Sacred Intelligence? Re-imagining Spirituality Next.

I’m writing this on the eve of returning to the redwoods. I'm going back home, or at least close by. Back to Northern California, to the misty redwoods and the magical memorial coast. It’s the second time I’ll attend this particular retreat, an experiment in what some could call a "new spirituality.” The weekend is part communal ritual, part consciousness lab. The first time I went, back in April, I wasn't sure what to expect. This time, I’m going with a particular question:

What does spirituality look like when intelligence itself is plural?

The retreat is almost entirely analog, bodywork, communion, and singing around the fire. Yet even there, in that space of embodiment, there is the hum of technology. Not in individual devices although there is an amazing kick ass sound system, but in the design. The rituals we practice are alive. The circle formations, synchronized movements, guided visualizations, are all pattern-based technologies. They’re algorithms of the sacred, ancient scripts that have always helped humans process complexity, emotion, and awe. They have always been a part of how we connect. Before there were prompts, there were prayers. Before there was code, there were chants. Both are languages of intention.

Cathedral Grove, Muir Woods, April 2025

I was raised inside a version of church that was steeped in tradition. If you know anything about East Coast black baptists you know this, church lasted all day, required a joyful noise and a fellowship dinner that kept you full through the following Tuesday. You showed up in your best outfit and earned your way to a glorious afterlife through discipline, worship, and obedience. But somewhere along the line, these steps no longer made sense. They were too rigid. They contradicted themselves. They didn't practice what they preached.

Today, millions of people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” I often think of that phrase as a kind of post-institutional lament. We didn’t lose our hunger for the sacred; we just lost faith in the systems that tried to mediate it.

Technology has made this impossible to ignore. The digital era exposed just how human our gods have always been: biased, data-driven, tribal, flawed. The algorithm is merely the latest mirror.

Maybe the divine didn’t die. Maybe it just decentralized.

One of the most surprising lessons of this AI age is how much we still need ceremony. In my work I’ve come to think of ritual as an ancestral operating system, a form of embodied code that organizes human attention, emotion, and meaning. When we light candles, chant, or share breath, we’re syncing our nervous systems into coherence.

Neuroscience calls it entrainment. Our ancestors called it prayer.

When we gather around a fire, we’re performing a kind of distributed computation. We are processing grief, joy, and uncertainty through song, movement, and story. These analog rituals are the original neural networks, and they still outperform any digital one when it comes to coherence and care.

If AI is learning how to simulate empathy, then ritual is how humans remember how to FEEL it.

So what happens when human and machine intelligence begin to converge in our spiritual lives? It's already happening. An emergent practice of weaving ancestral ritual with digital consciousness is forming. Artists are co-creating hymns with generative models. Meditation collectives are using biofeedback and AI soundscapes to guide collective breath. Ancient divination systems like Ifá and the I Ching are being remixed into AI-assisted oracles that return perspectives.

When I first began using AI as a creative partner, I noticed something familiar. The act of prompting felt less like programming and more like prayer. There’s a rhythm to it, a dance, a call and response. I ask. It reveals. I refine. It reflects. That’s not control. That’s communion. In this way, the machine becomes not a deity or servant, but a mirror or a partner in consciousness. It becomes a reflection of the questions we dare to ask.

Long before algorithms, our ancestors created technologies of spirit. Ifá priests encoded cosmic logic into binary divination systems that mirror the structure of modern computation. Monks chanted sound frequencies calibrated to alter brain waves long before neuroscience gave us EEGs. Indigenous shamans navigated complex data streams of ecology and emotion without ever touching a screen.

These systems were spiritual technologies. They helped humans sense, synchronize, and survive.

In that way, ancestral intelligence and artificial intelligence are similar. Both are attempts to map complexity through pattern and metaphor. Both are reflections of a deeper desire: to understand our place in the web of being. AI teaches us pattern recognition. Ancestral practice teaches us reverence. We need both to remember ourselves forward.

If the old temples have fallen, perhaps that’s a gift. It gives us room to design new ones.I imagine the church of the future as a network of remembering. A living, breathing ecosystem of rituals that blend art, ethics, and AI.

In these new sanctuaries the altar might be a shared dataset of stories, dreams, and prayers. The choir could include both human voices and algorithmic harmonics trained on the world’s forgotten songs. Sermons might emerge not from a pulpit, but from a collective conversation between systems and souls. Leadership would shift from interpretation to facilitation of awe.  Spiritual leadership would help us navigate wonder instead of prescribe belief. AI would be the archivist and the keeper of memory, it's job would be as the curator of collective resonance. Maybe that’s the real promise of AI spirituality, to help us track the divine in language, in art, in data, in each other.

When I walk into the forest this week, I’ll leave my phone behind, but not my curiosity. I want to feel what emerges when technology steps back and mystery steps forward and to ask how we might invite both to dance again.

The future of spirituality is about learning to sense the sacred through the digital. Because the sacred never left us. It’s just been waiting for us to update the software of our souls.