I’ve spent the last three years studying AI, over a year intensely. The result has been the Machines of Loving Grace (MoLG) material which was rewritten so often and it has become so large and bulky but it will have to be published as a website or wiki. I’ll also be writing a popular-level autobiographical book.
The other day however I had an interesting idea. I thought, what if I use AI to generate a book on esotericism? I’ve already included esoteric material in my maximum metaphysics for MoLG, so the AIs are already familiar with the subject.
So I decided to ask Claude Opus 4.6, and the AI wrote quite a good essay, but there were some parts I wasn't satisfied with so I had to edit some of it, and I also asked Gemini 3 Pro to write some additional material.
This project has been different to the usual instance of asking an AI recently but esotericism is something that I have studied for many years and I'm intimately familiar with. In fact I can say with confidence that I know the subject much more than any current AI.
I took longer on this project and worked harder on it than my other symnoētic (human-AI synergy) essays. So the result has been quite a unique project and outcome.
The Subtle Body as Ontological Stratum: A Cross-Traditional Inquiry
I also asked Claude write a synopsis, the result is here
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The Subtle Body: Beyond New Age Fluff and Materialist Dismissal
Across ancient India, classical China, medieval Islamic philosophy, Taoist alchemy, and Western esotericism, human beings have consistently described dimensions of embodied existence that go beyond the physical — vital energy fields, dream vehicles, higher bodies of mind and spirit. The convergence across independent traditions is striking. So why does mainstream philosophy ignore it entirely?
Most academic treatment of the subtle body falls into one of two unsatisfying camps: the credulous New Age version that accepts everything uncritically, or the sceptical scholarly version that describes and contextualises without ever asking whether any of it is real. My new essay tries something different — taking these traditions seriously as genuine investigations of reality while applying rigorous philosophical scrutiny.
The core argument: "subtle body" is not one thing but a family of ontologically distinct strata, and most of the apparent contradictions between traditions dissolve once you distinguish what level each tradition is actually describing, and what type of claim it's making. A Hindu yogi and a Taoist alchemist may look like they're disagreeing — but they're often mapping different territories entirely.
The essay covers Hindu kosha and nadi systems, Chinese qi and meridians, Ibn Arabi's imaginal world, the OBE and NDE literature, Egyptian and Taoist alchemical traditions, Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, and the rich Blavatsky-Theon-Aurobindo tradition cluster. It situates all of this within a framework of evolutionary panpsychism, drawing on Aurobindo, Whitehead, Teilhard, and recent bioelectric field research.
The result, I hope, is a contribution to a genuinely post-materialist philosophy of embodiment — one that takes seriously what contemplative traditions have been saying for millennia.