Class Overview
Welcome to class #2 of the Augmented Awakening course.
This class was special.
In it, Anand Rao introduces a completely new paradigm for interacting with AI that I haven’t seen before.
First, Anand doesn’t just use AI for task completion. He also uses it to facilitate personal growth.
Second, Anand doesn’t just use AI as a content creation tool. He also uses AI a “mirror” tool that helps us see ourselves better. More specially, he uses AI to help us become aware of how we become aware of patterns and how we react when patterns in our lives get disrupted.
Third, Anand doesn’t just AI for clear explanations. He also uses AI to create experiences that tap into and deepen our own pattern recognition abilities rather than having AI simply create explanations.
Why This Class Matters
We don't see the world as it is—we see it through our existing mental frameworks. These frameworks (often without our awareness):
Filter our experiences
Determine what we notice
Shape our response
For example, imagine wearing a pair of colored glasses for so long that you forget you have them on. The blue tint becomes your "normal" until someone momentarily switches them for red ones—suddenly, you're startled into awareness of the lens itself. This is exactly what Anand masterfully creates through his micro-experiences with AI.
In one fascinating demonstration, Anand used AI to generate increasingly nonsensical patterns, systematically breaking familiar language patterns until our meaning-making machinery became visible. Like scientists adding dye to observe otherwise invisible currents, these exercises reveal how our minds desperately work to impose order on chaos, create meaning from randomness, and maintain familiar patterns even when they no longer serve us. Participants experienced that precise moment when their brains either struggled to make sense of the unfamiliar or simply checked out—revealing their personal threshold between comfortable certainty and novel possibility.
Despite the huge impact of these filters, most of us aren't aware of what filters we're using and how they're impacting our experience. Therefore, we miss a crucial leverage point for impacting our experience of reality. When we become conscious of these patterns, we gain the power to transcend them.
What's particularly revealing is observing our reactions when micro-patterns are disrupted. As Anand demonstrated through various AI experiments, our comfort level with novelty, ambiguity, and pattern-breaking exposes our psychological flexibility. That moment when something feels "off" or unexpected becomes a window into our own conditioning. By noticing these reactions without judgment, we develop the capacity to expand our tolerance for the unfamiliar.
This class is especially relevant now as we're entering an era where accelerating technological change is shattering our established patterns and assumptions at an unprecedented rate. The mental models that served us well yesterday may become limitations tomorrow. Those who can observe their reactions to disruption, release outdated patterns, and integrate new perspectives will navigate this transition with greater ease and creativity. This class offers practical tools for developing exactly this kind of psychological adaptability.
As we navigate an era of accelerating technological change, I've become increasingly convinced that our psychological approach to this transformation is what will truly matter in the long run. Augmented Awakening addresses precisely this crucial dimension that other AI courses often miss.
Let’s go deeper into the paradigmatic shift…
The Mirror Paradigm Of Prompting
The Default Mode: Content Consumption
Most AI users today operate in a content consumption mode. They:
Focus primarily on the outputs AI generates
Value accuracy, coherence, and utility in those outputs
Judge success by how well the AI delivers desired information or completes specified tasks
Remain relatively unaware of their own cognitive processes during these interactions
This approach treats AI as an enhanced search engine or productivity tool—a means to externalize cognitive labor. While valuable, this approach vastly underutilizes AI's potential as a tool for personal development.
The Pattern Awareness Mode
In contrast, pattern awareness mode involves:
Attending to our cognitive and emotional responses to AI interactions
Noticing how we make meaning, detect patterns, and respond to pattern disruptions
Using AI to make our implicit mental models explicit
Developing meta-cognitive skills by witnessing our own thought processes
This approach treats AI not primarily as a source of information but as a mirror for understanding our own cognition—a tool for developing awareness of how we think.
The Emergence of "AI-Assisted Mindfulness"
Traditional mindfulness practices involve paying attention to our present-moment experience with curiosity and non-judgment. Anand's approach suggests a new form of practice we might call "AI-assisted mindfulness"—using AI interactions to develop awareness of our cognitive patterns.
When Anand asks participants questions like:
"How many people, when when they listened to that, dismissed it? How many people, when I'm trying to make sense of it because it seems like it should make sense? How many people treated it as evocation of triggers of ideas, of moments and thoughts."
He's guiding them to witness their own cognitive tendencies—not unlike how a meditation teacher might ask practitioners to notice when their mind wanders during breath focus.
The difference is that AI can systematically generate stimuli that trigger specific cognitive patterns, making them visible in ways that might otherwise require years of meditation practice.
The Big Picture: Comparing The Conventional Approach With The Mirror Paradigm
What You Get In Today’s Post
Free Subscribers get:
Access to the first 30 minutes of the class recording
Access to the AI-generated audio podcast summary
Paid Subscribers get:
Summary (key takeaways, step-by-step pattern awareness process)
Prompt (comprehensive prompt so you can use AI as a mirror in any domain)
Class resources (chat, resources shared)
Transcript (copy & paste the transcript into your favorite AI model and have conversations that deepen your takeaways from the class)
You get all of these perks for just $15/month as a paid subscriber:
