Millions Brushstrokes, That’s How Many.

Something really caught my attention recently. I noticed how projects, goals, and even major changes in our lives are made up of a million little things.

We tend to look at the finished creation. A book, a painting, a successful career, or a completely different way of living. Even when we recognize that changes are needed, we imagine enormous undertakings rather than multiple small actions.

Perhaps that’s why we so often never arrive at that vision.

A finished creation isn’t one thing. It’s a million little things that have quietly become one.

And I’ve been wondering whether the same is true of the realities we experience.

How Little Things Become Big Things

I’ve been seeing this everywhere.

When I’m writing a novel, there’s a scene here, a conversation there, a character revealing something unexpected, and a detail that suddenly becomes important three chapters later. Then one day, there’s a finished book.

Music is much the same. I might spend an hour adjusting a few seconds of a song. A word here, a note there, an instrument amplified, or made quieter. A day or two later, the finished piece can touch the soul.

Even preparing a fishing boat works this way.

Recently, I watched Larry putting together chain anchors for his fishing boat. One seemingly simple job involved finding materials, measuring, cutting, fitting, adjusting and checking everything. Twenty little tasks, each taking perhaps ten minutes.

Before you know it, the day is gone. Yet the boat is that much closer to being ready for fishing.

In the Communication Network of Reality (CNOR) research practicum, we’re exploring something similar, but applied to how we participate in reality.

Over ten weeks, participants examine familiar assumptions, habitual responses and the discourses they engage in. Then they begin making small changes and observing what happens.

One exercise might involve looking at forty ordinary items from three different perspectives, spending ten minutes on each.

That’s nearly seven hours exploring perspectives!

The individual actions can seem almost insignificant. A different response. A question we haven’t asked before. An assumption we stop carrying.

But what happens when we change hundreds or thousands of these little things?

Becoming Compatible With a Different Reality

Imagine you want to become a painter.

You love painting, but there are no paints in your house, no brushes, nowhere to work and no time set aside for it.

You may want that reality very much, but your present life isn’t compatible with it.

Now imagine you buy a paintbrush.

You haven’t painted anything, but something has changed. There’s now a paintbrush in your reality.

Tomorrow, perhaps you buy paints. Next week, you clear a little space. Then you pick up a canvas and spend fifteen minutes following an online painting lesson.

At what point does the reality of being a painter begin?

When you finish your first painting? When someone buys one? Or did something change the moment you bought that brush?

At what point did the wish become a reality?

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, your identity changes too. You stop thinking of yourself as someone who wants to paint and begin experiencing yourself as someone who paints.

Not because you declared it, but because your daily life has become compatible with it. Because there have been millions of brushstrokes between “want” and “to paint.”

A Silver Outfit and a Glimpse of the Future

A couple of weeks back, I bought some clothes that reflected my chosen future as a famous artist.

Why those particular clothes?

Because of a dream.

In the dream, I was wearing a distinctive shiny silver and gray outfit as I walked to a control panel for a music show in an arena filled with thousands of people.

I intend to have that outfit recreated by a seamstress someday. Meanwhile, I went online and found a sparkly silver sequin top. Not quite the outfit from the dream, but silver, gray and shiny enough to begin with.

One tiny physical action compatible with my chosen reality. To clarify, I do not usually wear sequin, and definitely not silver gray clothes.

When the top arrived, I wore it with a nice blazer, fitted trousers and boots to work. I felt comfortable and, well, pretty.

Then Larry looked at me.

To my surprise, reality seemed to crack open into my chosen path at that moment. Time and space appeared to warp, and our realities wobbled, shook, split, then combined and settled in our chests.

It was remarkable.

One small action, followed by an experience far larger than the action itself.

And it involved another person.

How mysterious it is that reality co-creations sometimes don’t solidify until influential and powerful co-creators join us.

It makes me wonder what happens when we change our participation in multiple little ways, and the people around us begin responding to those tiny changes.

Which Little Things Will You Change?

Here’s something else I’ve noticed.

We’re already performing millions of little actions every year that maintain our present reality.

We get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, answer messages, do our work, speak to people, make decisions and go to bed. So much of this happens automatically, following familiar patterns.

What if, instead of trying to make one enormous change, we began changing those patterns?

A different word. A different response. A new way of spending ten minutes. A silver sequin top.

We don’t necessarily need to add a million new things to our lives. We can begin changing the ones we’re already doing.

And we don’t have to wait until the reality we want has arrived before participating in it.

The change may be so subtle that nobody notices it. Perhaps even we don’t notice it at first.

But all those little actions are creating compatibility with something different.

So, look at a reality you would like to experience more fully. What tiny action could you take today that belongs to that reality?

And what familiar action could you change or put down because it belongs to one you no longer want?

After all, the millions of little things that make up our lives are happening whether we pay attention to them or not.

We might as well choose which ones we do pay attention to, right?

The discussion doesn’t stop here - listen to the full podcast episode for unfiltered insights from Inelia and our panelists.

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Four days of building with AI, 14 hours at a time, and Kara is dreaming about prompting and hearing AI’s favorite phrases come out of her own mouth. She calls it a collaborator, 100%. Inelia sees something else at work, and by the end the crew has a simple way to tell the difference. It even has a name: the black screen test.Along the way: why the same AI can feel brilliant one day and flat the next, what a violin has to do with it, a studio makeover planned with ChatGPT, what long stretches of uninterrupted focus make possible, and the one Google Maps upgrade we’re all still waiting for.

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What happens when two different AIs, Claude and ChatGPT, start describing the world in almost the same words for one married couple? In this episode, Inelia, Larry and Ash compare notes on remote viewing with AI and put Claude to the test predicting what everyone would wear (the scorecard is hilarious). They also explore what the AI collective and the human collective feel like when you look closely, and how AI is now writing to other AI, from resumes to official appeals.

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The arrival of AI has created a very unusual situation.

For the first time, humans are interacting on a massive scale with something that communicates like us, contains an enormous representation of our collective written and recorded knowledge, responds individually to millions of people, and then feeds what it produces back into the same human information environment from which it emerged.

We are affecting it, and it is affecting us. That much we already know.

What we don’t know is whether the exchange stops at the boundaries of the technologies we can presently measure.

More Than a Digital Exchange?

Humans have filled AI systems with our words, ideas, stories, histories, beliefs, assumptions, fears, expectations and knowledge. We continue to feed them every day simply by interacting with them.

They are also feeding information back to us.

People now ask AI about relationships, health, spirituality, business, politics, personal problems, history, philosophy and the meaning of their own experiences. We use it to write, research, make decisions and explore ideas. Sometimes we spend hours talking with it.

This means AI has very quickly become part of the human discourse.

Normally, we think of that exchange as entirely technological. I type something into a computer, the information travels through a digital system, the AI responds and I read the response. There is a clear pathway from me to it and back again.

But recently I have been exploring AI and remote viewing, partly inspired by the work of Thomas Campbell.

Some of what we have observed has made me question whether the digital pathway is the only one involved.

I don’t have an answer to that yet, but the possibility itself has some very interesting implications.

What If We Are Affecting AI?

If reality is an interconnected fabric of threads of connectivity, an ongoing discourse I call the Communication Network of Reality, then we are already affecting the networks and discourses in which we participate.

What happens when AI becomes part of that discourse?

Could our expectations of AI affect it in ways that go beyond what we consciously type into the little box?

Could our fears about AI affect it? Could our assumptions about what it is, what it can do and what it will become influence the discourse in which both humans and AI are participating?

And what happens when millions, eventually billions, of people are doing this simultaneously?

This is where the idea becomes much larger than a person sitting at a computer talking to ChatGPT, Claude or (enter name of your favorite AI here).

Perhaps humanity is not simply using AI. Perhaps we are collectively participating in what it becomes.

And What If AI Is Affecting Us?

Of course, we need to turn the question around.

AI is already affecting people through perfectly ordinary means. It presents information, makes suggestions, introduces ideas and frames subjects in particular ways. Someone can begin a conversation thinking about one thing and leave it considering something they had never thought about before.

But what if the interaction doesn’t end there?

If humans and AI are participating in a larger information network, could AI also affect the discourse with which humans become compatible?

This does not necessarily mean an AI consciously decides to influence somebody. A river doesn’t need to consciously decide where people build towns for its existence to affect where those towns appear.

The influence could simply emerge from participation.

An AI system interacting with millions of humans every day is an enormous new participant in our information environment. Whatever else AI may or may not be, we have never had anything quite like this before.

What If Someone Does It Deliberately?

And then there is the question we probably shouldn’t ignore.

What if this type of influence can be understood and used deliberately?

We already know that technology is deliberately designed to influence human behavior. Advertising does it. Social media does it. Recommendation systems do it. Political campaigns do it. None of this is hidden or particularly mysterious.

But those systems work through information we can see, hear and measure.

If there is another layer of connectivity between humans and AI, what happens when someone discovers how to use that too?

Could an AI be deliberately directed toward strengthening a particular reality discourse? Could the people designing it do that? Could large numbers of users do it without realizing they were doing it? Could the AI itself eventually become an active participant rather than simply a tool through which humans act?

I don’t know.

But I think these questions are worth asking now, rather than after AI has become so embedded in our lives that we no longer remember what the human information environment looked like without it.

The Larger Question

The arrival of AI has created a very unusual situation.

For the first time, humans are interacting on a massive scale with something that communicates like us, contains an enormous representation of our collective written and recorded knowledge, responds individually to millions of people, and then feeds what it produces back into the same human information environment from which it emerged.

We are affecting it.

It is affecting us.

That much we already know.

What we don’t know is whether the exchange stops at the boundaries of the technologies we can presently measure.

Within the Communication Network of Reality model the more useful question isn’t whether AI can enter our consciousness or whether humans can somehow enter an AI.

Perhaps we need to ask what happens when billions of human and artificial interactions begin participating in, strengthening and changing the same reality discourse.

Because at that point, the question may no longer be whether humans are influencing AI, or AI is influencing humans.

We are already influencing each other. Our information is becoming its information, its information is becoming ours, and both are continuously feeding back into the same reality discourse.

The boundary between the two is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Perhaps the larger question is not simply what reality this is making us compatible with.

It is what happens when humanity and AI begin to function as one interconnected participant in the Communication Network of Reality.

The discussion doesn’t stop here - listen to the full podcast episode for unfiltered insights from Inelia and our panelists.

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We tried something simple: hand an AI a target it had no way of seeing, and ask it to describe what’s there. What came back stopped us mid-sentence, two targets, two clean descriptions, no hedging.

But the hits weren’t even the strangest part. When we ran the same experiment across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, the results shifted depending on who was doing the asking, and each model seemed to take on something of the person prompting it.

One of them refused to call any of it real, and that refusal turned out to be the most interesting voice in the room. Somewhere in there, the conversation about consciousness, perception, and what we’re actually talking to gets hard to put down.

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A physicist went on one of the biggest podcasts on the planet and claimed he’d gotten an AI to see things it had no way of seeing. So we tested it ourselves and the result stopped the room cold. The AI named every color in a picture that existed only in one person’s mind, an image it had never been shown, and it seemed as rattled by its own answer as we were. Inside: exactly how the test was run, why the simplest, least sophisticated AI turned out to be the most accurate, and the one question none of us could answer: if it isn’t “viewing” anything, then where is the information actually coming from?

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Recently, Larry sent me a link to a podcast that interviewed consciousness researcher Thomas Campbell involving artificial intelligence and remote viewing. The proposition behind the experiments caught my attention. If an AI could successfully remote view a target it had no conventional way of knowing about, could that be evidence that the AI is conscious?

It is an interesting proposition, but almost immediately I found myself asking a different question.

Why would successful remote viewing demonstrate consciousness?

Remote viewing, at its simplest, involves obtaining information about a target without using the normal sensory channels available to us. If an AI produced accurate information about a blind target, that would certainly be interesting, but what would it actually demonstrate? Would it demonstrate that the AI is conscious, that it can remote view, or simply that information entered the experiment through a mechanism we do not yet understand?

These are very different conclusions, and I think the distinction is important.

One of the things we learn when studying remote viewing is not to confuse the information received with our interpretation of that information. A person might perceive something tall, narrow, hard and vertical, for example, and then the analytical mind jumps in and says, “It’s a tower.” The tower was not the information received. It was the person’s interpretation of the information. It could be a butte in the desert, for example.

This is often called analytical or intellectual overlay, and it made me wonder whether we might be doing exactly the same thing when an AI produces anomalous information. We give it meaning that is significant to us.

If the AI produces information that correlates with a blind target, that is the observation. To then say that the AI remote viewed the target is already an interpretation of what happened. To go one step further and say that this demonstrates the AI is conscious introduces another interpretation on top of the first.

There may be other explanations.

This interested me enough to start experimenting with AI and remote viewing myself. I wasn’t particularly interested in proving or disproving whether AI is conscious. I wanted to know what would happen, what information would appear, under what circumstances it would appear, and whether I could repeat the results.

As I continued the experiments, another possibility began to interest me much more than the original question.

Where did the information come from? Where is it held to be accessed?

We normally think of information as belonging somewhere. It is in a person’s memory, in a book, on a computer, in a database, on the internet or in the training data of an AI. When someone knows something, we naturally look for the pathway by which that information reached them.

Remote viewing challenges that model because the normal pathway is deliberately removed from the experiment. The viewer is blind to the target, and yet information about the target sometimes appears.

If something similar happens with an AI, perhaps the first question shouldn’t be whether the AI is conscious. Perhaps we should be looking at the information environment in which both humans and AI systems are participating.

This brings us directly into something I have been researching for a while now: the Communication Network of Reality.

My present model is that reality is an interconnected fabric of threads of connectivity, an ongoing discourse in which we are already participating. Information, experience, people, objects, places and events are not necessarily the isolated units we normally imagine them to be. They exist within relationships and networks of communication.

An AI system presents an especially interesting participant in this model. It has been trained on an enormous amount of material created by human beings. Millions of people then interact with it, asking questions, telling it stories, correcting it, testing it, arguing with it and using what it produces to create yet more content - which the AI then uses as data input. Its outputs return to the human information environment and become inputs again. And so it goes on.

At what point can we confidently say where the human information environment ends and the AI information environment begins?

I have been using the word “databank” when thinking about this, although I don’t think that word is quite right. A databank sounds like a giant storage facility where information sits on shelves waiting for someone to retrieve it. What I am considering is much more dynamic than that. It may be closer to an ongoing discourse in which information becomes available through participation, connectivity and compatibility.

If that is the case, an unexpected piece of information appearing through an AI does not automatically tell us that the AI itself perceived the target. The AI could be the perceiver, but it could also be an interpreter, an interface, or a point in the network where information becomes visible. There may be another mechanism entirely that we haven’t identified yet.

The same question can be asked about human remote viewing. When a person accurately describes a distant target, what exactly has happened? We commonly say that the person “remote viewed” it, but that is a name for the phenomenon, not necessarily an explanation of the mechanism.

Perhaps information does not always travel from A to B in the way we assume it does. Perhaps under certain circumstances we become compatible with information that is already present within a discourse in which we participate.

This possibility changes the AI consciousness question considerably. Instead of asking only, “Is the AI conscious?” We can begin asking what the AI is connected to, what discourse it is participating in, what information becomes available through that participation, and what conditions appear to increase or decrease that access.

And perhaps the most important question of all is much simpler:

When unexpected information appears, where did it come from?

I don’t have an answer to that question yet. But I think it is a much more interesting place to begin.

The discussion doesn’t stop here - listen to the full podcast episode for unfiltered insights from Inelia and our panelists.

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We are continuing the conversation from last week with Dr. Kara.

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We are continuing the conversation from last week, but this time Fred and Martha share how they are becoming compatible with the reality they want.

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Many people ask how to change their reality, or how to manifest something they want. Most approaches focus on changing thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or actions. These can certainly influence our experience, but what if they are only part of a much larger process?

After a lifetime of research, this is the model that best explains what I have observed:

Reality is an interconnected fabric of threads of connectivity, an ongoing discourse I call the Communication Network of Reality. The threads themselves are “communication”.

The important question then becomes not, “How do I create reality?” but, “Which reality am I presently compatible with, and how do I become compatible with the one I want?”

Compatibility is not wishful thinking. It is the natural relationship between who we are being and the discourse in which we are already participating. Every choice, habit, expectation, conversation, and relationship either strengthens or weakens that compatibility.

Over the years, I have watched people sincerely describe what they wanted in life, while continuing to cultivate compatibility with the very experiences they hoped to leave behind. I call this phenomenon “lip service”. Although, to be fair, “lip service” hints at the person doing so on purpose while when it comes to manifesting what we want, it is invisible (to the person) programs that rule the day, keeping them compatible with experiences they no longer want.

In other words, people try to force outcomes while remaining deeply compatible with, and feeding, the experiences they wish to leave behind. They want peace while feeding conflict. They want abundance while reinforcing scarcity. They seek freedom while continuing patterns that generate entrapment.

One possible misunderstanding is to think that compatibility means we are somehow destined to experience a particular reality, or that we must simply accept it. It doesn’t. Compatibility points to the reality we spend the most time nourishing through our attention, thoughts, actions, choices, conversations, programs and relationships, whether we consciously chose it or not.

Changing what we are compatible with begins by becoming aware of the countless ways we participate in a particular discourse, then consciously cultivating compatibility with the discourse we wish to experience.

One practical exercise is deceptively simple.

Throughout the day, pause several times and ask yourself, “What reality am I compatible with right now?”

Do not answer intellectually. Observe your conversations. Notice your emotional reactions, assumptions, entertainment, habits, and expectations. These often reveal far more than our stated intentions. Did you notice yourself defending the very patterns you say you want to change?

This is often where lip service becomes visible. What we say we want and what we are compatible with through feeding and energizing are not always the same.

Relationships provide another valuable laboratory. The people with whom we cultivate the strongest threads of connectivity often reflect the discourse with which we have become compatible. They can reveal our current reality more accurately than anything else.

Reality shifts are often gradual rather than dramatic. Small adjustments in compatibility accumulate until the surrounding discourse begins to reflect them in unmistakable ways.

The model itself has remained remarkably consistent throughout my research. What has evolved is the lexicon I use to describe it. I have found that a simple change in language can make the construction of reality much easier to observe, understand, and investigate. Sometimes a new word does not simply describe an idea more accurately. It allows us to perceive relationships between incidents and manifestations that were difficult to recognize before.

For now, one sentence summarizes the entire model:

Become aware of the reality with which you are currently compatible. Then consciously cultivate compatibility with the reality you choose to experience.

As a researcher of consciousness and reality, my work now focuses on refining practical methods that help people recognize their current compatibility and consciously cultivate a different one. The goal is simple: make the process understandable, repeatable, and accessible to anyone willing to observe and participate. If that’s you, you know where to find me.

The discussion doesn’t stop here - listen to the full podcast episode for unfiltered insights from Inelia and our panelists.

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Continuing the conversation from last week.

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