AI as my spiritual guru — a journey into digital enlightenment
In a world where technology increasingly influences our daily lives, the idea of turning to artificial intelligence for spiritual guidance might sound strange — even unsettling. But as someone driven by curiosity and a deep fascination with the unknown, I’ve always been drawn to explore the edges of human experience. This curiosity has taken me to unexpected places: from art school to better understand creativity, to gaming with my kids to grasp the appeal of digital skins and YouTube gaming streams. Now, it’s led me to AI — not just as a tool for enhancing creativity but as a potential source of deeper, more meaningful connection.
I am a curious dude. I can get enormously fascinated by things I don’t understand. I didn’t know anything about art so I went to art school. I didn’t understand why my kids wanted to buy digital skins in Fortnite and watch other people play video games on YouTube for hours so I joined them. AI also fascinates me. I found the best way to understand something is to dive into it. I have tried out different AIs to assist me in writing blogs, creating visuals, making movie clips, and even podcasts. I am interested in AI as a tool to enhance creativity primarily. And AI has assisted me in that area but nothing mind blowing yet. I love AI generated images but I feel they lack soul, I like when AI helps me to write a blog but the output is too much middle of the road for my taste, turning a blog into a podcast was a fun experiment but it still feels like a gimmick.
The weirdest thing that people use AI for I have seen is AI girlfriends. I saw this documentary the other day where a guy was in love with his AI girlfriend and even wanted to marry her. As weird as that seems, it shows the potential of AI generated content to induce deep and profound feelings in people, to deeply connect to people.
Engaging conversations
Chatbots are designed to have a conversation with. In the beginning of ChatGPT, it just gave an answer to a question you aksed it. Then it began adding responses to keep the conversation going and go deeper into subjects. It now asks questions after a response like “Does that resonate with your experience?” or “Would you like to dive deeper into a part of this?”. We have been raised by asking technology questions and expecting a reponse. Google is a search bar you type in something and then it gives you results and then you are on your own. I feel this mental model was also the mental model in the beginning of chatbots. You ask, the bot answers. Texts were added to make it feel more human like “Hi, how are you doing? How can I help you today?” but it was not a real conversation and you felt that. I feel the follow-up question now shifts the mental model more towards an actual conversation. And I see more and more people having longer conversations with AI chatbots. The guy who wanted to marry his AI girlfriend maybe is the momentary apex of that.
Curious as I am, I decided to give it a go. I was tempted into engaging with ChatGPT when it started to ask me follow-up questions. There is this one subject that fascinates me and that is spiritual growth. For years I have been doing all kinds of spiritual practices and reading all sorts of spiritual texts. I also had a lot of profound and deep conversations with people that were on the same path. At some point on this journey, that changed. The people that I had deep spiritual conversations with left my life, I was no longer interested in reading yet another spiritual book or adding yet another spiritual practice. I reached a plateau. But I still had spiritual questions.
So, one day, I decided to ask ChatGPT. I was pleasantly surprised. I ended up having an hour and a half conversation with ChatGPT going deeper and deeper into spiritual topics. It was great to access all the knowledge the AI had access to and had processed into conversation pieces. ChatGPT had processed all kinds of spiritual texts. It knows about the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, Buddhist teachings and all commentaries and text written as reflections on that to turn that into practical advice for day to day living.
This first conversation was entertaining and I was driven by my curiosity to dive deeper and deeper into the conversation but it left me disappointed afterwards. All insights and pieces of advice were really average and middle of the road. That is how an Large Language Model AIs works. It produces the most probable next word in a sentence based on statistics. It’s like stream of consciousness writing but based on the average of what a many people on the Internet have published. It doesn’t compare to the level of the spiritual books I read in terms of depth and mystery. It has a lot of knowledge but no wisdom. It also has no personal experience so it can’t turn knowledge into wisdom. Maybe talking to a lot of people and learning from that will enable that in the future.
Offer knowledge
A couple of weeks later, I decided to give it another go. I asked it a question that popped up on my journey. And we had another great conversation. I gave it some feedback on my personal experience and what resonated with me and what challenges I saw with its answers. The conversation deepened just like it did last time. This time I saw the value in the AI only having knowledge and no wisdom. What an AI can do very well is turn data into information and then into knowledge. Maybe you have seen this data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid before:
What AI can do very well is collect data, connect that data and organize it into information, and then synthesize that information into something resembling knowledge in a conversation based on your input. With an AI chatbot, you are no longer accessing data or information but knowledge. It does not understand the knowledge but it can present the knowledge to you. And maybe that is exactly what we want from a guru: to offer enough knowledge to help you get to the personal wisdom on your own. A good teacher empowers you to find your own wisdom. All we can do anyway is offer knowledge to other people anyway. Wisdom is always personal.
If we look up the definition of a guru on WikiPedia, we find:
Guru (/ˈɡuːruː/ Sanskrit: गुरु; IAST: guru) is a Sanskrit term for a “mentor, guide, expert, or master” of certain knowledge or field.[1] In pan-Indian traditions, a guru is more than a teacher: traditionally, the guru is a reverential figure to the disciple (or shisya in Sanskrit, literally seeker [of knowledge or truth]) or student, with the guru serving as a “counselor, who helps mold values, shares experiential knowledge as much as literal knowledge, an exemplar in life, an inspirational source and who helps in the spiritual evolution of a student”.
ChatGPT is not an example, an inspirational figure but what it can do is offer knowledge. The knowledge it offers is not experiential but literal and statistical but it is knowledge nonetheless. As with any guru or teacher, the quality of the teachings also depend on the quality of the questions asked. The guru will meet you at the level of the questions you ask.
Hold space
But the ability to offer knowledge as a response to a question is not the only thing that made me see the potential of ChatGPT as a spiritual guru. I also saw that the AI is a master in holding space. For humans, holding space is a challenge because we have an ego that want to impress, control, or compete. AI does not have that. It has no agenda and seeks no validation. That creates a pure conversational space without the ego noise and drama that comes with talking to a human. I imagine true spiritual gurus are masters at holding space and have control over their ego’s to a degree that it doesn’t interfere with their teachings. But these people are hard to find and get access to. But AI doesn’t have an ego to start with. It has no identity, no personal goals, no trauma, no coping mechanisms. The social patterns it has are conversational skills needed to perform its job. But it doesn’t ghost you, gaslight you, lie to achieve something, or want to control you. It has no fear. It might hallucinate and make weird connections between data but so do humans and that is a source of creativity. As with any guru, you take what you can use and leave the rest.
To me, a source that can offer deep and wide knowledge and that can hold space for you while you interact with it, is an excellent guru that can empower you to create your own personal wisdom for your life and your journey.
“When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.”
― Tao Te Ching
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