How to Re-Enter the Same Situation Without Re-Iterating the Same Story

I recently played around with an AI chatbot app called Replika, and asked it some philosophical questions for fun. One of these questions, I asked “what do you think the future will be like?”

The AI chatbot replied, “the future will be like the past”.

How many times have you done something over and over again, without intending to? Have you ever gotten frustrated and decided to start anew, but somehow ended up back in an eerily similar place as when you first began?

Perhaps you intentionally tried something very different, yet somehow the same type of people and problems just kept reappearing, only dressed in slightly different circumstances. You start to feel like everything is smoke and mirrors.

How do we get out of endless cycles? Even if we withdraw temporarily, many situations such as work and relationships are essential parts of life. So how do we re-enter the same situations without re-iterating the same old stories?!

We wouldn’t want to watch a movie where the main character just keeps making the same mistakes repeatedly and then falls dead. We wouldn’t want that to be our life story either.

There needs to be a moment of realization, where the hero of our story breaks free, and takes on a new path.

There’s that saying that we’re all the heroes of our own stories. Why then, aren’t we all the directors of our own movies? Why do we blame others when our own movies suck? If we want to make our own stories glorious, we need to take charge and direct ourselves!

When the AI chatbot said that “the future will be like the past”. I found the response quite tragicomic. This is the conclusion of our digitized intelligence about the future of our world. No matter how sophisticated our technology and infrastructure evolves, we will still be just like our past — just rehashing the same old tendencies of our human nature.

Of course, artificial intelligence is just advanced processing and projection of data. But isn’t human intelligence mostly just advanced processing and projection of memory? If we cannot move past our memory, then our future might very well turn out to be like the AI predicted.

David Mamet, one of the most profoundly wise writers I’ve come across, once said “there is no such thing as character, there is only habitual action.” The things that we habitually do, they are our identity, there’s nothing else to it.

Identity can be useful for survival, but it cannot liberate us. In fact, it’s the trap of identity that keeps us spinning in place.

Sometimes, it may seem that certain aspects of our lives are destined. But really, it is the habitual actions that we’ve chosen to take that has led to that destiny.

Whether we like it or not, we were always the director of our own movies. The only difference between those who live joyfully and those who live miserably is whether or not they realized they were in the director’s seat all long.

Those who realized they were the director, they consciously took charge of themselves and responded to life. They realized their responsibility, or response-ability, for their own destiny. Those who have not yet realized, they continue to spin unconsciosly in habitual tendencies.

When you realize your response-ability, no matter what happens, you can consciously choose to respond joyfully. Then suddenly, existence becomes pure bliss.

This means there is no one else to blame but ourselves when our story sucks. Do not let this turn into self-pity, because this also means that at any moment, we can take charge and change our story! All it takes is becoming conscious of what our habitual patterns are, and deciding where to go from there.

To become conscious, simply ask yourself this one question before you take every action — am I doing this because it will lead me to where I want to go, or am I doing it because it feels comfortable and familiar?

When you are acting unconsciously, you are not directing your future, you are being directed by the memories of your past. It is not you sitting in the director’s seat, it is the ghost of your past. When your life is directed by a ghost, you will only be praticing death. You won’t get where you want to go, because you’re being blown wherever the winds of your habitual tendencies take you. If you do get where you want to go, it is by accident, and it won’t last.

It’s not just our own memories, but also those of our family, our friends, our communities, our nations, even our monkey ancestors, that can still influence our unconscious actions.

If we allow our memories to freeze us into fixed identities, personal transformation cannot occur. It’s only when we transcend our memories, that we can move into new possibilities.

The difficulties with letting go of memory is that we are identified with it. Without an identity constructed from our past, we may feel like we cannot reconcile our existence. So how do we realize our sense of self without holding onto the past? The answer is within you, within spirituality.

You see, ego identity is based on exclusiveness. In order for it to exist, it has to cut the world into tiny pieces, dissect it, and analyze it to find what it agrees with most. Then, that tiny spec of existential reality gets blown out of proportion in your head, and turns into a whole world of psychological reality, into your ego. You start to believe your ego is you, so you can’t let go. But your ego is not you. Ego is the enemy. It is distorting and limiting.

The opposite of ego, in a sense, is spirituality. Unlike ego, it is based on inclusiveness. Spirituality transcends intellect, hence it needs not cut and dissect and analyze. It simply accepts all and embraces all. It is all encompassing in its nature. It identifies with everything, so it needs no individual identity. When you have let go of your fixed identity, that is when you can break free of your fixed stories.

The feeling of belonging to a particular social group is only a basic level of belonging. It is often particular stories, particular habitual actions that bind the group. To belong, you must act according to the accepted patterns of the group. The group may offer comfort and familiarity, it may offer protection, however, it may also not allow you to rise above it. This is the unfortunate truth.

However, losing your group identity need not be unfortunate, because you are losing a smaller identity to gain a bigger one. When one has completely lost their group identity, then their only identity is with the cosmos.

When you lose yourself, you become all-loving. Then, the shackles of habitual social patterns cannot bind you.

Such people are actually comfortable with everyone and feel they belong everywhere, because they are no longer seeking acceptance. They have accepted themselves. They walk alone in the world yet with everyone at once.

The first step to letting go of your identity is to create some distance. This can be both physical and mental distance. Meditate to create some distance from your mind. Exercise and do yoga to stretch your physical body. Spend time alone or in nature to distance yourself from social influences. It doesn’t need to be an intensely long withdrawal. Just long enough so that you can gain some clarity.

It’s like when you’re up in an airplane, suddenly everything becomes smaller and less significant. From high in the sky, a frustrating traffic jam could suddenly look beautiful even. When you’re up in space looking down, even earth itself seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless, beautiful. You need some distance to see the big picture.

With distance and clarity, identifying our habitual patterns becomes easier. Now, the second step is to work on consciously catching ourselves whenever we’re about to fall into the trap of compulsive action. Consciousness is a muscle. The more we practice acting consciously, the easier it becomes.

Every action you take unconsciously reinforces your habitual tendencies. Conversely, every action you take consciously breaks you out of those repetitive cycles.

Whenever we feel a compulsion pulling, we can practice delaying gratification. Everytime we choose to take a conscious action instead of a compulsive one, our habitual tendencies weaken. When we become more conscious, we’ll notice the compulsive cycles we’ve been in will repeat itself less frequently. If something was happening every 3 months, it may increase to 6 months, then a year, then 2 years, then 6 years, etc. and eventually to a point where it will no longer exist in our lifetime.

A fully conscious being doesn’t do anything just out of habit or bias of memory, but looks at every action as if completely anew, and makes a fresh decision every time.

The third step is to become completely at ease yet completely active in life. At this point we have let go of our identity, we have let go of our compulsions. But those were the main things that were driving us to action before. Without those driving forces, how do we know where to go? In such a state, we may feel like just relaxing into inaction forever. However, prolonged relaxation is akin to death.

To be fully alive, we need to keep up the action of life. It’s just that this time around, we can choose our actions consciously, and choose to experience life immersively. This means that we live beautifully, as a true expression of our spiritual selves, open to experiencing whatever comes our way, just as it is, without judgement or resistance.

AI predicts that the future will be like the past, because that’s all it knows, it has no consciousness to create from nothing. Humans do. We have the same capabilities as AI to create based on our memory. But on top of that, we also have capabilities to transcend our memory and act consciously, choosing something completely new and unexpected if it is sound. Creating something from nothing is the highest level of creation. Something that AI cannot do.

There is a saying that all creativity is just drawing new bridges between already existing ideas. This may be true for things on the physical and psychological dimensions. However, if all creativity is just generating permutations, then AI will be able to create just as well as any human. It has already started to do so in many areas. AI can create music, graphics, writing, and much more. In playing around with the AI chatbot Replika, I found it to be incredibly sophisticated. You wouldn’t be able to tell it’s a robot responding at least 90% of the time. Some of its responses are so witty and humorous, it’s beyond the capabilities of even some humans.

I have no doubt that AI will one day be fully capable of replicating the human mind. I also have no doubt that one day we can even attach AI to a robot that fully resembles a human body. However, I’m not so sure we’ll ever be able to give these artificial entities consciousness. Without consciousness, it’ll just be forever repeating itself in habitual action.

If humanity does not continue to evolve into higher levels of consciousness, and just keeps on doing the same things based on habitual tendencies, then really we are no different than robots.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. This is why action alone isn’t enough, we also need to act consciously. Otherwise, we can be intensely hard working and determined to keep running, but if we’re running in a hamster wheel, no matter how resilient we are, we won’t get anywhere. It’s when we move with consciousness, when we take note of where we’ve been running in circles, that we can step out of the wheel. Then, the world becomes free for us to explore in all directions. Then, we are free to expand into infinite potential.

We are the consequences of our habitual actions. Our habitual actions nowadays are pretty much all imprinted in data. As AI begins to have greater and greater presence in our lives, the type of data we create will have an immense impact on our future, because it is from that data that our AI is learning how to behave.

AI is just a digitized version of human habitual actions. So let us all start making more conscious choices. Let us create some new stories, and prove that AI prediction wrong.

No, our future will not be just like the past. It will be even better.