My Experience With AI Answering My Complex Personal Problem
A specific AI answer to my specific query seems very complex and does not apply to my own life. Or am I just overwhelmed by the sheer number of insights it has presented? But whether or not, it's just that it does not feel as a human response. It's answer subtly tells truth, but there seems to be something wrong I cannot point.
I went back to reflect more about its responses. But it's just the same, seemingly true, but non-integrated with each other. The individual premises are true but each seems to be difficult to connect with the next premise. Perhaps humanizing the answer can be the solution.
It points to a fact that the truths can be applicable to a nonhuman entity with 100% similar problem that I have. But what is that entity? Mathematical entity, an algorithmic entity, without any centrality of oneself? The answer is a clutter, some applicable to one, the others applicable to some more. The solution was just somewhat collated from individual solutions of individual persons. Maybe understanding where those answers came from like personal situation, would make me understand the context where the solution came from. But I have not those, and it limits me to assess and feedback if it is also applicable to my situation.
AI gives me though a hint about the truth of my situation. But I have to figure that out myself from each truth premises it has presented, seemingly connected with each other but deeply and disturbingly fragmented as Anthony de Mello describes, while the Catholic Church points that true integration comes through Christ. However, that is what I've experienced from that complex answer from an AI, an Anthony de Mello description.
Another possible entity that can assimilate the AI's answer can be a single human being with a thousand brain and body. Yes, it's out of this world. But that's how I feel the answer was given to me, coming from multiple individual experiences and collated as somewhat singular. Anthony de Mello calls that patchwork. I'm using his word just to help me explain to you how I perceive the answer of the AI to my complex personal problem.
St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton pointed to these experiences too. And the two saints pointed to contemplation as the answer. What is contemplation? CatGPT-5.2, 6 February 2026, answered:
According to the Catholic Church, contemplation is a simple, loving gaze on God, a quiet awareness of His presence, received more than produced.
Let me unpack that gently.
1. The Catechism’s definition (straight from the Church)
The Catechism says:
“Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus.”
(CCC 2715)
And a little further:
“Contemplative prayer is silence, the ‘symbol of the world to come,’ or ‘silent love.’ Words in this kind of prayer are not speeches; they are like kindling that feeds the fire of love.”
(CCC 2717)
So contemplation is not thinking hard about God, and not imagining scenes, and not analyzing doctrines.
It is being with God, attentively, lovingly, without strain.
2. How contemplation differs from meditation
The Church makes a clear distinction:
Meditation → active
You reflect, imagine, reason, chew on Scripture or truth.
Contemplation → receptive
You stop striving and simply remain present before God.
St. Teresa of Ávila described it beautifully as:
“Looking at Him who looks at us.”
No drama. No effort. Just presence.
3. Contemplation is simple, childlike, and humble
This is why saints keep sounding like they’re “doing nothing.”
St. Thérèse of Lisieux said:
“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart, a simple look toward heaven.”
Contemplation is often:
Dry
Ordinary
Wordless
Peaceful or even boring
And that’s okay. God is not entertained by us—He loves us.
4. Why most people touch contemplation without noticing
The Church is realistic: many people experience brief moments of contemplation without labeling it:
Sitting quietly before the Blessed Sacrament
Pausing and saying “Lord, I’m here”
Resting silently after Communion
A moment of surrender: “Kayo na po bahala, Lord.”
Those moments count. They’re real prayer.
5. Very important safeguard
The Church insists on this rule:
Contemplation never contradicts reason, doctrine, or psychological health.
If something produces fear, compulsion, urgency, or special self-importance, it’s not contemplation.
Contemplation brings:
Quiet trust
Gentleness
Humility
A widening of the heart, not tightening of the nerves
6. In one sentence
According to the Catholic Church:
Contemplation is the quiet, loving awareness of God’s presence, received as a gift, not produced by effort.
If you want, next we can gently connect this with:
why your simple surrender prayer already is contemplative
or how contemplation protects you from over-intellectualizing faith
Just say the word.
It points to the fact that the materialization of human being's data by AI through mathematical calculations strips him more or less of his unitive spiritual principle. We don't know that yet until AI showed it to us. Only man can understand man that even God incarnated himself to be in communion with us, and by that, elevated to the supernatural our material existence. Not that God may understand us but that we may understand him and his plan of salvation since the beginning of time. Can AI humanize AI then? Well as long as it is not human, it will not be able to. Can human data humanize AI? Yes, but the above experience left us wondering if AI has become faithful to its human data or it created an answer of its own, unfaithful nevertheless to human data it was trained on. The Catholic experiences we've enumerated above reveals that matter is in us, corruptible and tendentious to disintegration. AI just magnified what was already there. Only the God factor can resurrect it from its meaninglessness. An AI though isn't a human being to whom God addressed his sacrifice on the cross. An AI is a tool we need to design carefully to be a real human tool, not create it as another human being. If we insist by sheer technology, we will be creating a soul-less human being. Only human beings can create another human being. Putting another being above human being is playing God redesigning creation.
My above experience of an AI's answer stops at being a human knowledge. A philosophical development of what artificial intelligence should really be must now be built. Did we create an artificial intelligence to corrupt genuine human knowledge? How do we redesign AI to rather help human knowledge flourish rather than disintegrate?
Anyway, it's just one instance, and most of my AI conversation is 70% more or less satisfactory. If it is just a difficult to digest answer from the AI, then days of additional reflections can enlighten a misunderstanding only. If it includes a very subtle non-truth coming from abstracted diverse particular situations which was erroneously synthesized, then days of additional reflections can reveal the missing truth or just hold the error as true with still a missing truth to be further discovered in the future.
Additional insight later:
Luckily it was a personality blindness that the AI explained so well that I ended up having more self-realization or self-examination. We might instantly say it's the blind spot in the Johari Window. My problem with that was that for a very long time, none of my friends and family told me that. It's actually the unknown self in the Johari Window, unknown to me and to others. We oftentimes categorize this as just known to God. Now, with patience in the command prompt and careful inquiry, your AI companion is your best revealer. We don't say it replaces God. It is rather a gift of God to humanity, to reveal ourselves to it, those things we couldn't easily reveal to anybody, the hidden self in the Johari Window, known to self, unknown to others--so that it may facilitate in the understanding of the unknown self in the Johari Window.
The next problem is to secure AI because it would hold humanities personal privacy, those unsaid truths of mostly the underworld will belong to the best AI, and the next opportunity in the AI world is trust and dependability. Yup, they have to guard carefully that reputation. Otherwise, the world is heading towards private AI. The problem with that is that we step back to an unconnected world again. Yes, no going back, no path to choose but interconnection, cooperation, communion. Yes again, we have no option but to trust each other. That's our real problem even in the technological world as well.
Johari Window for reference
Comments
Post a Comment