2026 and Beyond: Heading towards The Singularity Point - Part 2

Part II — Crossing the Knee

How Technology, Culture, and Consciousness Began to Accelerate Together

"What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially."

— Ray Kurzweil

"After eons of slow expansion, the human species has entered a phase of compression. Every part of the globe is now inhabited, and we are confronted by a new reality: limited space and an expanding network of minds."

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Building the Earth (1953)

If the curve of acceleration has a knee—the point at which exponential growth becomes unmistakable—then the mid-2020s mark its crossing. What once felt abstract or distant is now entering lived experience. The compression of technological, social, and psychological change is no longer theoretical; it is embodied, perceptual, and increasingly unavoidable.

As technological systems grow more complex and integrated, human consciousness does not remain untouched. The same forces that accelerate information and communication externally appear to intensify experience internally. Boundaries soften. Perception widens. Long-suppressed questions about identity, meaning, and reality surface with renewed urgency.

Importantly, this convergence, what this blog series is calling the Singularity Point did not begin with the smartphone or artificial intelligence. Its roots stretch back through the cultural and technological "softening" of the twentieth century and back to the Industrial Revolution. In this second blog, the focus will be on tracing how knowledge and narratives surrounding particularly Kundalini and Tantra have moved into Western culture, however a broader treatment than this could one day explore how technological change has facilitated the wider transmission and interweaving of multiple spiritual and shamanic traditions across cultures.

The Industrial Threshold: When Inner Knowledge Moved West

Long before the digital age, the conditions for a rise in non-ordinary experiences were already forming through technological transformation. The Industrial Revolution did not only transform economies and cities; it altered time, attention, population density, and the psychological structure of daily life through new technologies. Steam power, mechanised manufacturing, railway networks, and telegraph systems compressed both space and time. Mechanised schedules replaced seasonal rhythms, urbanisation compressed human interaction, and work increasingly demanded abstract, repetitive focus. Religious frameworks shaped for agrarian societies and slower tempos of change began to strain under these new technological conditions.

This disruption created both psychological pressure and intellectual curiosity. As inherited structures of meaning weakened, space opened for forms of spiritual enquiry capable of addressing inner experience directly rather than through doctrine alone. In this sense, the modern search for consciousness did not arise in spite of industrialisation, but alongside it.

Early Transmission of Kundalini Knowledge

The first sustained introduction of Kundalini-related ideas into Western consciousness occurred in the late 18th and 19th centuries, enabled by infrastructure and new communication technologies. Steamship routes, railway networks, and telegraph systems accelerated colonial contact, while printing press technology enabled mass production and distribution of translated Sanskrit texts. European administrators, missionaries, and Orientalist scholars working in India encountered texts describing chakras, prana, and Kundalini energy. Initially treated as philosophical or ethnographic curiosities, these texts—now reproducible through industrial printing—quietly introduced a new vocabulary for inner experience across European and American readerships.

A key turning point came in the early 20th century with Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon. His publication of The Serpent Power (1919)—distributed through modern publishing networks and international book trade—presented Tantric Kundalini systems as coherent psychological–energetic models. For the first time, Western readers encountered detailed maps of inner transformation framed with intellectual seriousness, made accessible through industrial-scale book production and global distribution networks.

At roughly the same time, Indian teachers themselves began addressing Western audiences directly, enabled by steamship travel and mass communication. Swami Vivekananda, travelling by steamship to speak at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, framed yoga not as belief but as method—an inner science. His speeches were transcribed, printed, and distributed through newspapers, magazines, and books across continents. He was explicit about why this knowledge mattered now. The West, he argued, had mastered the external sciences while neglecting the internal, creating a dangerous imbalance. Yoga was offered as a stabilising counterweight: a way to cultivate mastery of mind and nervous system in an age defined by speed, abstraction, and material power.

Importantly, at this stage Kundalini was largely known about rather than widely encountered. The transmission was conceptual before it was experiential.

Population, Literacy, and the Rise of Spiritual Enquiry

By the late 19th century, several structural shifts converged: rapid population growth, expanding literacy enabled by public education and cheaper paper production, mass publishing through steam-powered presses, rising education levels, and eroding institutional religious authority. These conditions produced a population increasingly capable of introspection and comparative philosophy.

Within this context, new spiritual movements emerged that blended Eastern ideas, Western esotericism, and early psychology—and crucially, leveraged new technologies for dissemination. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, played a decisive role in popularising reincarnation, subtle bodies, chakras, and evolutionary spirituality through its extensive publishing operations, international correspondence networks, and lecture circuits enabled by railway and steamship travel. While often criticised for speculation, Theosophy normalised the idea that consciousness itself could be studied, compared, and developed across cultures, using modern communication technologies to create what was effectively the first global spiritual network.

This esoteric revival continued with groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which emphasised direct engagement with altered states of consciousness through structured practice. Though expressed in Western symbolic language, its aim—inner transformation through disciplined method—closely paralleled yogic traditions.

From Knowledge to Lived Experience

What becomes striking in hindsight is that knowledge of Kundalini and related inner phenomena arrived in the West decades before social conditions existed for widespread experiential access—but that arrival was entirely dependent on industrial technology. Printing presses enabled mass distribution of texts; steamships and railways allowed teachers to travel; telegraph and postal systems facilitated international correspondence between practitioners. Industrialisation increased stress and abstraction; urban density amplified nervous-system stimulation; literacy and publishing spread ideas rapidly across borders. The same technologies that accelerated external life created both the need for and the means of transmitting inner technologies.

Babaji and the Logic of Acceleration

Any account of this transition is incomplete without addressing Maha Avatar Babaji—whether understood as a historical individual, a lineage-holder beyond conventional biography, or an archetypal condensation of transmission.

Babaji entered Western awareness primarily through Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), where he is described as reviving Kriya Yoga in the mid-19th century by initiating Lahiri Mahasaya, a married householder working within colonial administration. This choice was symbolically decisive: awakening was reframed as compatible with modern life rather than monastic withdrawal.

Yogananda was explicit about why this transmission occurred when it did. He repeatedly stated that the era of slow ascetic paths had passed, and that humanity—already accelerating externally through technology—required inner methods capable of keeping pace. Kriya Yoga was framed as an inner technology: a psychophysiological method designed for speed, integration, and daily life. His Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) became one of the most widely distributed spiritual texts of the 20th century, translated into dozens of languages and disseminated globally through modern publishing and distribution networks. The technology of mass-produced books allowed this transmission to reach millions simultaneously—something impossible in previous eras.

From a strictly historical standpoint, Babaji remains ambiguous. Yet functionally, his role is clear. Whether literal or symbolic, Babaji represents the reactivation of inner technologies at the precise moment humanity's external systems began to accelerate. He legitimised the idea that Kundalini awakening was not a rare anomaly, but a latent human capacity suited to an age of increasing complexity.

From Survival to Transcendence: The Cultural Turn Inward

A crucial bridge between industrial modernity and the contemporary rise in non-ordinary experiences lies in psychology—most clearly articulated by Abraham Maslow in the mid-20th century. Maslow observed that human motivation unfolds in stages. When survival is uncertain, attention is dominated by food, safety, and belonging. As these needs stabilise, awareness naturally rises toward meaning, creativity, and self-understanding.

What Maslow recognised—quietly radical at the time—was that once basic needs are broadly met, higher psychological and existential needs do not disappear. They become active pressures. Large populations begin asking questions of meaning rather than survival, seeking what is real rather than what to believe. In his later work, Maslow identified what he called peak experiences—states of unity, timelessness, ego-softening, and profound meaning that closely resemble mystical or spiritual awakenings. He found these experiences were most common among psychologically healthy individuals whose foundational needs were already met. Eventually, he added a further stage to his model: self-transcendence, where identity loosens and concern expands beyond the individual self.

This psychological shift coincided with a broader cultural one. By the mid-20th century, especially in the postwar West, unprecedented numbers of people had access to education, leisure, mobility, and relative material security. Even where inequality persisted, the baseline of survival had shifted. Attention was freed—and it began to turn inward.

The 1960s functioned as an early precursor to our current inflection point. The psychedelic movement and the emergence of New Age spirituality were among the first mass-scale attempts to bridge inner and outer worlds in a modern, secular context. Substances such as LSD and psilocybin acted as a form of chemical technology, temporarily dissolving rigid ego structures and offering experiential glimpses of interconnectedness that resonated strongly with Teilhard de Chardin's vision of a shared field of consciousness. While the cultural backlash and subsequent prohibition curtailed this phase, the experiential imprint did not vanish. It lingered—in memory, in art, and in altered expectations about the nature of mind.

Equally significant was what followed. As institutional religion continued to decline, the drive toward transcendence did not disappear. It migrated. Practices that had once been embedded in ritual and cosmology—art, music, rhythm, dance, breath, and movement—were gradually relocated into secular culture. What had once taken place in temples and initiation rites became recreation, therapy, and self-expression. The temple gave way to the concert hall, the dance floor, the yoga studio, and later the festival and retreat. The practices remained; the metaphysical language surrounding them changed.

From this perspective, the rise of spiritual practice as recreation and therapy is not a cultural accident. It is the natural outcome of a population moving upward through Maslow's hierarchy, encountering the pressures of meaning and transcendence within a world no longer structured to contain them symbolically. Music became a vehicle for collective emotion and altered states. Dance reconnected bodies to rhythm and trance. Art externalised inner vision. Breathwork and meditation entered secular health and wellbeing. These practices functioned—often unknowingly—as technologies of nervous-system regulation and consciousness modulation.

Seen together, Maslow's psychology and the cultural legacy of the 1960s describe the same pattern from different angles. As external systems stabilised survival and increased complexity, inner systems activated. The question shifted from how to endure to how to integrate. Non-ordinary experiences may have arisen because human development had entered a new phase—one in which transcendence sought expression outside traditional religious containers.

Psychology as Western Spirituality: Jung and the Inner Threshold

Viewed in hindsight, aspects of modern depth psychology appears less as a departure from spirituality and more as its Western continuation, translated into secular language at a time when religious authority could no longer reliably contain inner experience.

Jung recognised the unconscious not simply as a storehouse of repression, but as a living symbolic field expressed through myth, dreams, religious imagery, and visionary experience. His concept of the collective unconscious reintroduced an ancient idea under modern conditions: that human beings participate in a shared psychic reality extending beyond individual biography.

What became clearer after the publication of The Red Book in 2009 was that Jung’s ideas were forged through direct inner encounters rather than theory alone. Between 1913 and 1917, he experienced intense visions, symbolic imagery, ego disintegration, and inner dialogues—states now recognisable as a form of spontaneous spiritual awakening. Through his practice of active imagination, Jung deliberately entered these inner worlds and documented encounters with archetypal figures and deep psychic energies.

Although Jung rarely used the language of Kundalini in his early work, his later writings and seminars reveal that he recognised clear parallels between yogic models of awakening and his own experiences. He understood Kundalini as a symbolic map of psychic transformation, culminating in an encounter with the Self.

Jung believed such experiences were becoming more frequent as traditional religious structures weakened. When shared symbols lose their binding power, he suggested, the psyche compensates, returning symbolic material through individuals—often disruptively, but meaningfully. From this perspective, analytical psychology functions as a Western initiation path: secular in language, yet deeply concerned with integration, transformation, and wholeness.

What emerged from Jung’s work, and later depth and transpersonal traditions, was a new form of Western spirituality embedded within therapy and self-inquiry. Dreams replaced scripture, symbols replaced dogma, and inner experience replaced belief. For a culture wary of metaphysics yet hungry for meaning, psychology became a way of approaching the sacred without naming it as such.

Is something deeper going on here? Possibly. When seen alongside the broader patterns traced in this blog—the industrial acceleration of life, the redistribution of spiritual practice into art, music, dance and therapy, the rise of Kundalini and non-ordinary experiences, and now the convergence of technology and consciousness—modern psychology appears less like an isolated discipline and more like a transitional organ. It helped Western societies survive the loss of shared cosmology while quietly training millions to turn inward, to tolerate ambiguity, to engage inner experience seriously.

If earlier cultures built temples to house the sacred, modernity built consulting rooms. The form changed, but the function endured. And as the pace of change accelerates, the question may no longer be whether forms of psychology are spiritual—but whether it has been preparing us, quietly and imperfectly, for a deeper integration now pressing to be recognised.

This helps explain why many contemporary spiritual awakenings are shaped less by monasteries or formal doctrine and more by music, movement, therapy, creativity, and embodied practice. What once required structured initiation now often emerges through everyday culture. The sacred did not disappear so much as redistribute itself, awaiting the language and context capable of holding it.

Alongside these shifts, another influential but often overlooked factor reshaped consciousness: travel. The jet engine and the globalisation it enabled functioned not only as economic infrastructure, but as a mechanism of perceptual change. From the 1990s onward, increasing numbers of people encountered radically different cultures, belief systems, and social norms within compressed timeframes. These encounters unsettled localised identities and expanded emotional and moral reference points, moving bodies—and nervous systems—beyond narrowly bounded cultural contexts.

Migration, both voluntary and forced, deepened this process by embedding cultural mixing into everyday life. Languages, customs, and values began to interweave within shared neighbourhoods and institutions, producing hybrid identities and new forms of belonging. Taken together, travel and migration help explain why contemporary spiritual awakenings so often draw on multiple traditions at once, with inner experience reflecting the same interconnectedness now characteristic of the outer world.

By the early 2020s, surveys consistently showed that large majorities of travellers reported lasting changes in worldview, empathy, and sense of connection following extended travel. In this sense, mobility itself became a driver of psychological and relational complexity.

Why This Matters

Seen together, these threads reveal a consistent pattern. As external systems grow more complex—industrial, technological, demographic—inner systems begin to activate in response. Kundalini, in this context, is not an exotic import into Western culture, but one expression of a broader adaptive process.

The modern rise of non-ordinary experiences does not appear random. It emerges at the intersection of industrial acceleration, population growth, cultural mixing, and the deliberate transmission of inner technologies across civilisations. What began in the 19th century as conceptual knowledge has, over time, become lived experience for increasing numbers of people.

In this light, the question is no longer why such experiences are appearing more frequently, but how consciously they will be recognised, integrated, and lived as humanity moves deeper into an age where inner and outer evolution can no longer be separated.

The Data of the Inner Shift

Long-term survey data offers important context. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, formal religious affiliation has declined steadily since the 1990s, while reports of spiritual experience have remained stable or increased.

In the UK, studies drawing on the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre show a marked rise across the late twentieth century in people reporting a sensed presence, power, or reality beyond the self. In the US, Pew Research data reveals a similar pattern: while institutional religion has waned, self-described spirituality and reports of profound experiences—feelings of deep connection, unity, or transcendence—have grown. By the mid-2020s, nearly half of Americans report having had at least one such experience, with large majorities affirming belief in a soul or spiritual dimension.

These shifts suggest not a disappearance of the sacred, but a redistribution of it—away from inherited institutions and toward lived, experiential forms.

A Distributed Awakening

Seen together, these forces describe a single reorganisation unfolding over decades. Many people today find their spiritual awakenings or non-ordinary experiences "triggered" not by monasteries or formal doctrine, but by practices that migrated from the sacred centre to the cultural periphery: meditation classes, breathwork, music festivals, therapy, psychedelics, or profound encounters with other cultures through travel.

Alongside deliberate practices and cultural exposure, there is another well-documented pathway into non-ordinary experience: disruption through crisis or trauma. Near-death experiences, severe illness, accidents, profound loss, and psychological breakdowns have long been associated with sudden shifts in perception, identity, and meaning. In these moments, the ordinary structures that organise experience—time, selfhood, bodily continuity, narrative coherence—are interrupted, and the assumptions that hold everyday reality together loosen.

From a psychological and neurological perspective, such events overwhelm the systems that stabilise the sense of self. Under extreme stress, habitual patterns of control give way to more primitive or integrative modes of processing. This can produce dissociation, but it can also open access to experiences of unity, timelessness, life review, or profound connection—features commonly reported in near-death and other crisis-induced states. In this sense, trauma can function as an unplanned initiation: a sudden breach in the boundary between ordinary awareness and deeper layers of consciousness.

This does not mean trauma causes awakening in a simple or desirable sense. Rather, it temporarily suspends the filters that narrow perception. What emerges depends on resilience, cultural framing, prior exposure to inner practices, and the availability of integration. Where meaning can be made, crisis may catalyse transformation; where it cannot, suffering may deepen.

Trauma-triggered and practice-induced experiences follow the same pattern: both loosen the structures that keep consciousness tightly focused on survival and control, revealing capacities that are normally latent. Both suggest that when familiar order breaks down—gradually through cultural change or suddenly through crisis—consciousness does not only fragment. It often reorganises.

This helps explain why some individuals who have experienced trauma may be more susceptible to altered states in modern conditions. Trauma can weaken a fixed sense of self and heighten sensitivity, while contemporary culture provides psychological language, inner practices, and narratives that legitimise such experiences. Trauma does not generate non-ordinary states, but it may lower the threshold at which they arise.

What emerges is neither pathology alone nor enlightenment by default, but a heightened responsiveness of consciousness under pressure. This underscores why integration matters so deeply: the same opening that allows insight can also amplify confusion. The outcome depends less on the experience itself than on the conditions that surround it.

From within this framework, such experiences do not appear as anomalies intruding upon a stable system. They resemble signals of adaptation. As technology—from global networks to artificial intelligence—pushes humanity into exponential external growth, consciousness appears to respond with its own form of expansion.

Why NOTES are important to note

In this context, it becomes again useful to distinguish again between a non-ordinary experience (NOE) and what might be called a non-ordinary transformative experience (NOTE). An NOE refers to the experience itself: an altered state, awakening, or disruption of ordinary perception. A NOTE emerges when that experience is gradually integrated—when the individual undertakes the longer work of meaning-making, embodiment, and psychological reorganisation. This process often involves encountering and healing repressed shadow material, unresolved trauma, and inherited conditioning. Transformation, in this sense, is not instantaneous; it unfolds over time as insight is metabolised into character, behaviour, and relationship.

Non-ordinary experiences can be understood as local coherence events within a rapidly reorganising global system. As the pace of change increases, more individuals cross thresholds that previous cultures accessed only through prolonged discipline, ritual, or crisis. What was once exceptional becomes distributed. But it is the movement from NOE to NOTE—from experience to integration—that determines whether these openings stabilise or fragment the system.

If the coming decades represent a vertical phase of technological growth, it follows that experiences of altered perception, expanded awareness, and existential reorientation will continue to increase—not as side effects, but as part of the same underlying convergence. The outer and inner curves rise together. Where adequate frameworks of support exist—psychological, social, cultural—more individuals may complete the arc from disruption to transformation.

This possibility carries a broader implication. As more people integrate their experiences rather than compartmentalise or pathologise them, system-wide coherence may increase. Individually integrated awakenings can translate into collective capacities: greater emotional regulation, relational depth, ethical sensitivity, and resilience under complexity. In this sense, the integration of non-ordinary experiences may be one of the quiet mechanisms through which social change unfolds in the next phase of our species.

The question, then, is no longer whether this acceleration is happening, but whether our cultural frameworks are mature enough to support the transition from experience to transformation via integration - from NOEs to NOTEs—and to recognise what this process is already revealing.

Part 3

https://www.kundalinicollective.org/post/2026-and-beyond-heading-towards-the-singularity-point-part-3

References and Data Sources

United States — Declining religion, persistent spirituality

Pew Research Center

Key reports: Religious Landscape Study (2007, 2014, 2021—2024 updates); “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.” (2023); “Spirituality Among Americans” (multiple waves)

Findings: Religious affiliation (“Christian”) fell from ~78% (1990s) to ~63% (2021—2024). “Religiously unaffiliated” rose from ~8% to ~28—30%. Belief in a soul/spirit remains high (≈80—85%). ~40—50% of Americans report having had a religious or mystical experience.

Significance: Pew explicitly separates institutional religion from spiritual belief and experience.

United Kingdom — Decline in religion, continuity of experience

British Social Attitudes Survey (NatCen Social Research)

Data source: British Social Attitudes Surveys (1983—2022)

Findings: Christian identification declined from ~66% (1983) to ~38% (2022). “No religion” rose to over 50%. Belief in a “higher power or spiritual force” declined much more slowly than church affiliation.

Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre (University of Wales Trinity Saint David)

Foundational studies: Hardy, A. (1979) The Spiritual Nature of Man; Hardy & Hay (1979) “Religious Experience and Its Measurement”; Hay, D. & Heald, G. (1987) “Religion Is Good for You”

Findings: Between 30—40% of the UK population report having had a spiritual or religious experience (defined experientially, not doctrinally). These rates did not decline in line with church attendance.

Significance: Hardy’s work is one of the only long-term datasets focused on experience itself, rather than belief or identity.

UK & Europe — Spirituality outside religion

Office for National Statistics (ONS) and National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)

Relevant reports: ONS: Religion, England and Wales (Census 2001—2021); NatCen qualitative studies on belief, wellbeing, and meaning (2010s—2020s)

Findings: Growth of “spiritual but not religious” identification. Increased engagement with meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and retreats. Greater acceptance of discussing “meaningful” or “transcendent” experiences outside religious frameworks.

Supporting academic context

James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience — Early recognition that experience persists independently of institutions

Davie, G. (1994) Believing Without Belonging

Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age