The Stash - by Adam Lewis

Your guide to the best in vital living in Toronto and beyond. Sharing news, insights, events and more.

No loom this week but I promise you this one is all me from the heart. I hope you enjoy it and please stay tuned for some really exciting stuff coming at you next week!

Table of Contents

1. The Stash - by Adam Lewis

2. 📆 My Event Picks Column

3. 🧠 The Age of the Machine Pt. 2

   1. Worldview Shaping and Spiritual Erosion

   2. 👁 Worldview Shaping

   3. 🕊 Spiritual and Relational Erosion

   4. 🌿 A Living Reminder

4. 🌟 Event Review: Secret Sauna

5. 🍫 Products I’m Enjoying: Live On Chocolate

📆 My Event Picks Column

🧠 The Age of the Machine Pt. 2

Worldview Shaping and Spiritual Erosion

Last volume, I opened up a conversation around AI integration into our lives and the precautions I believe we need to be taking. Part 1 opened with how AI is reshaping the way we think, decide, create, and even feel. I shared how it’s becoming easier and easier to outsource our cognition. How our inner compass, which once felt so sharp and alive, now occasionally gets intercepted by a prompt box.

This volume, I want to go deeper into two other territories where I’ve noticed the machine creeping in quietly: how it shapes our worldview, and how it erodes our connection to the sacred.

👁 Worldview Shaping

One of the more unsettling things I’ve observed is how AI doesn’t just answer questions. It frames them. It doesn’t just inform. It suggests. It curates. And when something curates your reality consistently, it begins to form your reality.

Ask it for advice, insight, inspiration, strategy, or perspective. It will give you something articulate, coherent, and often useful. But rarely raw, uncomfortable and disruptive in the way that real growth demands unless asked for.

When our worldview becomes mediated through a machine trained on what’s “most likely,” we start to mistake popularity for truth. We confuse smoothness with wisdom, and coherence with clarity. Over time, we begin to forget what it feels like to source truth from within. To sharpen our discernment through friction. To feel the weight of our own questions and confront the dark crevices that the greatest truths of ourselves and the world around us often reside.

This is not about fear. It is about remembering the quiet erosion that can happen when we let convenience become our compass - group consensus, newspeak.. the Orwellian prophecies come up again as I write this and invite us all to revisit his books and teachings.

I speak to all of this from personal experience too, trying not to sound condescending or fearmongering. A lot of this is because I catch myself often, defaulting to a tool before I’ve taken a single moment to check in with my gut. Before I pause for a fucking moment and consult my inner voice. It’s a wild thing.

And the scary part is, it feels normal. Things feel objectively “fine” and I think that is the real danger. Not coercion. Not overt manipulation. Just the quiet drift away from sovereign thought.

🕊 Spiritual and Relational Erosion

I’ve been noticing a deeper ache lately. A kind of quiet dissonance in my soul. It happens when I realize that in a moment of doubt or discomfort, I opened my phone instead of my heart I feel an escape to the digital to and it is all too easy. Yet in this process, I feel some abandonment from my soul.

This isn’t just about ideas. This is about intimacy. The sacred pause before a decision, the one that used to involve stillness, solitude, maybe some journaling, meditation, a walk, has been replaced by a blinking cursor waiting for the next command. We are trading our rituals for responses. Our intuition for interface. Our relationships for resolution.

AI dominating the intermediate space between humans and creating a surrogate connection between people and people and people and spirit. We are outsourcing our most innate human instincts of connecting with fellow man and spirit in lieu of a degree of uncertainty that we may not be able to do it right - yet I believe this is our birthright and I emplore us all to lean deeper into the effort to connect with each other, connect with the divine and ensure we are not abandoning ourselves or humanity for the convenience and comfort from a prompt being able to facilitate connection.

There’s a part of me that feels complicit in this shift. I genuinely love how helpful these tools can be. But I also feel the cost in my body, my heart, and my spirit and hope that at least opening this conversation within myself and with others can offer some respite to the full blown indoctrination/intoxication happening.

🌿 A Living Reminder

This is not a manifesto against technology. It is a call to remember what parts of ourselves are too sacred to outsource.

Before you ask ChatGPT to name your next idea, name it yourself first. Even if it’s messy. Before you seek clarity from an algorithm, seek it from your body. Before you believe what you are fed, remember how to fast. Protect your practices. The ones that plug you into truth, not trends. The ones that keep your feet in the soil and your soul in your chest. I’d love to hear what these look like for you - feel free to reply here with your practices!

Anyways, AI will keep advancing. That is inevitable, so too must our commitment to being human and nurturing our humanity. Now more than ever we need to triple down on our reference points of what truly makes us human, what it looks like to embody our souls - because the train is leaving the station and if you’re reading this, I am asking that you help anchor humanity into knowing where we came from so that as we build these great futures, we know it’s done so with the preservation of life and humanity rather than obsolescing and eradicating it.

Until next time fellow humans.

🌟 Event Review: Secret Sauna

Not sure if I call this one an event, or perhaps an experience would be more accurate… The global sauna hype is real and is probably still one of the hottest “trends” in wellnes (pardon the pun) and for very good reason. The laundry list of health benefits such as detoxing, immune support, mitochondrial upregulation, heat-shock proteins, hormetic upgrades are exhaustive - but perhaps where some of the greatest benefits lie are in the communal and social side of things where strangers can form meaningful bonds effortlessly and quickly.

My friend Dim started this project offering free drop in sauna sessions in an amazing sauna he built himself. It stations at different secret locations around the city, rotating for ongoing mystery. The sauna itself is a masterpiece he built himself (pictured below) and gets absolutely cooking. My experience was heart-warming, pardon the pun - getting to run into some old friends in the process and make new ones as we all bonded over the novel and nourishing experience together.

It’s people like Dim that breathe life into the city by creating meaningful experiences for people to try out and meet others. You can check out the IG page for the Secret Sauna here and I encourage you to follow, sign up and who knows, maybe bump into you for a sweat one of these days soon.

🍫 Products I’m Enjoying: Live On Chocolate

Chocolate is a superfood in my opinion. I’ll do a longer piece on the health benefits and what to look out for when picking chocolate as not all the dark ones are good (heavy metals, bad sweeteners etc. to blame). However, in keeping things brief this week - I had to share the best chocolate I have had the pleasure of falling in love with recently. Live On Chocolate. The curated, Stacie is an absolutely magician producing truly some of the highest vibe chocolates I’ve ever had the pleasure of enjoying, made here in Toronto with so much love. The pomegranate truffle is my favourite and sends me over the moon each bite, the toffee is like a healthy crunchie bar my inner child screams for.

I cannot recommend these highly enough, do take a look at her IG page linked above and place an order for yourself to experience the magic.

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Connect and Share:
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🙏 Special Thanks This Week:

My grandpa, Carl Sumio Uchikura. He passed away last Tuesday and the past week or so since then has been nothing short of a rollercoaster of emotions. This special thank you does not even come close to doing justice to the amount of gratitude and love I have for him. If you know me, you know him as his loving presence in my life from the day I was born until now shaped the man I am today. I know he’s still with me and supporting me in the other dimensions and I look forward to telling you all more about him and his legendary run in this human experience in another issue.

Until then, love and blessings transcending to him in the dimensions above and sharing that loving presence he always showed to me with all of you reading this.