In-form-at-ion: Rethinking Intelligence, AI, and the God Bit
Jose T. Thomas with Leena Jose T.

It all began with a bang — right in our kitchen.

One morning, the safety valve of our rice cooker burst. The lid shot up, struck the ceiling, crashed to the floor, and rolled across the room. No one was hurt, but the reactions of those around us unsettled us. “It’s God’s fury,” they said. “A punishment for some wrongdoing.” At the time, Catholic Pentecostalism was surging in Kerala, the southernmost state of India, where the monsoon winds first touch the land, and the idea of a wrathful, retributive God was gaining ground.

“God is love. How can He be furious? How can He punish?” Leena was already drifting away from the millennia-old concept of a punishing deity.

Thus began a series of morning discussions — sometimes over breakfast, sometimes during Leena’s meditative prayers in the kitchen — on how the idea of God has evolved across scriptures and civilizations. A kind of Kitchen Theology was taking shape.

It was the mid-1990s, and we were both in our thirties. Leena was experiencing God as pure love, overflowing with a missionary-like zeal to share this vision — one untouched by human fury, blame, or vengeance. Meanwhile, the internet had just begun making inroads into India. Jose, a journalist, was contemplating a shift from print media to digital content and editorial research.

Leena, a lecturer, took on the financial burden of our young family, even sponsoring her spouse’s self-styled career change. His first projects involved producing research-based backgrounders for her mission: persuading Christian preachers to embrace paradigm shifts in the concept of God, gender equality, and the social dimensions of faith, with justice and peace at the centre.

She organized seminars, study circles, roundtables, and think tanks. In supporting her work, Jose’s modest SOHO (Small Office Home Office) expanded into an ambitious exploration of humanity’s cultural and social evolution —one that gradually revealed the trajectory of this evolution towards a hopeful future.

Our kitchen, library, dining room, and study became sites of discussion, debate, prayer, meditation, and deep reflection. Our personal convictions, imaginations, and perspectives converged. We dined with Buddha, Jesus, Sree Narayana Guru, Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, Fritjof Capra, and many others — not seeking differences but relationships. 

Our son Aravind, an early adopter of Web 2.0, grew up to become our mentor in the Great Shift unfolding across the world — a shift from fear-based ideologies and theologies to a universal consciousness of unconditional, nonjudgmental love and harmony. He taught us to envision unconditional, compassionate love as a transformative alternative to the conventional preaching of love, which has remained fundamentally conditional.

Now, we find ourselves at a vantage point from which we can glimpse the whole of humanity and the cosmos as Anukampanam — a co-vibration — of the primordial quantum of Anpu in a universal field of compassionate intelligence. We call it the “God Bit”.

We do not present this as a theory but as a meditative installation. It’s an approach, a way of seeing and engaging with reality, using the paradigm of cosmic field of compassionate intelligence. We feel here a symbiosis of wisdom traditions and cutting-edge scientific knowledge. 

Without beginning with rigid definitions, we offer here a reflection on how our intuitions and insights — shaped by learning, unlearning, and relearning — have unfolded like a spiral staircase. We are content to call it a Kitchen Installation. The stairs may seem repetitive, as in any good meditation, but with every full circling you may be at a new height. This installation stands on three arches. You may enter through any of them.

— Jose T. & Leena