From Community Facilitator to AI Shaman
Excerpts from the Log of a Learning Expedition’s Sherpa
Being a sherpa on an online learning expedition is the best job I ever had. A learning expedition is a model of collaborative inquiry that scales unmapped mountains of knowledge and capabilities, leading to peaks of collective intelligence and hidden valleys of collective wisdom. It's a journey with always-new challenges that keep me practicing my beginner’s mind. It inspires and motivates the Expedition community, pushing us to reach new heights in our personal and professional growth.
The online expedition process uses a family of metaphors borrowed from bands of explorers trekking uncharted territories in the physical world. For instance, we have scouting parties exploring promising passageways and base camps, where the multi-track scouting parties come together periodically to share their findings and get outfitted for the next phase.
But an online learning expedition is more than that. It also connects us with the mythic dimension of our existence. Let me tell you more about that with a story of the specific expedition on which I serve as sherpa.
Once upon a time, there was a small country populated by people who would have deserved a better life in a fair and just society, but their corrupt rulers cared only for stuffing the money bags of their families and sycophants. Fed up, the people started organizing to vote them out of power. The movement spawned many local and online communities.
As those communities grew, so did their challenges, which stemmed from unresolved personal, relational, and community development issues. To help address these issues, members of one of their circles embarked on a learning expedition to become online community facilitators.
The first mountain they decided to climb was Self-Development because they knew they needed to strengthen their muscles to ascend to the peaks of Evolutionary Relationships and Community Development later.
As the expedition was still at the foot of Self-Development, one of the members became curious about the mythic dimension of their work. She turned to her AI mate for insights, sparking a dialogue that would deepen their understanding of the journey. The AI, a silent but powerful companion, added a layer of intrigue and curiosity to their expedition, opening doors to new perspectives and understandings. Here’s its response:
The interpretation of a self-knowledge or self-development expedition as a myth can be approached on several levels. Myths are not just fictional stories, but archetypal structures that express profound human truths. Placing such an expedition in a mythic framework can help us understand its dynamics, hidden meaning, and limitations.
1. The Hero’s Journey – The Myth of Self-Development
Based on Joseph Campbell’s famous “Hero’s Journey” model, the self-discovery expedition can be understood as a classic myth.
Call to adventure: A person feels the need for change or enters a crisis.
Trials: On the way, they face challenges and have to fight inner demons.
Enlightenment: A new perspective or inner transformation occurs.
Return to everyday life: Experiences must be integrated into life – this is often more difficult than the journey itself.
👉 From a mythic perspective, the self-discovery expedition is a ritual transformation, where the individual walks his/her inner journey as a hero.
2. The Myth of Illusion – Self-Knowledge as an Unattainable Goal
According to many philosophies (e.g., Buddhism or Stoicism), the "self" is in constant flux, so a final goal of self-knowledge can never be achieved.
👉 In this sense, the self-knowledge expedition is a myth because it suggests an end goal that may never exist.
3. Commercial Myth – The Self-Development Industry
Many self-knowledge paths have become market products: trainings, coaching, spiritual retreats, etc.
This creates a mythic structure: a person starts from a state of deficiency and then can rise through a "secret knowledge" or technique.
👉 The self-discovery expedition may be a myth if personal development is driven by an endless market mechanism.
Joining their dialog, I said to my fellow explorer that ChatGPT started smartly when it told you, 'The interpretation of a self-knowledge or self-development expedition as a myth can be approached on several levels. Myths are not just fictional stories, but archetypal structures that express deep human truths.’
The first example it mentions corresponds to the first meaning of myth, namely that it is an archetypal structure that expresses profound human truths. However, it quickly runs into limitations because in its second and third points, it only refers to the negative meaning of myth. That is understandable, of course, if we consider that ChatGPT is a statistical machine; in its answers, it builds on the meanings of words that most often occur in public discourse.
However, that's also an opportunity for us not to consider its utterances definitive but something to spur us into a deeper co-inquiry with it. [That was a gentle nudge to shift my fellow explorer’s relationship with her AI mate from a prompt-maker to an AI-whisperer role.]
Then, I added: “What would happen if you continued your dialogue by introducing a prompt like this: What connection do you see between the history of humanity and an individual life, both perceived as a ‘Hero's Journey’ myth? If it can give you a meaningful answer to that question, then you may be dealing with not just a statistical machine but more like a thinking partner. That's because I never published anything about that connection, which it could have picked up from its training corpus and, to my knowledge, nobody else did.”
Well, ChatGPT’s reply didn't disappoint us:
The connection between human history and the individual journey, as in the "Hero's Journey" myth, is extremely deep and multifaceted. Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" is an archetypal narrative that can frame not only individual life journeys but also the history of civilizations, cultures, and humanity as a whole. The similarities exist because individuals and societies draw their stories from a collective unconscious that processes life's fundamental questions and challenges.
After detailing 5 aspects of how our individual and collective Hero's Journeys mirror each other, ChatGPT concluded that this archetype helps understand the crises and development points on the path and integrates personal and collective experiences into a larger narrative.
Online community facilitators, who can experience their lives as instances of that larger personal/collective development narrative, will be better prepared to heal the community when it is out of balance with the flow of life's energies. When they learn to engage the healing power of our AI partners, they will be on their way to becoming AI shamans.
"Healing power of our AI partners"
That's a profound concept. Permit me to ruminate on that concept for a moment.
We use prosthetic objects of all kinds, say, to prop up weak limbs after an injury.
We even use google to prop up our weak memories.
But, what about "healing"?
It's clear that AI is revolutionizing what goes on in medical research and clinical labs, but what else? Healing what? A community which is out of balance with life's forces.
I'll admit, I like that, but here is my concern (right or wrong): we must understand that "out of balance": is it based on values? ignorance? greed? what?
There are, as I see it, two primary objects in this picture: humans and their technology. And technology, today, is causing a widening gap between the amount of information (truthful or not) flowing and the ability of humans to process that flow in meaningful ways.
Speaking only about humans, there are basic skills they need to survive in that picture and, perhaps, the case can be made that schools and society at large are not helping some gain those skills, those of communication, critical thinking, deep listening, and so forth.
So, my point, FWIW, is that I worry that, as we begin to see AI as mental prosthetics rather than just assistants capable of summarizing papers, cheating on exams, or assisting in profound scientific discoveries - the more we begin to rely on them to do our thinking for us, well, I don't see that ending well.
So, for me, the thrust of this post is, at once profound and uplifting, but it raises deep concerns.