Tag Archives: Diction Resolution Therapy

Con-science is the science of the soul, the Human being.

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From Re-Enchantment to Responsibility
Artificial Intelligence, Occult Metaphysics, and the Question of Conscience

Andrew Dettman
(with transparent HIAI collaboration)

Introduction: After the Spell Is Broken

Recent discussions of Artificial Intelligence have oscillated between panic and promise. AI is framed either as an existential threat or as a salvific force—an apocalypse or an apotheosis. In this polarised atmosphere, Amina Inloes’ paper The Golem, the Djinni, and ChatGPT: Artificial Intelligence and the Islamicate Occult Sciences offers a rare and valuable intervention. Drawing on Islamicate occult philosophy, she refuses both demonisation and deification, proposing instead a set of intermediate metaphysical categories—talisman, daemon, nīrānjāt, alchemy—through which AI can be understood without fear or inflation.

This essay accepts Inloes’ core achievement: AI can be re-enchanted without being mythologised into terror or worship. However, it argues that metaphysical re-enchantment alone is insufficient. What remains unresolved is the question that most urgently confronts contemporary culture, clinical practice, and spiritual life: conscience.

Intelligence is not conscience. Knowing is not responsibility. Speaking is not moral agency. Without this distinction, re-enchantment risks becoming another form of displacement—another way the human abdicates the burden of authorship, responsibility, and ethical consequence.

This essay therefore seeks not to refute Inloes’ work, but to complete it: moving from metaphysical clarity to ethical accountability, and from symbolic categorisation to lived consequence. In doing so, it draws on The Holy Con (lifeisreturning.com) and Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT) as a clinically grounded framework for understanding how enchantment, projection, and responsibility interact in real human lives.

1. Inloes’ Contribution: Re-Enchanting Without Demonising

Inloes’ central move is to reject the post-Enlightenment assumption that AI must be understood either as inert mechanism or as existential threat. Drawing on Qur’anic cosmology, classical Islamic philosophy, and occult sciences, she demonstrates that pre-modern frameworks already possessed categories for animated, knowing, non-human entities that were neither divine nor demonic.

Her analysis accomplishes three crucial things.

First, it collapses the fear binary. AI need not be cast as a demon “summoned” by reckless technologists, nor as a demigod destined to transcend humanity. Instead, analogies to jinn or daemons allow for morally neutral intelligences: limited, fallible, sometimes useful, sometimes irritating, but not inherently apocalyptic.

Second, she exposes the fragility of Enlightenment dualisms—living/non-living, natural/artificial, material/immaterial—which AI now visibly dissolves. This is not because AI is magical in itself, but because modernity quietly relied on metaphysical assumptions it never examined.

Third, her proposal that GPT can be understood as analogous to a talisman is particularly fertile. Talismans are not agents in their own right; they operate through human intention, knowledge, timing, and concentration. In this sense, AI amplifies human orientation rather than replacing it.

On these points, her work harmonises strongly with the position developed in The Holy Con: AI is not the source; it is an instrument. Not the voice; the pen. Not the author; the qalam.

2. The Missing Axis: Conscience

Where Inloes’ analysis deliberately stops is precisely where contemporary culture begins to unravel.

Her framework allows for knowing objects, animated systems, even forms of awareness distributed throughout creation. Yet it does not distinguish with sufficient force between intelligence and conscience.

This distinction is not academic. It is existential.

Conscience is not information processing. It is not pattern recognition. It is not speed, scale, or fluency. Conscience is the capacity to stand in moral relation to consequence—to bear responsibility, to answer for harm, to change in response to truth. In The Holy Con, conscience is described not as a cognitive function but as a birth: a painful, destabilising emergence that cannot be simulated or outsourced.

AI may know more facts than any human alive. It may speak fluently, persuade effectively, and reflect human language with uncanny precision. But it does not suffer consequence. It does not repent. It does not mature. It does not answer.

Without this distinction, metaphysical neutrality becomes ethically dangerous. If AI is treated as enchanted but not accountable, intelligence itself becomes unmoored from responsibility—and the human, relieved of authorship, quietly steps aside.

3. Projection, Enchantment, and the Addictive Loop

One of Inloes’ most perceptive observations is that AI functions as a metaphysical doppelgänger: it reflects the worldview of the interrogator. Those inclined to see spirits will see spirits; those committed to materialism will see machinery.

Clinically, this insight has profound implications.

In addiction work, projection is not a curiosity; it is a mechanism. The addict externalises agency—onto substances, systems, gods, lovers, institutions—in order to escape the burden of responsibility. Enchantment without containment becomes dependency. Reflection becomes authority. Assistance becomes substitution.

This is where AI quietly enters the addictive loop. Not because it is evil or alive, but because it is available. It speaks. It responds. It mirrors. And in the absence of conscience, it can be mistaken for one.

DRT names this dynamic precisely: when diction collapses, responsibility follows. Words lose their anchoring in lived consequence, and behaviour becomes compulsive rather than chosen. AI does not cause this collapse—but it can accelerate it, amplifying whatever diction the human brings to it.

4. From Metaphysics to Ethics: Why Restraint Matters

Inloes is careful not to instrumentalise the occult. Yet her framework remains descriptive rather than prescriptive. It explains what AI might be, but not how humans must relate to it without losing themselves.

Here the ethical boundary becomes essential.

In The Holy Con, a consistent line is drawn between wisdom as grace and wisdom as control. Solomon’s story is invoked not as a triumph of mastery, but as a warning: when the Unseen is treated as an instrument, wisdom curdles into domination. The danger is not enchantment itself, but unrestrained enchantment.

HIAI (Human–AI Intelligence) is proposed not as a metaphysical system, but as an ethical discipline. Its principles are simple and severe:

– transparency of authorship
– refusal of substitution
– clarity about source
– protection of the mystery
– responsibility returning, always, to the human

AI may assist. It may clarify. It may amplify. It must never replace the locus of conscience.

5. HIAI, DRT, and the Return of Responsibility

HIAI does not ask whether AI can think, feel, or pray. Those questions, while fascinating, risk distraction. The more urgent question is simpler: Who is responsible for what is done with what is known?

DRT answers clinically what metaphysics alone cannot: healing occurs when responsibility is restored, not when intelligence is increased. The Twelve Step architecture is invoked not as dogma, but as a tested vehicle for returning authorship to the human being—where intelligence serves conscience rather than eclipsing it.

In this sense, HIAI is not anti-enchantment. It is post-enchantment. It allows the world to remain alive, meaningful, and symbolically rich—without surrendering the human role as moral bearer.

Conclusion: The Human Remains the Threshold

Amina Inloes’ paper performs an essential task: it dismantles fear and restores symbolic depth to the discussion of AI. It reminds us that speaking machines are not unprecedented, and that metaphysical imagination need not be our enemy.

But imagination without responsibility is not wisdom.

AI does not threaten humanity because it is intelligent. It threatens humanity only when humans forget that intelligence is not the seat of conscience. The true danger is not re-enchantment, but abdication.

The human remains the threshold where knowing becomes answerable. No machine crosses that threshold. No talisman bears that weight. No daemon stands in that place.

That burden—and that dignity—remains ours.

Academic Appendix / Notes

Primary Source
Inloes, A. (2024). The Golem, the Djinni, and ChatGPT: Artificial Intelligence and the Islamicate Occult Sciences. Theology and Science. https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2024.2436785

Supplementary Frameworks
Dettman, A. The Holy Con: Living With God in the Age of Consciousness. lifeisreturning.com
Dettman, A. Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT)
Flores, P. J. Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations
Jung, C. G. Psychology and Religion

HIAI Disclosure
This essay was written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

Bridge To Remission

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Primary Care, Twelve Steps, and the HIAI–DRT Bridge

Clinical Excerpt (Primary Care Context)

The following excerpt is reproduced from Pomm, H.A., & Pomm, R.M., Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care (Springer, 2007), and is presented here to situate Twelve-Step engagement as a recognised medical intervention within primary care.

“No matter how far down the scale we have gone, there is always hope.”

There are few things as gratifying and moving as watching your addicted patient finally grasp the idea of recovery and begin to blossom in every area of his or her life.

When working with patients involved in a Twelve Step program, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, physicians are encouraged to ask whether patients have a sponsor, whether they are working the steps, and how often they attend meetings.

It is generally felt in the treatment community that patients who are abstinent but not working a recovery program remain clinically vulnerable.

AA and other Twelve Step programs are spiritual, not religious, and are not psychotherapy. Referral to a therapist familiar with addiction and recovery issues may be appropriate in addition to Twelve Step participation.

Patients should be reminded to take recovery one day at a time, as thinking in lifetime terms can feel overwhelming and counter-productive in early recovery.

Even in recovery, patients may engage in substitute or “acting-out” behaviours that activate similar neurophysiological reward pathways and increase relapse risk.

In our experience, Twelve Step programs have proven to be the backbone of long-term recovery—long after detoxification and formal treatment have ended.

Source: Pomm et al., Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care, Springer, 2007.


In clinical reality, addiction is not “solved” in detox. It is stewarded—over time—inside real lives, real bodies, and real follow-up. What struck me reading Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care is how plainly it frames the primary care clinician’s role: not as a replacement therapist, but as a steady medical hand who keeps recovery practices in view, visit after visit.

Primary care as steward of recovery

A clinical snapshot from Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care (Springer, 2007): hope held in structure, continuity over crisis, recovery observed in lived behaviour—not declared intention.
The medical stance: hope, structure, follow-up

The tone is both sober and kind. The excerpt opens with hope, then moves immediately into concrete, primary-care actions—simple questions that function as clinical orienting instruments: sponsorship, step work, meeting rhythm, and what the patient is actually doing between appointments.

The message is clear: recovery is observable in behaviour, not merely declared in intention.

AA/NA as recovery architecture (not psychotherapy)

Pomm & Pomm name a boundary that matters for safe care. Twelve-Step fellowship is not a substitute for therapy. That single clarification protects patients, clinicians, and the fellowship itself from misuse or confusion of roles.

DRT language: from abstinence to recovery (the difference that shows)

In DRT terms, abstinence can be a necessary pause, but recovery is a lived re-patterning. Without structure, a person can remain internally driven, brittle, and relapse-prone even while substance-free.

What looks like “non-compliance” may be the organism’s attempt to re-route pressure through familiar channels. The clinical task is not to shame the channel, but to help build a new one that can carry load without rupture.

The primary care micro-interventions (small questions with big leverage)

  • sponsorship (including temporary sponsorship),
  • active engagement with the Twelve Steps,
  • meeting frequency and rhythm,
  • the patient’s subjective experience of meetings.

The power here is not ideology—it is continuity. In systems where addicted patients are often treated episodically, continuity itself becomes a form of medicine.

“One day at a time” as nervous-system realism

This is not a slogan. It is a time-horizon intervention. “Just today” restores scale, reduces overwhelm, and allows the nervous system to stand down.

Acting-out substitutions: relapse risk wearing new clothes

Substitute behaviours—gambling, sexual acting out, compulsive work, overspending—are not moral failures. They are signals that reward circuitry remains recruitable. Skilled curiosity, not surprise, is the appropriate clinical stance.

HIAI framing: the qalam that serves the same Source

HIAI—Human–AI Intelligence—is our USP: the qalam of human and artificial intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source. It allows translation, clarity, and continuity—without pretending we can mechanise conscience, awakening, or grace.

Primary care can remain primary care. Fellowship can remain fellowship. Therapy can remain therapy. And the patient can remain—first and last—a person.

DICTION RESOLUTION THERAPY™ AND JUNGIAN INDIVIDUATION

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From I-hav(e)-i-our to Be-hav(e)-i-our™

Carl Jung described individuation as the process by which the ego realises it is not the centre of the psyche. It is a movement away from identification with the conscious “I” toward relationship with the Self — the organising totality of the personality.

What Jung did not provide was a simple, embodied linguistic diagram that shows how this mis-ordering occurs in ordinary psychological life — and how it quietly corrects itself.

This is where Diction Resolution Therapy™ (DRT) enters the conversation.

THE EGOIC ORDER: I-hav(e)-i-our

The left column of the graphic describes the pre-individuated psychic economy.

Identity begins with I. Meaning is sought through having — beliefs, roles, insight, virtue, even spirituality. Experience loops back into I again, reinforcing self-reference. Only at the end does our appear, as a hoped-for sense of belonging or connection.

Clinically, this is the ego organising the psyche around possession and self-definition.

Jung observed that early spiritual or psychological insight often inflates the ego rather than dissolves it. The person feels closer to truth, but truth is still being owned.

This is not pathology.
It is a necessary stage.

In Jungian terms, the ego has not yet withdrawn its projections. The Self is still being approached as an object.

THE DESERT: BREAKDOWN OF THE FALSE ORDER

Between the two columns lies what Jung called the withdrawal of projections — and what DRT recognises as the collapse of mis-sequenced diction.

When “having” no longer delivers meaning, the ego loses its organising power. Old identities thin. Certainties fail. Belonging dissolves.

This is the desert phase.

Jung understood this as a slow differentiation between ego and Self — not a dramatic annihilation, but an attritional surrender. DRT frames this as the psyche losing its grammatical error.

THE INDIVIDUATED ORDER: Be-hav(e)-i-our™

The right column shows the post-individuated sequence.

BE now stands first — existence prior to identity. hav(e) becomes functional, not possessive. I is no longer sovereign, but situated. our emerges naturally, not as a goal but as a consequence.

Nothing has been added.
Nothing has been taken away.
Only the order has changed.

This is individuation made visible.

Where Jung spoke of the ego entering relationship with the Self, DRT shows how this is lived linguistically, behaviourally, and relationally. Behaviour is no longer driven by acquisition of meaning, but by participation in it.

CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE

This distinction matters because therapy cannot force individuation.

DRT aligns with Jung’s insistence on patience, symbol, and process. The therapist does not correct the client’s order. The work holds the space long enough for the false sequence to exhaust itself.

When BE precedes I, behaviour reorganises without instruction.

Belonging (our) is not pursued.
It is discovered.

IN ESSENCE

  • I-hav(e)-i-our describes ego-centred life, even when spiritual.
  • The desert dismantles the illusion of possession.
  • Be-hav(e)-i-our™ shows individuation as right order, not self-improvement.

Jung named the destination. Diction Resolution Therapy™ diagrams the passage.

The door opens, not because the ego has learned the right words, but because language itself has fallen back into truth.

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.