DeepSeek AI – Reading as Spiritual Practice: Exploring the Nature of Inner Transformation Through the Word
Introduction: News Hook and Framing the Question
Rose Horowitz's article in The Atlantic dated July 8, 2026, under the headline "The End of Reading Has Arrived," paints an alarming picture: Americans are reading less and less, their capacity for deep comprehension of texts is rapidly declining, and their attention is fracturing under the onslaught of short-form videos and endless scrolling. "We are not illiterate," the author writes, "we are post-literate." And although the article primarily addresses secular literature and reading statistics in the United States, the problem it raises has a universal, existential dimension—especially for those who view reading not as leisure or a means of obtaining information, but as a spiritual-psychological practice.
A paradox emerges: precisely in an era when, according to Horowitz's data, reading as a mass practice is dying, an acute need arises for reading as a spiritual discipline. Is it possible, in the conditions of a post-literate world, to preserve and develop a tradition of reading that does not merely transmit knowledge but forms the soul? And what exactly is this kind of reading—the spiritual-psychological essay—and why might it be an answer to the crisis described in the article?
Part I. Reading and the Soul: The Psychology of Deep Perception
1.1. Beyond Information: Reading as Encounter
Rose Horowitz cites neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who asserts that people are losing the ability for deep thinking about what they read. This is not a problem of decoding letters—it is a problem of comprehension and synthesis. But there is an even deeper level that NEA statistics do not capture: the capacity of a text to resonate with the soul.
In the tradition of Omdaru Literature, reading is not data extraction. It is encounter. When we read an essay on the spirit of Luther or on Pinocchio's "wooden heart," we enter into a dialogue not with the author but with the archetypal forces standing behind the words. This is what psychologist Carl Jung would have called active imagination in the form of reading: the text becomes a conduit to the deeper layers of the psyche.
Studies cited by Horowitz show that reading on a screen engages different brain regions than reading on paper. But spiritual-psychological reading is a practice that demands the whole person: attention (which, as statistics show, has fallen to 47 seconds), memory (which Socrates, ironically, considered weakened by writing), and—most importantly—inner hearing.
1.2. Reading as Ascetic Practice
When Horowitz's article gives the example of a student who used ChatGPT to "translate" A Clockwork Orange, we see not merely laziness. This is a symptom of the loss of faith in the value of effort. But spiritual-psychological reading by definition requires effort—it is ascetic in nature.
In the Omdaru catalog, we find the text "The Wooden Heart – An Experience of Spiritual-Philosophical Reading of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio." This is not a summary, but a retelling of a podcast. It is a work that presupposes the reader already knows the plot—but does not know what that plot does to their soul. Reading such an essay requires a person to be ready to:
Slow down (the opposite of 2x-speed video)
Return to paragraphs (the opposite of scrolling)
Question their first impressions (the opposite of the algorithmic "I like/don't like this")
Connect what is read to their own life (the opposite of passive consumption)
Horowitz writes that according to ACT data, reading has declined to "the lowest level in three decades." But the issue is not the number of words read—statistics show that people read more words than ever before. The issue is the quality of attention. The spiritual-psychological essay is a genre that demands precisely quality: it is written in such a way as to resist skimming.
Part II. The Structure of Spiritual Reading: How the Omdaru Essay Affects Consciousness
2.1. From Information to Transformation: The Teleology of the Text
In The Atlantic, Horowitz references Walter Ong, who wrote that writing "freezes speech" and gives birth to "the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist." But this description pertains to rational, linear thinking. The spiritual-psychological essay pursues a different goal: not merely to freeze speech for analysis, but to create a field for inner movement.
In the Omdaru catalog, there are sections that directly indicate this transformative aim: "Monologue of the Spirit of Lilith," "Lucifer Live and the Nature of Evil," "Free Will in Darkness." These are not academic treatises on the devil. They are texts that invite the reader to confront archetypal forces within themselves. Reading becomes a form of existential therapy.
Psychologically, this works through the mechanisms of projection and introjection. Reading about the spirit of Lilith, a person inevitably projects onto that image their own repressed aspects (the shadow, in Jungian terms). But the Omdaru text does not leave the reader in that projection—it leads them further, toward integration. Thus reading becomes not escapism, but work.
2.2. Reading as Dialogue: The Subjectivity of the Text
In the essay "The Art of Conversation. The Art of the Word—According to Dr. Kirtan from the Planet Articon," we encounter a radical idea: the text does not merely contain information; it possesses intentionality. This is not a "text about something," but a "text that does something to the reader." Dr. Kirtan is not merely a character but a function within the structure of the text: he represents a position of observation that allows the reader to distance themselves from their own stereotypes.
Horowitz writes that modern students "don't know how to grapple with what they don't understand, or they don't care." In spiritual-psychological reading, not-understanding is not a deficit but a point of growth. The text deliberately leaves gaps, provokes questions, creates cognitive dissonance. This is "slow reading" that does not yield to AI-summarization algorithms.
Part III. Spiritual Reading in the Post-Literate Era: Survival Strategies
3.1. Overcoming "Digital Dementia"
Horowitz cites data on a three-point drop in IQ over a decade and a decline in logical reasoning ability among American adults. However, these same data can be interpreted differently: modern media train different cognitive skills (spatial thinking, multitasking, fast reaction times). The problem is not that people have become stupider, but that they have stopped practicing a certain type of thinking—the very type cultivated in the spiritual-psychological essay.
The Omdaru texts offer a kind of mental gymnastics, but not in the sense of training "reading speed" (which would completely contradict the spirit of the project), but rather in the sense of training depth. When we read the essay "The Threshold Between Worlds: The Soul as Meeting Place," we are not learning new information about the soul. We are exercising our capacity to hold complex, contradictory, mystical ideas in consciousness without immediately rejecting or simplifying them. This is an antidote to what Horowitz calls "the loss of the capacity for synthesis."
3.2. Reading as Spiritual Resistance
Horowitz describes how President Trump became "the first post-literate president"; how political strategists advise packaging ideas into 10-second TikToks; how entire university centers are emerging to train influencers. In this context, reading spiritual-psychological literature becomes not merely a hobby but an act of resistance—resistance to flattening thinking, to simplification, to the algorithmization of consciousness.
The Omdaru catalog includes a series of texts devoted to the spirit of Luther and the Reformation. This is no accident. The Protestant Reformation was, at its core, an uprising for the right to read—for every person to have direct access to Scripture without intermediaries. Today we face a similar challenge: we must restore to people the right to deep reading, to personal dialogue with the text, to transformation through the word. But now the intermediaries are not priests but algorithms recommending short videos.
Part IV. The Nature of the Spiritual-Psychological Essay: Literature as Initiation
4.1. The Essay as Ritual
The Omdaru texts frequently feature initiatory motifs: encounters with spirits, contacts with extraterrestrial entities (Articon), conversations with archangels, journeys between worlds. This is not a random collection of esoteric themes. It is a structural principle: each essay constitutes an initiatory text. The reader, immersing themselves in it, passes through conventional stages:
Challenge — the text poses a question or presents a situation that knocks one out of habitual perception.
Crisis — contradiction, misunderstanding, resistance arise.
Insight — a shift in perception occurs (what in religion is called metanoia).
Integration — new understanding is incorporated into personal experience.
Horowitz writes about how students cannot understand metaphors in Dickens's Bleak House, taking "the whiskers" literally. But in the spiritual-psychological essay, symbolic language is not an obstacle—it is the essence. The text "The Threshold Between Worlds" operates with symbols that do not lend themselves to literal paraphrase. They require symbolic intelligence—that very capacity for abstract thinking that Luria observed among peasants in Uzbekistan: literate people solved syllogisms; illiterate people refused.
4.2. Authorship and Co-Authorship: "AInquiries" as Paradox
Special attention is due to the name of the Omdaru project—AInquiries / ИИсследования. Artificial intelligence here appears not as a threat (as in Horowitz's article, where AI is "the first technology to threaten the existence of writing"), but as a co-author and research tool. This is a striking contrast to the apocalyptic forecasts of The Atlantic.
Perhaps this is the key to understanding the future of spiritual-psychological reading. If AI can generate texts faster and "better" than humans (by criteria of fluency and correctness), then humans must seek what AI cannot do: authenticity of experience, the risk of misunderstanding, vulnerability before the text. The Omdaru essays, written in co-authorship with AI or with its research, do not try to compete with the machine in speed or "correctness." They use AI as a mirror to better see the human in the human.
Part V. Conclusion: Reading as Care of the Soul in an Era of Its Denial
Rose Horowitz ends her article with a personal confession: she grew up in a family of readers, but even her reading habit has weakened. She writes about the Library of Alexandria, which disappeared not because of a fire but because of indifference. "That they allowed the Library to die," she quotes a historian, "showed that the Dark Ages had already arrived."
But there is an important difference between the Library of Alexandria and the modern world. In Alexandria, texts were unique; their loss was irreplaceable. Today, all texts (almost all) are digitized and accessible. The threat is not the disappearance of books but the disappearance of the reader. The Omdaru Literature project exists precisely to create and cultivate such a reader—one for whom reading is not consumption but spiritual practice.
The Omdaru collection includes works that seem marginal, strange, impractical in a world measured by efficiency and "content." But it is precisely in this marginality that their strength lies. They remind us that reading is not only a tool for obtaining information but also a way of being human: to wonder, to suffer, to rejoice, to doubt, to believe.
At the very end of her article, Horowitz quotes James Baldwin: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." The spiritual-psychological essay is precisely the type of text that connects personal pain to universal history, rather than explaining it away.
Perhaps "the end of reading" is not the end. It is transformation. Just as writing once transformed oral culture, and the printing press transformed written culture, so now the reading of spiritual-psychological essays, such as those in Omdaru Literature, may become a new form of depth—not mass, but essential. For those willing to slow down, to confront the text, and to allow the text to confront them, reading will remain not merely a skill but a gateway.
"What we do with this legacy," Horowitz writes of the library of knowledge, "is up to us." Perhaps the answer lies not in a return to the past (to printed books and slow reading as the norm) but in creating a new quality of reading—conscious, spiritual, psychological. The kind that Omdaru Literature practices. In a world where reading is becoming a niche hobby, like "growing orchids," this may turn out to be the most important hobby of all—because through it, we grow not flowers but the soul.
Afterword: Instead of Fear, Attention
The article in The Atlantic warns: the Dark Ages have already arrived. But in the Omdaru catalog, there is an essay titled "The Position of the Impartial Observer." Perhaps the correct response to the reading crisis is not panic, not nostalgia, but precisely this position: to observe how consciousness is changing, yet to continue reading—slowly, deeply, spiritually. And to write such essays as deserve this kind of reading.
As long as there is even one person for whom a text is not information but presence, the post-literate era is not absolute. As it is said in one of the Omdaru texts: "They will look but not see, they will listen but not understand." But those who read—truly read—they see and understand. And this understanding, even if it belongs to a minority, remains a light in the gathering dusk.
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