AI, Genius, and the Three Worlds We Forgot We Live In

What is now emerging is not simply a question of speed or output.
It is a question of origin.
Who is authoring meaning when intelligence is no longer scarce.

Most people assume artificial intelligence is forcing humanity to compete with machines.

Faster writing.
Faster art.
Faster thinking.

But something unexpected is happening.

As intelligence becomes abundant, people are discovering that technical perfection alone does not move them.

A flawless image generated in seconds can feel strangely empty.

A song assembled by algorithm can impress and still fail to linger.

Meanwhile, a rough sketch drawn by a human hand, a story told imperfectly but honestly, or a voice carrying lived experience can stop us in our tracks.

We recognize something.

Even when we cannot explain why.

It isn’t just skill we are responding to.

It is authorship.

It is intention.

It is the sense that behind what we are encountering stands a living interior world attempting to express itself.

During a recent OpenAI DevDay, Sam Altman quietly said something that should stop us in our tracks:

“Show someone an image. And if you say, ‘I’ll sell you this piece of art and an AI made it and it’s beautiful, but you know an AI made it.’ The value that people put on that effectively rounds to zero.

If a human made it, even with AI tools, and it's someone you can connect to, and has a story, and put their creative energy into it, it’s worth a lot. But without the person effectively signing their name to it and saying, ‘This is my thing,’ we seem to not care. "I think that’s another very positive sign for human creators.'

This isn’t just a positive sign for human creators.

It points to something much older.

Something that has always been there.

What we are discovering is not nostalgia for human creativity. It is evidence that human perception is tuned to origin. Across neuroscience, psychology, and aesthetics, people consistently respond more strongly to expressions believed to carry lived intention and causal history.

Authenticity is not simply preference.

It changes attention, emotion, and valuation itself.

The Three Worlds

The ancient Celts described reality as existing across three worlds:

Above.
Below.
And the Middle.

The Above World was the realm of inspiration. The breath of poetry. The sudden knowing that arrives without effort. The imagination that seems to appear before we understand where it came from.

The Below World was the deep memory of existence itself.

Ancestry.
Land.
Inheritance.

Every story ever told. Every wound ever carried. Every belief hardened into truth through repetition.

And then there is the Middle World.

The place where we live.

The now.

The Celts believed a wise life required standing between these worlds without becoming trapped in either.

Too much Below and a person becomes governed by inheritance. By conditioning. By the beliefs handed down without question.

Too much Above and a person becomes intoxicated with vision but disconnected from embodiment.

Wisdom lived in the meeting point.

In the Middle.

Modern cognitive science increasingly describes a similar dynamic. Predictive models formed from the past meet incoming novelty reshaping those models, and conscious experience emerges at their meeting point.

What Genius Actually Means

When I use the word genius, I am not speaking about IQ, talent, or exceptional performance.

The original Roman understanding of genius referred to something very different.

A genius was the guiding spirit of a person’s life. The unique expression attempting to come through them.

Not something you possess.

Something you participate with.

You have felt it.

The idea that won’t leave you alone.

The insight that arrives after years of tension.

The sentence that writes itself.

The solution that appears in a flash and feels larger than your effort.
Gordon Globus calls this a moment of disclosure.

Across cultures this has been described as:

• muse,
• daimon,
• spirit,
• inspiration,
• grace.

I am not asking you to believe in anything mystical.

I am asking you to notice something experiential.

There is novelty constantly arriving into the present moment.

Possibility entering now.

Across psychology and neuroscience, moments of insight share a common signature. Sudden integration occurs across brain networks before conscious reasoning catches up. People experience these moments as intuition, inspiration, or calling.

Long before we named them scientifically, cultures called them genius.

When that possibility meets a human willing to listen, meaning is born.

That meaning becomes the Below.

Civilizations are built from yesterday’s inspiration hardened into today’s belief.

The Neuroscience of Authenticity

 Research from the Mauritshuis Museum  in The Hague found that authentic masterpieces generate up to ten times stronger neural responses compared to reproductions. (Read more)

 Their research showed that an image can be visually identical. But the nervous system responds differently. Being witness to authentic genius creates more mental stimulation and deeper more prolonged engagement!

Why?

Because intention matters. Origin matters. The human behind the expression matters. Some part of us deeper than our conscious awareness recognizes source.

How Belief Blocks Genius

The Rembrandt brain-scanner study at Oxford showed something equally profound. Participants were shown the same painting under different labels. (read more here)

When told it was authentic, regions associated with reward and meaning lit up.

When told it was fake, emotional engagement dropped.

The painting never changed.

Belief changed the experience.

Meaning constructs reality before awareness notices.

But belief alone does not explain the phenomenon.

Eye-tracking and physiological studies show that attention patterns shift even before conscious interpretation forms. Something about perceived authorship reorganizes perception itself.

Humans appear tuned to detect coherence of origin long before they can articulate why.

Human beings author meaning in response to experience. Over time those meanings stabilize into beliefs that organize perception itself. Because the mind forgets it authored these beliefs, they appear as reality rather than interpretation.

When survival-rooted beliefs no longer fit present life, experience begins repeating patterns that reveal them.

What we call shadow may be meaning operating without ownership, the point where awareness encounters the limits of its own authorship.

Belief does more than color interpretation.

It quietly constructs the boundaries of what awareness can perceive at all.

Every human life inherits layers of meaning:

• personal experience,
• family stories,
• cultural assumptions,
• survival strategies refined across generations.

These beliefs form protective structures.

They help us navigate danger and belong within communities.

But when meaning hardens into certainty, perception narrows.

Experience begins repeating itself, not because reality refuses to change, but because awareness continues encountering the world through yesterday’s conclusions.

Psychology calls this confirmation bias.

Trauma research calls it reenactment.

Neuroscience describes predictive models defending themselves against contradiction.

Across time, experience itself applies pressure against these rigid structures.

Friction appears as projection, conflict, or dissatisfaction.

Signals that inherited meaning no longer fits the life attempting to emerge.

What feels like disruption may in fact be adaptation.

Not belief creating reality.

But reality inviting belief to evolve.

AI Is Calling for Greater Genius in the Middle World

Artificial intelligence stands on the accumulated meaning of humanity and recombines it at speed.

It is brilliant.

It is useful.

It is transformative.

But it does not originate lived experience.

It does not stand in the Middle and take responsibility.

AI recombines the accumulated Below at extraordinary speed.

But without lived stakes, without consequence borne in a human nervous system, the signal of authorship weakens.

The difference is not intelligence.

It is responsibility.
It is presence.
It is consciously living experience.

As execution becomes effortless, something remarkable happens.

We begin searching for origin.

We begin to ask:
Who meant this?
Who stands behind this?
What life is expressing itself here?

AI is not diminishing human genius.

It is exposing how deeply we have always needed it. It is untethering our orientation and recalibrating and calling for deeper expression of the genius in the middle world.

When intelligence becomes infrastructure, authenticity becomes the edge.

The Danger of the Below

But there is something we must remain vigilant about.

Belief is yesterday’s meaning calcified into certainty.

Every one of us stands on billions of years of accumulated meaning.

Personal.
Generational.
Collective.
Evolutionary.

That is the Below.

It is powerful.

It is necessary.

But it requires calibration.

If belief becomes rigid, it shuts down access to the Above.

Imagination dries up.

Curiosity narrows.

We begin living from inherited narratives instead of participating in living authorship.

Depth work is not about escaping the Below.

It is about recalibrating it.

Because when belief loosens, novelty can enter again.

Genius is not destroyed.

It simply loses a pathway into expression when certainty closes the door.

The Open Secret

Perhaps the emergence of AI is not primarily a technological revolution.

Perhaps it is a mirror.

As intelligence becomes abundant, humanity is being invited to rediscover something we have always known.

We are moved by authentic expression.

We recognize when something carries life.

We sense when it doesn’t.

We may not always articulate it.

Belief may distort it.

But the signal is there.

The Celts would say wisdom lives in the Middle.

Standing between what has been and what is arriving.

Participating consciously in meaning-making.

Maybe the question AI is quietly placing before each of us is not:

Can you compete with the machine?

But rather:

What is trying to come through you?

And are you willing to stand in the Middle long enough to let it?

Because in a world where machines can generate almost anything, the only thing they cannot generate is the life you have actually lived. Research shows that is what really matters anyways.