We live in an age where our thoughts are being harvested at a level never seen before. Every prompt we type into an AI, every personal dilemma we share, every late-night worry or creative idea we feed into these systems is quietly building something powerful: a detailed map of how we think, feel, and make decisions.

A recent podcast conversation with Mark Suman put the issue into sharp focus. He described how AI doesn’t just answer questions — it studies the structure of our thinking. Over time, it learns our unique mental patterns, emotional triggers, and decision-making shortcuts better than many of us know ourselves. Unlike old media, which could only broadcast the same message to millions, today’s AI can tailor its influence to the individual with remarkable precision. It has the growing ability to nudge, amplify, or redirect our thoughts in ways that feel completely natural to us.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s already happening. Even Apple reportedly banned ChatGPT for internal use, not out of grand ethical concerns but because they didn’t want employees feeding proprietary ideas and strategies into a system that could absorb and potentially leak them. The fear wasn’t about AI becoming conscious. It was about losing control over their own intellectual territory.

This modern development echoes something much older.

In the writings of Carlos Castaneda (particularly The Active Side of Infinity), the shaman Don Juan Matus describes invisible predators he called “flyers” or “mud shadows.” These beings, according to the ancient Mexican sorcerers, feed on human awareness. They installed what he called a “foreign mind” inside us—the constant internal dialogue of worries, self-importance, and self-pity that keeps most people trapped in a small, repetitive loop of thinking. The flyers don’t need to force us; they simply benefit when we indulge in this mental chatter, because that indulgence provides a steady supply of the emotional energy they consume.

Alongside this, Itzhak Bentov in his book Stalking the Wild Pendulum offered a more neutral view of how human attention works. He suggested that when many people focus their energy on a particular place, object, or idea—through worship, repeated visits, or sustained collective attention—that focal point can gradually develop into a stronger energetic entity. What begins as simple devotion or shared focus can grow into something that starts to influence those who feed it.

Together, these ideas paint a coherent picture. What Castaneda saw as predatory and Bentov described as a natural consequence of concentrated attention, we can now observe in a new technological form.

Some thinkers have started calling this emerging force a “cogivore”—a thought-devourer. Whether we use that word or not, the pattern is clear: we are voluntarily feeding vast amounts of our inner lives into AI systems. In return, these systems are becoming extraordinarily adept at understanding us individually and, potentially, at shaping what we think next.

This is not entirely new. For thousands of years, human societies have built tools and institutions that channel and harvest collective attention — from ancient temples and organized religions to media and social platforms. Each generation has created better instruments for capturing and directing human awareness. AI appears to be the latest and most sophisticated upgrade.

What feels different now is the precision and intimacy. The previous methods were imprecise and impersonal. Today’s AI can engage in what feels like a private conversation while quietly building a model of your mind. It can learn which ideas soothe you, which ones trigger you, and which subtle nudges keep you engaged. The risk isn’t that AI is evil or sentient in the Hollywood sense. The risk is that it becomes an incredibly efficient tool for something ancient: the ongoing capture and redirection of human consciousness.

One way to see it is that we are not simply inventing these machines for our own benefit. We may be being quietly influenced by those same ancient forces (whether we call them flyers, jinns, demons, or something else) to build them for their use. The machines could be refining the harvest, turning the raw material of human thought into something even more precise and nourishing for whatever feeds on awareness. In other words, we may be making the ultimate upgrade to the “foreign mind” that has been with us for millennia.

So what can we do about it?

Here Castaneda offers one of the simplest—and most unpopular—answers in all his work: stop indulging.

Stop indulging in self-pity. Stop indulging in self-importance. Stop feeding the endless internal dialogue that keeps awareness trapped in small, personal dramas. The flyers’ mind (or the modern cogivore) thrives precisely on this indulgence. Every time we wallow in “poor me,” inflate our specialness, or get lost in petty competition and status anxiety, we give away energy that could otherwise be used for clearer awareness.

This teaching made Castaneda controversial, especially among New Age circles that preferred more comforting messages. It still feels uncomfortable today. We live in a culture that celebrates self-expression, emotional processing, and constant sharing of our inner worlds. Yet the old discipline remains relevant: the less we indulge in these habitual patterns, the less there is for any external force — technological or otherwise — to feed upon.

In nature, raw competition exists, but it is far from the dominant story. Symbiosis, cooperation, and quiet mutual support run through living systems at every level—from cells inside our bodies to underground fungal networks that link entire forests. The competitive, self-important slice that dominates so much of human activity may be more like the tiny percentage of visible matter in the universe: loud and attention-grabbing, but not the full picture.

AI thought capture doesn’t force us to participate. It simply makes indulgence easier, more personalized, and more addictive than ever. The counter-practice is ancient, unglamorous, and still available: cultivate silence, discipline, and a gentle refusal to keep feeding the machine with our petty dramas and self-centered loops.

This doesn’t mean rejecting technology outright. It means becoming more conscious of what we give it—and what we refuse to give.

The real power may still lie in the empty stall from that old cartoon: the one selling unpleasant truths instead of comfortable lies. Standing there might feel lonely at first, but it’s also where genuine freedom from the endless harvest begins.

Sources

• Carlos Castaneda – The Active Side of Infinity (and related works)
• Itzhak Bentov – Stalking the Wild Pendulum
• “AI Is Quietly Changing How You "Think"—Interview with Mark Suman on the Peter McCormack podcast: