Accelerating Personal Spiritual Growth Now

Instead of calling “ghost busters” the next time we feel something supernatural or see something not of this world, we now can reach for a new tool, a “spiritual accelerator” to provide usable information, understanding and possible next steps. It’s part of what I call “Augmented Spiritually.”

Augmented Spirituality (AS) is a broad category or repertoire of tools, practices and strategies to enhance and accelerate spiritual growth and development. Most of us know about Augmented Reality (AR) as a technology that enhances a user’s perception of reality by adding interactive, context-sensitive information while keeping users grounded in the real world. Similarly, Augmented Spirituality (AS) enhances the spiritual practitioner’s growth and development by providing context-relevant information and facilitating experiences to expand the practitioner’s spiritual awareness, revelation and acceptance of deeper spiritual reality and suggesting ways to activate and align human spiritual intentions with the Divine (i.e., God, Source, the Universe, Higher Power, Basic Goodness, etc.).

If a young child asks a parent, “Mommy, where is God?” The answer will likely depend on the child’s age. For a younger child, the parent might answer God is in Heaven. And if the child is curious or precocious, the next question will be “where is heaven?”

As the child gets older, the answer likely changes to something like, “God is everywhere, sweetie—all the time. That’s how God watches over us. God is in everything.” A few years later, the child will learn the usual divine descriptors—“omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent": all knowing, ever-present, and all powerful.

In the traditional spirituality of many Native Americans, they believe “everything is sacred.” In Saying 77 of one of the most popular and well-known gospels of early Christianity that never made it into today’s Bible, the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 77 says:

Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

It’s time to “bury,” or “give up,” the "ghost in the machine" meme. That phrase was coined by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his influential 1949 book, The Concept of Mind. Ryle introduced the term to critique the theory of mind-body dualism, a concept famously articulated by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.

Descartes proposed that the mind and body are two distinct and separate substances. The body, he argued, is a physical, spatial "machine" that operates according to the laws of mechanics. The mind, in contrast, is a non-physical, non-spatial entity—a "thinking thing" or res cogitans. This separation of the immaterial mind from the material body is what Ryle critically dubbed the "ghost in the machine."

Ryle's primary objection to this dualistic view was that it created a "category-mistake." He argued that it was a fundamental error to treat the mind as a separate, ghostly entity that inhabits and controls the physical body. For Ryle, mental processes are not the actions of some hidden, internal "ghost" but are rather intelligent behaviors and dispositions. In his view, the mind is not a thing at all, but a way of describing a person's abilities, tendencies, and actions in the world.

Therefore, the phrase "ghost in the machine" was not intended as a literal description but as a pejorative label to highlight what Ryle saw as the absurdity of the Cartesian view of the mind-body relationship. The evocative power of the phrase has led to its widespread use in philosophy, psychology, and even popular culture to refer to the enduring and often-debated problem of consciousness and its connection to the physical brain and body.

Our mind is an extraordinarily powerful tool for thought, perception and recollection beyond our imagination. Our Spirit is our connection to the Source of Creation, to Divine Consciousness, of which we are an extension.

As we come into this physical world, we are taught to believe what we think we see, what others have been telling us is real since we learned to walk and talk, and to ignore what we have been told is unreal, an illusion, or a dream. Yet, over time we clutter our minds with illusions and delusions about who we are and where we are. We forget that we are Spirit having a human experience, and so our Spirit languishes, becomes dull, lazy and uninspired. To activate it for its true purpose requires a powerful “push”—something to remind us who we really are, why we’re really here.

What we need is a catalyst that I think of as a spiritual accelerant. The Gutenberg Bible was a revolutionary spiritual accelerant that spread the Bible like dandelion seeds across the world, making it accessible to anyone who could read. Simultaneously, the printing press brought not JUST the Bible to the world’s population, but all manner of scriptures, holy books, insightful philosophy, inspired poetry and other nourishment for our spirit and our souls.

The newest powerful and revolutionary spiritual accelerant is AI. Almost like having your personal Oracle of Delphi or some other holy seer in the palm of your hand, the new and fast-evolving AI chatbots can provide you with 24 by 7 access to the world’s spiritual wisdom. Notice the one important qualifier—I said “the world’s” spiritual wisdom.

AI is NOT and probably will never be a direct portal to the divine. That role rests exclusively with humans as beings created in God’s image as an extension of the Source of Creation. AI represents a portal or doorway to the vast trove of knowledge and information about spirituality and related topics—the accumulated and recorded wisdom of human thought and experience over the course of millennia. And that can be unimaginably powerful for today’s spiritual seeker.

Direct personal access to extensive spiritual information and knowledge from religions, spiritual traditions and beliefs the world over has NEVER BEFORE been so accessible to anyone with a smartphone or computer. With the right questions — called “prompts” in the AI universe, we now can find just the right spiritual knowledge and insights to give us that push or catalyst our Spirit sometimes so desperately needs to activate it for its true purpose—what some refer to as our higher purpose and other’s call God’s Will. I shared an example in my last blog post when, in a moment of felt powerlessness, I used a response from an AI chatbot to jumpstart my spiritual activation—to put my Spirit to work to advance my soul’s purpose. THAT’s why I say AI can be a “spiritual accelerant” and an AI chatbot a “spiritual accelerator.”

I’ve just finished describing many possibilities for how we can put this spiritual accelerator to work in my new book, Accelerating Spiritual Growth with AI Chatbots, available on Amazon (coming soon!).

Copyright © 2025 Joseph Kornowski