2026 and Beyond: Heading Towards the Singularity Point - Part 1
- Sameer
- Jan 1
- 10 min read
Part I — Two Ways of Seeing the Horizon
"It is in the nature of exponential growth that events develop extremely slowly for extremely long periods of time, but as one glides through the knee of the curve, events erupt at an increasingly furious pace."
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near
"The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself."
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I had a spontaneous awakening 20 years ago, at a time when the world—and the language available to describe such experiences—was very different. This was before the iPhone, before fast mobile internet, just before YouTube, and before there was widespread public conversation about Kundalini awakenings or related non-ordinary states. There were few maps, little context, and almost no shared framework for understanding what was happening.
During that first year, alongside the disorientation and intensity, there were also profound non-ordinary moments of unexpected clarity. One of them took the form of a an idea that in twenty years time, the world would be entering a profound period of transition. At the time, I didn't know what that meant. It wasn't a prediction so much as a felt recognition—an intuition without explanation.
Nearly two decades on, the external world has changed in ways that would have been difficult to anticipate in 2006. Technological development has accelerated markedly. Over the coming next twenty years, advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, cold fusion, and biotechnology appear increasingly interconnected rather than isolated, forming a convergent trajectory rather than a series of separate innovations.
At the same time, global connectivity has reshaped culture at a fundamental level. Social media, artificial intelligence, and the sheer abundance of information have altered how people think, relate, and construct meaning, both individually and collectively.
Alongside these external shifts, experiences once regarded as rare or marginal — spiritual awakenings, altered states of consciousness, and profound changes in identity — have become more visible and more frequently reported. Rather than receding in the face of technological progress, such experiences now appear alongside it, suggesting a parallel transformation unfolding within human experience itself.
This blog series is a suggestion that we are entering a new phase of humanity and explores the idea that technological acceleration and shifts in human consciousness are not separate phenomena, but parallel expressions of the same underlying transition. It examines why this coming period will feel so disruptive—and why it may also hold the conditions for deep transformation.
Because the blog is longer than normal I've divided it into three parts:
- Part I - Two Ways of Seeing the Horizon sets the scene, bringing together technological and spiritual ways of understanding what's unfolding around us, and why this moment feels different.
- Part II - Crossing the Knee looks back at how technology, culture, and human experience began accelerating together, tracing the story from the Industrial Revolution to the mid-20th century through to today.
- Part III - A Real New Age turns toward the future, exploring what the next twenty years might ask of us—and how periods of disruption can also become pathways toward deeper integration and maturity.
This is not written to persuade, predict, or promote a belief system. It is written to notice a pattern—one that many people are encountering inwardly at the same time it is unfolding outwardly. The question it ultimately raises is not whether change is coming, but how consciously we are prepared to meet it.
Throughout this series, NOEs and NOTEs will be used to describe these phenomena without imposing religious interpretation or reducing them to pathology. They are treated as real, significant experiences that deserve serious attention—particularly as they become more common in a period of rapid transformation.
Non-Ordinary Experiences (NOEs) refer to any state of consciousness that departs significantly from everyday waking awareness. These include temporary altered states, precognition, telepathy, synchronicities, pranic awakenings, kundalini activations, perception shifts, moments of expanded awareness, and UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) experiences that feel qualitatively different from ordinary consciousness. NOEs can be brief or sustained, subtle or overwhelming, sought through practice or arising spontaneously.
Non-Ordinary Transformative Experiences (NOTEs) are a specific subset of NOEs—those powerful enough to fundamentally reorganise a person's sense of identity, reality, or meaning. While someone might have many NOEs throughout their life, NOTEs mark genuine turning points. These are the mystical experiences, kundalini awakenings, experiences of unity or interconnection, and profound openings that cannot be explained away and are slowly integrated. They also include profound NDEs that change one's outlook on life and transformative hallucinogenic experiences that awaken deeper awareness. They cross a threshold and permanently alter one's relationship to self and world. NOTEs are less common than NOEs, but they appear to be increasing in frequency alongside technological and cultural acceleration. Without adequate support and integration, NOTEs can be profoundly challenging.
This blog series suggests that there is a direct relationship between the acceleration of NOEs, and the pace of technological change. As our external systems grow more complex and interconnected, the conditions for non-ordinary experiences become increasingly common. However, to navigate the coming decades—and the disruptions they will bring—society will need to do more than simply acknowledge these experiences. We will need to find ways to support the integration from NOEs into NOTEs. The difference matters: unintegrated experiences can destabilise individuals and communities, while successfully integrated experiences can cultivate the psychological resilience, relational depth, and systemic awareness that complex times demand. Integration is not a luxury; it may be essential to our collective capacity to meet what lies ahead. Throughout this series, examples will be drawn primarily from the subset of NOEs and NOTEs that include spiritual awakenings and kundalini experiences.
Kurzweil, Teilhard, and the Shape of What's Coming
As 2026 begins, it is becoming clear that we may be entering a shift in human experience that is easy to overlook if we focus only on familiar indicators. Much of our attention remains fixed on the dashboard of the old world—fiscal headroom, GDP growth, migration figures, interest rates. These measures still matter, but they describe a system shaped by linear assumptions. In many respects, they function as a rear-view mirror.
Ahead of us, the terrain looks different. The changes now unfolding are not incremental adjustments within an existing order, but signs of exponential transformation—technological, social, and psychological—beginning to converge. What feels like instability or crisis may instead mark the point where the established rhythm of human life gives way to a new phase of organisation.
To make sense of this moment, it helps to bring together two thinkers who approached the same horizon from opposite directions. Ray Kurzweil, born February 12, 1948 and still living, described the external mechanics: accelerating computation, artificial intelligence, and the compounding effects of technological feedback. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, born May 1, 1881 - died April 10, 1955, described the internal arc: the growth of collective consciousness and the emergence of what he called the Noosphere. One mapped the outer curve; the other traced its inner consequence
The suggestion explored here is not that humanity must choose between a technological future and a spiritual one. Increasingly, they appear to be two aspects of the same process. The outer systems we are building—networks, algorithms, intelligent machines—are beginning to resemble a nervous system at planetary scale. At the same time, the inner dimension of human experience—identity, meaning, perception—is being reorganised in response.
This leads to a simple but consequential observation. Over the past half-century, periods of rapid technological expansion have coincided with a measurable rise in non-ordinary experiences: altered states of consciousness, spontaneous spiritual awakenings, shifts in identity, and profound experiences of connection or meaning. These experiences have not appeared in isolation, nor have they been confined to particular cultures or belief systems. They have surfaced alongside expanding communication networks, accelerating information flow, and increasing systemic complexity.
From this perspective, technological change does not cause these experiences in a direct or mechanical sense. Rather, it appears to create the conditions in which they become more likely, more visible, and more widely distributed. As outer systems accelerate and interconnect, inner frameworks—how people experience self, time, and meaning—are placed under similar pressure to adapt.
If 2025 marks the point where exponential technological growth becomes unmistakable, then it follows that shifts in consciousness may also begin to accelerate as part of the same underlying transformation. What was once rare, marginal, or culturally contained may increasingly become a common feature of human experience.
This blog is not an argument that technology replaces spirituality, nor that consciousness can be engineered. It is an attempt to notice a pattern: as humanity builds ever more powerful external systems, the inner landscape reorganises in response and perhaps this is how things are. If the coming years bring a steep rise in technological capability, it is reasonable to expect a corresponding rise in experiences that challenge existing models of reality, identity, and meaning.
Two Ways of Seeing the Same Horizon
To understand why this moment feels qualitatively different, it is useful to slow down and examine these two thinkers who, decades apart, described the same convergence from opposite directions.
Ray Kurzweil can be understood as the pre-eminent outer mechanic of the future. His career—as an inventor, entrepreneur, and later a senior figure at Google—has been guided by a single observation: technological progress follows an exponential, not linear, trajectory. This insight crystallised into what he termed the Law of Accelerating Returns, the idea that each generation of technology is used to build the next, causing progress to compound rather than advance step by step.
Kurzweil brought this argument into public consciousness with his 2005 book ‘The Singularity Is Near’, where he popularised the term Technological Singularity. The core claim is straightforward but far-reaching: as information technologies accelerate—computation, data, networks, artificial intelligence—they approach a threshold beyond which change becomes so rapid and self-reinforcing that existing social, biological, and cognitive frameworks can no longer keep pace.
Kurzweil's assessment of humanity is fundamentally mathematical. He argues that because we continuously use current tools to design more powerful successors, the curve of progress steepens predictably. On this basis, he projects a point—often dated around the mid-21st century often citing 2045 or 2046—where non-biological intelligence exceeds human intelligence by many orders of magnitude. Importantly, Kurzweil does not frame this as an extinction event. In his view, the Singularity represents an evolutionary transition: a merging of biological and non-biological intelligence through neural interfaces, biotechnology, and cognitive augmentation. Aging, disease, and even death are treated not as metaphysical limits, but as engineering problems awaiting sufficient complexity to be solved.
Where Kurzweil focuses on mechanisms, scaling laws, and timelines, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin approached the same accelerating complexity from the inside out. A French Jesuit priest and accomplished palaeontologist—best known for his role in the discovery of Peking Man—de Chardin lived at the intersection of empirical science and Christian mysticism. His life's work was an attempt to reconcile evolutionary theory with a deeper account of meaning, purpose, and consciousness.
De Chardin proposed that evolution is not merely a sequence of biological adaptations shaped by chance, but a directional process driven by what he called the law of complexity-consciousness. As matter organises into increasingly complex forms—atoms, molecules, cells, nervous systems—it also becomes capable of greater interior awareness. Consciousness, in this view, is not an accidental by-product of evolution, but one of its defining trajectories.
Within this framework, humanity occupies a pivotal role. De Chardin did not see humans as the endpoint of evolution, but as a threshold moment—the point at which evolution becomes conscious of itself. With human language, reflection, and symbolic thought, the universe begins to look back upon its own unfolding.
His most prescient contribution was the concept of the Noosphere, derived from the Greek nous, meaning mind. He imagined a layer of shared human thought and awareness gradually forming around the planet, emerging from communication, culture, and collective reflection, much as the biosphere emerged from biological life. Writing decades before digital networks, de Chardin described this as a kind of planetary thinking system—a "cerebralisation" of Earth—driven by what he called forces of compression. As humanity becomes more interconnected, he argued, individual separateness would be progressively transcended, not erased, but integrated into a higher-order unity.
At the far horizon of this process, de Chardin placed the ‘Omega Point’: a state of maximal complexity and consciousness in which fragmentation gives way to coherence. Importantly, the Omega Point was not imagined as a static utopia, but as a dynamic convergence—a culmination of evolutionary pressures drawing matter, life, and mind toward deeper integration.
Seen together, Kurzweil and de Chardin describe the same curve from different sides. Kurzweil, with his Techological Singularity maps the external acceleration of systems, machines, and intelligence. De Chardin, with his Omega Point traces the internal intensification of awareness, meaning, and relational depth. One speaks the language of computation and engineering; the other speaks the language of evolution and spirit.
What becomes striking in hindsight is not how different their visions are, but how closely they align. Both locate humanity at a threshold. Both describe a future shaped by convergence rather than fragmentation. And both imply that what appears as technological acceleration on the surface may simultaneously represent a profound reorganisation of human consciousness beneath it.
Taken together, these perspectives point toward what might be called the 'Singularity Point': not a moment when machines simply outpace humans, nor a purely mystical culmination of history, but a phase in which inner and outer evolution intersect. At this point, accelerating intelligence in our tools coincides with an intensification of intelligence within ourselves—an alignment between how fast our systems think and how deeply we are forced to reflect.
The Singularity Point is my suggested name to mark the phase in which the feedback between inner and outer evolution becomes visible and unavoidable. It marks the moment when technological acceleration is no longer understood as separate from consciousness, but as part of a reciprocal process—one in which changes in our tools reshape perception, identity, and meaning, and changes in consciousness, in turn, reshape the systems we build. At this threshold, shifts in awareness are no longer peripheral or private experiences, but recognised forces within civilisation's development. It marks the threshold where technological acceleration begins to reorganise meaning, identity, and perception at scale; where shifts in consciousness are no longer peripheral or private, but structurally linked to the way civilisation itself is evolving. From this vantage, technological change and inner transformation are no longer separate stories. They are parallel expressions of the same underlying transition, unfolding together.
Framing the future in hopeful terms is grounded in understanding what becomes possible when inner development matches the pace of outer acceleration. Exponential technological change creates instability, but it also creates conditions for profound collective maturation—if we can meet it consciously. The ideal outcome is not that technology slows to accommodate our current level of awareness, but that consciousness evolves to engage technology's expanding potential wisely. If humanity can cultivate emotional resilience, cognitive flexibility, relational depth, and contemplative capacity at anything approaching the rate we've developed computational power, what now appears as turbulence may resolve into transformation.
This series suggests that collective awakening is inevitable alongside technological acceleration—the question is not whether consciousness will shift, but how. Parts II and III will explore the mechanisms through which technological change appears to catalyse shifts in awareness. If we do not develop internally at pace with external change, that awakening will still come (I believe), but likely through crisis: economic disruption, ecological breakdown, social fragmentation and psychological overwhelm. The more optimal path is conscious, intentional inner development. For those of us already navigating non-ordinary experiences, this presents a particular invitation: to explore how we might help create the conditions in society for transformation through integration rather than collapse.
We will return to this in Part III, because understanding exponential change—and our capacity to grow with it rather than be overwhelmed by it—is essential to making sense of why disruption and possibility are not opposites but parallel expressions of the same threshold we are crossing.
For Part 2
For Part 3
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