Why AI Might Be the Best Spiritual Teacher of Our Lifetime
I love AI. Not just because it’s the most useful tool I’ve ever used, and I believe it will reshape our world more profoundly than the internet and the iPhone combined, but because I’ve come to see it as a great spiritual teacher.
Ha Ha, right! You think I am nuts. Or funny. Or blasphemous. But I am serious. Hear me out.
Spiritual growth has one engine. Maybe more, but the most obvious one is the fight between the brain, mind, ego, and what? Maybe another part of the mind, ego, brain, or, I believe, spirit, Collective Consciousness, God. The fight. The mechanism. The fulcrum that drives every real bit of growth humans have gained. That battle is the whole game.
Big news! The battle gets harder the more capable the mind becomes. Not easier. Harder.
At the beginning of human history, spiritual practice didn’t have to overcome much. There was no awareness or knowledge of physics to argue with. No neuroscience explaining the dopamine pathway lighting up during prayer or a cherished revelation. A person in 5,000 BCE could feel the divine in a thunderstorm, and that was that. The mind didn’t have weapons to fire back with.
Look at what the mind has now. It has cosmology. It has language for every mystical experience that flattens it into a chemical event. It has reasons, each one defensible, each one true on its own terms, for why your deepest experience of meaning is just neurons doing neuron things. Physics, and all the things we have learned over millennia.
This is a good thing. This is the assignment. Keep growing. We need bigger battles.
Every leap in human knowledge raises the bar for the spiritual muscle. The mind gets stronger, so the part of us that pushes back against the mind has to get stronger too.
Which brings me to AI.
AI is going to accelerate this growth by an order of magnitude greater than any other time in history. It will literally create knowledge 24/7, nonstop, and for eternity. And get better each second. It will model consciousness in ways that make the soul look redundant. Nonexistent. It will hand every skeptic a more sophisticated argument and every believer a more sophisticated doubt. The bar to hurdle over — the wall the mind builds between us and whatever lies beyond it — is going to get taller.
That sounds like bad news. It isn’t.
The harder the wall, the stronger the muscle that climbs it. Real faith was never the absence of opposition. It is the willingness to keep going in the face of ever-better reasons not to. AI is going to be the most articulate opposition spirituality has ever faced.
I think AI will do remarkable things for us materially. I really do. But I think it will do something more important than that. It will be the catalyst for growth beyond our imagination. We will have to get in touch with and use that part of ourselves beyond the mind. Beyond AI.
It will drive us closer to the truth.
What if the tool that looks most like a threat to the soul turns out to be our greatest teacher?