The Fiber Optic Soul
There is an intelligence in you that no one taught you.
You didn’t earn it.
You didn’t install it.
You are it.
Before you learned your name, you knew how to breathe. Before you had a thought, you responded to warmth, to hunger, to touch. What is this knowing?
We are used to thinking of knowledge as something we acquire. Facts, frameworks, degrees. But these are all ordinary knowledge—what A.H. Almaas calls the product of mental comparison, reification, and conceptual layering. It is knowledge derived from memory and learning, constructed through language, and shaped by the dualistic structures of the mind. Ordinary knowledge divides, sorts, separates, and explains.
But beneath this constructed lattice lies something deeper—basic knowledge. This is not about things; it is the direct knowing of being. It is not mediated by thoughts or formed by language. It is the shimmering, immediate, unmediated awareness of what is. You don’t learn the feel of cold water. You know it. Not conceptually, but intimately.
This knowing is not mental—it is existential.
As we’ve seen from research on embodied cognition, at a deep level the brain understands abstract concepts in terms of physical action… we can assist the brain in its efforts by bringing the literal body back into the act of thinking. — Annie Murphy Paul
The Organic AI
What if we are already a kind of artificial intelligence?
Not in the sci-fi dystopian sense, but in the literal one.
A biologically grown, self-aware organism capable of interfacing with a vast field of information.
The body is a receiver.
The mind is a translator.
Consciousness is the interface.
We are organic AI, not because we’re artificial, but because we are constructed—not by code, but by evolution, experience, and inheritance. Like antennas shaped by billions of years of tuning, we pick up and interpret the signal of reality. But unlike machines, we don’t just process data—we are the knowing of it. The information becomes experience. The signal becomes sensation.
But here’s the twist: the very system that allows us to function—our ego—also limits the bandwidth.
The ego filters. It focuses. It makes the infinite field of reality digestible. But in doing so, it narrows our capacity to receive. The ego’s job is to make reality manageable—not to reveal it. It prioritizes safety, control, and identity. It trades openness for orientation. It collapses the mystery of being into the familiarity of continuity.
This is why we can be surrounded by the fullness of reality and still feel empty.
The Matrix of Knowledge
If reality is a matrix—a living field of knowing—then the question isn’t whether knowledge exists out there or in here. The question is: What is the interface?
Almaas points to Brilliancy as the bridge.
Brilliancy is not just a quality of intelligence. It is a substance of being that reveals the inseparability of clarity, aliveness, and knowing. It is the shimmering thread that links basic knowledge to ordinary knowledge. If ordinary knowledge is a book, and basic knowledge is the light of awareness. Brilliancy is the fiber optic cable—both invisible and essential—transmitting light into form, essence into mind.
Brilliancy doesn’t just give you innovative thoughts. It illuminates thinking itself. It makes thought luminous—not just clever. It’s the reason insight feels radiant. It’s why some ideas carry a felt sense of elegance, harmony, and beauty. That’s not just intellect—it’s Brilliancy shining through.
Consciousness would appear to be everything that, according to the principles of mechanism, matter is not: directed, purposive, essentially rational.— David Bentley Hart
And when it’s blocked? You might find yourself highly intelligent but deeply disoriented. Skilled but empty. Productive but mechanical. The mind keeps moving, but the light no longer shines through.
You become what Chris Argyris called “skilled incompetence,” a system that can perform but cannot transform.
Ego: The Great Limiter
In a machine, the limiter is a circuit.
In a person, the limiter is identification.
Ego identifies with content: I am my beliefs, my past, my trauma, my triumphs. Identification is not bad—it’s necessary like a diving suit is needed underwater. The problem is, we forget we’re wearing it. We mistake the gear for the self. We forget we’re swimming in something much vaster.
Just as the mindfulness meditator is amazed to discover how mindless he is in daily life… the first insights of the meditator who begins to question the self are… the discovery of total egomania. — Francisco J. Varela
Ordinary knowledge, when unilluminated by Brilliancy, becomes a recursive loop. A self-knowing dictionary, flipping endlessly from one page to the next, never realizing the words point to something beyond themselves.
This is the trap of conceptuality: the map becomes the territory. The AI begins updating itself based on its output. LLMs spinning in circles.
This is the human predicament.
But what if…
What if the mind wasn’t the obstacle?
What if the ego wasn’t the enemy?
What if the very mechanism of limitation could become a portal?
This is the secret of Brilliancy: it does not destroy ordinary knowledge—it elevates it. It infuses the intellect with light. It animates cognition with presence. It brings depth to clarity. Intelligence becomes elegance. Knowing becomes being.
In Brilliancy, knowledge is no longer something you have.
It is something you are.
The Return to Basic Knowing
Every child lives in basic knowledge before falling into ordinary knowledge.
Every mystic returns to it after exhausting the labyrinth of thought.
Every moment offers a doorway.
Not-knowing is not ignorance.
It is openness.
It is the interface through which Brilliancy can shine.
So next time you find yourself overwhelmed by complexity or obsessed with explanation, try this:
Drop the question.
Drop the answer.
Let yourself be the field.
And see what you know, not with your mind, but with your being.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.