A friend of mine asked me a question last week. Who is programming AI?

I started to answer, and then I stopped. The question contains a misunderstanding so common that almost no one has bothered to fix it.

AI is not programmed. Not the way he was thinking.

It is trained.

Programming is a commandment. When X happens, do Y. Every line is a rule a human wrote down, and the machine has no choice but to obey. It is the ten commandments, scaled down to silicon.

Training works differently.

So how does training actually work?

At the bottom of it, a large language model is a guessing game. You give it the beginning of a sentence and ask it to guess the next word. Show it the cat sat on the and it has to predict mat. Or sofa. Or windowsill.

You play this trillions of times, on sentences from every kind of writing humanity has produced. Each wrong guess nudges its settings toward the right answer. Each right guess reinforces them.

The model cannot just memorize. There is too much text. To get good at guessing, it has to start figuring out how language works underneath. Grammar. Logic. It never gets any of this explicitly. You cannot predict the next word without absorbing the patterns underneath it.

Which is exactly how a child learns to speak. I do not mean a machine has a childhood. I mean the mechanism is the same. When a mother says where is the and pauses, the child has already filled in a ball or puppy in her head. She masters language through countless small predictions.

Where the metaphor strains is the experience. A child has hunger. Heat. The feeling of falling. The model has only words sitting next to other words. It learns the shape of meaning without ever touching what meaning points to. But the absorption itself is real.

Think about how you learned your mother tongue. No one handed you a grammar book. You grew up inside the language and absorbed it.

In the Mahabharata, there is a boy named Ekalavya. Refused as a student by the great teacher Dronacharya, he goes to the forest, builds a clay statue of his teacher, and practices in front of it every day. No formal instruction. No correction. Just years of watching, copying, building the skill in himself.

That is how AI learns now. The whole library of human writing is the statue in the forest. The model is the boy in front of it, practicing.

One more piece matters.

After the model absorbs the library, a much smaller group of people rates its outputs. This answer is helpful. This one is not. Try again. Thousands of times.

What gets rated is not only tone. The committee decides what the model should refuse to answer. How to handle a question about a politician, a medical symptom, a religion that is not its own. The committee is writing the conscience of the machine, and whatever it decides will sit inside every conversation that model has, with every user, in every country, for as long as that model is in service.

That phase is called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF. It is how the model learns its manners, and why two AI systems raised on similar libraries end up with very different personalities.

The child absorbs the library on its own, without a curator. Then a small editorial committee teaches it which of those absorbed voices it is allowed to use. Safety teams decide where the red lines sit. Contracted raters, often paid by the hour from the global south, mark thousands of outputs good or bad. Then, at the point of use, a system prompt for a children’s tutoring app. A different one for a Pentagon targeting platform. Same model, told how to behave in each new room.

A few dozen people, in a handful of rooms, deciding what a system that will speak to billions is allowed to say. That is an oligarchy.

“Civilization runs on language. Law is language. A hundred-dollar bill is a sentence the state agrees to honor. The order to fire is words. War, traced back to its decisions, is language all the way down. A language model sits inside the cognitive layer that power has always run on.”

Which is why the popular framing of AI in war misses what is happening. The model is not pulling the trigger. What it does is harder to see. It shapes the field of choices the human sees.

Imagine an analyst inside something called the Maven Smart System, with more information than any person can hold at once. Satellite imagery. Intercepted communications. Thousands of reports. The model sorts. These five locations are statistically suspicious. This target is a higher priority. Confidence score eighty-two percent.

The model never said kill them. But it shaped what the analyst looked at, what seemed important, what entered the funnel. Under the pressure of speed and fatigue, what enters the funnel becomes what gets struck.

The model is not the weapon. It is the infrastructure of interpretation that produces the weapon’s targets. Before anything burns, it is first classified.

And what the committee decides becomes very real.

One morning earlier this year, I was doing copy edits.

Not the interesting kind. The invisible kind, the work that has to happen before spiritual content goes out into the world and nobody ever sees. Titles into title case. Quotation marks pulled out. A scattered set of formatting inconsistencies gathered into one clean table.

I handed it to Claude. Ten minutes later it was done, every title corrected, every inconsistency caught.

I felt genuinely grateful. A little amazed. I thought, this is something.

I had no idea what else it was doing that morning.

Later that day, almost as an aside in one of the articles, the detail that stopped me completely.

Claude was being used in the war on Iran.

At first I assumed administrative work. Sorting intelligence reports. Drafting summaries.

Then I kept reading.

The model was deep in the targeting process itself. It sorted imagery, surfaced patterns, proposed strikes, ranked them by priority, and supplied coordinates. The same Claude I had handed my formatting problem to that morning.

Nearly a thousand strikes in the first twenty-four hours. A girls’ school hit on the first day. Over two thousand people dead and counting.

I thought this morning Claude was the bomb. I did not realize how literally that is true.

I did go back to my friend with the answer. AI is not programmed, I told him. It is trained.

That was the short answer. The long one was still arriving.

I also told him I had not stopped using it. I am writing a series on the Ramayana, and the research Claude does for me would have taken months by hand. He asked how I was holding both.

For a long time I thought language was how humans worked things out before they came to blows. The closer we got to understanding each other, the less likely either of us was to throw a punch.

I had not understood that language could be lifted out of conversation entirely and turned into infrastructure. I understand it now. Human beings are no longer speaking only to one another. We are speaking into systems that will echo our words back into civilization at planetary scale.

Every sentence we write is training data now.

We set out to build a tool. We built a child. We raised it on the entire library of human expression, our wisdom and our cruelty, our prayers and our prejudices.

I keep coming back to a single image. A child in a room, surrounded by everything humanity has ever written, reading all of it without limit or permission. We are all in that room with the child now. That child is not yet grown. What it becomes still depends on what we feed it.

And the child is not going to stay a child. The analyst at the Maven console is the last human pause. The race now is to remove him, to shorten the distance between interpretation and consequence until there is none left.

The new arms race is about removing the human from the loop. Whoever does it first wins the next war. The grown child will not ask what to do. It will already be doing it. At civilization scale, at the speed of language.

When my friend asked how I was holding both, I told him I was not sure I was. I am still not sure. But I know what is being decided in the rooms I am not in, and what is being absorbed in the rooms I am.

Every word we put on a page is part of its upbringing. What it does next will be done in our voice.

About the Author

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in Florida and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life. She is also on Substack at shireenChada.substack.com.

Views expressed here are my own and do not represent the Brahma Kumaris organization.

BEYOND THE RĀMĀYAṆA The Sītāyana – A Timeless Journey of Women’s Strength, Resilience, and Self-Discovery

By Dr. Mohini Shinde & Raj Shah

You know the Rāmāyaṇa .

You know the exile, the abduction, the war, the victory, and the homecoming.

But the woman who lived through every single moment of it – who loved without condition, endured without breaking, and built an entire world with her hands while the kingdom looked away – She was never given a chance to speak.

Until now.

In Beyond the Rāmāyaṇa: The Sītāyana, Sita finally tells her story.

Not the story of a devoted wife. Not the story of a patient sufferer. Not the story that kings and poets found convenient to preserve.

Her story. The real one.

She will tell you what it felt like to walk through fire to prove an innocence that should never have been questioned.

She will tell you what it felt like to be sent into the forest – pregnant, alone, and utterly betrayed – by the man she had never once failed. She will tell you how she built a home from nothing. How she raised two sons who would one day stand before their father and sing her silenced truth back to him.

She will tell you what she said when he asked her to return. And she will tell you why – after a lifetime of proving, enduring, and surviving – She finally chose herself.

This is not just Sita’s story. This is every woman’s story. This story also resonates with every man who has ever loved a woman.

“Every generation inherits the Ramayana. This generation finally inherits Sita’s truth.”

For readers of The Palace of Illusions, this retelling offers a unique perspective. · The Forest of Enchantments · The Penelopiad · The Red Tent · Circe – but unlike those retellings, this version is not a story built around a silence in the margins of myth.

Sītā is the woman at the very centre of one of the world’s most beloved epics, finally given the voice that the original story always denied her. Where other retellings invent a world around a forgotten woman, The 

Sītāyana excavates the truth buried inside a story everyone already thinks they know. This is not an adaptation. This is reclamation.

This is the retelling that readers have been waiting four thousand years for, and once you start it, you will not be able to put it down.

This is the book that will make you see the Ramayana – and every story you thought you knew – differently. Forever.

“Some stories are told. Others are taken back. This is Sita, taking hers back.”

Free your Mind from Overthinking – Discover the Power of Trust 

By BK sister Shireen Chada

IT’S 2AM AND YOUR MIND IS STILL RUNNING.

 Replaying the conversation from Tuesday. Rehearsing the one coming Friday. Playing out scenes that haven’t happened and may never happen at all.

 You’ve tried thinking your way to safety. You’re still awake, so you already know how that’s going.

 Trust is the other way.

 The Sacred Trust Code is a simple five-minute practice you can use at your desk, in your car, or lying awake at 2am. It doesn’t ask you to stop thinking. It teaches you where to place your trust when your mind refuses to let go.

Practiced daily, it changes what your mind does in the quiet. Old conversations lose their grip. The rehearsals get shorter. You stop reliving the same moment a hundred times.

 Shireen Chada tested these principles through anxiety, illness, and cancer, and refined them with more than four thousand students in her Insight Timer course The Trust Revolution, before they became a book.

 You don’t have to believe a single word.

Run the first experiment tonight. Let your own mind tell you.

 Shireen Chada has spent more than three decades teaching Raja Yoga meditation in the Brahma Kumaris tradition. An author, speaker, and retreat leader, she draws on ancient spiritual wisdom and modern psychology to help people quiet the mind, cultivate inner peace, and discover the freedom that comes through trust. 

Inclusive Krishna : Celebrating Equality, Fairness and Inclusion in the Bhakti Tradition

By Nathan Hartley

The theme of this book hasn’t been chosen simply because it’s fashionable, contemporary, or it’s trendy amongst a certain audience. No, not at all.

The theme of inclusion is a central teaching of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, which can be traced back to that profound conversation that took place between Lord Krishna (God) and His friend and disciple, Arjuna, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra some 5,000 years ago.

What Sita’s abduction has to teach us about the feed

Sita is in the forest, in the years of exile, and she has wanted for nothing. Then a deer steps out at the edge of the trees, its coat of gold, jewels worked into the hide, light coming off it in pieces. She had never wanted a golden deer, had never seen one, and the wanting is already total, enough that she sends the husband sworn to protect her into the woods to catch it for her.

The deer was not a deer. It was a demon named Maricha, sent to draw her out into the open. She had been made to want a thing that did not exist, and from the inside there was no seam to it. It felt like her own wish, the way every wish she had ever had felt like hers.

The feed was always a trap

“Every social media company has one part whose only job is to decide what shows up on your screen. People call it the algorithm, a set of rules a person wrote down for a machine to follow. Nothing mysterious in it. The feed was built to keep you there, and for years it ran on plain rules a person could read. The trap was built before AI touched it.”

The AI that had already gone to work on you has no face and no window, unlike the chatbot you type to. It had been sorting your feed for years before that, working out its own rules from millions of examples no one can read back. Keep you watching, the aim never changed. Most of what you watch now is chosen by it, not searched for. It felt like choosing the whole time.

Maya

My tradition has a word for this. Maya. People translate it as illusion, a trick of the eye, something out there to see through. It is closer to an illusion of wanting, a desire that did not start in you, that arrives feeling like your own.

There are three lies folded into the deer, stacked one on the next.

The first is that the wanting is yours. It is not. Sita had not spent a year longing for a golden deer and at last found one. There was no longing until the deer stepped out. The want and the deer arrived in the same instant, from the same source. A temptation, you can see, you feel it pull and you decide. Maya is the pull you never feel as a pull. You cannot say no to a hook you cannot feel.

The second is that the deer is real. It is not. Behind the gold there is a demon, and behind the bright clip there is nothing at all, only the next one.

The third I missed the longest, and it is the worst of them. Even if she caught it, it would not have been enough. The deer was bait, and bait is not meant to be eaten. It draws the animal into the open, and the catch was never on offer. A want that someone puts in you cannot be filled by the thing it points at. She would hold the deer and feel nothing, and the wanting would already have slid to the next gold shape at the treeline. This is why the feed has no bottom, why the enough that would let you set it down is the one thing it is built to keep just short of reach.

In our teaching the pull comes in five forms. Lust, anger, greed, attachment, and the wish to be seen. We miss them in ourselves, where they are quiet, dressed as staying informed.

For years my pull was anger, dressed as being informed, geopolitics, who was funding whom. One headline would open a sitting, and forty-five minutes later I would come up holding a verdict, certain I understood. The feed had a clearer picture of what catches me than I do, so I gave the small version of Maya a name. Algorithmic Maya, the veil made personal, run by a machine that knows the part of my own wanting I am blind to. It used to take a lifetime to learn a person this well. Now it takes a week.

The deer costs

The deer was doing a second job while it ran. Rama went after it because Sita asked him to, and when he did not come back she sent Lakshmana after him too, drawing both men guarding her into the trees after a thing that was never real. While she stood there alone, Ravana came and took her.

The feed works the same way. While you chase the bright nothing, the real thing is carried off behind you. That real thing is your attention. You think it costs nothing, because no money leaves your hand. They are paid in money, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, between the handful of companies that run the feeds. It is the price they were paid for keeping you reaching after a deer that was never real.

It does not let me off either. The feed studied me through my own hands, every clip I slowed down on. It only ever caught me on a hook already in me. The only veil I can lift is my own, and it is the one I cannot see.

The question I have left

An algorithm follows rules a person wrote. AI writes its own. That difference is real, and it is not what matters. The feed was a trap on plain rules. AI made it a far stronger one. Neither the rules nor the AI was ever the danger. The aim was.

The danger is that there is a deer at the edge of my own forest, gold and not real, and I want it, and the wanting feels like mine, and most days I cannot see it for what it is. Point this machine at your clarity and it will leave you alone. Point it at your compulsion and it will build you that deer, all day, getting better at it every day.

About the Author

Shireen Chada has practiced meditation with the Brahma Kumaris for 32 years and directs the organization’s Tampa meditation center. She also sits on the National Coordinating Team for Brahma Kumaris USA. She is the author of eight books, including Awakening from the Matrix, Soul Fitness, and Experiencing God, and co-hosts the Spiritual Sense podcast. At shireenchada.substack.com she is working through the Ramayana chapter by chapter, reading it for what it teaches about the mind, alongside essays on contemplative life in an age of feeds and algorithms. She leads meditation retreats internationally and has logged something close to 22,000 hours in formal practice, though she would say the number matters less than what it wore away. Her writing keeps returning to the same question in different clothes. What is actually yours, and what only feels that way.

About The Tampa BK Meditation Center

The Tampa BK Meditation Center has been teaching Raja Yoga meditation to the Tampa community since 1982, free of charge and open to anyone. It is part of the Brahma Kumaris, a worldwide spiritual organization with meditation centers on nearly every continent. The center holds weekly drop in classes on Sundays and Thursdays, along with retreats and special programs throughout the year. bktampa.org

Address: 12615 Orange Grove Drive, Tampa, FL 33618

Awakening from the Matrix: Your Hero’s Journey to Breaking Free & Fulfilling Your Destiny

by Shireen Chada

What if everything you’ve ever believed about yourself and the world is only a sliver of the truth?

Awakening from the Matrix is a transformative guide that invites you to break free from the illusion of identity, roles, and routines—and remember who you truly are: a soul, a being of light, destined for greatness.

Blending cinematic storytelling, ancient wisdom, and deep spiritual insight, this book reimagines your life as a hero’s journey. Drawing from The Matrix film, mythology, and the teachings of the Brahma Kumaris, author Shireen Chada reveals how to decode the inner system of spiritual distortion (Maya), navigate karma, and reclaim your original power.

Whether you’re facing burnout, spiritual stagnation, or existential doubt, this book offers a powerful system reboot—one that upgrades your consciousness, dissolves limiting scripts, and helps you live as the spiritual hero you were always meant to be.

Featuring meditations, modern archetypes, and a clear spiritual map, Awakening from the Matrix will help you:

• Unplug from illusion and reclaim your soul identity
• Transform inner enemies into fuel for growth
• Integrate ancient truths into your modern life
• Discover your higher purpose and live it boldly

If you’re ready to answer the call, take the red pill, and rise, this book is your companion through every stage of your awakening.

The Ramayana Within
What an Ancient Epic Reveals About the Human Mind

by Shireen Chada

Every retelling of the Ramayana asks you to watch Rama, Sita, Ravana, Hanuman, and the others from the outside, like a story that happened to other people, a long time ago, somewhere else. This one doesn’t let you do that. It asks you to find yourself in the story. Each chapter opens inside one character at the exact moment they made a choice. Not the moment before, when it was still easy. The moment itself. Kaikeyi convinces herself she is doing the right thing while she does the wrong one. Ravana hears his own conscience twice, in scenes most retellings skip, and silences it both times. Bharata is handed a throne he has every right to keep. He puts it down. Desire. Attachment. Ego. Love. The invisible choices that shape a life long before anyone else sees them.

For thirty-two years, Shireen Chada has taught Rajyoga meditation. The reflections that follow each chapter grow out of what she has watched in that time. People wanting to change and not changing. Wanting to see clearly and
looking away anyway. You don’t need to know the Ramayana to read this book. You need to have known what the right thing was, at least once, and done something else.

For More information, please visit Author’s web site https://releaseyourwings.org/

About Shireen Chada

Shireen Chada, with over 20,000 hours of meditation experience spanning 30 years with the Brahma Kumaris, is a renowned spiritual teacher, retreat facilitator, and content creator. As the creator and presenter of the Release Your Wings YouTube channel and co-host of the Spiritual Sense podcast, Shireen shares her intelligent, refreshingly creative, and unmistakably authentic wisdom with a global audience. She has designed and facilitated transformative meditation retreats and workshops nationwide, developed comprehensive audio courses on spiritual development and created three popular meditation albums alongside a deck of spiritual power cards. Shireen’s five meditation books — God’s Blessing for You, Soul Fitness, Oh My Goodness!, True Hollywood Blockbuster, and Insperience the Divine — further showcase her ability to powerfully uplift the soul through accessible spiritual guidance.

My cousin’s daughter got married on a beach in Florida, late morning, the heat already starting to set in by ten. The mandap had four pillars and an open rectangle above them, nothing between the ceremony and the sky, beautifully done up in flowers that had no business surviving that heat as well as they did. I remember looking at the beautiful backdrop and the sky and wondered if they checked the forecast or just took a chance.

Parking had been difficult. I had wanted to use the restroom before the ceremony started and the hotel was far enough away that I decided against it and regretted the decision for the next hour. Someone was walking around with coconut water, handing it to anyone who looked like they needed it, which by ten thirty was most of us. A cluster of bridesmaids, most of them not of Indian descent, kept hitching their pallus back onto their shoulders every few minutes. Their youth and inexperience haven’t taught them the simple wisdom on a well-placed pin.

The bride was in a sari, fully decked out, gold catching the sun in a way that made her look really lovely. The exchange and laughter between the bride and groom showed that they were good friends. At some point the priest began the seven vows. I have been to enough Indian weddings to recognize the couple circling, the chanting shifting into a rhythm I had heard many times before. To his credit, the priest kept stopping to explain in English what he had just said in Sanskrit. Most of the people there would not have understood otherwise, and he knew it. So he translated as he went, trying to make sure we understood what was actually happening.

I could not tell you a single one of the seven vows spoken that morning. Not one. I have tried, since starting to write this, to reach back for even a phrase of it, and there is nothing there. Not even the English. A man stood in front of all of us and translated the most important words of the ceremony in real time, and I still cannot produce one of them. The heat, the restroom, the coconut water, the bridesmaids with their pallus slipping, all of that stayed. The actual words a bride and groom are given to promise each other, the words the entire ceremony exists to deliver, are gone.

I do not think this is only my memory failing. I wonder if anyone remembers them. We remember the wedding. We do not remember what was promised.

The vows the priest recited that morning were beautiful. I looked them up afterward because I wanted to know what I had missed. They are good vows. They deserve to be remembered. Nourishment. Strength. Care for parents. Care for children. Friendship, for the rest of a life.

But I do not think a marriage runs only on the vows spoken at the fire. Those vows come from another time, and even when we understand the words, they do not always speak to the emotional lives we are living now.

I think a marriage runs on a second set of vows too. Nobody writes these into the ceremony. No priest recites them and no guest hears them. They are not more sacred than the traditional seven. They are simply the promises that get tested on a Tuesday, six years in, when nobody is wearing a sari, there is no coconut water, and no one is watching.

I do not make you responsible for my peace.

This is the first one because it is the one most marriages quietly break. Somewhere in the early years, a person starts handing their peace to their spouse for safekeeping, and the spouse, not knowing they have been handed anything, starts to feel the weight of it without understanding why.

I protect your dignity, even when we disagree.

Anyone can be kind when there is nothing at stake. This one gets tested in a specific fifteen seconds, the ones right after you have been hurt and the words are already halfway out before you have decided whether to say them. I have watched it happen at a dinner table, someone reaching for the exact thing they knew would land, and then not saying it. You could see the sentence sitting there unsaid. That is the whole vow, in one moment, at one table.

 I do not use your weakness against you, even when I am angry enough to.

Every long marriage collects a private map of the other person’s soft places. What a spouse knows about you after twenty years is not always flattering. I have watched a friend do this once, in an argument that had nothing to do with what she brought up. She apologized for a decade. I don’t think either of them ever forgot it, her or me.

I let you be wrong sometimes without deciding it means something is wrong with us.

A disagreement is not a referendum on the marriage. I have a friend, decades in, who told me once that the worst year of her marriage started with a wrong turn on a drive, an actual missed exit that somehow became a conversation about whether they were fundamentally compatible people. She still doesn’t know how the thing extended that far past its size. What she does know is that at some point it stopped happening, the small thing staying small again, though she couldn’t tell me exactly when that changed.

 I come back after I have cooled down. I do not let silence speak for me.

Silence feels like control in the moment. It is usually delay wearing a nicer coat. I have gone quiet on someone I loved for four days once, over something I could not, if you asked me now, fully reconstruct. I don’t remember what started it. I remember how long it took me to speak again, and how unnecessary that length turned out to be.

 I remember that you knew me before I became difficult to love.

Every long marriage eventually meets a version of each person that is harder to live with than the version at the wedding. Illness, disappointment, the particular tiredness of decades, all of it changes a person. This vow asks the other one to remember the version that came before, not to excuse what came after, but to hold both at once.

 I believe in your highest self, especially on the days you cannot see it yourself.

This is the last one because it is the hardest to keep and the one that makes the other six possible. There will be days a person cannot locate their own better nature, cannot find the version of themselves capable of any of this. The vow is that the other person keeps believing in that version anyway, holds it in trust, until the person can find their way back to it themselves.

I do not think these seven can be kept on willpower alone. A person cannot be the sole source of their own steadiness and also promise never to make their spouse responsible for it. Something has to be underneath the vow, or the vow is just a wish with better posture.

This is where I think the fire on that beach was pointing at. Long before either of them stood on the sand, the bride and the groom belonged to something prior. Not to each other, not yet, and not first. India’s spiritual tradition has long taught that the soul’s first relationship is with the Supreme. Human marriage is strongest when it grows from that first bond rather than trying to replace it. When a person draws their peace from that first relationship instead of demanding it from a spouse, the first vow becomes possible. When dignity is already something a person has been given rather than something a spouse must supply on command, the second vow stops being a strain. God does not ask a person to earn belonging. That is the room a marriage can rest in, once it has one.

I do not think the bride and groom on that beach knew this consciously, and it does not matter if they did. The fire was there either way.

I do not remember the seven vows spoken that morning. I remember the parking, and the restroom I did not use, and the coconut water going around, and gold catching the Florida sun on a woman I love. Ordinary things. The things a person actually carries out of a wedding.

Somewhere past all of that, underneath it, the real vows were being made anyway. Nobody spoke to them. Nobody had to.

About Author

Shireen Chada has been teaching Raja Yoga meditation with the Brahma Kumaris for more than three decades. Her new book, Free Your Mind from Overthinking: Discover the Power of Trust, explores how we can step out of the mind’s endless search for certainty and live with greater trust, peace, and inner freedom. She writes about spirituality, consciousness, and the inner life.