This is a lovely card, known as Lord of Happiness. It talks about a sense of inner fulfilment and bliss, which radiates outward to touch everybody with whom you come into contact.At a spiritual level, we’re talking about inner harmony, contentment and tranquillity – an appreciation of the High Powers, feeling at one with the Universe. This feeling leads to feeling that we are blessed by life.On an everyday level, the card will often come up to mark periods of high achievement, and the resulting sense of pleasure and satisfaction. It will also come up to acknowledge joy and happiness in an emotional relationship.When this card appears in your reading, it’s important to make the time to simply enjoy your own feelings, to revel in your sense of calmness and joy.
The oldest surviving depiction of St. Francis is a fresco near the entrance of the Benedictineabbey of Subiaco, painted between March 1228 and March 1229. He is depicted without the stigmata, but the image is a religious image and not a portrait.[6]
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (c. 1181 – 3 October 1226), known as Francis of Assisi,[b] was an Italian mystic, poet and Catholic friar who founded the religious order of the Franciscans. He was inspired to lead a Christian life of poverty as a beggar[7] and itinerant preacher. One of the most venerated figures in Christianity,[8][4] Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 16 July 1228. He is commonly portrayed wearing a brown habit with a rope tied around his waist, featuring three knots that symbolize the three Franciscan vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
Francis is associated with patronage of animals and the environment. It became customary for churches to hold ceremonies blessing animals on his feast day of the fourth of October. He is known for devotion to the Eucharist.[13] Along with Catherine of Siena, he was designated patron saint of Italy. He is also the namesake of the American city of San Francisco.
Names
Francis (Italian: Francesco d’Assisi; Latin: Franciscus Assisiensis) was baptized Giovanni by his mother. His surnames, di Pietro di Bernardone, come from his father, Pietro di Bernardone. The latter was in France on business when Francis was born in Assisi, a small town in Italy. Upon his return, Pietro took to calling his son Francesco (“Free man” or “Frenchman”), possibly in honor of his commercial success and enthusiasm for all things French.[14]
His full name contemporarily could be translated to John Peter “Francis” Bernardone.
São Francisco das Chagas, painted by Ducarmo Teles.
Early life
Francis of Assisi was born c. 1181,[15][16] one of the children of an Italian father, Pietro di Bernardone dei Moriconi, a prosperous silk merchant, and a French mother, Pica di Bourlemont, about whom little is known except that she was a noblewoman originally from Provence.[17]
Indulged by his parents, Francis lived the high-spirited life typical of a wealthy young man.[12] As a youth, Francis became a devotee of troubadours and was fascinated with all things Transalpine.[14] He was handsome, witty, gallant, and delighted in fine clothes. He spent money lavishly.[11] Although many hagiographers remark about his bright clothing, rich friends, and love of pleasures,[17] his displays of disillusionment toward the world that surrounded him came fairly early in his life, as is shown in the “story of the beggar”. In this account, he was selling cloth and velvet in the marketplace on behalf of his father when a beggar came to him and asked for alms. At the conclusion of his business deal, Francis abandoned his wares and ran after the beggar. When he found him, Francis gave the man everything he had in his pockets. His friends mocked him for his charity; his father scolded him in rage.[18]
Around 1202, he joined a military expedition against Perugia and was taken as a prisoner at Collestrada. He spent a year as a captive,[19] during which an illness caused him to re-evaluate his life. However, upon his return to Assisi in 1203, Francis returned to his carefree life. In 1205, Francis left for Apulia to enlist in the army of Walter III, Count of Brienne. A strange vision made him return to Assisi and lose interest in the worldly life.[12] According to hagiographic accounts, thereafter he began to avoid the sports and feasts of his former companions. A friend asked him whether he was thinking of marrying, to which he answered: “Yes, a fairer bride than any of you have ever seen”, meaning his “Lady Poverty”.[11]
On a pilgrimage to Rome, he joined the poor in begging at St. Peter’s Basilica.[12] He spent some time in lonely places, asking God for divine illumination. He said he had a mystical vision of Jesus Christ in the forsaken country chapel of San Damiano, just outside Assisi, in which the Icon of Christ Crucified said to him, “Francis, Francis, go and repair My church which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.” He took this to mean the ruined church in which he was presently praying, and so he sold some cloth from his father’s store to assist the priest there.[20] When the priest refused to accept the ill-gotten gains, an indignant Francis threw the coins on the floor.[11]
In order to avoid his father’s wrath, Francis hid in a cave near San Damiano for about a month. When he returned to town, hungry and dirty, he was dragged home by his father, beaten, bound, and locked in a small storeroom. Freed by his mother during Bernardone’s absence, Francis returned at once to San Damiano, where he found shelter with the officiating priest, but he was soon cited before the city consuls by his father. The latter, not content with having recovered the scattered gold from San Damiano, sought also to force his son to forego his inheritance by way of restitution. In the midst of legal proceedings before the Bishop of Assisi, Francis renounced his father and his patrimony.[11] Some accounts report that he stripped himself naked in token of this renunciation, and the bishop covered him with his own cloak.[21][22]
For the next couple of months, Francis wandered as a beggar in the hills behind Assisi. He spent some time at a neighbouring monastery working as a scullion. He then went to Gubbio, where a friend gave him, as an alms, the cloak, girdle, and staff of a pilgrim. Returning to Assisi, he traversed the city, begging stones for the restoration of St. Damiano. These he carried to the old chapel, set in place himself, and so at length rebuilt it. Over the course of two years, he embraced the life of a penitent, during which he restored several ruined chapels in the countryside around Assisi, among them San Pietro in Spina (in the area of San Petrignano in the valley about a kilometer from Rivotorto, today on private property and once again in ruin); and the Porziuncola, the little chapel of St. Mary of the Angels in the plain just below the town.[11] This later became his favorite abode.[20] By degrees he took to nursing lepers, in the leper colonies near Assisi.
The house where Francis of Assisi lived when young
Saint Francis renounces his earthly father.
Founding of the Franciscan Orders
Friars Minor
One morning in February 1208, Francis was taking part in a Mass in the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, near which he had by then built himself a hut. The Gospel of the day was the “Commissioning of the Twelve” from the Book of Matthew. The disciples were to go and proclaim that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Francis was inspired to devote himself to a life of poverty. Having obtained a coarse woolen tunic, the dress then worn by the poorest Umbrian peasants, he tied it around himself with a knotted rope and went about exhorting the people of the countryside to penance, brotherly love, and peace. Francis’s preaching to ordinary people was unusual as he had no license to do so.[4]
His example attracted others. Within a year Francis had eleven followers. The brothers lived a simple life in the deserted leper colony of Rivo Torto near Assisi; but they spent much of their time wandering through the mountainous districts of Umbria, making a deep impression upon their hearers by their earnest exhortations.[11]
Pope Innocent III approving the statutes of the Order of the Franciscans, by Giotto, 1295–1300
In 1209 he composed a simple rule for his followers (“friars”), the Regula primitiva or “Primitive Rule”, which came from verses in the Bible. The rule was “to follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps.” He then led eleven followers to Rome to seek permission from Pope Innocent III to found a new religious order.[23] Upon entry to Rome, the brothers encountered Bishop Guido of Assisi, who had in his company Giovanni di San Paolo, the Cardinal Bishop of Sabina. The Cardinal, who was the confessor of Pope Innocent III, was immediately sympathetic to Francis and agreed to represent Francis to the pope. After several days, the pope agreed to admit the group informally, adding that when God increased the group in grace and number, they could return for an official audience. The group was tonsured.[24] This was important in part because it recognized Church authority and prevented his following from accusations of heresy, as had happened to the Waldensians decades earlier. Though a number of the pope’s counselors considered the mode of life proposed by Francis to be unsafe and impractical, following a dream in which he saw Francis holding up the Lateran Basilica, he decided to endorse Francis’s order. This occurred, according to tradition, on 16 April 1210, and constituted the official founding of the Franciscan Order.[4] The group, then the “Lesser Brothers” (Order of Friars Minor also known as the Franciscan Order or the Seraphic Order), were centered in the Porziuncola and preached first in Umbria, before expanding throughout Italy.[4] Francis was later ordained a deacon, but not a priest.[11]
Poor Clares and Third Order
From then on, the new order grew quickly. Hearing Francis preaching in the church of San Rufino in Assisi in 1211, the young noblewoman Clare of Assisi sought to live like them. Her cousin Rufino also sought to join. On the night of Palm Sunday, 28 March 1212, Clare clandestinely left her family’s palace. Francis received her at the Porziuncola and thereby established the Order of Poor Clares.[25] He gave Clare a religious habit, a garment similar to his own, before lodging her, her younger sister Caterina, and other young women in a nearby monastery of Benedictine nuns until he could provide a suitable monastery. Later he transferred them to San Damiano,[4] to a few small huts or cells. This became the first monastery of the Second Franciscan Order, now known as Poor Clares.[11]
For those who could not leave their affairs, Francis later formed the Third Order of Brothers and Sisters of Penance, a fraternity composed of either laity or clergy whose members neither withdrew from the world nor took religious vows. Instead, they observed the principles of Franciscan life in their daily lives.[4] Before long, the Third Order – now titled the Secular Franciscan Order – grew beyond Italy.[26]
Travels
Determined to bring the Gospel to all peoples and let God convert them, Francis sought on several occasions to take his message out of Italy. In the late spring of 1212, he set out for Jerusalem, but was shipwrecked by a storm on the Dalmatian coast, forcing him to return to Italy. On 8 May 1213, he was given the use of the mountain of La Verna (Alverna) as a gift from Count Orlando di Chiusi, who described it as “eminently suitable for whoever wishes to do penance in a place remote from mankind”.[27] The mountain would become one of his favourite retreats for prayer.[28]
In the same year, Francis sailed for Morocco, but an illness forced him to break off his journey while in Spain.
In 1219, accompanied by Friar Illuminatus of Arce and hoping to convert the Sultan of Egypt or be martyred in the attempt, Francis went to Egypt during the Fifth Crusade where a Crusader army had been encamped for over a year besieging the walled city of Damietta. The Sultan, al-Kamil, a nephew of Saladin, had succeeded his father as Sultan of Egypt in 1218 and was encamped upstream of Damietta. A bloody and futile attack on the city was launched by the Christians on 29 August 1219, following which both sides agreed to a ceasefire that lasted four weeks.[29] Probably during this interlude Francis and his companion crossed the Muslims’ lines and were brought before the Sultan, remaining in his camp for a few days.[30] Reports give no information about what transpired during the encounter beyond noting that the Sultan received Francis graciously and that Francis preached to the Muslims. He returned unharmed.[d] No known Arab sources mention the visit.[31]
Francis and others treating victims of leprosy or smallpox
Such an incident is alluded to in a scene in the late 13th-century fresco cycle, attributed to Giotto, in the upper basilica at Assisi.[e]
According to some late sources, the Sultan gave Francis permission to visit the sacred places in the Holy Land and even to preach there. All that can safely be asserted is that Francis and his companion left the Crusader camp for Acre, from where they embarked for Italy in the latter half of 1220. Drawing on a 1267 sermon by Bonaventure, later sources report that the Sultan secretly converted or accepted a death-bed baptism as a result of meeting Francis.[f]
Due to these events in Jerusalem,[citation needed] Franciscans have been present in the Holy Land almost uninterruptedly since 1217. They received concessions from the Mameluke Sultan in 1333 with regard to certain Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and (so far as concerns the Catholic Church) jurisdictional privileges from Pope Clement VI in 1342.[32]
The growing order of friars was divided into provinces; groups were sent to France, Germany, Hungary, and Spain and to the East. Upon receiving a report of the martyrdom of five brothers in Morocco, Francis returned to Italy via Venice.[33] Cardinal Ugolino di Conti was then nominated by the pope as the protector of the order. Another reason for Francis’ return to Italy was that the Franciscan Order had grown at an unprecedented rate compared to previous religious orders, but its organizational sophistication had not kept up with this growth and had little more to govern it than Francis’ example and simple rule. To address this problem, Francis prepared a new and more detailed Rule, the “First Rule” or “Rule Without a Papal Bull” (Regula prima, Regula non bullata), which again asserted devotion to poverty and the apostolic life. However, it also introduced greater institutional structure, though this was never officially endorsed by the pope.[4]
On 29 September 1220, Francis handed over the governance of the order to Brother Peter Catani at the Porziuncola, but Peter died only five months later.
Brother Peter was succeeded by Brother Elias as Vicar of Francis. Two years later, Francis modified the “First Rule”, creating the “Second Rule” or “Rule With a Bull”, which was approved by Pope Honorius III on 29 November 1223. As the order’s official rule, it called on the friars “to observe the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, living in obedience without anything of our own and in chastity”. In addition, it set regulations for discipline, preaching, and entering the order. Once the rule was endorsed by the pope, Francis withdrew increasingly from external affairs.[4] During 1221 and 1222, he crossed Italy, first as far south as Catania in Sicily and afterward as far north as Bologna.[34]
While he was praying on the mountain of Verna, during a forty-day fast in preparation for Michaelmas (29 September), Francis is said to have had a vision on or about 13 September 1224, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, as a result of which he received the stigmata. Brother Leo, who had been with Francis at the time, left a clear and simple account of the event, the first definite account of the phenomenon of stigmata. “Suddenly he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross. This angel gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ.”[37] Suffering from these stigmata and from trachoma, Francis received care in several cities (Siena, Cortona, Nocera) to no avail. In the end, he was brought back to a hut next to the Porziuncola. Here he spent his last days dictating his spiritual testament. He died on the evening of Saturday, 3 October 1226, singing Psalm 141, “Voce mea ad Dominum”.
On 16 July 1228, he was declared a saint by Pope Gregory IX (the former cardinal Ugolino di Conti, a friend of Francis and Cardinal Protector of the Order). The next day, the pope laid the foundation stone for the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. Francis was buried on 25 May 1230, under the Lower Basilica, but his tomb was soon hidden on orders of Brother Elias, in order to protect it from Saracen invaders. His burial place remained unknown until it was rediscovered in 1818. Pasquale Belli then constructed a crypt for the remains in the Lower Basilica. It was refashioned between 1927 and 1930 into its present form by Ugo Tarchi. In 1978, the remains of Francis were examined and confirmed by a commission of scholars appointed by Pope Paul VI, and put into a glass urn in the ancient stone tomb.[38]
Today I will not grasp at other people or things to complete me. Rather, I’ll remember that in God I am already complete.
As I allow all people and things to be, whoever and however they are, the universe will respond positively to my correct positioning of heart and mind. As I allow all things to be, all things will in turn be wonderful.
Dear God, Please take away my grasping nature. May my mind not seek to control Either people or events, But rather may I look with love on all things. Then and only then will my world transform From darkness to light And from fear to love. Amen
Wednesday April 3, 2024 (Bay Area Reporter, ebar.com)
Professor Luis Menéndez-Antuña, shown with Finn, his golden doodle, will be delivering the Boswell lecture at the Pacific School of Religion’s Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. Photo: Courtesy Luis Menéndez-Antuña
“Sex is a force that deconstructs the ego.”
Menéndez-Antuña
This year’s Boswell lecture at the Pacific School of Religion’s Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion will be offering an interpretation of the intersection between sex and the Bible based in queer theory.
The Berkeley-based Protestant Christian seminary puts on the lecture. This year’s iteration, the 17th annual, “Why Do Biblical Interpreters Hate Sex So Much?” will be presented by Luis Menéndez-Antuña, a gay man who’s an assistant professor of New Testament at the Boston University School of Theology.
The lecture, which is free, will be Thursday, April 18, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Pacific time. People interested in watching or listening should register in advance on the CLGS website where they can sign up for a Zoom link.
Menéndez-Antuña’s lecture questions the progressive interpretations of the New Testament, which, he said, often come about to affirm one’s own preconceived identity and conclusions.
“I’m very honored and pleased,” Menéndez-Antuña said in a recent Facetime interview. “I’ve been working on questions of queer interpretation for quite a while now and I’m very pleased to give this lecture particularly because these are issues with which many pastors, practitioners, and theologians struggle with, and also because for pastoral purpose, one of the consequences of this approach is in the life of the church … a stronger awareness of the need for sex education, and what sex is and what sex does.”
The lecture is named for the late John Boswell, considered one of the founders of queer theology. An Episcopalian-turned-Roman Catholic theologian and Yale professor who focused on the intersection between homosexuality and Christianity in his studies, Boswell died of complications due to AIDS in 1994. In his work “Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe,” Boswell famously wrote about an eighth century liturgical Greek manuscript featuring a sacramental union between two men — and wondered if this was, perhaps, a marriage ceremony.
Menéndez-Antuña will argue that progressive circles have maintained “Paul’s rather contemptuous stance on pleasure,” the CLGS website states, which have “morphed into less visible iterations — harder to identify and, therefore, assuming more insidious postures.”
“Part of the assumption within progressive circles is we can go back to the Bible in order to retrieve historical information that will help us to be better to people, in a way,” Menéndez-Antuña said. “My argument goes against this trend because drawing against this trend, drawing from recent queer theory, sex is mostly a force that goes against identity formation.”
Menéndez-Antuña said he’s drawing from a strain of queer theory inaugurated by the late academic Leo Bersani, who argued in his AIDS-era essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” that “there is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”
What people don’t like about sex, Menéndez-Antuña said, is that it deconstructs identity.
“Sex is a force that deconstructs the ego,” he said. “Humans tend to build identity on ego formation. I’m a teacher, I’m a husband, I’m a journalist, I’m a theologian, I’m a son: all of those are ego identifications, and his [Bersani’s] argument is sex is a force that chips away at identity formation, and instead of looking away from this destructive force, we should actually take it in the center of how we think of ourselves.”
The lecture will give four ways in which this intersects with the New Testament’s views of sexuality, some of which buttress identity and some of which deconstruct identity, but all of which should be read on their own terms, Menéndez-Antuña said.
“There’s not just one way to read the Bible in a queer way,” he said. “Instead of paying attention to those [passages] which reinforce where we are, we should pay more attention to the ones that deconstruct who we are.”
For example, “in the gospels, we see Jesus talking about asking the disciples to abandon their wives. That’s a good example in which a moral norm goes against the construction of identity. For many people, marriage was the foundation of their identity. In other cases, for example Paul talks about same-sex relations going against Christian identity because they’re an example of idolatry. In that case, moral forms reinforce identity rather than destroy it.”
Conservative theologians typically take the dissertation in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans chapter 1 as a blanket prohibition of homosexuality; progressive theologians typically argue it is a reference to temple prostitution and pederasty, as the Bay Area Reporter previously reported in a story about a recent documentary that alleged a related passage of the New Testament had been mistranslated.
“Sexuality is an identity — gay, straight, lesbian, a plethora of identities — and his [Bersani’s] argument is that sex does away with those kinds of identities,” Menéndez-Antuña said. “That’s actually what I’m trying to point out at the end of the lecture — progressive circles try to take moral norms from the Bible to enforce the ego, when at the center is the negation of the ego.”
MCC pastor completed time at center, ED says
Bernard Schlager, Ph.D., associate professor of historical and cultural studies at the school and the executive director of the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion, told the B.A.R. that the Reverend Dr. Roland Stringfellow, who’d been the managing director of the center in 2023, has now left.
Stringfellow is the pastor of a Metropolitan Community Churches congregation in Detroit; Schlager was on sabbatical last year, as the B.A.R. previously reported.
“Roland left CLGS at the end of December 2023 to move into full-time social work in the Detroit area where he has been living (and pastoring) for the past several years,” Schlager stated to the B.A.R. “CLGS is opening a search soon for Roland’s replacement as coordinator of the CLGS African American Roundtable; that was a part-time position held by Roland for many years. We miss him but are grateful for his 15-year connection to CLGS: first as a student and then as a member of our CLGS staff.”
Stringfellow did not return a request for comment.
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Earthrise tells the story of the first image captured of the Earth from space in 1968. Told solely by the Apollo 8 astronauts, the film recounts their experiences and memories and explores the beauty, awe, and grandeur of the Earth against the blackness of space. This iconic image had a powerful impact on the astronauts and the world, offering a perspective that transcended national, political, and religious boundaries. Told 50 years later, Earthrise compels us to remember this shift and to reflect on the Earth as a shared home.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS AND CREDITS (emergencemagazine.org)
Take a good look at your life right now. If you don’t like something about it, close your eyes and imagine the life you want. Now allow yourself to focus your inner eye on the person you would have to be in order to create your preferred life. Notice the differences in how you behave and present yourself; allow yourself to spend several seconds breathing in the new image, expanding your energy into this new mold. Hold the image for several seconds and ask God to imprint it on your subconscious mind. Do that every day for 5 minutes or so. If you share this technique with certain people, the chances are good they’ll tell you that it’s way too simple. It’s up to you what you choose to believe.
Dear God, Please impress upon me The vision of whom I am meant to be. Reveal to me the bigger life That You would have me live. Undo the forces that keep me bound, That I might serve you more. Amen.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • Apr 14, 2024 Mike Jay is a freelance journalist and cultural historian. He is author of many books including Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind; Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century; High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History, Science and Culture; Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic; This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond; and The Influencing Machine: James Tilly and the Air Loom. His website is https://mikejay.net/ This wide-ranging interview provides something of an overview of Mike Jays research into all aspects of drugs and culture. 00:00 Introduction 07:49 Drug use in animals 15:01 Primary drugs unique to cultures 19:09 Social status and drugs 26:15 Religious use of drugs 32:34 Learning to use a drug 40:54 Drugs in the arts and literature 45:43 Drugs and ritual magic 48:45 Narcotics 55:39 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on March 20, 2024)
The author, inventor and futurist has had his eye on the future for generations. Many in the field of AI are now catching up.Cody Pickens | Special to The Examiner
Preparing for my interview with author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, I did something I’ve never done before. I opened the ChatGPT app on my phone and began to type: “What should I ask Ray Kurzweil when I interview him?”
Within seconds, eight questions appeared on my screen. What normally takes a couple of hours of preparation was done in a nanosecond. I must admit, it kind of felt like cheating.
Unlike me, Kurzweil has been embracing AI for decades. In his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” Kurzweil made the bold prediction that AI would expand human intelligence exponentially, changing life as we know it.
He wasn’t wrong.
Now in his 70s, Kurzweil is upping the ante in his newest book, “The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI,” revisiting his prediction of the melding of human and machine, with 20 additional years of data showing the exponential rate of technological advancement. It’s a fascinating look at the future and the hope for a better world.
Kurzweil with Stevie Wonder, as an advisor, shown here in the 1980s. Kurzweil Music Systems made the Kurzweil Keyboard K250, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil
Kurzweil has long been recognized as a great thinker. The son of a musician father and visual artist mother, he grew up in New York City and at a young age became enamored with computers, writing his first computer program at the age of 15.
While at MIT, earning a degree in computer science and literature, Kurzweil started a company that created a computer program to match high school students with colleges. In the ensuing years, he went on to found (and sell) multiple technology-fueled companies and inventions, including the first reading machine for the blind and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments (inspired by meeting Stevie Wonder). He has authored 11 books.
In 2012, Google cofounder Larry Page hired Kurzweil to join the company. He still works there today as a principal researcher and AI visionary, looking at the long-term implications of technology and society.
On a recent afternoon, I met with Kurzweil at the Merchants Exchange Building in downtown San Francisco. Wearing his signature hand-painted suspenders, he sat down with me to talk about large language models, the singularity and the future of humanity with AI.
Ray, for many of us laypeople, artificial intelligence is a fairly new concept, but not for you. I’ve actually been in artificial intelligence for 61 years, and that’s a record. Nobody else has that longevity. When I started, no one had heard of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence? What’s that? Now everybody’s heard of it, and people are very nervous about it.
Yes, they are. But they’re also very intrigued. This added intelligence … it’s really coming from people, and it’s going to make us smarter. People are nervous about that, but that’s really the goal of humanity. We’re trying to increase our intelligence. If you were to ask a mouse, “Would you like to become as intelligent as a human?” Well, they wouldn’t even understand the question, and they’d have no idea how to answer. But we are intelligent humans, and we’re glad about that. If we make ourselves even smarter, that’ll be even more beneficial, and that’s what this is all about. And it’s going very, very quickly — at an exponential rate … a 20 quadrillion–fold increase over 80 years.
I can’t even fathom what that number means! So, how did you get interested in artificial intelligence? It seemed pretty amazing to me that we could actually replicate the human brain. My father was a musician, so the very first project I did was to write music using a computer, and you could feed in particular melodies. It would try to replicate the kind of melodies that Mozart created. It was not quite as good, but you could recognize it as Mozart or as Chopin. And I worked with my father on it and showed it on [the game show] “I’ve Got a Secret.”
A born inventor, Kurzweil at age 6 with his father, a conductor, composer and musician, and his mother, a visual artist, in New York City.Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil
That was very exciting to have a computer compose music. No one had ever done that before. Now automatic composition is a major field, but that was 61 years ago. I’ve always been very excited about artificial intelligence because that’s the secret of humanity, the fact that we have intelligence. If we can recreate that — which we’re getting very close to — within a few years, we’ll be able to emulate the intelligence that any human being can have.
That’s unbelievable. Large language models [computer programs that generate human-like text] are actually better than humans. You could ask it anything, and it will answer you with an intelligent prompt. And if you don’t like that [answer], you could ask it again, and you’ll get something else that means something similar. It can do that for any topic. No human being can do that. Einstein knew something about physics, but he didn’t know philosophy and so on.
In what areas do you see the most promising benefits of AI, and by areas I mean education, health care, climate change … Well, health care I think is the most significant because I think we’ll reach longevity and escape velocity in five years, by 2029. Right now you go through a year, you use up to a year of your longevity. But we also have scientific progress, which is moving ahead. So you actually get back some of that loss. Right now you’re getting back about four months. However, scientific progress is progressing exponentially. By 2029, you’re going to get back a full year. So you lose a year, but you’re going to get back a full year from scientific progress. Past 2029 you’ll get back more than a year. As far as longevity is concerned, you’ll actually go backwards in time.
One of your boldest predictions is that we as humans may one day live forever. Do you still believe that? There’s a little bit of a misquote [with laughter].
OK, it’s good to have you here to get it right. So it’s not a guarantee, but your longevity is actually going to increase, not decrease. And as we go further, we’ll be able to overcome more and more possibilities.
For example, we’re going to combine with large language models. It’s going to become part of us, and it’s going to increase our intelligence. So that’s part of our intelligence that we can get back because we back up everything that’s computational. The part of our intelligence that comes from machines is going to be backed up. So if that gets destroyed, you can recreate it. It’s like you lose your phone, but you can get it back because it’s all backed up. But the intelligence that’s real, that is part of our body. If you lose that, you can’t get it back. We will be able to do that. We’ll be able to access stuff that’s going on in our real brain and back that up, just like the computational part.
In 2015, record producer Mike Clink presented Kurzweil with a Grammy Award for outstanding achievement in music technology.Frederick M. Brown/WireImage
So the coexistence of man and machine, is that what singularity is? Yeah. Singularity comes from physics. If you have a black hole, you can’t actually look inside the black hole. Nothing can get out because gravity keeps it inside. That’s really what singularity means — that we really can’t access it, we can’t back it up, and we can’t really fully understand it because we can’t access it. So that’s what I mean here. We’re going to merge with computation, and we’re going to become so intelligent we really can’t describe what it’s like. … We will understand it when we get there, but right now we can’t really predict it.
When you say that, I’m thinking of a chip in our brain. Well, we will have chips in our brain, but we won’t be able to describe what it’s going to be like past the singularity. That’s very hard to imagine. But we can say some things. Our longevity will be way past what it is today. We really can go on forever, and we’re not actually going to get older. We’ll continue to look the way we do now.
You’ve talked about some of the benefits of AI. What do you fear about artificial intelligence? Well, what do we fear now about humans even before AI? When I was a small child, they invented atomic weapons. We exploded two nuclear weapons. If you ask people, “We just exploded two weapons within one week in anger; what’s the likelihood that’s going to happen again?” People say, “Well, absolutely that’s going to happen.” And here we are 80 years later. The people who have atomic weapons are not the nicest people in the world, and yet it hasn’t happened.
But human beings, even without AI, can cause a lot of destruction. That’s actually getting better as we’ve gotten more intelligent. We have two wars in the world now that people are paying attention to, and thousands of people are dying, and that’s terrible, but not as bad as it used to be. Eighty years ago, we had 100 million people die in Europe and Asia through World War II. But intelligence can make us what we would consider evil and cause a tremendous amount of destruction. And that’s just from natural intelligence. If we can make ourselves more intelligent with AI, people are afraid of that.
They also see it as not part of humanity. Right now, AI can, for example, do coding. Not quite as good as humans, but within five years it’ll be as good as humans. People are afraid of that because they’ve got a job doing that, and AI can do that instead.
A Price-Performance of Computation chart by Kurzweil, who began tracking the pace of technological progress 40 years ago and discovered that it was advancing at an exponential rate. He has used this data to make many accurate predictions, including his 1999 prediction that computers would reach human level intelligence by 2029. While controversial at the time, AI is now right on track to hit this milestone by 2029, if not sooner.Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil
Speaking of jobs, one of the fears of AI is that machines will replace jobs and even further widen the inequality gap. What do you think? It hasn’t so far. The Luddites came along 200 years ago because they created machines that could create clothing and so on, and people say, “Well, look at these machines, and there’s more coming out every day, and all jobs are going to go away.” But it didn’t happen. We actually have more jobs today than we did then, despite the fact that machines can do jobs.
This is a revolution of sorts, like the Industrial Revolution. But there was a period after the Industrial Revolution that was pretty awful with child labor, dangerous workplaces, environmental harm. But it was worse before that. If you go back, say 300 years, life was horrible. Life expectancy was like 28. You go back 100 years compared to today, we make 10 times as much in constant dollars as we did 100 years ago. And of course, we didn’t even have things like electronics, for example. So despite the fact that we get rid of jobs, we’re actually in better shape, and that’s going to continue. Large language models will create the ability of people to get enough money to live, and we’ll be doing things that we enjoy doing compared to today.
So you don’t anticipate a dark period during this transition? There may be some difficulty if you have a certain job, and then they can use large language models instead of yourself; you may be unhappy about that. But eventually we’ll be far better off than we are today. That’s been true of every type of automation.
Let’s talk about your new book, “The Singularity Is Nearer,” the sequel to 2005’s “The Singularity Is Near,” and which comes out this summer. In 1999, I wrote “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” and I predicted that the Turing test, which is where a computer can emulate a human being, would happen within 30 years, by 2029. Stanford was so alarmed, they held an international conference, and they had hundreds of people come from all over the world who were experts in AI. They agreed with me that this would happen, but not in 30 years. They felt it would take 100 years. … And right now we have large language models. Not quite the Turing test, but very, very close. A lot of people like Elon Musk think it’s going to happen next year. I’m saying five years. So one large language model will know everything that any human being knows in five years, and people are now accepting that. This was a major controversy back in 1999. Now it’s just about to happen, so I wrote this book telling what life will be like. And it basically will be better. But there are also some problems because human beings can create problems. If we can add to our intelligence, we’ll be creating more problems and also solving more problems.
Well, that’s very optimistic. I like that. I read recently that Mark Zuckerberg/Meta intended to spend upwards of $30 billion annually on AI development. Of course, Google, with which you are affiliated, and Microsoft and others are investing heavily as well. This is an enormous amount of money. Right. But millions of people are using it, and it is making us smarter. If we can use these kinds of tools, we have much more capability than we had before. … Everybody does well. Could you imagine not having these phones?
No. Exactly. Five years ago I used to ask after a speech, who here has their phone? I’d say maybe two-thirds had it, but a third didn’t have it. Ten years ago, almost nobody had it. It’s getting adopted very quickly, but it makes us smarter. No one goes out without it.
It’s very true. Sometimes I have to stop myself from googling things I can’t remember because I feel like I need to use my brain, test my memory. It’s just too easy to find the information on my phone. But that is your brain. There’s no purpose to memorizing these things. You have it in your hand; you might as well use it.
What do you think is the biggest technological discovery in the recent past that is going to profoundly impact the way that we live 10 years from now? Well, the ability to extend our longevity. … That’s going to radically change what humanity is about. All of religion, for example, is about this issue. What do you do as you get older? What happens when you die? You have to get used to the fact that time goes by, and you have less and less time. That’s going to completely change. Ultimately, we’ll have more and more ways of keeping our longevity going. And then people say, “Well, I don’t want to live past 90 or 100 or 110.” If you say, I don’t want to live past 100, but when you’re 99.9 years old, you want to continue anyway. The only time that people want to take their lives is if they’re in unbearable pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, spiritual pain. Then people don’t want to go on. But if you’re feeling fairly good about life, nobody wants to end their lives. And we’re continually changing who we are. Life expectancy was 20 a thousand years ago. It was 35 in 1800. It’s 48 in 1900. It’s now pushing 80. But as it continues to expand, we’re actually happy about that, and nobody really complains about it.
You are a computer scientist, an inventor, an author, a world-class thinker. Are you religious at all? I believe in innovation. That’s really what my life has been about and what I’ve tried to contribute to. I think religion is something we’ve made up because we didn’t have any alternative.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her exquisite manifesto for the magic of real human conversation. Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the mycelial web of invisible connections undergirding our emotional lives — the way “sadness” shares a Latin root with “sated” and originally meant a fulness of experience, the way “holy” shares a Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things.
Because we know their power, we ask of words to hold what we cannot hold — the complexity of experience, the polyphony of voices inside us narrating that experience, the longing for clarity amid the confusion. There is, therefore, singular disorientation to those moments when they fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language turn out too small to contain emotions at once overwhelmingly expansive and acutely specific.
John Koenig offers a remedy for this lack in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (public library) — a soulful invitation to “get to work redefining the world around us, until our language more closely matches the reality we experience.”
The title, though beautiful, is misleading — the emotional states Koenig defines are not obscure but, despite their specificity, profoundly relatable and universal; they are not sorrows but emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capacity for affirming the joy of being alive: maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”), apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin”), the wends (“the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations”), anoscetia (“the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you’”), dès vu (“the awareness that this moment will become a memory”).
Koenig composites his imaginative etymologies from a multitude of sources: names and places from folklore and pop culture, terms from chemistry and astronomy, the existing lexicon of languages living and dead, from Latin and Ancient Greek to Japanese and Māori. He writes:
In language, all things are possible. Which means that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is too obscure to define. We just have to do it.
[…]
Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.
There are various words addressing the maddening uncertainty of the two fundamental dimensions of human life: time and love.
ÉNOUEMENT n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.
French énouer, to pluck defective bits from a stretch of cloth + dénouement, the final part of a story, in which all the threads of the plot are drawn together and everything is explained. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS adj. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; wishing there were some way to know ahead of time whether this is the person you’re going to wake up next to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of having to count them out one by one, quietly hoping your streak continues.
Mandarin 确认 (quèrèn), confirmation. Twenty thousand days is roughly fifty-five years. Pronounced “kweh-ruh-nuhs.”
There are words that reckon with the challenges of self-knowledge.
AGNOSTHESIA n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
Ancient Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos), not knowing + διάθεσις (diáthesis), condition, mood. Pronounced “ag-nos-thee-zhuh.”
ZIELSCHMERZ n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.
German Ziel, goal + Schmerz, pain. Pronounced “zeel-shmerts.”
There are words that anchor us in both the smallness and the grandeur of existence, its fierce fragility, its devastating beauty; words tasked with holding the hardest truth — that we are children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence, living with only marginal and mostly illusory control over the circumstances of our lives and other people’s choices, forever vulnerable to the accidents of a universe insentient to our hopes.
GALAGOG n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.
From galaxy, a gravitationally bound system of millions of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS n. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.
Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the process of turning theory into reality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”
SUERZA n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
MAHPIOHANZIA n. the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the burden of your own weight, which you’ve been carrying your entire life without a second thought.
Lakota mahpiohanzi, “a shadow caused by a cloud.” Pronounced “mah-pee-oh-han-zee-uh.”
Emerging from the various entries is a reminder, both haunting and comforting, that despite how singular our experience feels, we are all grappling with just about the same core concerns; that our time is short and precious; that all of our confusions are a single question, the best answer to which is love.
To be human is to be divided yet indivisible — a totality of personhood constantly sundered by conflicting impulses and desires, violently pulling us in opposite directions, paralyzing us with the inability to move ahead toward happiness and wholeness. “When we are in conflict we tend to make such sharp oppositions between ideas and attitudes and get caught and entangled in what seems to be a hopeless choice,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary as she contemplated inner conflict and the measure of maturity, “but when the neurotic ambivalence is resolved one tends to move beyond sharp differences, sharply defined boundaries and begins to see the interaction between everything, the relation between everything.”
The supreme challenge of human life is that we are much more opaque to ourselves than we like to admit — mighty subterranean rivers of emotion and motive course beneath the reasoned surface of our conscious beliefs, values, and desires. Neurosis might be an old-fashioned word, but it is useful shorthand for the tension that arises from these conflicting facets of our experience that leave us unsure of what we want, what to want. For all his groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of those subterranean currents, Freud’s great error was his pessimism about the mutability and treatment of our neuroses — to him, the cards were dealt in early childhood and the game of life played out deterministically. His tragedy was his lack of faith in human growth and human goodness — Freud was the supreme cynic of the psyche.
A counterpoint to his view of human nature and potential comes from the work of the pioneering German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (September 16, 1885–December 4, 1952), nowhere more insightfully than in her book Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (public library), based on a series of lectures she delivered in 1943, as the world itself was being sundered by human nature’s warring factions. What emerges is a radical effort to allay neurotic hopelessness and contour the route to wholeness, governed by Horney’s conviction that we have both the will and the capacity to develop our potential for happiness and goodness, and that rather than living as victims of some deterministic pathology, we go on changing for as long as we live.
Karen Horney
Horney defines neurosis as “a protective edifice built around the basic conflict.” Concerned with “what unresolved conflicts do to people, how they produce states of anxiety, depression, indecision, inertia, detachment, and so on,” concerned about the immense emotional energy and intelligence we exert on trying to solve our inner conflicts — “or, more precisely, to deny their existence and create an artificial harmony” — she writes:
Neurotic conflicts cannot be resolved by rational decision. The neurotic’s attempts at solution are not only futile but harmful. But these conflicts can be resolved by changing the conditions within the personality that brought them into being.
[…]
It is not neurotic to have conflicts. At one time or another our wishes, our interests, our convictions are bound to collide with those of others around us. And just as such clashes between ourselves and our environment are a commonplace, so, too, conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life.
[…]
To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset. The more we face our own conflicts and seek out our own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength we will gain. Only when we are willing to bear the brunt can we approximate the ideal of being the captain of our ship.
Horney observes that most of our inner drives, from the longing for affection to the craving for power, operate by an engine of compulsion fueled by conflicting desires. She writes:
Compulsive drives are specifically neurotic; they are born of feelings of isolation, helplessness, fear and hostility, and represent ways of coping with the world despite these feelings; they aim primarily not at satisfaction but at safety; their compulsive character is due to the anxiety lurking behind them.
With an eye to her extensive work with patients, she reflects on the four major attempts to resolve our inner conflicts:
The initial attempt was to eclipse part of the conflict and raise its opposite to predominance. The second was to “move away from” people. The function of neurotic detachment now appeared in a new light. Detachment was part of the basic conflict — that is, one of the original conflicting attitudes toward others; but it also represented an attempt at solution, since maintaining an emotional distance between the self and others set the conflict out of operation. The third attempt was very different in kind. Instead of moving away from others, the neurotic moved away from himself. His whole actual self became somewhat unreal to him and he created in its place an idealized image of himself in which the conflicting parts were so transfigured that they no longer appeared as conflicts but as various aspects of a rich personality… The need for perfection now appeared as an endeavor to measure up to this idealized image; the craving for admiration could be seen as the patient’s need to have outside affirmation that he really was his idealized image. And the farther the image was removed from reality the more insatiable this latter need would logically be. Of all the attempts at solution the idealized image is probably the most important by reason of its far-reaching effect on the whole personality. But in turn it generates a new inner rift, and hence calls for further patchwork. The fourth attempt at solution seeks primarily to do away with this rift, though it helps as well to spirit away all other conflicts. Through what I call externalization, inner processes are experienced as going on outside the self. If the idealized image means taking a step away from the actual self, externalization represents a still more radical divorce. It again creates new conflicts, or rather greatly augments the original conflict — that between the self and the outside world.
Our inner conflicts, Horney observes, are in dynamic relationship with the outside world — we are creatures of culture, and the tumults of our culture invariably magnify our inner tumults:
The kind, scope, and intensity of such conflicts are largely determined by the civilization in which we live. If the civilization is stable and tradition bound, the variety of choices presenting themselves are limited and the range of possible individual conflicts narrow. Even then they are not lacking. One loyalty may interfere with another; personal desires may stand against obligations to the group. But if the civilization is in a stage of rapid transition, where highly contradictory values and divergent ways of living exist side by side, the choices the individual has to make are manifold and difficult.
The central bind of our inner conflicts, beyond their largely unconscious nature, is the inability to choose one of the contradictory impulses over the other — a metastasis of our general inability to know what we want. Horney observes:
We must be aware of what our wishes are, or even more, of what our feelings are. [And yet] we do not know what we really feel or want.
[…]
Even if we recognize a conflict as such, we must be willing and able to renounce one of the two contradictory issues. But the capacity for clear and conscious renunciation is rare, because our feelings and beliefs are muddled, and perhaps because in the last analysis most people are not secure and happy enough to renounce anything.
To make a decision presupposes the willingness and capacity to assume responsibility for it. This would include the risk of making a wrong decision and the willingness to bear the consequences without blaming others for them.
The commonest consequence of this paralysis in the effort to resolve inner conflicts is hopelessness — the debilitating fear that because the resolution is difficult to do, it cannot be done. All hopelessness is a form of fear-based cynicism. As far as our capacity for growth goes, it is a dangerous and self-limiting mindset — perhaps the most pernicious tactic we have for standing in our own way. Horney writes:
Human beings can apparently endure an amazing amount of misery as long as there is hope; but neurotic entanglements invariably generate a measure of hopelessness… It may be deeply buried: superficially the neurotic may be preoccupied with imagining or planning conditions that would make things better… The neurotic expects a world of good from external changes, but inevitably carries himself and his neurosis into each new situation.
Hope that rests on externals is naturally more prevalent among the young… As people grow older and one hope after another fades, they are more willing to take a good look at themselves as a possible source of distress.
It is this paralytic sense of hopelessness that keeps us in untenable situations — situations that can be bettered by some effort and initiative, the motive spring of which is hope. In its absence, we remain stuck. Horney considers the root of this self-limitation:
Hopelessness is an ultimate product of unresolved conflicts, with its deepest root in the despair of ever being wholehearted and undivided. A mounting scale of neurotic difficulties leads to this condition. Basic is the sense of being caught in conflicts like a bird in a net, with no apparent possibility of ever extricating oneself. On top of this come all the attempts at solution which not only fail but increasingly alienate the person from himself. Repetitive experience serves to intensify the hopelessness — talents that never lead to achievement, whether because again and again energies are scattered in too many directions or because the difficulties arising in any creative process are enough to deter the person from further pursuit. This may apply as well to love affairs, marriages, friendships, which are shipwrecked one after another. Such repeated failures are as disheartening as is the experience of laboratory rats when, conditioned to jump into a certain opening for food, they jump again and again only to find it barred.
[Your] situation is hopeless only so long as the status quo persists and is regarded as unchangeable… What makes it hopeless is your own attitude toward it. If you would consider changing your claims on life there would be no need to feel hopeless.
As we begin to work on resolving our inner conflicts, we get “a taste of how it feels to be free” — which is the ultimate aim of therapy. Horney writes:
The conflicts can be resolved only by changing those conditions within the personality that brought them into being. This is a radical way, and a hard one. In view of the difficulties involved in changing anything within ourselves, it is quite understandable that we should scour the ground for short cuts.
[…]
The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that conflicts are resolved.
In language, all things are possible. Which means that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is too obscure to define. We just have to do it.
