2024 Mahashivaratri Message
Every year on the auspicious night of nature’s greatest tranquillity, Mahashivaratri, Jagadguru Swami Isa delivers a message about an upcoming challenge that is likely to be faced by Earth due to human activity. These messages are intended to shine a light on the short window of opportunity that we have to change course and avert major forthcoming disasters. They are a call for people everywhere to awaken and take necessary action, immediately and sincerely, in whichever ways we can.
In 2024, on March 8th, Swami Isa’s Mahashivaratri address began with an addendum to last year’s theme of the grave dangers of quantum research.
Swamiji said that scientific research organisations around the world are working to develop applications of the theory of quantum entanglement (when multiple objects—such as a pair of electrons or photons—share a single quantum state). Some places are working on extremely dangerous new weapons that use this principle. There is the potential for creating an uncontrollable chain reaction that could cause unprecedented destruction.
Last year, Swamiji told us that not long ago, only soldiers could fight, and warfare was on the gross physical plane. But now, thanks to scientific discoveries, everybody can fight, and battles are not restricted to the physical plane. Recently, warfare extended to the subtle plane, and now it is taking place on the causal plane, the plane of quantum energy. When scientific interference travels beyond the gross plane to the causal plane, the impact is unimaginable, Swami Isa says, because the universe is interconnected.
Secondly, Swami Isa calls our attention to the great new threat of ‘organic artificial intelligence’. Research has been going on for a few decades into using biological materials to perform computations, and into the interactions between computers and organic systems. Brain-to-computer interfaces, brain-to-brain interfaces, biocomputing, ‘organoid intelligence’, and computer-designed organisms that reproduce are just a few examples. Brain implants and embedded microchips in human bodies have recently been successful. Other researchers are interested in the creation of genetically modified ‘designer babies’, or new generations of people that are cognitively and/or physically enhanced.
Blurring the lines between human intelligence and artificial intelligence will carry grave consequences, Swami Isa warns. If humans begin to accept artificial forms of data — including engineered genes, the original human data — in their brains and bodies, human nature will gradually become machine nature. Negative information can be programmed in human thought that acts just like a bomb. Such programming can result in worse than human forms, like demons.
Now, robots are imitating human beings. If we continue in this way, after some time, human beings will be living like robots. People won't be able to tell the difference between AI and human beings. And both will be able to be controlled externally, especially in war. Human beings won't be wanted, only robots, inside the office and everywhere else.
Human beings are not for machines. Machines are for human beings. The purpose of artificial intelligence is not to change humane thought.