The Only Way to Stay is Through Love: Imagination, Mediation, & AI in the Ram Dass Tradition

Abstract

Looking at the emergence of chatbots that simulate the late spiritual teacher Ram Dass in his tone, style, and content as a case study, this paper argues that the Ram Dass tradition offers a distinctive perspective for engaging mediating technologies in spiritual formation and care. The Ram Dass tradition repeatedly grappled with the limitations of mediating technologies, such as psychedelics, teachers, and sacred images; and in each case those limitations became the formative junctures for cultivating the prosocial qualities of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. From within this framework, the theological concern with AI simulation centers on the absence of the critical limits through which love becomes available. Drawing on autoethnographic vignettes from my experience as Ram Dass's end-of-life caregiver and from subsequent work sustaining practices of memorialization in his community, this paper affirms the current embodiment-centered discourse on AI and spiritual care, and complicates it by uplifting posthumous relationality, sacred image theology, and the formative faculties of love and imagination. Within that framework, the immediacy of chatbot responsiveness emerges as a central concern. While chatbots have the potential to widen access to spiritual guidance, they also risk spiritually deskilling users by offloading the interpretive labor of imagination through which love, remembrance, and lineage are sustained.