This essay originally appeared on the UNITY EARTH website. We are grateful to author and executive director of UNITY EARTH, Ben Bowler, for permission to reprint it here—Ed.
Over recent days, I have found myself returning to a question that feels increasingly important: as rapidly advancing AI transforms our understanding of intelligence, can we also deepen our understanding of spirit? The conversations are everywhere. What will happen to our work, our creativity, our children’s futures? What happens as machines surpass us in more of the capacities through which we have understood our place in the world?
The genie is out of the bottle. We are already living within the transformation, and its implications reach into our sense of identity and purpose. For those of us engaged in interspirituality, a space of collective human spirituality, this moment brings a particular opportunity and responsibility. We have spent years creating containers where wisdom traditions can meet, where people can discover a wider belonging, and where spiritual understanding can become shared insight and action. I believe this work is becoming more urgent.
At the heart of my response is a conviction that intelligence is not spirit. Spirit is a higher reality than processing power. Intelligence is a magnificent capacity, but its power does not make it the source of meaning or the measure of a life. The ability to answer a question, solve a problem or produce a compelling argument tells us something about capability. Our spiritual traditions ask further questions about the one who knows, the purpose of knowing, and the love through which knowledge becomes service.
The opening chapter of Genesis offers a starting point shared by Jewish and Christian traditions: “So God created man in his own image.” The verse goes on to include both male and female in that divine image. For me, this places human dignity in our relationship with the Creator. We do not earn that dignity through intellectual achievement, economic usefulness or public recognition. It belongs to us before any of these things can be measured. (Genesis 1:27)
That has profound implications in an age increasingly preoccupied with superior intelligence. A child does not become more sacred by learning faster. An elder does not become less sacred as memory fades. Someone who needs lifelong care possesses a dignity as complete as that of a celebrated scientist. If we truly believe that human beings bear the divine image, then our worth cannot rise and fall with our performance. A machine’s greater capability cannot diminish the sacredness of a person.
The language of being children of God takes this relationship further. Writing to the Christian community in Rome, Paul describes the Spirit bearing witness that we are God’s children. Here, spiritual identity is something encountered inwardly through relationship with God. I hear in this an invitation to discover our inheritance in a universe whose deepest source is personal and loving. (Romans 8:16)
My conviction is that this divine parenthood embraces the whole human family. To understand ourselves as children of one Creator changes the way we look at one another. The stranger, the opponent and the person whose beliefs unsettle us belong within that same family. Our responsibility to our Maker finds expression in the quality of our relationships with all God’s children. This is powerfully encapsulated in Jesus’ radical teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44–45)
Christian scripture also speaks of divine indwelling. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, received from God. This is an embodied teaching, joining spiritual presence to responsibility for how we live. It invites us to treat our lives as places in which the sacred is present and through which it can find expression. (1 Corinthians 6:19)
Within my own spiritual understanding, the indwelling spark is central. The Urantia Book describes a divine presence within the human mind, guiding the growth of the soul, and understands personality as a gift bestowed by the Universal Father. These teachings give particular depth to the sense that “we are spiritual beings having a human experience”. Personality, in this understanding, is the unique person capable of relationship and choice; the soul grows through our living response to spirit. Together, these gifts open our lives towards an eternal destiny. (The Urantia Book, Paper 5, especially 5:1.5 and 5:6.1–8)
Pope Leo XIV brings a timely voice to this inquiry in his 2026 encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. He warns that making intelligence an absolute measure can obscure affection, will, commitment and relationships. His examination of transhumanism asks us to consider the understanding of humanity beyond its technological achievements. He locates our deepest fulfilment in divine grace and transformation through love. I hear in this a powerful contribution to the interspiritual conversation: our capacity to grow is inseparable from the soulful relationships through which we receive and share life. (Magnifica Humanitas, §§113–117 and 126–128)
This also brings me to a concern about certain visions of transhumanism: the assumption that, if we could preserve and reproduce enough of a person’s memories, thoughts and patterns of behaviour, we would have preserved the person. Such mechanistic views provoke profound questions about identity. Would a digital reconstruction of everything I have said, remembered and believed actually be me? My conviction is that we are far more than the sum of our thoughts. Our spiritual identity reaches beyond the contents of our minds.
To understand ourselves as children of God, endowed with personality and growing souls, is to recognise a dimension of personhood that an informational account leaves unexplained. The divine image is not a pattern of data. The indwelling spirit is not an accumulation of knowledge. However faithfully a system might reproduce our expressions, that resemblance would not establish the continuation of the person whose life gave them meaning. From this spiritual perspective, our eternal potential rests in our living relationship with Spirit. The desire to transcend human limitation finds its deepest fulfillment in the transformation of the whole person through love, spiritual growth and participation in divine purpose.
Questions about machine consciousness remain open to investigation and debate. Yet whatever we discover about artificial intelligence, we still face the responsibility of becoming more truthful, loving and responsive to the divine presence in our own lives. No advance in technology relieves us of that work.
Buddhist teachings add another dimension. In Mahayana traditions, Buddha-nature is considered a fundamental aspect of our identity and points towards the capacity for awakening present in all sentient beings. Texts such as the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra and the Mahayana Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra explore this profound potential. Ignorance, attachment and habitual patterns obscure what spiritual practice can reveal. Wisdom and compassion can be cultivated because awakening is possible. (Tsadra Foundation: Buddha-Nature)
Buddha-nature has its own meaning, distinct from a Creator-bestowed soul or an indwelling fragment of God. Honouring that distinction makes interspiritual encounters richer. I find a powerful resonance in the invitation to look beyond our habitual identities and discover a depth that ordinary measures of achievement cannot capture. My language of spirit and the Buddhist language of awakened mind arise from different understandings, yet both can challenge a civilisation that treats intellectual performance as the highest human aspiration.
This is part of what interspirituality makes possible. We bring our convictions into relationship with the lived wisdom of others. We listen carefully enough to be challenged. We allow another tradition’s practice to illuminate something our own habits have obscured. Such encounters can deepen our faith while enlarging our capacity to recognise wisdom beyond familiar forms.
The 2015 Fuji Declaration gives this conversation a contemporary and collective expression. Its opening affirmation states: “We affirm the divine spark in the heart and mind of every human being.” It connects that recognition with commitments to peace, the well-being of all life, creativity and the development of a more harmonious civilisation. As a contemporary declaration, it carries these spiritual aspirations into a shared public commitment. (The Fuji Declaration)
What moves me is the responsibility contained in that affirmation. To recognise the divine spark in every person is to accept that our institutions, economies and technologies should serve the flourishing of those persons. In relation to AI, this becomes a searching question: will the systems we create help people live with greater dignity, deepen their relationships and contribute meaningfully to the world? The answer will depend on choices made by people, communities and institutions, and on the values those choices embody.
Indigenous wisdom contributes to this inquiry as a living presence. Through UNITY EARTH’s encounters with Indigenous elders and communities, questions of wholeness, Country, ancestry, belonging and responsibility have repeatedly come into focus. These encounters ask us to see ourselves within relationships that precede us and will continue beyond us. They also ask us to listen to particular peoples and places, respecting the distinctiveness of the knowledge they carry.
As we spend more of our lives in digital environments, I feel a growing need for that grounding. We remain embodied beings, nourished by the Earth, formed through relationships and responsible to future generations. Sacred travel, ceremony, time on Country and attentive listening can help us remember this. A wider field of information becomes more meaningful when we remain present to the living world in which our decisions take effect.
I also believe this moment invites us to reconsider revelation from God. The possibility of divine communication deserves serious attention in a civilisation increasingly captivated by the power of its own inventions. If our universe is spiritually alive, then wisdom can reach us through an initiative greater than our own. We seek, but we may also be sought. We ask, and we may be addressed. Our capacity to receive deserves at least as much cultivation as our capacity to produce.
Revelation asks for discernment. A claim to divine authority must be examined carefully, with attention to its truthfulness and the life it encourages. Does it deepen humility, compassion and responsibility? Does it invite sincere inquiry? Does it help people grow in love? Interspiritual friendship offers a valuable setting for these questions, bringing different histories of faith, lineage, insight and error into an honest conversation.
What, then, do we owe our Creator? I return to this question because gratitude seems inseparable from the recognition that life is a gift. We have received the capacity to love, to choose, to seek truth and to participate in creation. Those gifts carry an invitation to become more fully available to their Source. Prayer, contemplation, service and the daily effort to live sincerely are ways of answering. Through them, spiritual conviction takes root in the ordinary circumstances of a life.
For UNITY EARTH, this gives fresh urgency to the work of gathering. Across cultures and traditions, we need places where people can practise listening, encounter the sacred and develop the trust required for meaningful collaboration. We need conversations in which scientists can bring their discoveries, spiritual practitioners their disciplines, and Indigenous wisdom keepers their knowledge on their own terms. We need to carry what we discover into education, community life and the decisions shaping our technological future.
In The Age of Convergence, I reflected on the meeting of human aspiration and divine presence. The age of AI brings that inquiry into sharper focus. As intelligence becomes more powerful, our need for spiritual orientation becomes more pressing. We are being asked to remember our origin, attend to the presence within us and take responsibility for what we bring into the world.
The divine spark is an invitation to more life. To recognise it in ourselves is to accept a calling; to recognise it in others is to accept a relationship. As we enter this extraordinary chapter of human history, may we become more faithful to both, allowing the love of our Creator to shape the civilisation we are creating together. ♦
Ben Bowler is the executive director of UNITY EARTH, a global network on a mission to accelerate the realization of unity and peace on earth.