If you look through the eyes of a child, the whole world feels alive. There is life in everything and everything is in conversation. As we grow up, we start to perceive life as more mechanical. We adopt habits to cope with stress but which detach us from more dynamic ways of seeing the world.

In the Vedic tradition, people believe they can instill prana, or subtle life force, into inanimate objects through a process called pranapratishta. Vedic astrology, too, attributes personalities to planets and speaks of the connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm.

In the northern Himalayas and in Tibetan traditions, people believe they can communicate with deities. Indigenous cultures from Native American communities, Balinese healers, and Māori elders have long seen nature as alive, responsive, and mystical. 

Today, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The world is on the edge of a profound transformation. Machines are beginning to predict and perform tasks once considered uniquely human. And due to advancements in artificial intelligence, they can do this faster, at greater scale, and at a fraction of the cost. While this promises extraordinary progress, it is also........

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