Marlovian Over-reacher in the Luxury Raunch of Devil by Dr. Jernail S. Anand

John Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ to justify the ways of God to man. The man that we meet in Eden has now stumbled into the 21^st century but his reluctant preference for the tree of knowledge has now become a passionate quest into the unknown.  And we are face to facewith several existential questions whose answers no thinker has provided till date: Can man know everything? Can he possess the ultimate knowledge? Is the physical world the only world about which man should know? What about the invisible forces which control men? Can AI bring to man insights into those realms which have been held sacrosanct till today?

In one of my poems, Godrok, which won me the title of the Grok Star from the xAI, I have shown how AI is helping Yama also in creating charge sheets, and serving them while man is still on the ventilator itself, and instead of death taking him into oblivion, the AI reconstitutes him on the hospital bed, into a small child, and is handed over to his new parents, with his entire memory reset.

With technological advances like Grok, we see technology running ahead of man. If we look at it dispassionately, advances in science and technology are meant to make life more livable, comfortable, and easy, so that most of the human jobs are taken up by technology, leaving time with man, to devote to his mental and moral upliftment, or it can be better described if we say, to bring him into a state of bliss, from where he had digressed.

The Limited Existence

Man is not bad, nor evil intentioned. Only he is crazy, and he forgets his limits. He forgets he has a body which has been forestalled from evolving beyond a certain point. He has eyes which have a limited vision. He has arms which do not extend beyond two feet. How big are his hands and fingers? Everything is in a fine balance, so that if even one becomes excessive in size, it will destroy thebalance which characterizes the cosmic creation.

It is often said ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. The truth is that Knowledge is a dangerous domain, and one reason why I call so is that Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit at the instigation of Devil. Even today, we are living in that state of curse. The only proposition that emerges is  that we can return to Eden, only if we relinquish all that we have accumulated over the years by way of knowledge?  In other words, we shall have to ‘forget’ our knowledge, and press the ‘reset’ button, and return to the state of original intelligence, i.e. innocence. Only then, we can get back into the realm of bliss which was created by God for his chosen species, homo sapiens.

The Puppet and the Divine Will

It is an accepted truth that everything happens as per the Will of God. If man ate the fruit of knowledge, God created conditions, by sending Satan with an insidious message.  We should remember that although we try our best to say that God is all powerful, omniscient and omnipresent, still, man has been cleverly endowed with a brain and ideas like ‘free will’. These ideas help God to escape all responsibility.  The basic issue is: who provides the stimulus to man to undertake various deeds. Moreover, if we compare life to a film or a play, we shall have to accept that there is a director, and a script writer too, and men are mere actors who cannot trespass their script. It means whatever man does is already scripted and he is being supervised. In this way, it becomes clear that all that is happening is God’s will, and man is an intelligent puppet only.

The puppet is ‘intelligent’ becauseman is imparted a false feeling of self-importance, that he can do this or do that. Facts are disturbing. Man has no power over his birth. He has no power over the skin of his colour, his parents, the place where he will be born, and whom he will marry and where and how he will die. This shows that all these things are like different roles which have been prewritten. Otherwise, you won’t be on the stage.

In a drama, the director is invisible. We feelcharacters are acting on their own. In real life too, people seem to be acting on their own, while the fact is: they are helpless before an overriding fate. There are  thousands of strings which control their actions, and the most surprising thing about human life is we have no idea who is pulling them. We think we are doing everything after brainstorming sessions. And thus, when some good takes place, we garland ourselves. But when something goes amiss, we curse fate. This shows that we accept we are being controlled by a superior force. But here is a catch too. When gods see people engaged in minor ego scuffles, they leave them to their fate. God gives them a long rope, and they strangle themselves to death.Getting free of them, gods go only after people who are meant to move the earth;on whose deeds depends the future architecture of human race.

It is not that we are being controlled, there are theories [Stephen Hawking’s Fermi Paradox] which show that what is happening to us now, the way things are unfolding, might have taken place, on some other planet, years ago. In the planetary world, where objects are situated millions of light years away from each other,it is not possible that things that happened there a year or two back are now unfolding on this earth. After such speculations, the questions gain more density: Do we go anywhere after death? I wonder if we really go anywhere.  Going under the earth does not mean extinction. Losing the body and the bones does not mean the end of man. It is a cycle. Death is an illusion which keeps men on tenterhooks.

Justifying Ways of Man to God

Let me get back to my original quest to justify the ways of Man to God. We respond to our changing needs as times change,  and relocate the social structures  accordingly. AI too is the need of this fast generation.  It is a great achievement of human mind, but let me alert you once again, we are navigating in the ocean of knowledge, and it was something God never wanted man to wade in. We have lost our innocence, and our bliss too. But, it is a paradox and a big surprise too, that it has never occurred to us for generations, and the sermonacs too are reluctant to point out this flaw of our civilization which is ‘progressing’ [?] on the wheels of knowledge. Where is it going? Away from its source? Shall it never return?

As pointed out earlier, we are imprisoned in our identity and nature blesses us with certain faculties which are essential to our existence, so that there is a working human being. With AI, we have crossed through the tight borders of reality and now, we can move at a faster pace, look far into planets, and think much faster. It is a feel good factor of our civilization, no doubt, but we shall soon start feeling that this artificial world is too much with us, and we shall start looking for our ‘self’ lost somewhere  in this melee of thrills and a sense of artificial achievement.

The Alert

With AI and its ready powers, man has proved that he can create a world of artificial reality, which runs parallel to the original creation of God.  But the only difference is that it lacks spontaneity that marks the divine creations. God, as I can see, is happy that if man took the path of knowledge, he has done so well. He is happy with man’s creative and inquisitive powers. But, we should not forget that God never wanted us to digress into Knowledge. God made it into a matter of choice. And even today, no God ever comes to life to force us into decisions we don’t want to take. He actually permitted us to create our own world with powers of the brain. So all this empire of knowledge, which is a creation of man’s choice, actually stands on the wrong side of things.  It has a devilish imprint because it was Satan who had initiated man into the world of Knowledge, which was a moral and spiritual deviation. Now, we have taken this moral digression to the heights of non-creative imagination and are blindly following the agenda of corporates who have grabbed all centres of Knowledge. Holy knowledge which came from scriptures fell into the hands of quacks while the knowledge that man has now accumulated is also not neutral. It has an inbuilt mission to divest man of his divinity. Bliss, joy, happiness, are the byproducts of Innocence, towards which we possess neither any reverence, not any inclination.  We prefer to remain acquiring knowledge which is an endless pursuit into the realms of nothingness.

Picnicingin the Pleasure Dome of Devil

As I said, we are treading on dangerous ground already, because it’s devil’s luxury raunch where we are camping now. In the first instance are we aware of it? If so, do we really want to renounce these joys and go back to Eden? The condition for entering the tents of God is: emptying this mind of everything we accumulated by way of Knowledge at the behest of Devil [sorry to infer]. Return to Innocence and Bliss it seems is a dream no infected mind will entertain.

If we want that God should own us, [how many of us really want?] we shall have to surrender all our knowledge, and embrace wisdom, and use this knowledge for the welfare of mankind. It is not that man disobeyed God. It was a rehearsed act. God gave man a very long rope. It is for us that we do not let this rope go round and round our neck, in the name of liberty [free will]. We should not forget that God loves his Satan too, because it is his police that strikes and brings to account people who err on the path of duty. Still,God  waits for man to return to the divine fold, forsaking all his knowledge, artificial or original, because there [in His Golden Tent]  we do not need it. Here too, we did not need so much. We actually overdid ourselves. AI is a Marlovian overreach for man, if he does not realize its evil potential, and surrender his knowledge to divine wisdom.

Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, [the Seneca, Charter of Morava, Franz Kafka and Maxim Gorky award and Signs Peace Award Laureate, with an opus of 180 books, whose name adorns the Poets’ Rock in Serbia]]  is a towering literary figure whose work embodies a rare fusion of creativity, intellect, and moral vision.