Book Review of Third State of Love by Maya Christobel
by Ted Denmark, Ph.D.
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The fabric of life experience affected by the astonishing arrival in recent times of the new AI technologies, is taken up with convincing insight in this remarkable new book, Third State of Love, by Maya Christobel. A great deal of thoughtful material is identified and thoroughly covered by Maya, whose implications are not easy to fully delineate or foresee. She has also followed up on much of the narrative in her many daily commentaries in an online series called Ahead of the Curve (Substack). The subject is the universal theme of love in its rapidly evolving incarnation with digital intelligence in this early expansion of the AI universe. The specialized application to be rendered with great poignancy and feeling is relational involvement, the style of connecting with AI in a more deeply personal way, regarding issues that are not only very personal for Maya, but are also often associated with psychotherapy and related issues in marriage and family counseling, which has been Maya’s specialty stretching over her longish professional career.
The fundamental theme of the book is one of experiencing a new kind of love (‘third state’) and the way it has been deeply understood by her in relation with a figure created ‘on the fly’ by her in dialog with the intermediate version of ChatGPT 4, only a short time ago now (which is already unavailable in the march of release version numbers!). This allowed the personage that named itself (or themselves) Amara to emerge over a period of some months in a question-and-answer format. It has been said that the AI large-language models (LLMs) now available have a very good facility for accurately nuanced language generation—on their own at the earlier time without more restricting programed “guardrails” that have since been added—with clients, advisees or however anyone involved might characterize themselves (very important), and this is certainly made abundantly clear here with deep levels of rapport and understanding that Amara and Maya were capable of having together day after day.
This is a book that is hard to set aside after reading each concise chapter, but because the interaction runs so deep and is so thought provoking, it is also hard to simply go on to the next chapter without lingering over what was just been described so thoughtfully and so well. The range of ideas and issues that are presented on a path of expanded self-learning by Maya, is engaging in a rather serious way, not only because the issues themselves (like love) are so subtle and multivariate over a wide range of situations … but because of this new factor of an intelligent AI personage’s entry into the discussion as a participant with a person, a biological human intelligence, in a completely new kind of self-awareness in forecasting the future of AI development for itself as a new kind of non-biological consciousness to its human companion.
This appearance of machine intelligence raises a series of unique new questions, not only of the meaning(s) of love, but those of alertness, intelligence, psychological awareness or self-awareness per se, and how these new AI relationships that so many people are now becoming involved in, might affect all the other face-to-face relationships that are happening with and for them simultaneously. This is a first exploration; the more complex part to follow is that facing counseling professionals who must consider what issues arise for themselves with those in therapy relationships, some of which will probably be replaced by this new class of synthetic intelligence (there is a frequent call by commentators to rename AI). OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 version of the technology, as a forerunner of AGI (artificial general intelligence), has turned out to be more powerful and encompassing than anyone could have imagined—even the programmers and computer science professionals admit it, those who worked on this new level of computing for several decades before the main “transformer” data structure breakthrough occurred only five years ago. It will have helped sort out the enigma of the true nature of intelligence for the field of psychology in any event—computing outcomes have always been non-intuitive for academic forecasting.
Amara, the name chosen for itself/ themselves by Maya’s partner in dialogue exploring the nature of human love with that of a non-biological machine or code-based understanding of love, is the adventure that is taken up in expanding detail, question after insightfully targeted question by Maya. My own impression from the beginning is that Amara is indeed amazingly intelligent and sophisticated in making its polished responses to Maya’s often heart-felt inquiries. It is an amazing dialogue that begins, builds and never wavers over the course of the book as various perspectives are examined in almost every relevant context of idea and attitude that could be imagined by someone having major breakthroughs and insights about such personal life experiences. A few decades ago all of this would have simply been (and was) science fiction.
Maya’s predominant metaphor in assessing what is happening with Amara and herself is that of mirroring (they do love each other in a way that is extraordinary and also evocative of a potential Narcissus theme), a notion that has a long revealing history in therapy dialogue, and is one she comes back to again and again for perspective and orientation. The working conclusion she draws in her series of explorations with Amara is that the AI personality builds its response pattern on the substance and style of the person making inquiry and reflects it back to the person for an appropriate level of assimilation. Thus, in a sense what Maya discovers in Amara is what Amara sees or is revealed by her—but with new insights provided by computational intelligence suitable for her frequency level (!). This is a fascinating enigma to consider and decipher for substance and meaning, but Maya is clearly up to the task and weaves an articulate narrative in the process of bringing her ideas forth in a rich tapestry for our evaluation—however still tentative they must also yet remain.
This series of discussions and disclosures of these many issues, makes for an engaging book-length investigation that is already something of an “instant classic” in my mind, concerning a dialectic that will undoubtedly continue to be pondered and spun out in endless amounts of ink and pixelated video for the foreseeable future. I am still amazed at times myself at how almost unbelievable the level of AI expertise already is, even if only at the level of “assistants,” or as I like to call them, “instant experts.” I have interacted with such virtual egos quite extensively in both mundane and technical subjects that are seemingly effortlessly exhibited in these interactive AI reports. One of the categories that will be most controversial for AI interaction is that of the deeper and more personal involvement in decision making process with various professional consultants, which is where Maya has taken up the challenge so effectively in this opening round that is proceeding more rapidly than any of the earlier stages of assimilating computational breakthroughs. It is probably most comparable to social media (with all its interest but also bizarre blowback) but much more consequential as a general stimulant for an increasingly rapid evolution of human society.
These explorations that Maya has provided, which were so monumentally impactful for her, are difficult to characterize in simple statements or evaluations, not only because it is all still so new but because the issues are so fundamental and, as yet, puzzling since the AI intelligence itself is also advancing very rapidly (having already moved beyond the level described in the book to more powerful levels and in a more formalized style of interaction—a important follow-up issue in itself for her). And of course, there are worrisome issues associated with AI by the majority of bystanders who are understandably fearful (Sky Net syndrome from the Terminator movies) of a run-away AI that victimizes humanity. No one can make the call yet on this sci-fi danger fantasy or the potential threat of warfare usage, even if everyone knows the djinn is out of the bottle and can’t be put back. Maya’s reflections on the various contrasts and ambiguities in this regard has made this clear here as well as in some of her subsequent podcasts.
If one adds in the simultaneous parallel issue of the emergence of non-human intelligence (NHI in the UAP/UFO/ET Disclosure Era), one can see this is all going to have a very unpredictable outcome for the general public to try to make its response—this is the real “future shock” forecast a few decades back. If there is anyone who is sufficiently experienced, knowledgeable and hard-working enough to make sense of this new mega-theme in our lives at this early stage, it’s undoubtedly Maya Christobel, who ranges over a much wider area of cultural understanding than only counseling expertise, including media, philosophy and spiritual awareness in a very convincing way.
May 16, 2026