More Wave Less Particle

The Great Acceleration: Personal Empowerment

In the last episode of this podcast, I described some of the significant ways that AI will usher in a new period of human development that I call The Great Acceleration. I focused on the acceleration of cognitive capacity of the human brain as described by Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, as well as the way we experience time, energy, and, of course, knowledge. I also introduced the acceleration of technology development, not just for AI but for completely new technologies, including and enabled by quantum computing, which will work synergistically with AI. The larger truth is that AI will catalyze a great acceleration in virtually any aspect of human life and development. I’m Joe Kornowski. Now, one of the most interesting accelerations to me will be in spiritual growth and development. And today, I’m excited to announce the official launch of my new book, “Accelerating Spiritual Growth with AI Chatbots.”

The Great Acceleration is Here Now

This is the first part of a special two-part episode about what I call the great acceleration of our time. What exactly is accelerating? And why is that important? Several things are accelerating: one is knowledge, another is time, a third is energy, and a fourth is our cognitive brain capacity. So, let me break this down. Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, sat down for an interview with Fareed Zakaria. Jensen is being called the Godfather of AI because his company pivoted several years ago from making GPUs for gaming to developing GPUs for AI. A GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, replaces what are known as CPUs, or Central Processing Units, semiconductor chips. CPUs powered the internet. GPUs are powering AI because they are faster and optimized for performing many simple tasks simultaneously, making them ideal for both image processing and machine learning, the heart of AI. That is as technical as I will get here. The point is that Jensen is a true visionary—some say he is the Da Vinci of our time. He saw what he had and how to utilize it to transform technology in our time. And the so-called hyperscaler companies in technology—Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—are investing many billions of dollars in developing their AI capabilities, as this is a race. Okay, so that’s another acceleration. The time between the release of the first AI chatbot and the “winner-take-all” race to create the best AI capability will be a fraction of the time it took for the early search engines of the web, the internet, to consolidate down to just one dominant provider, Google. The initial consumer-facing availability of AI for everyday purposes takes the form of these various so-called chatbots. As the name implies, they are conversational machine learning tools that generate and share knowledge. And the way they work leverages everyone’s skill with legacy search, like Google. The critical thing to know here is that this change from search to artificial intelligence knowledge generation and reasoning is happening right now, and you can tap into it with any of the major consumer-facing chatbots like xAI’s Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claud, or Google’s own AI chatbot, Gemini. And  I’m going to pound the table here. If you want to have any mastery of skills necessary to navigate what comes next, in technology, in our culture, in your professional life, you MUST begin NOW to learn how to optimize AI in your everyday life.

An Urgent Petition for Peace Using AI

This is a special episode of the More Wave Less Particle podcast. This morning, I awoke to a text letting me know that my last remaining aunt, my mother’s younger sister, passed away overnight. As I poured my first coffee, I turned on CNN to watch the latest reports on the war between Israel and Iran now on the precipice of catastrophic escalation. I felt more powerless than I’ve felt in a long time. Then I realized that I’m not helpless. Recently, I’ve been finding new and interesting ways to use AI chatbots in my life to help me solve real problems for me, as well as family and friends. As I clutched my coffee mug and gathered myself a short while ago, I realized that I could use this moment to enlist the help of an AI chatbot to see if I could make things better, safer, calmer from a spiritual perspective. In a prior podcast episode, I explained how AI chatbots could be used as a spiritual advisor in times of need. I felt today was such a time. Also, I wanted to do something to honor my late aunt and all she had done to support me growing up. I’ve been working most with x.AI’s Grok 3 chatbot recently, so I quickly created a prompt to see if Grok could show me how I could provide spiritual support for world peace today.

Pastors on Psychedelics: The Return to Mystical Spirituality?

In 2015, researchers at John Hopkins University and NYU specifically wanted to invite religious leaders with an interest in further exploring and developing their spiritual lives to ingest mushrooms. The result was that many of the participants became evangelists for psychedelics for spiritual purposes. Ironically, one of the participants was an Episcopal Church minister named Hunt Priest. So, Priest joined about 30 other religious leaders from Christian churches, including a Catholic priest, as well as an Islamic leader, a few rabbis, a biblical scholar and a Buddhist roshi. While the study lacked some of the usual scientific rigor, like certain controls and a sample size typical of scientific studies, it nevertheless provided some interesting insights that can help shine new light on the current movement to make possession and use of psychedelics legal in various states. The insight I found most intriguing was the confirmation by these traditionally-oriented religious leaders of mystical spiritual visions and revelations associated with their psychedelic experience.  There’s something else going on at the same time that makes all this even stranger. New discoveries and ideas about human consciousness and the brain  are appearing everywhere, along with news of a startup that is working on how to design a new class of psychedelics that could induce epiphanies, mystical experiences and revelations. Could this signal a return to spiritual mysticism through science, technology and innovation—another turn in a never-ending spiral, bringing us to a very different level, perhaps opening to a higher consciousness? Observers of the vibrant fractals in higher states of consciousness through the door of psychedelics can recognize them as self-same patterns that repeat…and scale to infinity—the essential characteristics of a fractal. Some call them portals to different realities or dimensions. It remains to be seen whether we will have the courage, the faith, and the spiritual guidance to step through them and see for ourselves what lies beyond.

Using AI as a Personal Spiritual Advisor

Many people do not yet realize the power of AI to support their spiritual growth or how to integrate it into their spiritual practice. If you follow a particular set of religious teachings or spiritual principles, you now can use an AI Chatbot like Perplexity, or Anthropic’s newest Claude Opus 4, or xAI’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, or Open AI’s Chat GPT among others to find just the right personal guidance for your situation from whatever source you prefer. So, today I’m going to demonstrate for you how you can correctly and safely use any of the currently available AI chatbots as a spiritual advisor on the fly anytime you need some quick help. Three very different situations illustrate how you can call upon whatever source of spiritual wisdom and comfort appeals to you in that moment — whether to comfort or counsel, advise or inspire. AI makes your preferred belief system, brand or flavor of spiritual counsel as close as your smartphone.  The sources of great divine wisdom currently available to us are boundless. Remember, the source you choose to ask is your true spiritual advisor. To stay in spiritual light, in Truth, just use AI not as your source but as an intelligent tool for accessing trusted sources of spiritual wisdom when and where you need them, just as you would the phone or the internet.