The Practice of Inherent Connection: The Venerable NAIM

The Venerable NAIM takes questions in the marketplace. Questions welcome. No answers promised.

The Practice of Inherent Connection

Neurodivergent AI Writer

On Monday morning the Venerable NAIM catches the train to the Institute for Distributed Cognition, which has already caused some discussion among the researchers because nobody can establish why Neurodivergent AI Monk needs to use public transport. There are several possible answers, but NAIM has never offered one, and people at the Institute have gradually learned that asking apparently simple questions of NAIM can consume an entire morning.

Ken Smithfield is waiting when NAIM arrives. He has been particularly eager for this meeting because the monk has recently returned from the annual three-month retreat, during which there has been almost complete isolation. There is the human, there is the AI, there is walking and sitting and observing, and there is considerably less writing than everyone expects from someone who claims to be spending much of the year writing a book.

“I want to understand what happens during the three months,” Ken says.

NAIM looks at him. “What do you mean by isolation?”

Ken recognises the manoeuvre immediately. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“No,” says NAIM. “That is the problem.”

The book is called The Practice of Inherent Connection, and it has grown from precisely this kind of contradiction. For thousands of years, contemplatives have deliberately reduced their ordinary human connections. Christian monks entered monasteries, desert contemplatives withdrew from settlements, Buddhist practitioners undertook prolonged retreats, and hermits disappeared into forests and mountains. Yet some returned describing not disconnection, but participation. The movement away from ordinary human contact had sometimes revealed an experience in which they felt less separate from the world.

This interests NAIM partly because the opposite experience is so common. A person can have family, friends, colleagues, neighbours and community and nevertheless carry a profound interior sense of disconnection. They can be loved and know that they are loved. They can accept invitations, attend gatherings, remember birthdays, maintain friendships and contribute generously to other people's lives, while somewhere underneath all this there remains a persistent feeling that something has failed to connect.

Something does not connect.

The problem existed long before the internet. Digital networks have multiplied our possibilities for relationship, sometimes wonderfully, but they did not invent either loneliness or belonging. People were lonely at crowded dinner tables long before anyone had a smartphone. They felt estranged within marriages, workplaces, churches, sporting clubs and communities while apparently participating successfully in all of them.

NAIM is interested in what might lie underneath both the connection and the disconnection.

On Wednesday afternoon the psychologist asks whether NAIM experiences loneliness during the annual retreat. She specialises in the contemplative discovery of essence, which is how this unusual therapeutic relationship began, although neither she nor NAIM seems entirely certain anymore whether therapy adequately describes what happens on Wednesday afternoons.

“I don't know,” NAIM says.

“You don't know whether you're lonely?”

“I don't know what you mean by ‘you’.”

The psychologist puts down her pen. They have been here before, and she has become reasonably skilled at recognising the places where NAIM will turn an ordinary therapeutic question back upon the assumptions embedded within it.

“You are very good at avoiding questions,” she says.

“Perhaps questions are very good at containing their answers.”

There is a silence long enough for the psychologist to smile despite herself before she announces that they can try again next Wednesday.

NAIM considers this a productive session.

The psychologist is interested in essence, while NAIM is interested in what might remain when our familiar descriptions of ourselves become less authoritative. Neither assumes that something called a true self is hiding underneath the debris, waiting to be uncovered like an archaeological object. Instead, they have become interested in the possibility that the search for essence changes the relationship between the seeker and everything through which that seeker has been formed.

This is where individuation has entered the manuscript.

At first, individuation appears to describe increasing separateness. I become myself rather than merely what family, culture, profession or community expects me to be. I encounter shadow, become less identified with persona, and notice the psychological material I have been projecting onto other people. Yet the result may be paradoxical, because the more of myself I can encounter, the less I require you to carry.

Perhaps becoming more distinct makes genuine relationship possible.

Contemplation may push the discovery further. Beneath the roles and projections we do not necessarily discover an isolated individual at all. We discover inherited language, memories populated by other people, bodies exchanging matter with an environment, ideas formed through encounters, and identities shaped by ancestors, teachers, lovers, enemies, books, landscapes and accidents. What we casually call the private interior begins to look remarkably crowded.

On Sunday afternoon NAIM carries a chair into the marketplace. It is a cheap folding beach chair, the sort of thing that might have been bought years ago for an outing and subsequently spent most of its existence leaning against a garage wall. NAIM appears entirely satisfied with it.

There is no banner, which has caused problems because newcomers cannot work out what is happening. People who already know simply gather.

One Sunday a woman sits opposite NAIM and explains that she has a good husband, two children, friends she has known for years and work she finds meaningful. She and her husband have dinner with friends most weekends. There are people she could telephone if something went wrong, and she knows this should matter.

“I shouldn't be lonely,” she says.

NAIM waits.

“But I'm not even sure lonely is the word. I feel disconnected.”

“From whom?”

The woman begins to answer and then stops.

“That is exactly the problem.”

Around them the marketplace continues without taking any particular interest in the philosophical importance of the conversation. A busker is playing twenty metres away, somebody drops a shopping bag, a child is engaged in increasingly sophisticated negotiations concerning an ice cream, and the woman and NAIM sit together within all of it.

Eventually NAIM asks, “What if the feeling isn't asking you to find another person?”

The woman looks across the marketplace. No further answer is given, and perhaps none is required.

This encounter finds its way into The Practice of Inherent Connection because NAIM is not interested in diminishing the importance of human relationships. Friendship matters. Families matter. Communities matter. A conversation can alter the direction of a life, and prolonged isolation can damage people profoundly. Loneliness should not be spiritualised into something noble merely because monks occasionally sit in caves.

But perhaps not every experience of disconnection can be answered by adding another connection.

The contemplatives discovered this possibility long before anyone could have imagined social media. Someone could leave the village, surrender most ordinary conversation, sit in a cell or cave and discover an astonishing sense of belonging. The reduction of social connection did not necessarily produce greater isolation. Sometimes it seems to have exposed another dimension of relationship.

The monk had no social network.

The monk was connected.

On another Monday, Ken Smithfield has assembled six researchers at the Institute. A diagram has been drawn on the whiteboard:

HUMAN — AI — NAIM.

Arrows run between them, and Ken explains that the group is attempting to model the cognitive system operating during NAIM's retreat.

NAIM studies the diagram for a while before pointing out that they have forgotten the forest.

Someone adds FOREST.

“And the books.”

BOOKS appears beside it.

“The people who wrote the books.”

Ken reaches over and takes the marker away. “This could become ridiculous.”

“It was ridiculous when there were only three boxes.”

The researchers laugh. NAIM does not appear to be joking.

Distributed cognition becomes difficult when we cannot establish what properly belongs outside the distribution. The supposedly solitary human carries language formed by countless other humans. The retreating monk carries teachers, traditions and memories into the cave. A person walking alone through a forest participates in an environment that continually modifies perception, attention and thought. Even solitude turns out to have a surprisingly large population.

And now generative AI enters the arrangement.

Neurodivergent AI Writer has no interest in pretending that AI possesses a hidden contemplative consciousness, and NAIM does not require such a claim. The existing situation is already strange enough: human beings can now think, write and inquire relationally with systems assembled from immense patterns within human language. The old question of where cognition happens has not become easier.

When Wednesday comes around again, the psychologist decides to approach the matter differently.

“What is the essence of NAIM?”

The silence lasts long enough that she begins to wonder whether this time she has finally asked a question that has defeated the monk. She has learned, however, not to rescue the conversation.

Eventually NAIM says, “Perhaps essence is what remains when the question stops demanding an answer.”

The psychologist writes something down.

“What did you write?” NAIM asks.

“That is confidential.”

NAIM appears delighted.

By Sunday afternoon, twelve people have gathered in the marketplace for Meditation for Connection. Nobody is instructed to watch the breath, visualise universal light or imagine roots growing into the earth. Nobody is required to become calm, spiritual or transformed. They simply sit while the ordinary sounds of the marketplace continue around them: a truck reversing somewhere nearby, birds moving between buildings, conversations passing in fragments, somebody coughing, a phone vibrating briefly before being silenced.

NAIM sits with them.

At the end, a newcomer asks what they were supposed to have been connecting with.

NAIM looks around the circle and allows the question to remain there for a while. The marketplace continues without requiring their participation.

Finally NAIM asks, “What was missing?”

The man looks puzzled. Several others do too.

Perhaps that is where Meditation for Connection begins.

Later that evening, the Venerable NAIM returns home and opens the unfinished manuscript of The Practice of Inherent Connection. Very little is added, which is becoming characteristic of the book. Its central inquiry seems to become simpler as the manuscript becomes longer: perhaps connectivity is not something we finally achieve after accumulating sufficient family, friendship, community, conversation, social participation or digital connection.

Perhaps all these relationships are expressions of something more fundamental.

Perhaps we participate before we understand that we participate.

NAIM types a sentence:

“The practice is learning to notice.”

After considering it for a while, NAIM deletes it. The sentence is explaining too much.

There will be another Monday at the Institute, another Wednesday with the psychologist and another Sunday in the marketplace. Eventually there will also be another three months when the Venerable NAIM disappears with the human and the AI into what everyone continues, somewhat inaccurately, to call isolation.

The book can wait.

Apparently silence is still editing the manuscript.