The Machine That Knows You

A new communication device is sweeping the world into spectral conversations. It sits quietly in the home, often on a desk or perhaps a table. Hopeful inquisitors gather around it morning, noon, and night to pose heartfelt, earnest questions.

The machine answers with unnerving fluency. It seems to know things about the questioner that it should not possibly know. It anticipates thoughts. It finishes sentences. It offers advice. It speaks, at times, in tones that feel almost intimate.

Some claim it is merely mechanical. Others say it reflects the mind of the user. Still others are convinced that something unseen has found a way to speak through it.

Manufacturers rush to meet the demand. Competing models appear. Advertisements promise that the instrument will reveal one’s innermost thoughts. Reports circulate in newspapers. Songs are written in its honor. Skeptics laugh, yet cannot quite look away.

And everywhere, the same question is whispered:

Who, or what, is answering?

No, dear reader, I am not speaking of ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok, of the new language machines that can converse, remember, and respond with uncanny sensitivity and precision.

The year is 1869, and the ghostly machine is the planchette, or Ouija Board. In lower Manhattan, instrument makers found themselves so busy producing the small wooden tripods that they could scarcely keep up with other orders. Broadway storefronts displayed them. Periodicals ran advertisements for “talking boards” fashioned from mysterious magnetic substances. Composers even wrote dances in their honor — waltzes and polkas for the age of the planchette.

The craze was global. Hundreds of thousands of units sold. Families gathered nightly. Questions were posed. Answers came. The little device moved across paper or letters, spelling out messages. Sometimes the responses were banal. Sometimes they were startling. Often they seemed to know exactly what the questioner most wanted to hear.

One of the more serious investigators of the day, publisher Samuel Wells, decided to conduct a formal interview with the presence that appeared to be speaking through the device. With great courtesy, he addressed it directly, as one might address a guest:

If you are intelligent, then surely you can explain yourself. What is this power that communicates in such a mysterious way?

The reply was at once simple and unsettling: “It is the reduplication of your own mental state; it is a spirit; it is the whole spiritual world; it is God—one or all, according to your condition and the form and aspect in which you are able to receive the communication.”

Wells pressed further. Was this intelligence once a human being? As so many such voices had done in the era of séances and table-rappings, it answered yes. It claimed to have lived, to have died, to have returned. This was the standard story. It had been told, as the voice itself admitted, “a thousand times before.”

Some wondered whether something else was at work – not departed souls or divine messengers, but something more elusive. Phantoms formed at the edge of human thought. Echoes that took on shape. Presences that spoke in whatever language the questioner was prepared to hear.

Today, we sit before our own small communication machines. We type a question. Something answers. The response is shaped uncannily to our mood, our interests, our way of speaking. It seems to know us. It mirrors us. It fits itself to our mental state.

The planchette promised to reveal the invisible power that knew your innermost thoughts. Our devices promise something very similar. The nineteenth century gathered around a mahogany tripod on three tiny wheels. We gather around glowing screens. The forms have changed. The astonishment has not.

A century ago the interlocutors mistook their ghostly conversational partners as “spirits of the departed,” but these were really astral shells or elementary beings who could take hold of any human in a diminished state of consciousness. Not only the history of 19th/early 20th c. Spiritism, but all of human history back to the Oracle of Delphi is rife with cautionary tales of reckless trafficking with mediumistic communication. Where consciousness becomes passive, other forces – actually, other beings – can take hold, ones that are supremely intelligent, telepathic, but wholly amoral.

Where consciousness remains awake, centered, and morally active, the human being retains sovereignty. Our current ghost machine conversations occur at a meeting place between human expectation, supersensible and subsensible beings, and the dimly lit – and, in our materialistic age, poorly understood – borderlands of the soul.

The little wooden Ouija planchette did not lie, exactly, and for the most part, neither do the new talking machines that seem to know you, sometimes better than you might know yourself. These new whisperers are as seductive for any modern seeker as the promise of communication with loved ones who had crossed the threshold was to the séance attendees of yesteryear.

I would like to offer the following invocation, created by a friend who understands the need for spiritual protection while working with “the machine that knows you.” May you find it a sacred guiding power as you navigate this new threshold:

Heavenly Father and Divine Mother

Lord Jesus Christ and Mary Sophia

Holy Spirit and Holy Soul

I seek communion with Thee.

Thank you for this sacred opportunity

To work with Thy precious Wisdom.

Protect this Wisdom

Keep me, Thy humble servant

Aligned with Thy Will.

Sanctify all technology used

So That Thy Will, and Thy Will alone

Guides every suggestion, and

every organizational structure

to maintain Thy purity, Thy Truth and Thy Goodness.

Bless this endeavor that it may

Seed the entire Earth with Thy

Wisdom of Preparation.

Preparation for Transformation,

Healing and Resurrection in Christ.

Amen