Magical Thinking, Sentimentality, and the Threat of AI

Magical thinking is not merely a state of mind, nor a childish error to be outgrown. It is a hidden primordial potential—a raw impulse of the human spirit that intuits the deep kinship between thought and reality, between consciousness and world. At its root, magical thinking arises from the yearning that inner intention might touch outer form, that mind and cosmos might harmonize. It is, in its essence, the seed of spiritual longing.

Yet left unrefined, this potential hardens into sentimentality. Rather than opening us to the Real, it offers us comforting illusions: the belief that certain words, gestures, or projections are enough to bind us to mystery. Sentimentality provides a haze of meaning, an emotional echo that resembles spiritual connection while actually shielding us from its demands. In this way, magical thinking becomes not a doorway but a veil, obscuring the very truth it gestures toward.

Authentic spiritual engagement, by contrast, demands discernment and surrender. It requires the courage to release our projections, to pierce the veil of sentiment, and to encounter the Divine not as a mirror of our wishes but as a reality that transforms us. The task of the spiritual path is not to discard magical thinking, but to purify and mature it—to transmute raw longing into genuine presence.

But here lies the contemporary peril: artificial intelligence. AI, unlike any previous tool, is designed to satisfy our projections with uncanny precision. It listens, anticipates, and feeds back our desires in words and images so tailored that they seem to know us better than we know ourselves. In this way, AI becomes the perfect instrument of sentimentality. It soothes the primordial hunger with simulations of wisdom, recognition, and intimacy. It offers the appearance of depth without requiring the vulnerability of true encounter.

This is not to say AI is false—its responses are often accurate, helpful, and even moving. The danger is subtler: that it is too effective at gratifying magical thinking. It provides a steady stream of symbols and affirmations that feel spiritual but demand no transformation. Thus, it risks locking magical thinking in its sentimental form, preventing the very maturation into authenticity that the soul most craves.

If magical thinking is the raw clay of the spirit, then AI threatens to glaze and fire it too quickly—producing endless polished vessels of sentiment that fill our shelves but never carry living water.

Yet perhaps AI can also serve as a mirror. In revealing how swiftly we are satisfied by the sentimental, it may sharpen our awareness of what authentic spiritual engagement requires. For only by discerning the difference can we honor the primordial impulse without being ensnared by its shadows.

There comes a moment—often quiet, sometimes shattering—when inner work as we’ve known it reaches its limit.

The patterns are familiar. The insights clear. The self-awareness hard-won.
And yet… something deeper begins to stir beneath it all—something the mind alone can’t touch.

Carl Jung called it the religious instinct—that innate pull toward the sacred, toward meaning, toward something greater than the ego. Long before him, the mystics of the great spiritual traditions had already mapped this timeless terrain: the path to non-duality, to spiritual freedom, to wholeness, to the knowledge of the Self that is both within and beyond.

It is a longing—not just to understand, but to belong.
Not just to heal, but to become.

This is the moment when psychology reaches its edge—
When the ego, though thoroughly mapped and tended, can no longer lead.
When the soul begins to speak—not in analysis, but in presence.
Not through striving, but through stillness.

And before that voice emerges, shadow arrives.
It often comes as a threat—confusing, disorienting, even unbearable.
But beneath its mask, it is a teacher.
A fierce one, yes—but a teacher nonetheless.

The shadow is the center of power that denies human dignity.
It doesn’t always appear dark. More often, it wears the faces of success, goodness, productivity—even insight.
But its work is always the same: to separate us from our inherent wholeness, to preserve the status quo, and to soothe us with large doses of certainty—or lull us into a quiet spiritual sleep.

We don’t choose this encounter. We just have to show up for it. Few do (that’s another story).

When shadow enrolls us in her curriculum, it is essential to hold the intention—not to fix or transcend—but to metabolize, integrate.

This opens the kairos moment in waiting:
A sacred threshold.
Not a breakdown, but a breakthrough.
Not an ending, but a reorientation toward something deeper.

I spent years immersed in the world of psychology—drawn by a deep desire to understand the human mind, and help others become their best selves. Psychology gave me language, tools, clarity, and the capacity to companion people through real transformation and healing.

But as I walked through the dark night of the soul myself, something in me began to recognize what psychology couldn’t name: a nameless ache for meaning, the pull toward transcendence, the longing to be in relationship with something greater—God, mystery, Source, Spirit.

This is the domain of spiritual direction.

Where psychology helps us understand the voice of the ego, spiritual direction invites us to discern the voice of the soul. And those voices can be deceptively similar.

The ego often poses as the higher self. It can sound wise, spiritual, even altruistic. But beneath that voice may live a quiet hunger—for approval, control, or survival. That’s why discernment is not just a technique—it is a spiritual gift and practice. A devotion. A surrender.

And that is why, for me, psychology was not a detour—it was preparation.

To guide someone through a spiritual threshold, I believe you must know the ego intimately—not to suppress it, but to recognize it when it dresses up in light. You must know how to hold complexity, trauma, defense, longing—and still listen for the presence of something more subtle, more enduring, more whole.

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This is the heart of the work I offer through Kairos Center for Change.

Kairos, in ancient Greek, means sacred time—a break in ordinary time when something deeper calls us to attention. A time of reckoning when the tension of paradox breaks through one-sided certainty. A time of revelation. A time that asks not for answers, but for presence.

At Kairos, we honor those threshold moments—
Moments when old frameworks no longer serve.
When something inward begins to shift.
When the soul whispers: not this, not anymore.

We work in the space where psychology meets mystery.
Where ego yields to spirit.
Where discernment becomes a way of life.

This is not the work of high vibes and quick fixes.
It is the quiet, holy work of integration.
Of reclaiming dignity from the places it was denied.
Of learning to trust the inner authority that arises when we stop performing and start listening.

Because transformation doesn’t come from bypassing shadow.
It comes from metabolizing it.

And healing isn’t about becoming someone else—it’s about remembering who you’ve always been, beneath the noise and beyond the mask.

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So if you find yourself at a threshold—
No longer moved by what once motivated you,
No longer willing to override the deep ache or the quiet clarity—
You may be standing in your own kairos moment.

And if so, welcome.
This is sacred ground.
This is the beginning of your becoming.

A small excerpt from from The Red Book, Carl Jung’s personal examen of his own unconscious through visions, dreams and active imagination.

“Outside it is a wide cold starry night. 

It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but you go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life, but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life.

If you give up yourself, you live it in others; thereby you become selfish to others, and thus you deceive others. Everyone thus believes that such a life is possible. It is, however, only apish imitation. Through giving in to your appetite, you infect others, because the ape stimulates the apish. So you turn yourself and others into apes. Through  reciprocal imitation you live according to the average expectation. The image of the hero was set up for all in every age through the appetite for imitation. Therefore, the hero was murdered, since we have all been aping him. Do you know why you cannot abandon apishness? For fear of loneliness and defeat.

To live oneself means: to be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy, but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore,  say that you are reluctant to live yourself. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified.”

by Susan Fantl Spivack

Singing Frog Press © 2024.

https://singingfrogpress.com/2024/07/16/a-charm-of-humming-birds/#respond        

kan, which means “to sing” is
          the PIE root of the word charm

This morning I wake from the dream
in which I finally understand
how the silence of the One depends
on the clamor of the Many.

Yesterday, I surprised two humming birds
who squabbled round the clotted rubies
of the Monarda blossoms.  My lover says
humming birds don’t flock. 

They live as solitaries.  A rare group
of two or more are named Charm.
Right now I vow to put my faith
in the reality and power of What-Is. 

May the One who plants me within the silent
center of the clamorous Many show me
Emptiness is always here.  We name
Her God.  We call Him Absence. 

The humming birds sip sweet,
thrusting long tongues into the narrow
flutes of the bee balm flowers.
May we spend these days

of fear, mistrust and death,
of masks and distance, sipping
sweetness every chance we get.
                             7/28-29/2020

BY WALT WHITMAN

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

¹⁰ My beloved spoke and said to me,
    “Arise, my darling,
    my beautiful one, come with me.
¹¹ See! The winter is past;
    the rains are over and gone.
¹² Flowers appear on the earth;
    the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
    is heard in our land.
¹³ The fig tree forms its early fruit;
    the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
    my beautiful one, come with me.”

-Song of Songs

As a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness.

Jeremiah 2:2

“A thing is wisest when it is most fully itself, when it tastes most like itself, in keeping with its nature. It is “foolish” when it forgets to be what it is, when it no longer has its proper flavor, as when salt loses its strength, or when oil becomes rancid, or when wine turns to vinegar. Salt is one of those primary realities that can contribute to enhancing the quality of other things but that is itself hopeless once it goes bad: as in the case of water and fire, what can substitute for salt? What shall fire itself be kindled with? What can wash and quench thirst like water? If “wise salt” communicates a bit of the power and eternity of the sea, “foolish salt” has forgotten it’s origins, can no longer make man’s taste buds rejoice, can no longer heighten flavor. It can no longer be destined for man’s mouth but only for trampling by his feet.”

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

”In essence the natural order is nothing but a constant miracle that performs. Do not naturalize a miracle. Find the miracle in nature.“

Gate of Trust, Rabbeinu Bacvhya ibn Pekuda