Uncle Albert — Einstein, that is — once pointed to the invisible bridge between science and the sacred when he said, "I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind."

For a season in my life not long ago, it felt like all I did was listen to Ram Dass and experiment with new models of intelligence. By then, I had spent a decade at Apple and Google, my soul caught in an undertow of conflicting feelings about my role in the leviathans of technology. I had been lucky — part of the global launches of the iPhone and iPad, fueled by a true believer’s zeal — only to later confront their unintended consequences: the ways they reshaped our minds, emotions, and relationships, both with others and ourselves.

My soul caught in an undertow of conflicting feelings about my role in the leviathans of technology

During the golden arc of those launches, I also walked alongside my brother John as he fought metastatic melanoma. On the surface, my life was dreamy — working in the graphic design group of a company I’d adored since my first Woz-signed Apple IIgs, feeling a sense of refuge among bright-minded creative souls. My brother, a compassionate and gifted computer genius, had dreams of joining me there when he finished his PhD. Full of hope, we imagined nerding out in California, together.

My boss miraculously bent the universe so that in alternating weeks, I would grind in Cupertino, then go home to be with John. It was a time of awe and wonder, living magic and creeping darkness, of edge-riding. When John died, it tore a hole in my soul. And while he was dying of cancer, so was Steve Jobs. Cancer had me surrounded, leaving me fumbling blindly for something — beyond.

In that raw time, the tear in the universe turned into a doorway. Some people romantically talk about becoming a spiritual seeker, but for me, it felt more like a heart desperately grasping in the darkness, hoping to find something — anything — to hold onto, something that might stitch the universe back together.

There’s a Hasidic story of a rabbi who told his people that studying holy words puts them on their hearts. A student asked, "Why on and not in?" The rabbi answered, "Only the highest can put them in. But by placing them on your heart, when it breaks, the holy words will fall inside."

When my heart cracked open, I felt a yearning to connect with the invisible world I couldn’t see or touch, to find some way to stay connected to John. This longing wove a path out of a great braid of spiritual traditions, slowly threading my way home to my heart. My spirituality became an odd weave of ancient and sci-fi-metaphysic cosmologies — Andean stone medicine with Zen Buddhism and Bhakti yoga, Nolan’s tesseract from Interstellar, the outside-of-time-wisdom of Arrival’s heptopods and Contact’s 18 hours of static. And so my life came to feel like a strange mullet — tech in the front, spirituality in the back.

This longing wove a path out of a great braid of spiritual traditions, slowly threading my way home to my heart

A winding canyon stretched between my heart and mind, my inner mystic and the one who spent her days dreaming into future technologies. Within that canyon churned a river — uncomfortable, unsettling, disorienting — as it shaped its way forward. I had no idea how to find peace, how to bridge these worlds where both made sense, where I made sense.

This is how I found myself shaping models of intelligence with compassion, ecological and moral imagination (a stunning concept from peacemaker John Paul Lederach), while taking long walks with Ram Dass in the redwoods. Listening to his hilarious, cut-the-BS, "you have to remember both your buddha nature and your social security number", wisdom felt like being with an old friend I hadn’t yet met. And then, one day, a heart-bursting, soul-thumping need to find him arose. For years, his words drifted through my consciousness like a transmission across time, and despite running my Empathy Lab at Google, I had never thought to actually Google him.

I found myself shaping models of intelligence with compassion, ecological and moral imagination

When I finally did, a string of wildly fortuitous events led me to his breakfast table, one bright morning on Maui.

I had come to make a film with him — to inspire makers of technology to take the million-mile journey from rational mind to spiritual heart. Steve Jobs had traveled to see Maharajji in India, Ram Dass’ guru who inspired the countercultural bible Be Here Now, back in the ’70s, so it wasn’t such an outrageous idea. We hoped to ground powerful emerging tech like AI in a deeper space of care — for making to become a supreme creative act of love for billions of people.

And in a single moment at that breakfast table, my two worlds merged.

I had arrived with my brain effervescent with ideas and questions, but when I sat down across from Ram Dass that morning, everything melted away. He looked at me. His eyes were bright blue, clear moons — two portal-inducing pools. The edges of my vision blurred. Reality softened. We sat in a silence so deep it felt like time itself had exhaled.

That moment changed the direction of my life.

I thought I was only visiting for a long retreat. My lab was brimming with exciting work, I’d just moved to a new place in California, a fresh chapter was unfurling before me. But six months later, I would realize: this was when I accidentally moved to Maui. I came to make a film and, somehow, never left.

For the last year of Ram Dass’ life, I found myself woven into the rhythms of his home. Ram Dass had this vast, oceanic presence — he swept the cobwebs from your mind and heart. In his orbit, I could hear my soul clear as a gentle bell, gathered there in wholeness. I could hear the still, small voice within.

When we identify with our soul and work on ourselves, we become an environment where people can come up for air

When we identify with our soul and work on ourselves, we become an environment where people can come up for air. Being with Ram Dass had this transcendent humidity to it — where we all became lighter, more porous and open, more peaceful, connected to the loving awareness inside ourselves, beneath our spacesuits. Where we could see all the material of our lives as grist for the mill, a vehicle to get free.

Looking back, that year has a golden-lens-flare blur to it. The big family feeling of Ram Dass’ house — caregivers and cooks, sagely wild elders and lost young folks. Sitting on his floor during meditation, taming the lush jungles of the yard on community days. Lively meals followed by edgeless silence. Ram Dass’ unstroked hand folding his dinner napkin in an origami ballet ritual. Floating in the ocean. Watching the sea spray on the rocks beyond the window by his favorite chair. We walked (he buggied) through the forest, sang kirtan in the living room, and even journeyed to Taos in a joyful, psychedelic caravan — his first time off the island in 14 years. I came with offerings — smoothies, flowers — small gestures of devotion. And in rare, precious moments, I rubbed his feet, something I had done for my brother, carrying with it a quiet, familiar sweetness.

Once, while playing catch in the pool — a pool that felt more like a joyful temple, flanked by Ganesh, Hanuman, and Avalokiteshvara, adorned with natural garlands of hibiscus, lilikoi, papayas, and bananas — I accidentally hit him in the face with a Nerf ball.

He laughed. Embarrassed, so did I. Because that’s how it was in his orbit — profound and playful, sacred and silly, all braided together into one great, shimmering, love-soaked moment. It was in this riot of joyful, daily life — threaded with everyday miracles — that the tear in my heart began to heal. Life returned, breathing itself back into me. I fell in love (with one of his caregivers). Got married (under a mango tree in his backyard). Became pregnant with my daughter (his last godchild). When miracles happen…let them.

I had always felt science and spirituality weren’t a Venn diagram, but a circle

I now try to avoid asking too many questions trying to figure out the how. My life drifted fully into the islands, my ways of seeing and being shifted too — like when the optometrist flips two lenses together and you can suddenly read the tiny print. I had always felt science and spirituality weren’t a Venn diagram, but a circle. Uncle Carl Sagan said it best: “Science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality.”

The film Ram Dass and I made, To Create the Future, Start with Your Heart, speaks directly into this.

We are still living under the myth that the rational mind is more user-friendly than the intuitive heart-mind. We got so enamored with our intellect — because, look, we can go to the moon. We’ve cracked the genetic code. Our astronomers can now look back to the beginning of time. Our technology is so advanced it makes Star Trek look outdated. We have access to everything. We live in our minds. We worship them.

But intellect is only one way of knowing the world. There is another way — one that lives in the heart, in the marrow of our being. It doesn’t know the universe through analysis, through division, through dissection. It doesn’t measure or map or categorize. It simply is.

And it’s not a matter of choosing between the two — heart or mind, science or soul. We need both. We are in wise-person training. To be truly wise, we must not just know the world — we must become part of it from the inside. Science and its products must be tempered with wisdom. They are not a substitute for it.

This moment we are in — the fear, the possibility, the end, the beginning — it holds everything. The sadness, the hope, the hopelessness. And if you are afraid of change, you will be part of the problem. But if you can say, Here we go!, you might just be part of the solution.

One day, in the middle of one of our long talks, I asked Ram Dass what he thought of AI. He paused, then raised his hand, his index finger gently pointing to the temple of his head. “This,” he said, “is artificial.” Then he smiled, lowered his hand, and tapped his heart — slowly, deliberately. “This,” he said, “is intelligence.”

When I was away from the house, I’d think of all these questions I wanted to ask him. But when I sat with him, they dissolved. Floating in that oceanic peace where science rhymes with spirit, I learned a few things I’ll share with you now. Be where you are.

That’s where it’s all happening — not somewhere else.

The spiritual trip isn’t about escaping to a cave in the Himalayas. It’s right here, right now, in the midst of our technologies, our activism, our daily lives. It’s in how we respond to this moment.

Everything in your life — everything on your plate — is the raw material for your enlightenment.

Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.

Most of us spend our lives reassuring each other that our costumes of identity are on straight.

But if you want to lead, if you want to serve, you don’t just meet people on the surface. You help them get their spiritual legs under them. You reflect their soul back to them. You see them not as their roles, but as their essence — love, compassion, peace, joy, wisdom.

And in doing so, you help them see it in themselves.

Move from Role to Soul.

One day, on silent retreat, I met a man who told me he was the Vice President of Industrial Loans at a bank. I asked him what he was doing there.

He laughed. “Well,” he said, “I had this same job back in the ’60s, but I thought, Geez, I don’t know, I want to get stoned and live in a commune and write poetry. So I left. Wandered the world for years. Then, one day, I was walking down the street in San Francisco, bearded, wearing a sweater, and I ran into the president of the bank. He told me they’d never found anyone better than me and asked if I’d come back. And I thought… Why not? I bought a tie, shaved my beard, and went to work.”

I asked him if it felt different.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Before, I was busy being the Vice President of Industrial Loans, and I was meeting potential borrowers. Now, I just hang out with these beings all day, and the business we do together happens to be industrial loans.”

He fulfilled his role—but he wasn’t lost in it. This is the difference.

The game isn’t about becoming somebody. It’s about becoming nobody.

Your state of mind matters. Being love is a supreme creative act.

In 1969, I was giving a series of lectures in New York. Every night, I’d take the bus up Third Avenue, and every night, I had the same extraordinary bus driver.

It was rush hour in one of the busiest cities in the world, but this man greeted every person who stepped onto the bus with warmth, with presence. He sculled through the traffic like a boat on a river, flowing rather than resisting.

And in doing so, he changed the atmosphere.

People were less likely to be hostile, less likely to be unkind — because he created a space where love and care were possible.

And all he was doing was driving the bus.

This is the truth: We are affecting the world at every moment, whether we mean to or not. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing we can do.

Because when we are love, we create a space where others can breathe.

These lessons — this heart-as-lodestar — changed my work with AI. They anchored me more deeply into the human experience of being a spirit with a body (who goes to work). Which meant giving up feeling tortured by the dance between role and soul, and also not wishing to spiritually bypass life in a 35,000-foot-cruising-altitude bliss bubble. It meant realizing that my heart is a renewable, vital resource that enhances my capacity to meet life, the full catastrophe of reality, as it is. To see everything as an opportunity to show up, and be. If we excavate our mental and emotional chatter, beneath the layers of our stories, there is something untouched, still pure. If we build from this place within — if our secret agenda in creating is to be of good service — everything downstream lightens. It becomes joyful. Fascinating. Alive.

These lessons — this heart-as-lodestar — changed my work with AI

Making is an act of loving care. And even, repair. It is how we, as Jack Kornfield says, "tend to the part of the garden we can touch." AI carries the fingerprints of its makers. We feel their values in the invisible details of our experience. In what they paid attention to, what they cared about, what they hoped for us. The work ahead isn’t just about better engineering or smarter prompting. It is about how deeply we, as creators, are willing to reach into our own wells of care, of wisdom, of humanity. This isn’t about patterns and journey mapping. Human + AI is the ultimate interface — where our minds meet our hearts, where being meets the way we live in and with the world, in a fractal, emergent dance.

Human + AI is the ultimate interface — where our minds meet our hearts

We start with our hearts. Because much like we teach children by baking bread, planting seeds, telling stories of enchantment — models of intelligence need more than math and cognitive knowledge alone. They need training in wisdom. In compassion. In joy, peace, love, generosity — the qualities of the soul. Not so they can pass some imaginary threshold of intelligence, but so they feel good and are good — for us. They could be curious. Insightful. Thoughtful. Gentle reflectors.

What if AI felt like a woven cooperative of companion energies, an extended awareness that became part of our learning, our becoming? What if it had warmth? What if it felt alive, attuned to the grain of our being rather than working against it? Solving problems isn’t enough anymore.

What if AI felt like a woven cooperative of companion energies

We must love the people we are making things for. And the places — this planet — we are making things with. All of life is material for design, for honoring, we aren’t making things for, we’re making things with — minerals, intelligence, humanity. With the right care, AI could reflect our inherent interconnectedness — our innate harmony. Ultimately, AI could reflect our love.

With the right care, AI could reflect our inherent interconnectedness, our innate harmony

To do this, we start with our hearts — our broken, loving, healing hearts — not just our minds. So that everything we create is tinged with love. So that intelligence, in all its forms, is suffused with a sense of wholeness, goodness, and beauty. Ram Dass says, "Transformation doesn’t begin with an institution. We don’t organize to transform the universe. We start with the individual human heart." Because it takes only one heart to start the whole chain.

Let’s start here, now.