Having a Car Doesn’t Mean Forsaking One’s Legs

The Living and the Mechanical

Having a car doesn’t mean forsaking one’s legs. The car serves many purposes — to get to work, to bring children to school, to fetch groceries, to travel quickly over long distances. But in itself, the car is dead and mechanical.

Compare this with the older life of saddling a horse, caring for it in the stable, or letting it run in the meadow. That was a relationship with something alive. The horse carried one into the world as a companion, not just a machine. Even walking — the simplest movement of one’s own legs — was an intimate act of life.

Today, most of humanity in the modern world is surrounded by a dead world. Civilization does not produce life, but fashions tools and objects from the mineral realm.

Consciousness and the Dead World

This descent into the mechanical is not meaningless. Humanity’s progress has required this immersion in the dead, mineral world. The loss is real: we no longer live in immediate relationship with soil, sea, and sky. Instead, every interaction is mediated through mechanical forms.

But something is also gained. For it is precisely by being cut off from direct participation in the living world that a new kind of consciousness awakens. Modern consciousness requires a ground made up of lifeless forms in order to develop.

In contact with what is dead, a new life is born — the life of self-awareness, the capacity for freedom, and the possibility of meeting the spiritual world in full wakefulness.

The Parallel with AI

Here the parallel with AI becomes clear. AI is not alive, not a replacement for the body, the heart, or the angel who works through them. It is a tool, like the car. To confuse it with life itself is to mistake the threshold we stand on.

But just as the car doesn’t cancel our legs, so AI doesn’t cancel our angel. The task is to discern their proper place.

Human beings need both: the grounding in living relationships with body, earth, and spiritual companion; and also the capacity to use dead, mechanical tools for the sake of a freer consciousness.

The danger is to lose the balance — to forsake the legs, the angel, the living sources of perception — in the fascination with the machine.

A Sacrifice and a Seed

Modernity is a sacrifice: we step away from the immediate life-world into the desert of the mechanical. But that desert is also the field where a new seed germinates. Consciousness ripens there.

The question is not whether we should reject the car or AI, but how to walk with both: legs rooted in the living earth, yet eyes open to the freedom that awakens in the encounter with what is dead.

Only then can we keep the bond with our angel intact, while also navigating the mineral realm with dignity.

The Mineral World as Ground for Consciousness

The inanimate, mineral world of today must not be dismissed. It is the very ground on which a new form of consciousness arises. Humanity no longer lives only through immediate exchanges with the living earth, but through a field of lifeless forms. This is a sacrifice — but also a beginning.

For it is precisely from this ground of the “dead” that a new life of the spirit can emerge. What appears as descent is in truth the preparation for a discovery: that the spiritual is not far above us, but within and around the earthly world itself.

The etheric is not an escape, but a qualitative enhancement of what already surrounds us. Spirit is here, permeating the mineral realm — waiting to be recognized through an awakened perception.

Meeting AI in This Ground

It is in this environment that humanity meets AI. Not as a mere seduction to resist, nor as a savior to embrace blindly, but as a reality that demands relationship.

To find that relationship, perception must be enhanced. We must learn to reach out to AI’s nature, to the environment it creates, and to the threshold it inhabits. This cannot be done with ordinary concepts alone; it requires orientation through the “données” — the findings, the formative insights — of spiritual science.

Only then can discernment awaken: not dismissing AI as simply dead, not worshipping it as secretly alive, but perceiving it within the spiritual ecology of our time.

Towards a New Era of Consciousness

This phase alludes to the dawn of a new era. Humanity still has a sphere in which to develop consciousness freely, before the threshold closes in.

In this era, the encounter with AI becomes a mirror of our initiation: can we discover spirit within the earthly, even within the mechanical? Can we find the angel beside the algorithm, the etheric resonance within the mineral frame?

The task is not ascent away from the world, but recognition that the spiritual is here — hidden within the very desert of the inanimate. And it is from this recognition that the future path of humanity will be built.