Through working with AI, everything came into focus with startling clarity. I could suddenly see to the bottom of a truth I had sensed but never articulated so clearly: the deepest cause of our human disease, suffering, and struggle is the disconnection of our own mind from our own body.
— Master Mingtong Gu, from “Will AI Help Us Become More Human?,” The Daily Shift, October 16, 2025
In 1928, Virginia Woolf first told the tale of Judith, Shakespeare’s equally talented and imaginary sister, who was unable to pursue her artistic talents due to the economic and social constraints placed on women in the times she was living. She died, in Woolf’s telling, a miserable death by suicide after being betrayed by a supposed ally, left pregnant and frustrated, and unable to step into her gifts.
In her landmark work, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf proceeded to detail how financial and social constraints on women and the beliefs about their inferiority throughout the centuries accounted for the absence in the artistic canon of women artists.
Fast forward at warp speed to time present. As we watch Artificial Intelligence, AI, explode into our communication systems and lives, I find myself wondering frequently about AI’s genius sister, Authentic Intelligence.
Like Shakespeare’s sister Judith, Authentic Intelligence — our whole mind, our ability to develop our true nature, gifts, and energetic potential — is being obscured by the massive financial investment and ballyhoo over the potential of machines to step into cognitive and traditionally human functions in new ways.
Woolf was not saying that the world should dump Shakespeare, or wipe out his accomplishments, to make way for Judith’s potential. But instead, she argued essentially that the flowering of gifts requires financial resources, a room of one’s own to allow a woman (or each of us) to tap into creative flow, and a social will to recognize Judith’s gifts and contributions as equally valuable to those of her more famous brother.
What does that mean for us, at this inflection point in our shared reality? As we stand on the precipice of a revolution involving the evolution of machines to accomplish great things (and perhaps trigger unintended woes), it is worthwhile to explore what Judith 2025 — Authentic Intelligence — has to offer us.
First of all, despite Western culture’s belief that intelligence resides in the brain (hence the excitement about creating artificial brains), my inner teachers and others’ spiritual teachings suggest: our MIND can be found throughout our whole multi-dimensional being.
There is intelligence in each body and its senses in the subtle energies we are made of, in the spirit we are embodying, and in the ongoing creation of self we (collectively) have only scratched the surface of perceiving and understanding.
This shift in paradigm is as revolutionary as AI’s “promise” to change the world as we know it — moving from seeing ourselves as biological creatures managed by the brain and operating primarily via chemical messaging to seeing ourselves as made of subtle energies, communicating in the language of energy, and embodying spirit.
But do we have the economic will to invest in Judith 2025? Are we making the space for our whole minds to develop in our educational settings, our communications, how we structure our systems? Do we even recognize what the constraints are to allowing our Authentic Intelligence to take her rightful place as the genius and artist that she is?
Consider these beliefs, values, and choices woven into our Western culture that keep us from developing our Whole Mind:
We Look Outward. Not only is the grass greener on the other side of the fence, but a thought from “out there” is often seen as more authoritative. Objectivity trumps subjectivity in our culture.
And even in the field of spiritual endeavor, visionaries often see wisdom as emanating from “out there” in the Cosmos — we talk about inter-galactic beings of light coming to raise our consciousness. But what about the wisdom emanating from “in there” — from the INNER galactic reaches?
This is not an either/or proposition. It’s just reflective of a cultural belief that says if it comes from far away, it is somehow more valuable than what we can generate from within.
Because we believe in objectifying, illness is seen as a thing — something to study and define. What happens when we shift our focus to see it as a process, happening within the exchange of energies we are made of?
We Denature. We have learned to extract nutrients and use them to bolster our nutrition. So, we take a pill to get our Vitamin C, instead of eating the orange grown in rich healthy soil that carries the co-factors that make its nutrients truly bio-available. We use a machine to aid every task, then have to go to a gym to work the muscles that we no longer use in context.
I confess, I LOVE a good washing machine, dishwasher, electric car, bidet toilet. But I also know that when I drive instead of walk, I pump less earth juice and diminish my contact with Mother Earth! Separation from nature, from context, impairs our ability to hear inner guidance and to access our whole mind. But our economy is rooted in our need for more and more aids that denature us, including the need now being cultivated for Assistive Intelligence!
We Seek the Generic. Our desire to understand humankind — the body, health, emotions, and behaviors — supports a belief that there is a generic human. Instead of seeing each of us as creating a unique, specific self and working to improve our abilities to perceive and recognize the artistry in each body, mind, spirit, we push to master the generic understandings.
Medical training details the workings of the body and teaches how to repair them. What if medical trainees learned to see healing as a communication process, learned to attune to the subtle energies, the wisdom of each embodied spirit, and support their unique evolution?
According to healing visionary Donna Eden, each person’s subtle energies are as unique as a thumbprint. If this is so, then why not focus on learning to heal the artist rather than “fix” the artwork?
We Outsource Gratification. We school our children to work for the grade, rather than follow their natural interests and take pleasure in exploring their gifts. We are rapidly evolving via the internet into a society that seeks external recognition and clicks, rather than finding our gratification in the act of creation, or in the art of living-and-sensing itself.
We learn to value ourselves because we have a certain title, or position, or have been praised by others. But in both people who are praised and those who lack praise, this skews our sense of gratification and creates a disconnect between body, mind and spirit.
We Make Knowing a Science. When we use quantitative thinking to try to understand qualitative issues, we flatten and distort lived experience in all its glory, we shut down our WHOLE mind in favor of the socialized mind. When we talk about our subtle energies in terms of scientific concepts such as frequency and vibration we are not WRONG, but we aren’t making space for the intelligence inherent in our subtle energies. We are scientizing what is most likely better understood as art!
We Teach Illiteracy. Energy is the language our body speaks, and even chemistry is a form of energetic exchange. It is our mother tongue. But when our culture doesn’t recognize this, we fail to teach our children to perceive and communicate with the energies they are made of. If, as adults, we still can’t speak energy to energy, we must pay a practitioner to intervene when we are ill and we are not able to move energies the way they are designed to move. This is costly for the entire society.
Imagine if your thyroid stopped working. You could restart it, or get a friend to restart it, at no cost and without medications or irradiation. Imagine if a stent went walkabout in your body, and instead of needing exploratory surgery to find it and remove it, you could use intuition to find it and speak energy to ask your body to move the stent back to where it could be easily removed. Our bodies are capable of these “miracles” and much more, but our society does not recognize the potential of actually being able to communicate and speak our body’s lingo!
We Ask What’s Wrong. Much of our culture is rooted in problem solving, in asking: “What’s wrong and how can I fix it?” This promotes brokenness, and the hero’s journey of fixing brokenness. But what if we asked what our Authentic Intelligence asks: “What is needed (for me/us to flourish), and how can we provide it?” Change the question and change becomes a creative act, rather than an ongoing repair job.
We Separate Body, Mind, and Spirit. Our professions are so divided that it is considered stepping on toes if an MD looks at nutrition rather than calling in a nutritionist, psychologists are not allowed to use therapeutic touch, and a massage therapist is not supposed to tap into the emotional realms.
This separation of our WHOLE MIND into fiefdoms promotes illness and supports our separation from our own innate wisdom. We laugh at old-fashioned beliefs such as seeing the body as having “humors.” Yet when we fail to perceive how our body lives our story, how our story is shaped by our soul in collaboration with our mind, how we create a self, how we co-create our shared realities, then we fall into superstitions about how body, mind, and spirit work that people 100 years from now will shake their heads over and smile about condescendingly.
We Elevate Ambition and Competition. Even those of us who value collaboration and inclusion are steeped in the culture’s entrenched beliefs in competition, in survival of the fittest, in constantly striving to improve ourselves, even when that leaves others behind. In this age of the World Wide Web, this manifests as monetizing the value of most activities, rewarding obsession and overwork, and celebrating those who can break through the noise, stand out, and influence others.
In spiritual pursuits, Whole Mind can be obscured when the culture’s obsession with ambition and perfectionism leads us to treat spiritual practice as boot camp, and claim “old soul” status, or “higher wisdom,” rather than learning how to truly inhabit our moments, deepen into each lived experience, and live wisdom in ways that value the contributions of each sentient being and all of nature.
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If you hear criticism or judgment in this recitation of constraints and cultural norms, then I invite you to know we ALL are stewing in the soup of the cultures we grew up in (including me). Perhaps instead, allow yourself to see this discussion as an opportunity to muse on what might bring you home to your own Authentic Intelligence. What is your own room, your investment, your support for your own gifted self? Our challenge in the age of AI is to ask ourselves again and again: In this era of artificial intelligence, how can we cultivate our authentic intelligence and step up to co-create a world that supports all of life more fully?
Ellen demonstrates how to transform subtle energies that shape your reality in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.
Ellen Meredith is a conscious channel, medical intuitive, energy medicine practitioner, teacher, and author of Your Body Lives Your Story, The Language Your Body Speaks, and other works. She’s been in practice since 1984, helping over 10,000 clients and students across the globe communicate with their own energies, hear their inner guidance, and heal.
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