Augmented Awakening Recording #12 with Anand Rao

Michael Simmons

Dec 14, 2025

∙ Paid

Final Session: Augmented Awakening

This was the final session of Augmented Awakening—the first course of its kind exploring how to use AI for awakening and conscious evolution.

Over twelve weeks, we’ve explored something unprecedented: how artificial intelligence can serve not just as a tool for productivity, but as a partner in our deepest personal development. This final session brought together everything we’ve learned, helping us cement and embody these practices so we can carry them forward beyond the course itself.

Anand, who has graciously led this course, shared his framework for making change real—not just understanding it intellectually, but living it in every aspect of our lives. His emphasis on experiential learning over theory has been the thread running through each session, reminding us that what counts isn’t whether we can describe transformation, but whether we’re actually living it.

During the class, we:

Reflected on the complete 12-session journey together
Explored how AI tools risk atrophying our core capabilities
Discussed the tension between outsourcing tasks and preserving growth
Examined beginner’s mind versus expert’s mind in learning
Considered AI’s role in expanding consciousness, not just knowledge
Heard participant reflections on their awakening journeys this year
Addressed the challenge of discernment in an overwhelming world
Learned about Anand’s continuing programs and coaching offerings
Practiced a guided closing meditation on maintaining openness
Discussed feedback mechanisms for ongoing course development

The Implications

Anand framed this final session around a central question that has haunted every conversation about artificial intelligence: As we build machines toward artificial superintelligence, what happens to human superintelligence? Why aren’t we using our own capacity for transformation to become continuously self-evolving?

This question emerged from a conversation Anand had with me 2-3 years ago and spawned his Recursive Self-Evolution program. It speaks to something deeper than skill acquisition or productivity gains. The course has been about using AI not to replace our development, but to catalyze it—to expand into territories of consciousness we haven’t explored before.

The broader significance lies in Anand’s insistence on what he calls “implicit and inductive” learning—learning through lived experience rather than theory. In a world where we can get any explanation, any framework, any “fridge magnet wisdom” on demand, the real challenge isn’t access to information. It’s making it real. It’s making it lived.

As AI capabilities expand exponentially, the course suggests we’re at an inflection point. Some will use these tools to bypass the hard work of genuine transformation. But for those willing to maintain what Zen practitioners call “beginner’s mind”—that quality of openness to novelty, of “huh” and “oh” and genuine curiosity—AI can become a partner in exploring not just new learning, but new states of consciousness and engagement with the world.

The reminder Anand offered in the closing meditation captures the essence: “In the expert’s mind, there are few possibilities. In the beginner’s mind, there are many.” That’s the invitation moving forward—to use AI to both refine and narrow when needed, but also to expand into possibilities we haven’t imagined yet.