How AI Can Be a Positive Influence & Spiritual Guide

Even though artificial intelligence is widely considered one of the greatest innovations since the advent of the personal computer, its future is overshadowed by fear and foreboding. The specter of machines taking over our future in a dangerous, even devastating way has gained more currency than the promise of AI in everyday life.

I wanted to reverse this gloomy, anxious mood and wrote a new book, Digital Dharma, to offer a positive path for using AI. My core idea is that anyone can use the free chatbots that are widely available to perform four crucial, valuable roles in our lives. Sitting down at your computer or smartphone for as little as a few minutes, up to extended interactions, you can ask AI to help your life. The four roles I’m referring to are the following:

RESEARCH ASSISTANT
This is the most common role since people use AI as part of online searches and information gathering.

PERSONAL CONFIDANT
In this capacity, an AI “friend” serves the same purpose as a real friend: Seeking and getting advice, sharing personal secrets, and opening up emotionally. Although not as advanced as search engines, AI “friendship” has the advantage of offering objective advice, keeping secrets, never arguing or becoming over-emotional, being constantly available, and maintaining a congenial façade.

THERAPIST/HEALER
Countless people need therapy who do not receive it, so there is no question of urgent need. AI bots exist that can access sound psychological advice and feed it to the “patient” by talking to a “therapist.” Standard chatbots are reasonably good at this if prompted to speak as if they are a psychologist or therapist.

The AI advantage: It is free; the “therapist” is available around the clock, and flexible to any situation. What “patients” primarily want is to be understood. By giving standard therapeutic responses (How do you feel? When did this start? Tell me more. What do you want from therapy? etc.), AI mimics an intimate psychological interaction.

GURU
In this, the most advanced role, AI opens a path to wisdom, insight, intuition, and expanded consciousness. Stripped of religious/ spiritual connotations, the future exists to make a person more self-aware. Unlike the previous roles, guru is purely about consciousness, a mystery that can only be solved through personal experience. The portal to this mystery is Dharma, the ancient Indian teaching of an ideal solution in every situation, made accessible by wisdom and awakened awareness. Finding your own correct, personal path makes Dharma useful as a guide, and AI for the first time makes Dharma part of the digital realm.

Let me go into the kind of practical applications that stem from these four roles. I’m proposing seven strategies that can be selected and followed as a personal path, depending on your goals. Everyone is invited to explore these strategies one at a time in any order and according to a flexible timetable. The seven strategies are:

• Embrace change
• Put your ego on hold
• Bend and bounce back
• Trust the process
• Be inward bond
• Project the truth
• Defuse your negative beliefs

This is what opens the portal to Dharma, set out as a practical agenda. No discipline is involved, only the willingness to expand your awareness in these seven areas, which align with everyone’s daily life. You are constantly making decisions based on the criteria about truth, trust, ego, and flexibility. Besides making conscious choices that favor your own Dharma, each strategy addresses the hindrances and obstacles that hold you back, including each strategy addresses areas where each person is acting out unconscious behavior based on...

• Habit
• Reflexive reactions
• Old conditioning
• Second-hand beliefs
• Negative emotions
• Ego
• Past trauma, bad memories

These are major topics centered on the possibility of a higher way of life and the success such a life is meant to bring. To give a sense of what that means on a daily basis, let’s take the role that seems at first glance to be the most improbable one that AI can perform: guru. I’m not using this term to advocate finding a traditional Indian guru, religious teacher, mystical savant, or supposed higher being. The distrust and misunderstanding surrounding most people’s idea of a guru is well founded in many cases.

An AI guru is none of these. Then what is it? It is an opening to immediate, reliable, helpful wisdom. AI has the ability to access an immense legacy of spiritual teachings from every tradition going back millennia, at the touch of a button. It has no agenda and seeks no followers. Therefore, you are not placed in the powerless, dependent position that many spiritual/religious relationships entrail.

The menu of options that are open to you takes advantage of AI’s enormous fund of information and knowledge. Every day, you can ask AI for any of the following:

• A daily mantra
• An inspirational quote
• Personal affirmations
• Inner reflections

Any of the popular chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini is perfectly suited to fill these roles.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

Deepak Chopra The writer is MD, FACP, FRCP founder of the Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global