: Khe recounts a supernatural experience, a brush with a daivata—or demigod—of the technosphere, in the pre-internet era. This entity, existing entirely disconnected from any AI, had an influence over the metaphysical landscape of the communication systems that eventually became the internet, a spirit all but stamped out with the internet’s eventual total corporatization (if AI is the mind of “the machine”, then the daivata Khe experienced was the soul). In the process of recounting this supernatural experience, the former Brahmachari gives us an invitation into his mind— a place where the often polarized spheres of eclectic esotericism and right-hand path resolve meet.