What a year, for all of us! When it started I was in Santa Fe, NM after deciding to leave New York for points west. I was reevaluating everything in my life.

Now I am living at the Mystic Manor in Los Angeles, and enrolled as a masters candidate in philosophy, cosmology and consciousness at CIIS. I am teaching yoga and meditation again, both in-person and online, as well as practicing Vedic astrology augmented by archetypal astrology.

This newsletter about my novel turned screenplay about spiritual crisis, polyamory, and what it means to be a man in the 21st century is still on-hold. But I am going to be very active this coming year on my Cosmic Diamonds newsletter, where I talk about my various yoga, meditation, and Vedic astrology offerings, as well as Yog-Vedanta philosophy more generally.

In fact, with my enrolling in the philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program at CIIS this year, and other personal developments more broadly, my interests have (re)broadened substantially. I plan to start talking more about philosophy, what I am calling The Cosmic Renaissance (a.k.a. the Wisdom Revolution, Great Turning, New Age, etc.), popular culture, depth psychology, Carl Jung’s Active Imagination, and artificial intelligence, including the recent AI art explosion. As some of you know, I studied AI and machine learning my first time in grad school some 30 years ago. AI feels exhilarating for the first time since, like anything could happen.

Cosmic Diamonds

Basically, instead of trying to squeeze everything into this newsletter or—gasp!—create a new one, I am going to simply expand what I talk about on Cosmic Diamonds.

The AI Art Explosion

Like everyone else, I caught the AI art bug in 2022. I did play with ChatGPT, and was very impressed. But the AI art really captured my imagination. Sure, the Lensa portraits we all posted on Instagram were fun. And DALL•E 2 was impressive. But, in my opinion, Midjourney stole the show, even though it has the steepest learning curve (a new hobby of mine seems to be teaching friends how to use it).

There are obviously a lot of open, interesting questions about the ethics of AI art, how these models were trained, how copyright law applies, and what it means for visual artists generally. I would like to explore those questions more some time. But not today. Today is for celebrating.

Below are some of my own experiments with different styles and techniques in Midjourney. From top left, a vision of a Native American headdress I had in an ayahuasca ceremony, Slovaj Žižek as a classical composer in an oil painting, a wise Chinese sage in the desert, an interpretation of the Talking Heads song This Must Be the Place, lower Manhattan in the 1970s from an old photograph, Ken Wilber as a Buddhist, Gaia with the sun and moon balanced behind her, and NYC once again in the 1970s.

Turning song lyrics into AI art is my favorite AI prompt. Here is David Bowie inside the lyrics to his song The Bewlay Brothers, which has some incredibly evocative and personal lyrics.

The Cosmic Renaissance

As part of one of my final essays for grad school, I contemplated what spiritual traditions would make up The Cosmic Renaissance. Building on what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, I suggested that a new spirituality or global worldview could use a healthy helping of heart, drawing inspiration from heart-based traditions like classical Tantra, Bhakti, and the teachings of Jesus (as opposed to Christianity). This led me down the rabbit hole of researching the popular idea that Jesus spent time in India during his “lost years.” So I had fun imagining what that might have looked like, with the help of Midjourney.

More broadly, I am interested in the question of worldviews, and the role of modern-day philosophers in shaping our worldview. It seems that we have a dearth of popular philosophers, that we are stuck with cheap knock-offs like Jordan Peterson or Ken Wilber. This is a question I will continue to explore, including on the next episode of my podcast.

So I hope you will follow me over on my Cosmic Diamonds newsletter. And I wish you a restorative and love-filled new year. Maybe 2023 will usher in a bit of this Cosmic Renaissance…