The Art of Spiritual Prompting

I'm blogging early this week because I have a lot of ideas swimming in my head. All these ideas deserve their day in my blog. In fact, I keep a list of future blog titles that I plan to tackle whenever I'm inspired to do so. I'm writing this from Coffee Bean at what used to be known as the Da Men Mall. This mall is undergoing a makeover, and it has changed its name to EasyHome. For now, the place is quite deserted. I'm happy that at least Coffee Bean is still here. I've spent many productive hours here in the past before working on my projects. Let's see if I can also make this session, fueled by a hot Americano, a productive one too.

Today, I would like to discuss the concept of 'prompting', which has become familiar to us in the era of LLM-based generative AI tools like ChatGPT.  There are so many YouTube videos and articles out there that teach you how to coax LLMs to produce better outputs using the correct prompts. Apparently, it's mostly the quality of the prompt that determines the quality and accuracy of the generated response from the LLM. It's basically baked into the way LLMs work, for the LLM's response is composed of the predicted words or tokens that probabilistically match the context of the question or preamble text provided by the user. 

The surprising thing that LLMs have taught us is that what we would normally consider as 'intelligence' has a lot to do with how we associate words and string them together coherently to produce thoughts and ideas. LLMs weave words together like threads in a tapestry, predicting the next strand until meaning emerges. 

With a correctly engineered prompt, we could induce the LLM to output a chunk of code, even an entire application, that works right out of the box. Nowadays, you see many content providers trying to show off their coolest "one-shot" prompt-engineered application on YouTube. 

Let me now try to tie the concept of prompt engineering to spirituality. Intriguingly, all religious traditions--scriptures, their iconography, rituals and liturgy--serve as a kind of hyper-prompt to induce some kind of spiritual insight. For example, the student of the Bible would claim to be divinely inspired (or perhaps prompted?) by the text to experience certain epiphanies. Without the required contextual input of scriptural text coupled with his life experiences, he certainly would not be able to gain the same insight. 

Religious awakenings often come unexpectedly in a flash. It is simply the culminating effect of the right multimodal prompt. It could be an evocative turn of phrase from a religious verse, or a chance conjunction of events--golden sunlight through the clouds, the swell waves in the ocean, or the reverberating call for prayer from the mosque--that evokes a sense of awe and mystery, which immediately points to glory and the existence of God.

All spiritual traditions are collections of curated prompts that serve to produce in the believer states of divine rapture. The LLM gains its intelligence by seeing the interconnections between words through its laboriously trained neural network. Religion acts as a similar framework for believers to tap into its potential network of embedded wisdom. 

Just like how LLMs under certain conditions could hallucinate, religions could also induce their followers to go astray with false beliefs. The line between wisdom and violence can often be a fine one. We should learn from how we use LLMs and apply the same principles to religion. Only correct prompting would determine if the output contains erudite insights or hallucinatory dogma. Whether in code or in scripture, the art of prompting reminds us that wisdom depends not just on the system, but on the care with which we ask our questions.

The Ripples of Karma

Here I am starting off 2026 with an early blog article. I am now free to work from anywhere, since I no longer have to attend online meetings. Today, on this first working day of the year, I'm writing this from Komugi Cafe at Main Place, a cafe which I am quite fond of. Earlier this morning, I was up early for my morning walk in the park, where I listened to a lecture on the subject of karma by an academic who has studied it from a Hindu and Buddhist perspective.

I agreed with most of his views about karma. For example, the popular notion of karma is that it is some kind of cosmic law of retribution, and that is not exactly correct. Karma, or at least the way I choose to understand it, is just action and its effects. 

There is no 'good' or 'bad' karma as such. The effects of one's thoughts and actions (which also originate from thoughts) are a complex interaction of many forces. But every tiny little thought has a consequence in the universe; at the very least, it will change the state of your mind. Neuronal connections are reinforced or disinhibited as a consequence of the thought. The type of change that happens is dependent on the existing state of your complex neural network.

The state of your mind now determines your next thought (and hence action). If you have been cultivating thoughts of hatred towards someone, the likelihood of you taking an action that will lead to negative consequences in your relationship with that person increases. You could have avoided it if you had dissolved your hatred at its conception. That's how you 'burn' karma. Samskaras are just latent states which you had cultivated over time. 

How do you dissolve karma? That's where meditation comes in. When you meditate, you can observe all these subtle impressions of the mind. Everything that distracts you when you meditate consists of latent karmic forces, which you had inadvertently cultivated in the past. Understand their origin and allow them to dissipate their energy by channelling them into some positive action. If you sincerely forgive someone who has wronged you, that karma is immediately dissolved. End of story. You close the account. That's one way of 'burning' karma.

'Bad karma' only arises when many negative thoughts have accumulated and reinforced themselves sufficiently to snowball into some physical circumstance that causes you suffering. Do not rejoice too much over 'good karma', for it is also a transient state, which momentarily appears to bring you some pleasure. Gratitude is the right attitude to 'enjoy' your karmic windfall, lest it may inflate your ego, which again could lead you karmically astray. Let go, dissolve, recharge and redistribute. Let our actions and reactions even out the imbalances in the karmic continuum. 

What about actions from our past lives? Doesn't the belief in karma also imply the belief in reincarnation and how we reap the consequences of our good or bad actions from previous lives? Well, I would suggest that understanding the effects of karma within your lifetime is already a good start. Whether we have past or future lives is a slightly different discussion, because it involves your grasp of what life is, and how you view yourself, your personality, with all your idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, in relation to the universe. As long as you see yourself as this limited being, you will always have past and future lives. We will leave this as the intriguing subject for a future blog article. 

When you grasp the karma that is latent and manifesting at this very moment, the past and the future are immaterial. Learn to handle the karma of the moment, and you will see that all of existence is a continuum, and karma is nothing but its ripples.