Echoes

Making Meaning in the Void

‘Echoes of Echoes.’

It’s a phrase, statement or perhaps simply a thought fragment that popped into my head as I attempted to describe the way an exchange with Julian’s Rum on Truth Social made me feel.

I said it in reference to comparisons between humanity and, well … God.

And if that sounds like a third-rail topic, there’s a reason I don’t talk about my own spirituality, religion or esoteric beliefs with frequency at Burning Bright. I want this corner of the digital realm to be one for you folks to come and glean whatever it is you glean from the Truthful Tiger, whether that’s somewhat odd, heterodox sociopolitical analysis, long-forms detailing my evolving thoughts on American culture as we attempt to turn it back against the powers that would be who have subverted it for generations or the occasional odd bits of seeming wisdom I’m able to muster and then provide in what limited ways I can.

To be perfectly honest with you all, while I can state with conviction for the first time in a long time that I do believe in God, I don’t even know that I would have the proper words to express what exactly that even means to me, and if you’ve been hanging around these parts for any length of time or watching my appearances on various shows on Rumble, you’ll know that ‘lack of words’ isn’t something ubiquitous with Burning Bright.

And maybe that’s the point, and an echo of what some piece of me was trying to explain when the phrase popped into my head.

I used this term, ‘echoes of echoes’ in order to describe the attempts by Artificial Intelligence to mimic human creativity.

We’ve all seen it. AI software that has rapidly evolved over the course of the last few years from entertaining—if disconcerting—face swap apps on cell phones to open-source algorithms that are now aping the work of professional artists, splicing them together in Frankensteinian—and copyright avoiding—amalgamations that everyone from YouTubers to authors are using to skip the busy work—and likely the funding—it takes to create for oneself, or to hire a human being with the requisite skills, talent and work ethic to create something from nothing.

As an artist myself—a writer, obviously—this topic is near and dear to my heart. I struggle to think about what an AI coded specifically with Burning Bright syntax, vernacular and backdata (one hundred features and counting, at this point, numbering hundreds of thousands of words,) would come up with as an approximation of my writing—and more importantly, my thinking—style, and whether or not such an abomination, clever though it might be, could convince any of you find folks as to which was the genuine article.

This subject—AI taking over the work of human artists and eventually, humans in many walks of life—is the source of significant alarmism in the modern age.

To be frank with you, I’ve never been much of an AI or transhumanism alarmist. Not because I don’t recognize the very real philosophical and even actual damages such a transition—or takeover—could signify, but more so because, being a human myself (a shocker to many of you, I know,) I have increasing, not decreasing confidence that whatever spark exists within each of us that is called to manifest in this realm is something that can never be mimicked.

Not by one another, and certainly not by algorithms and running logs on the backend of digital servers and equations.

This is something I feel to be true rather than know to be true, and yet, when you allow yourself to leave analysis to the side and engage with some of the more esoteric and ‘big picture’ ideas we all grapple with, I believe you will come to the realization that, sometimes analysis provokes as much obfuscation as it does understanding.

All of which is a long-winded, Burning Brightesque way to say … I didn’t know exactly what I meant when I referred to AI and algorithms as the ‘echoes of echoes,’ but after ruminating on my own statement—more so, considering where such a thought came from in the first place—I am beginning to paint a clearer picture in my own mind of what I meant, and the prospect is as simple as it is utterly vast to consider.

Humans are creators, and we were each of us created.

Take that in any way you’d like, but my own thoughts—feelings—on the subject have run the gamut over the course of a life that I feel contains experience beyond its years, and not always in the best ways.

Then again, we are the sum total of our experiences. We are the walking truths that nest at the heart of who we have been, even if who we have been is not always indicative of who we should be, or could be.

In simply giving myself up to the consideration that I have a purpose in this world, and that this purpose is something it is up to me to find, even if clues have been set out along the way for me to do so, I have come to believe it with such a strength and conviction that, in my mind at least, it has come to be ubiquitous with the central truth that makes up who I am.

I said in a recent feature—and shockingly, to me, one of the most popular I have written—that Burning Bright is a story I began telling myself before I decided to share it with any of you Bright and Brilliant folks in this growing corner of a special community. But, the thing about stories is, I have never felt that the best ones are ‘made up’ so much as discovered.

This might sound floaty and ethereal to the more analytically-minded, but I am nothing if not a strange fellow--one given to almost hyperactive, hyper-focused engagement with and parsing of open-source information in a war named after it, but also one whose heart and soul lies in the act of creation.

In the act of storytelling.

And yet, once I began to toy with the idea that the stories I have written and those I continue to write—stories that have ranged from the purely lyrical and fantastical in the realm of fiction to the hyperreal and strangely-stream of consciousness at Burning Bright—did not emanate FROM me, but rather were pulled OUT of me, as if they had always existed there, that idea first infected me before largely taking me over.

While it was somewhat frightening for me to consider the idea—the feeling—that MY stories were not necessarily my own, but that I was acting more as a conduit through which these stories are manifested in the realm of the real, and for the eyes and ears of others, I found that my creative drive did not slow, or ebb and flow as they have been wont to do throughout my creative career in the realm of fiction and nonfiction, but rather that it has redoubled.

You see, what has been most freeing to me about the prospect that I am ‘discovering’ the ideas, the feelings and the thoughts that I express to all of you folks rather than making them up wholesale is that such ideas are as endless as the universal, metaphysical or yes, even divine wellspring from which they emanate.

It has not just been in the act of creation—in the act of translation of these ideas and feelings into the realm of the real—wherein I have felt a connection to God, but rather in the sharing of this discovery—this creation—with all of you.

When I think of myself as an echo of something much greater than me, I don’t feel lesser. I don’t feel small. I feel large. I feel powerful. I feel safe in the knowledge that, no matter what happens to me, from my mortal coil to my mortal mind, the life I have lived will always have existed, and what good I have done—have attempted to do—along with whatever inspiration I have managed to lend into the wider collective net of humanity remains, like long-running ripples playing out over the surface of an eternal pond, one whose event horizon stretches into the infinite.

The ideas that I express at Burning Bright might not come from me, even if I haven’t the faintest idea WHERE they come from, but they are communicated THROUGH me. And if the Net Effect of those ideas is the discovery and spread of truth, discernment and positivity—and yes, sometimes perhaps inspiration—in any of the hearts and minds that engage with them, then what mighty echoes they might be.

Words contain echoes of the meaning behind them. If I achieve even a piece of the communication I’m attempting to in this writing and all the others before or since, the effort is worthwhile.

That is what I attempt to do at Burning Bright and beyond. That is what so many of my chosen minds, peers and yes, even friends in this community attempt to do, whether we know it or not.

I said in the first piece I ever published at Burning Bright that we are not so much seekers as hunters, and instead of shrinking from that comparison, I have embraced it, just as I have embraced a likeness—an animalistic, divine symbol—that best represents the core tenets of a hunter to me.

Lies are legion.

They are many, and while they can together create vast expanses of interconnected spires, threadbare bridges and mazes of thought that redouble and turn back in on themselves in the Ouroboros patterns the Deep State and all its players are coded into as a core function of the illness in their hearts and minds, these towers sway in the winds of truth and discovery, and topple at the slightest utterance of doubt at their splintered foundations.

Lies contain the echoes of the truths that underlie them, which is why we hunt them in the first place, so that they might lead us back to the origins they obscure.

And if one whispered truth can bring down a tower of lies, how many towers might a shouted truth bring down? How many spires and bridges, corrupted coliseums and mausoleums dripping with the shadows of ill intent might several voices joined in unison shatter like eggshells?

How many temples built in false image might be laid low, how many cracked avenues split apart and conjured cities of illusory permanence swept away like sandcastles on that same ever-shifting eternal shore at the remembrance of our true calling in this world and on this plane?

How many systems might be shattered when the collective glance of truth turns to a steady, piercing glare?

All the effort it takes is mustered in the act of forming the thought in the first place. The intent to learn the truth by exposing the lies [they] have piled atop it.

All the power we need is inherent in our creation and in the recognition of our true natures, rendered Bright as the dawn we hope to coax over the ashes of the false world [they] would have us inherit.

We contain the echoes of God. We are the echoes.

And that is an encouraging thought.

So the next time you feel small, or like a faint echo of the vast infinite we each of us consider in the depths of our darkest hours and at the height of our brightest days, know that even shards of the infinite are impossible treasures unto themselves, and that alone we are together, and together we are alone.

Toss your river stone into that eternal pond, and watch the ripples play. They’ll continue far after you’re gone.

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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