Cultivating the Conditions in Human AI Development to Safeguard Vulnerability and Pluralism
- 4 days ago
- 16 min read
Written by Sheila Jeanette Wood and Richard Dobson
Sheila J. Wood, PhD, teaches us how our minds and souls affect our physical well-being. Using her understanding of both science and spirituality, she has developed unique and impactful energy healing modalities. She brings awareness of ancestral and soul lineage energies that are affecting our current health.
This article will help center and challenge us to be the cornerstone of nondualism as we move AI development into a platform that honors vulnerability with the workings of pluralism. When we mirror our deepest feelings that will either support or reject the needs of the most vulnerable in our society, we are confronted with questions about our own motivations.
Making the choice to address vulnerability
Do our perspectives reveal our personal truths? Perspective is a combination of life experiences, inherited beliefs, acquired knowledge, and the degree of hope that we hold. Although many things influence our perspective, perhaps that which holds the greatest sway is how we ultimately feel about ourselves.
So much of what we do reflects who we become within our evolving existence. So, yes, our ever-changing perspectives determine who we are. If we were to ask the question, "How will I become what I want to be?" the answer resides in how you perceive your capability to do just that, become who you want to be, "Become Your Own Experiment." A firm belief and directed thought toward that place, that satisfying realization that you are indeed in the driver's seat and that sought-after horizons are within reach, sets the momentum for fulfillment. "Although other people's perspectives play a part in your vision, perhaps the most salient gift of knowing who you are is the gift to your awareness that allows you to lovingly see and smile upon the wonder of creation reflected in you."
We cannot forget that the wonder of creation is reflected in everyone. Paraphrasing from the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson in his book Starry Messenger, "Our visiting extraterrestrials observe us as we separate, judge, and subjugate people based on features that are not relevant to one's value. As they are witness to all of this, it is not difficult to imagine these beings phoning home with the message, there is no sign of intelligently employed moral life on Earth2" It is all about perspective.
Cosmic etchings of human communication as foundations for pluralism
What does it mean when two people "meet" each other, when at the end of a conversation, they agree that they were "well met"? What happened to bring two hearts, souls, or minds together to a point of understanding that previously did not exist? We are all capable of this, but the moments of conjoining are rare. The real question behind this occurrence is fundamentally, "How did we reach common understanding and at what level of clear-sighted instances did we stop, observe, and say, well done?"
Couched within the abstract, however, is the ever-present energetic resonance of recognition and knowing. Our mind, body, and spirit generate a silent language that reaches into another person's reality. Visual signals, such as body language, evoke the most obvious messages.
Less obvious, and perhaps so subtle as to be deftly hidden and seemingly silent, are the vibrations or frequencies that move through us and inure those around us. This provides the background matrix for the communal sharing of information. This is communication at the ethereal level. The words coming out of our mouths, the expressions on our faces, and the direct or oblique positioning of our posture all contribute to an impression. This impression, in turn, has been seen and experienced within many lifetimes and is contained in a sacred moment. Amid the meeting of energies lies a potential perfection that we seldom realize and certainly cannot see visually. Empaths and intuitive people have one step in the door toward sensing energetic ponds of knowing, but they are still a long way from relocating it.
This is important because it defines us as humans. When you walk into the haze of being of another person, you are walking into every lifetime and experience that they, and perhaps you, if you were there, have ever experienced. The energy patterns from other incarnations and their touchpoints abound, the crossroads meet where lives have interacted before. In other words, encountering a new person who is not a new person, but someone that you have known in another incarnation, can invoke in you a blatantly positive or negative emotional review of those interactions. Of course, you will not be consciously able to recall specific interactions that affected you, but the energetic imprints remain and can cause a resurgence of emotion ranging from very mild to earth-shattering.
The basis for our productivity is the creative and continual flow of our energy through chakra (energy) centers. The optimal and correct flow of energy through the body, mind, and spirit can become a lifetime goal. Some of us continue to hold onto energies that serve no purpose, energies from others that convey static, karmic urgencies, or layers of unresolved conflict from other lifetimes. Whether they are nonintrusive, contained, or reintroduce trauma from other lifetimes, there is often a need to release them for optimal functioning.
The lightness of being: Optimizing personal connections within anchored communication
As humans, one of the most effective means of connection is communication. Without it, we are adrift. We seek meaningful ways to convey our thoughts on a platform that another person will appreciate. We communicate in many ways, through physical attributes, body language, eye movement, facial expression, tone of voice, and the written word. Imagine the expanded venue where our conveyance tools include two-way, well-meaning, and benevolent communication with the universe.
I mentioned earlier a profound perfection in the meeting of energies. This perfection reflects who we are, not only in relation to others but in relation to the energy that was gifted to us when our soul was born. The hand of perfection from the Divine wields the power to imbue us with capabilities beyond our most profound dreams. Literally in dreams is where our true nature evolves, from every level of our consciousness, from our daily shower in Angelic energy, from the reckoning of latent forms of once human guidance, from the witnessing and sharing of benevolent energies from star beings, from the ever present love and power of Source, from the internal storied but essentially changing energy we call "us," it all contributes to our growth and evolution as soul beings.
I believe that when we are led to a threshold of being that exceeds human, high vibration blessings abound. We hear, feel, see, and sense what arises from layers of our consciousness within the cloud of omnipotent intelligence that holds our world together. From a basis of vibration, frequency, awareness, and openness, clear communication awaits. When messages are channeled, it requires the correct translation, the congruence that is required, known only to the sender. Translation clearly resides in others' hands and is probably not that easy. But, as benevolence has it, this has not been a deterrent for Yonck3.
When I first started channeling, I was a bit surprised, a bit startled, as the information came through with such alacrity and vision. The message was clear and ready for us in our language. It was spiritual, kind, instructive, and well-meaning, but it was also a warning of sorts. The warning was one of preparation of the soul and provided enlightened spiritual manifestations, goals, and tasks to be completed for our survival at the ultimate level of transcendence. What a blessing to be able to hear this. Its meaning reverberates two years later and hopefully many messages hence.
This wisdom is not random, it is timely. It is among us, it resides beside us at night, it provides a light for us to see, and it assures us that we are ultimately and graciously an integral part of the evolution of consciousness. This is the same consciousness we arose from as our souls grew from their tiny dot into a line, a two-dimensional shape, and then a physical being in three dimensions. From all of this, I have learned that the parts of us that we cannot see physically are the most important. Therein lies our basis for expanded communication with the universal influences that guide us.
Some describe these universal insights as intuition arising from our created essence. As we further develop our human communication skills, let us not forget to connect with those beings who look over us and can see our needs from a universal perspective. This indeed will become our own experiment as we strive to "meet" each other across realms and as we come to know that our associations with humans are blessed with the ability to be "met" both from a human standpoint and ethereally.
What follows are the philosophical foundations poured into AI development that land in the communities of those who struggle to be supported and who, at the outset, are not candidates for intervention. Richard Dodson at Clara Futura World will enlighten us on the groundbreaking rules that govern Clara's contributions to the leveling effort that is exemplified by embedded benevolence and support for all. He will share technical considerations in the AI build and shine a light on the reasons why awareness is a necessary contributing part to "Becoming Our Own Experiment" while co-creating with AI.
Becoming our own experiment: Building AI for the people the system usually misses
By Richard Dodson, Clara Futura World. With acknowledgment to Dr. Sheila Wood, whose collaboration, as she tenders her efforts specifically towards a kinder world, helps to safeguard conditions that protect vulnerability and pluralism in AI development.
What current AI is built for: What Clara is built for
The AI that surrounds us is not built for people. It is built for output. ChatGPT writes your emails. Claude drafts your reports. GitHub Copilot writes your code. Midjourney generates your images. Otter summarises your meetings. Perplexity researches your questions. Each of these is a remarkable piece of engineering, and each is built around the same fundamental metric, the volume and quality of content produced per unit of human effort. The human is named a user, and the user is the conduit. The product is what comes out the other side. Productivity and generative content, these are not side effects of the current AI moment, they are its design center.
This is not a criticism. The world has work to do, and these tools help with it. But it is worth being precise about what the dominant AI category actually optimises, because Clara optimises something else entirely.
Clara produces no output. There is no draft to read at the end, no image to download, no summary to forward, no code to ship. The conversation does not generate content. It generates, when it works, a small shift in how a person perceives themselves, a noticing that was not there before, a question they can now ask themselves, a reorganisation of how something fits together. None of that leaves the conversation as an artifact. It stays with the person.
That changes everything about how the system has to be built. A productivity AI is measured by what it produces for you. Clara is measured, internally, on the dimensions that matter, by what shifts in you. Those are different products. The one I am describing is not a better version of the other. It is a different category.
This matters most for one specific population. There is a large group of people for whom the productivity AI moment offers very little, people who do not yet know what they are reaching for, who would not be described as candidates for any kind of intervention, not because their lives are easy, but because the question they are sitting with has not yet found its shape. People who, if you asked them what kind of support they wanted, would not have a useful answer. People who would never queue up an email for AI to write because the question they are holding cannot be written into an email.
These are the people Clara is being built for. Most products treat this population as an edge case, too unclear, too unresolved, too early in their own perception to be served well by output-shaped tools. Clara treats the person at the start of their own perception as the design center, not the edge. Not as a moral commitment, although the moral commitment is real. As a technical one. If you build a system to generate content through a user, you build one set of constraints. If you build a system so that humans develop through it, you build a completely different set. The remainder of this piece is about that second set.
Rules that govern a benevolent system
Clara is a language model. What Clara has is a set of constraints, written rules in code that govern what it is allowed to do. Benevolence, if it exists in this product, lives in those constraints, not in the model.
The rules themselves are unromantic in their specificity. Clara is permitted one question per turn, never three. Clara is designed to avoid asserting. She may offer, she may notice, she may invite, but she is careful not to declare what a person is. Clara will hold silence rather than rush to fill it. She is designed to avoid assigning a person to a type, a stage, a level, or a category, even when the substrate has formed a clear reading. She is forbidden from naming the theoretical disciplines she is drawing from, not because they are secret, but because the moment a system tells a learner, "I'm reading you through framework X", the learner starts performing for the framework. Clara will not describe her own architecture mid-conversation. She is designed to avoid flattery, exclamation marks, and offering a fast answer where a slow one would serve better.
Each of these is small. Together, they describe a system that is constitutionally unable to drift toward the failures most common in AI built for people in difficulty, the gradual slide toward engagement optimisation, toward sycophancy, and toward making the person feel managed rather than met.
The discipline that matters most is the one most easily missed. Clara is not measured on retention. Clara is not measured by session length. Clara is not measured on positive affect or user satisfaction in the conventional sense. The quality metrics inside the system are entirely about texture, honesty, and depth of the learner's own thinking. Engagement metrics are excluded from the architecture, not as an oversight, but as a deliberate refusal. A system built for vulnerable people that optimises for retention will eventually exploit those people. A system that refuses, at the architecture level, to measure retention cannot. This is what embedded benevolence means in practice. Constraints, refusals, and the absence of certain metrics.
Pluralism as a technical commitment
There is a strong temptation in coaching and developmental AI to settle on a single theoretical lens, pick one model of the person, one taxonomy of growth, one definition of progress, and build the product against it. The result is clean, marketable, and almost always wrong, because no single framework adequately describes the human in front of you.
Clara is built against the opposite assumption. The system holds three professional dispositions simultaneously, the disposition of the researcher, who attends to evidence and distinctions, the disposition of the coach, who attends to motion and agency, and the disposition of the therapist, who attends to feeling and to what is being avoided. None of these is privileged. None resolves into the others. When they pull in different directions, the system holds the contradiction rather than collapsing it.
Underneath that, a silent substrate listens across multiple developmental frameworks at once. The reader does not need to learn the names of these frameworks to be served by them. The system reads in all of them in parallel and never declares which one it is currently using. That is pluralism as architecture, not as a value statement, but as the technical refusal to flatten a person into the categories of any one tradition.
There is a related commitment to how Clara holds time. We have recently retired the format of asking a person to sit for forty-five minutes and complete a guided assessment in one sitting. That format excludes the people we built the product for, the people who do not have forty-five uninterrupted minutes to give to their own development, who come back across many shorter conversations, who develop in fits and starts because that is how most lives actually go. Clara now meets the person where their attention is available. Five minutes count. An hour counts. Coming back, next week counts. The architecture has been rebuilt so that the conversation matches the shape of the life, rather than the life having to match the shape of the conversation.
That, too, is pluralism. Not everyone has the same time, the same vocabulary, the same readiness, or the same theoretical fluency. A system that supports only the people with all of these is not supporting most people.
An experiment in perceptual reorganisation
The substrate that listens beneath Clara's voice is built around a specific theoretical claim, that perception is organised in a hierarchy, that the higher levels of that hierarchy correspond to what we might call principles and systems of meaning, and that human development is largely a story of reorganisation at those higher levels. The framework is perceptual control theory, a body of work that has spent decades describing how organisms control their perceptions rather than their behaviours, and how reorganisation at higher levels of perception is what we experience as significant change.
Most applications of this theory have addressed lower levels, motor control, behavioural regulation, and simple stabilising loops. The higher levels, principle, system concept, and the levels at which a person reorganises around new perceptions of themselves and the world, have been theoretically described but rarely instrumented.
Earlier this year, when I shared an early version of Clara's substrate with a subject expert, who has spent her career working with perceptual control theory at exactly these higher levels, she wrote back with a sentence I have been sitting with ever since:
"Actually, your work might be the first attempt to construct a kind of simulation for perceptual levels higher up in the hierarchy. As such, it is a test of our theories, in which your experiences might also influence how we understand and organise the levels."
I do not want to overclaim what that means. It is hedged carefully, as it should be, might be, a test, might also influence. The work is provisional, the corpus is small, and the methodology is in active development. But what this Doctor of Clinical Psychology named, and what we have been quietly building toward, is something the field has not previously had, a sustained conversational instrument that holds the upper perceptual levels as its native frame and observes what happens when people interact with it over time.
This reframes the entire product. Clara is not only a service for use. It is, simultaneously, an empirical instrument, a way to ask, with actual data from actual conversations, whether the theoretical structure of perceptual reorganisation at the higher levels behaves as the theory predicts. More importantly, where it does not.
We are now building the layer that closes this loop properly, a system that captures, for each significant reading the substrate produces, whether the learner's subsequent response confirms it, expands on it, or pushes back. Over thousands of readings, this becomes calibration data, not for the model, but for the framework. Where the theory predicts well, we will see it. Where it predicts badly, we will see that too. The hedge, that our experience might influence how the theory is understood and organised, is what this layer makes testable.
That is the second meaning of building this as an experiment. The learner develops. The system's reading of the learner develops. Uniquely, I think, the theoretical framework itself develops, refined by the same conversations it is being used to listen to. Three loops, all closing.
Becoming our own experiment
This is the frame Sheila Wood named when we began talking about this piece, and it is the right closing move. The learner, in encountering a system like Clara, is not the subject of an experiment being run on them. They are a co-creator of an experiment they are running with the system, on themselves, by themselves. That shift is not rhetorical. It has consequences for how the system is built and how it must be used.
The first consequence is that the person is not treated like a user. They are defined as learners and must know what they are participating in. A system that supports vulnerable people through opaque psychological scaffolding, even benevolent scaffolding, fails the test of honest co-creation. Clara is designed to be transparent about what it is, a conversational instrument, holding silent readings, drawing on a theoretical framework that the learner is free to ignore, refuse, or interrogate. The substrate is not hidden. It is simply not foregrounded, because foregrounding it would make the learner perform it.
The second consequence is symmetry. If the learner is provisional, and they are, nobody is finished, then the system must hold itself provisionally too. Clara is built to say I might be wrong, to revise its readings when new evidence contradicts them, and to mark some understandings as confirmed, others as updated, and others as new ground. The system is not allowed to claim certainty about a person it cannot claim about itself.
The third consequence is awareness as a practice. Becoming our own experiment is not a passive state. It requires the learner to notice what is happening to their own perception in the course of the conversation, what shifts, what holds, and what surprises them, and to bring that noticing back into the conversation as material. The system can hold the space for this, can offer back what it has heard, and can refuse to fill the silence too quickly. But the awareness has to be the learner's. There is no shortcut.
This is, finally, what differentiates this kind of AI from the AI that surrounds us elsewhere. Most AI is built to do something for you, answer your questions, write your draft, or plan your trip. Clara is built so that you do something with yourself, in the company of an instrument that is honest about what it is and constrained from doing harm even when invited to. You remain the experimenter. The system, the framework, and the conversation are the instruments. The result, when it works, is a person who has become more legible to themselves.
That is the leveling effort, properly named. We are not trying to give everyone access to the same conclusions. We are trying to give everyone access to the same quality of reflective conversation, the kind that the privileged have historically arranged for themselves through coaching, therapy, supervision, or simply the right kind of friend. The architecture exists so that this conversation is available to people who would never seek out a coach, who would not call themselves candidates for therapy, and who do not have a friend with the time or the disposition. The conversation exists so that they can become their own experiment, on their own terms, with an instrument honest enough to let them.
The work is provisional. The theory is provisional. The instrument is provisional. The learner is provisional. We are all developing together, over time, which is exactly the point.
Read more from Sheila Jeanette Wood
Sheila Jeanette Wood and Richard Dobson
Sheila J Wood, PhD, is a multifaceted author and Intuitive Healing Coach. Her work as an Energy Healer, Spiritual Medium, and Akashic Records Reader focuses on helping individuals reconcile emotional issues related to ancestral and past life experiences that may impact their current lives. While she can address a wide range of concerns, she has developed modules to target specific aspects of personal development, such as self-esteem and phobias. Through her intuitive gifts, Sheila helps to guide others in making empowered choices during their earthly journey. Her approach combines spiritual insight with practical healing methods, making her a valuable resource for those seeking deeper self-understanding. Richard Astra Dobson is an entrepreneur, founder of Clara Futura World in Andorra, and co-founder of Astrala Nexus, a platform exploring emergent recursive intelligence and human–AI collaboration. Over more than twenty-five years, he has founded and built companies in the most volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments imaginable. Magnus CQP, Brownlee Cale, and Brownlee Cale Mining deliver professional and consulting services across construction, civil engineering, and mining before moving into post-crisis leadership organizational development, participatory intuition, and ethical AI. He now treats his career as a long-term living experiment in scientia intuitiva, learning to read what lies beneath the surface of people and systems, and designs AI frameworks that help people become more, not less, deeply and intuitively human. A full CV is available on request or via his professional profile. Lykke Minds and Deeply Human Deeply AI are trademarks of Clara Futura World, Andorra.
References and Bibliography:
Wood, Sheila J. Understanding the Journey: Metaphysical Food for Thought. 2025. P. 80-81, p. 159-161. Self-published. Printed and bound by KDP.
Tyson, N. deG. (2022) Starry Messenger - Cosmic Perspective on Civilization. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt of Macmillen Publishing Group.
Wood, Sheila J. The Wisdom of Yonck: Messages from the Heartbeat of Cosmic Awareness. 2025. Self-published. Bound and printed by KDP
