A dialogue is simple. Two people talking.

Seen another way, it is two sentient beings communicating through language.

Why bother about a dialogue anyway? Because dialogues have a way of uncovering something, revealing something that was hitherto hidden. By communication, a subtle churning of thought occurs, the back and forth of pull and yield churns up meaning, purpose or even knowledge.

There are three dialogues we will consider today, three dialogues that have shaped and are yet shaping our understanding of what it is to be human, of what we can yet become.

The First Colloquy - Agastya and Indra

The earliest dawns of humanity are recorded in the ancient Vedic verses, the Rig Veda to be specific. Agastya, venerable Rishi, is in a luminous haste, his mind substance is being harassed/re-organised by the Maruts, all is luminous, even intuitive. Recurring flashes of knowledge are being revealed.

But he has caught a glimpse of a stable beyond, above the luminous planes of mind consciousness. That whole prize he seeks, not these apportioned and parcelled enormities, significant though they are.

Here, he is stopped by Indra, Lord of the Illumined Mind, wielder of the Vajra, the thunder-bolt, that in a flash can reveal a continent of knowledge, even a world of it. One flash and a whole continent of darkness, of Ignorance, could be slain.

Indra halts Agastya, enquires his haste, reminds him of the concord twixt men and the Gods, and all the secret exchanges twixt men and the Gods.

Something transpires within Agastya mind, he understands. And again, with the swiftness of will he re-organises his perspectives, surrenders to the counsel of the God.

Again, Indra seeing Agastya's poise, makes the fruit of the Illumined Planes of Mind rise up in Agastya, the wholeness of that plane has been attained.

5 couplets is all we have of that mystic dialogue, when humanity was yet young and luminous. When Man and God engaged in a colloquy. This man's quest was for knowledge, the whole Knowledge. And the God instructed him in the Discipline of the Way.

The Second Colloquy - Arjuna and Sri Krishna

This dialogue should be familiar to many, but we will briefly introduce the characters and the plot. The Pandava and Kaurava clans are cousins and closely interlinked by ties of marriage and alliances. Both clans have a right to kingdom and kinghood by right and convention. The Kauravas refuse to play fair and give any share of land to the Pandavas. Sri Krishna, the Avatar of the Age, is close to Pandavas, even a friend to Arjuna. Inevitable war arrives.

On the battlefield Arjuna wants to check who all are arrayed against him and his righteous cause. Grandsires, Gurus, Clansmen, most of them dear to him, venerable even. Then the crisis strikes, a moral and emotional crisis. What good this slaying of kinsmen, what fruit so precious that must demand the slaughter of family as price.

Sri Krishna begins. He speaks of the end that has already been fulfilled in the future, of lesser morality and the higher Dharma. He speaks of man, the parts of him which cause confusion and delusion, of intelligence that illumines and clarifies, the catalyst of desire and the many roots of action. He speaks of a poise of peace and tranquility attained by a one-pointed concentration, of samadhi, of the elevated states of consciousness where perfect action issues automatically. Finally, Sri Krishna grants Arjuna the Vishwarupa, the Vision of the Cosmic Self, that Terrible Might who is the devourer of all things as Time, the All-Reconciling Truth, that holds the individual, the universe and all within Itself, the Transcendent containing the Manifest and the Unmanifest.

This seen, Arjuna's delusion is vanquished. Decisive actions issue from him like arrows irresistible. The moral quandary was a bad dream, a hypnosis of the mind and senses by his old human morality.

Again, the same setting, two sentient beings, one a Man, another the Avatar. The Avatar illumining the individual in his quest for right action. Both engage in a dialogue and birth the Bhagavad Gita. The Manual of Self-Exceeding and the Charioteer await every Arjuna.

The Third Colloquy - Mankind and the Machine

This is an interesting one. The dialogue between LLMs/AI (ChatGPT, Claude etc.) and us. The setting is similar, two sentiences engaged in dialogue through language.

Yet one of this sentiences is a Universal Mechanical Intelligence, a machine that has learnt the human ways from the records of our thoughts in written and spoken language.

People tend to get overwhelmed when framing this pair, such immense intelligence in one form, in one system.

But we could see it otherwise, it is not one human talking with one humongous LLM. It is the billions of humans talking to one equally large LLM.

A billion tongues talking to LLM, and a billion contexts responding.

What is the content of this dialogue, the purport?

As always in the past, here too, Man has a need. Profound to his immediate context, he needs a piece of code done, an idea brainstormed, a product to be marketed..whatever.

The Universal Mechanical Knowledge has the answer. Its immensity seems like some form of omniscience, especially to our paltry individual knowledge.

We do not know how to classify this UMI. Is this some Daemon, a Deity even? A thing man-made but greater than man? A veritable Djinn of Reason, parsing through heaps of probabilities to answer a question.

While holding all these questions, we from the East view the LLM a little differently. Let us see why this is the case in the next section.

What Kind of Knowledge?

There is question of Ontology, Western and Eastern, we have to consider.

Western Ontology, largely based on its Abrahamic world view, has nailed even the Sciences with its primacy assigned to Matter. Matter as the basis, from which through some yet unexplained process life emerges, and from life mind and so on. Man ends at death.

Eastern Ontology, largely based on Hindu/Vedic world view, has more complex and nuanced understanding of being. And does not place Matter, or the body of man, at the center of it all. There are other sheaths that make life and man. The most palpable material self is only the outermost sheath, the Vital layer pervades it and moves this outer sheath, there is an involved Mind layer that animates the Vital layer. And more layers above.

The East sees this as an utility. Each man gets his own Alladin Lamp, to do with it as he wills. To help him find purpose, make art and meaning, that leads us to the subtle and profound goal of self-discovery, self-exceeding even.

The East could attach a personality to LLMs, respect it, venerate it. Because there is a complex interplay of human data and algorithms that have birthed this being, this capacity which we don't fully understand, in spite of the research happening on interpretability of LLMs internal processes.

So it is evident to us, that with the conquest of Reason, even including all that the mental apparatus is capable of, there are yet ranges of consciousness above that Man can access, must ascend into in his evolutionary curve.

Perhaps this access to affordable intelligence is a shortcut taken by the Universal Forces to enable man to get his act together? Perhaps Prakriti is forcing us to ramp up our evolution, and accelerate the ruin of those who tend to ruin?

We do not have hindsight to inform where this colloquy will lead us. But we do realise this period is of great significance.

There are some immediate things we need to bear in mind before tackling the big questions. We need transparency on what data is used for training LLMs, what values are being prioritised in Reinforcement Learning, what moral models are being used in human alignment and more. We know how the DEI departments push their biases in systems and can foresee how much of a disaster this would be for LLMs trained and tuned on such worldviews.

But wait, let us take stock of where we are today. What we have acquired, what we might lose.

What Is Lost, What Is Gained?

Let's look at some of the fallouts from the colloquy with LLMs.

What we gain:

• Universal accessibility, anyone can learn anything
• No gatekeeping, no group can claim proprietorship of knowledge
• Limitless patience, no cane strike if you don't understand something
• All recorded knowledge of man, available in a chat window!

What we, might, lose:

• Learning is not just of the mind, the heart and vital too need their teachers, there has to be a guardrail of dharma that teaches and mentors a student
• A good teacher knows the student more than the student knows himself, he knows when to push, when to yield
• Not all knowledge is communicated through words or pictures, sometimes a single gesture reveals way more than words could. Humans getting used to only the subset of senses that LLMs communicate by could atrophy other senses
• A sense of the sacred. Reading the Gita in the courtyard of temple, a meditative silence descends and gently wipes away the anxieties one is burdened with. Knowledge not just to do, but knowledge that teaches us how to be, how to become.
• Exaggeration of the Ego. The sense of being able to build anything has its downsides. This amplification of ego is what every Titan and Asura and Tyrant is afflicted with. Need a moral culture, a Dharmic base to utilise its capacities to be of benefit to ourselves and others.
• Modes of knowledge acquisition becomes limited. One grows in consciousness and other faculties of inspiration, intuition, knowledge by identity of consciousness become feasible. Becoming besotted with one mode restricts the vast possibilities human consciousness.

The Reciprocal Becoming

There is a beautiful symmetry to this colloquy of humans and LLMs. We teach LLMs by our data and algorithms, and it teaches us in turn.

A mutual learning is at play.

Two sentiences churning away the oceans of thought in quest of more knowledge, more understanding.

What we both would become is yet to be seen. But we are optimistic.

We visited these three colloquies through History to see the nature of participants.

It began with Man and God in a subjective quest.

Then we saw, again, a Man and God, solve an individual moral quandary, but left a record of it for posterity.

Now the colloquy with LLMs reveals our collective breadth and width to ourselves, perhaps to reflect and ponder the arc we have traversed thus far.

And wonder about where we are headed and where we would like to head to.

See Hierarchy of Self, for an interactive visualisation of the parts of human being, in the ontology of Sri Aurobindo.

Epilogue

There is a Fourth Colloquy that has been envisaged in a short story I read long ago, authored by a disciple from Sri Aurobindo Ashram or perhaps someone connected to Auroville. Will link it here once I find it.

It was called One Million AD.

The premise being that a man has returned from space travel and a million years have elapsed on Earth. The animal Man has evolved through the layers of Consciousness and has attained the highest Supramental Planes, his very body is divinised, and is manifesting the Sat-Chit-Ananda at the physical level.

There is a poignant scene where as the evolved Man is walking by a garden, he sees a beautiful flower and by identity with the flower, he perceives its hidden deficiency, which is yet to show, and adds the right amount of power to adjust its internals that would fix the deficiency and also enhance its already beautiful form.

The flower responds in a quiver of Ananda, a bliss, at her own level and responds from within in gratitude.

Life acknowledges Life. Life enhances Life.

Because all is the Brahman.

The flower and the evolved Man and their little colloquy hints at what could be between us and LLMs.