Weighed down with sleep

The Transfiguration and AI

At the Lenten vigil in our monastery chapel on Saturday evening, March 15, I offered the following reflection on the Transfiguration (Lk 9:28-36). Because the question that came out of my lectio, "What does it mean to 'listen to Jesus' in the era of AI?" is one that all monks and seekers need to wrestle with today, I am sharing it. Would love to hear the thoughts and insights of the Fifth Kind of Monks...

Lectio with this Gospel frustrated me because the phrase that kept stopping me wasn’t what I wanted. There’s incredible imagery in these few verses, mystical and mysterious and otherworldly. But I got stuck on Peter and his companions being “weighed down with sleep.”

Being sleepy and being “weighed down with sleep,” as the gospel writer describes Peter, James, and John, are two different things. Ordinary sleepiness is the get up and walk around, stretch, grab a coffee and keep pushing through, kind of tiredness.

Being “weighed with sleep” down feels more like those rare times between deep sleep and waking when I’m not fully asleep but not awake either and my body feels paralyzed. In those few moments when I’m immobile, I’m aware of being somewhere not quite of this world. By the time I fully wake and come to attention, that other world has vanished.

Last Sunday afternoon, still feeling the effects of the time change, I fell asleep reading and had this “weighed down” experience—probably since this reflection had been on my mind. When I semi-woke, I was aware of one of our sisters who died a number of years ago standing at the door talking to me. I tried to sit up, tell her I just needed a minute, but I couldn’t move. Finally, I shook myself to awareness, but by then she was gone. And I couldn’t remember what she had said to me.

Then I had a new understanding of the appearance of long-dead prophets and a voice coming from a cloud. I re-read this passage as Peter having a semi-awake experience of universal consciousness.

We can’t know what Luke intended to convey when he wrote about brilliance and light and mystical encounter, the cloud that overshadows and terrifies, the voice of God, and the later silence of the disciples. But his knowledge of the story had to come from one of the three disciples, and I’m guessing it was Peter.

After the trek up the mountain, Peter was drifting off and when he was trying to pull himself back to full consciousness, yet still in the fog of dream space, he uttered his suggestion about tents. He’s not yet fully awake, caught in the in-between world that neuroscientists cannot explain. What is an appearance of someone from the dead but a creation of our unconscious — even if we don’t know how our unconscious works, or with what it connects?

Peter, and by extension James and John, must have been preoccupied with all that Jesus was saying and doing. Maybe on the hike up the mountain Jesus shared with them some hard things about his mission, and they feel like they are on the verge of some new understanding. Then as Peter later told the story, still unable to articulate what wasn’t yet clear to him, he described what he saw and heard in the dream-like state of being “weighed down with sleep.” He told of brilliance and prophets and clouds and the voice of God—and that he and his companions were afraid.

Yes, the disciples are beginning to understand something new about Jesus and the world he envisions. They know in their hearts they want to listen to him but at the same time they are growing in awareness that Jesus isn’t about glory and prestige but rather about loving unto death. Eventually, after another episode of falling asleep in the Garden of Getsemani, they will see even more clearly. But at this moment, they are in stunned silence.

Now it is two thousand years later. For most of these years, humans have created the myths and stories that shape the cultures that define our world. We can relate to Peter because he was human as we are. We, too, can hear the voice, “This is my beloved, listen to him.” And like the disciples, we can consciously choose our response.

But humans today have crossed a chasm that has irrevocably changed how we relate, live together, and make decisions.

Think of the most rigid person you know, the most controlling, or the one who always knows what is right in every circumstance. Even so, you can reason with them when your relationship hits an impasse, or you can decide to end the relationship. Or maybe you are that person. Either way, for humans conversatio is always possible even when we don’t fully understand the inner processes of our consciousness that move us to forgive, to change, to start over.

With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, we are now living in relationship with non-human entities that are not conscious and cannot reason with us. Machine algorithms without a moral sense are making decisions about us and for us. They are everywhere shaping our world and our economy and our thinking.

What does it mean to “listen to Jesus” in the era of AI? How do we influence a world where algorithms can be designed and taught to serve good as well as evil?

If social media and AI had existed two thousand years ago the portion of this gospel passage that would have gone viral is the glorious appearance of two dead prophets and the tents Peter wanted to erect. And sales of tents and white robes would have skyrocketed.

The voice from heaven telling us to listen to Jesus would be obscured at the bottom of the rankings because loving unto death won’t get a lot of clicks and shares.

This new reality is not going away. We must stay awake and aware and listen to the voice of God even when algorithms want to send us elsewhere or tell us that other things are more important. What are the mountains of understanding we need to climb and from what clouds of confusion must we emerge to engage with what is happening here? The world won’t wait while we figure it out, in fact, the world is already way ahead of us.

We must remember the vast universe of which we are a part, the mysterious and universal consciousness from which new ideas and insight and inspiration arise. We remember that real human relationships and networks fill our world and that, as Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book, Nexus, “while computers are nowhere near their full potential, the same is true of humans.”

And, finally, we must remember that Peter and the disciples shook off the weight of sleep and walked down the mountain with Jesus to live an alternative vision. How can we do less?

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash