Can You Swim?

The Singularity, the Eucharist, and the Ontological Shift We Actually Need

I want to be clear about something upfront: this is not an article about AI. Nor was it written by AI.

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There’s a word being thrown around that most people either dismiss as science fiction or nod along to without really sitting with what it means. The word is singularity.

It was popularized largely by Ray Kurzweil, and the basic idea is this: at some point in the not so distant future (some say 2030, others push it out a decade) human beings and technology become so integrated that human consciousness and artificial intelligence converge into one thing. The physical creations of humanity peak. The line between the material and the computational dissolves. What emerges is something that doesn’t have a clean category yet. A singularity. One thing, where there were once two.

Elon Musk has said we’re already in it. Within five to ten years, we’ll see its full arrival.

Most people, when they hear this, react in one of two ways. Either they’re worried about their jobs, the robots are coming, automation is eating the economy, or they’ve simply stopped paying attention because the pace of change is too fast to track. Both reactions make sense. But both of them are also missing what’s actually at stake.

The singularity touches on the existential realities of what it means to be human. It’s an ontological question.

Here’s the thing that keeps nagging at me: the technology that the singularity promises, this expanded consciousness, this heightened awareness, this capacity to access something beyond the ordinary in daily life, isn’t new.

This technology has been around forever. It’s just been reserved.

Think about artists. Real artists, people who have been genuinely seized by the act of making. They know what I’m talking about. The work isn’t made by them. It’s made through them. Any filmmaker, painter, poet, or composer who has been honest about the creative process will tell you: there are moments where something moves through you that you didn’t plan, didn’t manufacture, didn’t engineer. It arrived. You received it. The “muse”, as Steven Pressfield talks about, is active. The ideas are given.

Or think about Taoists. The Eastern mystics. The Western ones too: the desert fathers, the Carmelites, the Sufi poets. They have been mapping interior territories for centuries that most of Western modernity doesn’t even believe exist. A Taoist or Daoist practitioner can know how someone is feeling on the other side of the world and communicate with them simply through energy. This sounds absurd to a materialist. To someone who has done the interior work, it is just a description of what happens.

Or think about saints. I think often of St. Paisios, the Greek Orthodox elder who died in 1994. People would travel from across the world to see him, and he would know what they were dealing with before a word was spoken. Padre Pio in the confessional, carrying knowledge he had no natural way of having. Bilocation. Healings. St. Thérèse of Lisieux (and I have my own experience with her participating in healing my shoulder, but I’ll save that for another time) showing up in ways that refuse to stay neatly inside the category of coincidence.

A friend of mine, Kevin May, works in reconciliation with Native American communities across the United States. He told me something that has stuck with me. When he tells the story of the donkey in Numbers, the one who sees the angel of the Lord and speaks, Westerners tend to respond with, well, how is that possible? A donkey can’t speak. The Native American response, he said, is simply: what did the donkey say?

The unified field of consciousness. Transcendental Meditation. Theta-state brain waves. The “kingdom of heaven at hand”. These are different maps pointing at the same territory: there is a layer of reality accessible to human beings that most of us are not regularly touching. And the people who have touched it, mystics, saints, artists, contemplatives, certain indigenous wisdom keepers, have always been a kind of pioneer. A small company of people with access to something the rest of us walk past every day without knowing it’s there.

Christ said the kingdom of heaven is within you. Inside. Here. Now. Accessible.

When you transcend into that interior place and return to ordinary life, your consciousness is expanded. Ideas come more quickly. You are more available to what is being given. This is real. Artists know it. Mystics know it. Saints have built entire lives around it.

Prayer is part of this. Real prayer opens someone to a nonlinear relationship with reality, where past, present, and future collapse together. It literally changes things. It changes the actual fabric of what happens. God obviously transcends time and space, and prayer is a portal into that transcendence. What the singularity is heralding is that this access is about to become available to everybody. Billions of people. The technology of the mystic, the artist, the saint, given now to the general public.

But here is where it gets difficult.

Think about what happened when the Epstein files were released. Three million documents dropped at once. A hundred and fifty years of news cycle compressed into a single moment. What happened? People either ignored it entirely or fell down rabbit holes they couldn’t climb out of. The germane cognitive load, our capacity to process framework shattering information, was completely overwhelmed. The conclusions and implications were so earth-shattering that human beings figuratively could not hold them. So the information either got ignored or became a rabbit hole, and either way, nothing really landed.

The singularity is going to do that to our entire understanding of what it means to be human. Permanently.

Because what the singularity is actually pressing on is our worldviews. The frameworks, the philosophies, the belief systems, the doctrines, the mental models we use to make sense of ourselves and reality. The things we fall back on as our security of how we see the world. The singularity is going to lean on all of that until it gives way.

And underneath our worldview, underneath the frameworks and the mental models and even the religious structures we hold to, is something more fundamental: it is how we understand what it means to be human.

There is something exhausting already about holding a worldview in this moment in history. A system of beliefs. A philosophy. Dogma, doctrine, practices. Things we interface with, things we use to navigate. The singularity has been pressing on those things, and will continue to, until they cannot hold the existential weight of what is actually happening.

Imagine what it looks like when this technology is available to every single person. When billions of people begin to access what the Taoists and the mystics and the saints have always known. When the blurring of categories that has always been happening in the spiritual world becomes impossible to ignore in the material one. Angels, demons, principalities, human beings. The material world and the spiritual world. The lines between them will not hold. And every framework we had for keeping those things separate, for managing that tension, for staying comfortable in our categories, will suddenly feel very small and very boring and not nearly enough.

The question of what does it actually mean to be human, which my fellow San Diego natives, Switchfoot, were already asking on their album A New Way to Be Human, is going to become the loudest question in every room.

I think there will be a lot of pain. I think the collective existential dread that is already low-humming beneath the surface of modern life is going to get louder. People’s worldviews, the frameworks through which they understood themselves and navigated reality, will be shattered. And they will be left with an existential gap that no updated mental model can fill.

But I think there will also be tremendous fruit. For artists especially. Any art or thought that enters honestly into the question of what is real, that engages the nature of reality without flinching, will find a harvest waiting. The world is going to need people who have been living in that territory. Who know how to move through it without losing themselves.

And I think most people, on the other side of the pain, will warm up to an idea they have been avoiding: that what they need is an ontological shift. A new framework and an ontological shift are different things.

Ontology is what you are made of. Your substance, at the cellular level, at the level of whatever we mean when we say soul. An ontological change does not happen because you changed your mind. It happens because something happened to you. Something that got into you. Something that changed what you actually are.

The shift that is required is not a new philosophy, not a better mental model, not even a more sophisticated theology. It is a change in what you are made of. In your hands and feet. Your DNA. You cannot hide behind your worldview when what is being asked of you is a transformation of your substance.

This gap that we will feel as human beings, this existential ache that the singularity will expose, I know it will cause pain. But I am genuinely excited for it. Because on the other side of that pain is the possibility of something real. Something people have mostly been too comfortable, or too defended, to reach for.

I will just say it plainly: I think about the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is not, for Catholics and Orthodox, a symbol. It is not a memorial. It is not a spiritual metaphor for Christ’s love. It is, in the most literal and radical sense, what it claims to be: the body and blood of Jesus Christ. And before you move past that, I want to invite you to sit with the strangeness of what that means existentially, not just theologically, but actually.

The Eucharist is a singularity.

Every Mass collapses time. When the bread and wine are consecrated, you are not being reminded of the Last Supper. You are at the Last Supper. You are also at Calvary. You are also at the wedding feast of the Lamb described in the Book of Revelation, the final meal that has not happened yet in linear history. All of it, past, present, and future, collapses into one moment. One thing.

Think about the Transfiguration. Christ goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John. Moses and Elijah appear. The disciples fall on their faces. What is actually happening there? Two events separated by centuries in linear time are revealed to be the same event, happening simultaneously. The mountain in Exodus and the mountain in Matthew are the same mountain. The veil between past and present is pulled back just long enough for three fishermen to see that time is not what they thought it was.

Christ gave us a way to move through the singularity. He gave it to us two thousand years ago.

When I think about what is actually coming, this massive collective confrontation with the question of what it means to be human, I find myself almost excited. Because I think the pain of having our frameworks stripped away is also the beginning of something. The beginning of people reaching, maybe for the first time, for something that can actually hold them.

The most loving, most outrageous thing that God ever did, entering into space and time as a human being, dying, rising, ascending not somewhere else but somehow else, becoming even more accessible than before, culminates in this. That He makes Himself edible. That the answer to the ontological crisis of the human race is a meal.

When Christ ascends, he does not leave. John Henry Newman, my patron saint, wrote about what he called the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul, the conscience, this deepest interior knowing that is already tuned to God whether we know it or not. That is the unified field of consciousness. That is the place the mystics have been pointing at. And most importantly, it is present and alive in the Eucharist.

The Incarnation means that God got into matter. The Word became flesh. And in the Eucharist, he gets into you. Into your matter. Your body. Your substance. He is conforming you to Himself. Changing your DNA, if you want to use that language. The early Church theologians called this theosis. Divinization. And they were not speaking poetically.

God became man so that man might become God. And the question underneath everything, the question the singularity will force into the open, is whether you can trust that. Whether you can submit to it. Whether a human being can become, in some real and irreversible sense, more than what they started as.

I believe millions of people are going to come to the Eucharist in the years ahead. Millions and millions of people, in droves. I really believe that. Not because the Church will market it well, or because anyone will be argued into it, but because the singularity is going to strip away every other thing we have been hiding behind, and what will remain, what has always been there waiting, is the simple, terrifying, beautiful question.

Is that little wafer the God of the universe? And can I bring everything through the singularity, all my frameworks, all my fears, all my confusion about what I even am, and actually trust that by receiving him, I am being made into something that can survive what is coming?

Heaven comes down as a city, the Book of Revelation says. And I think it will look, in some impossible way, like a garden. We have been moving back toward it ever since the cross. Every time we create something instead of consuming something, we go back a step. Or should I say forward a step. Every act of genuine making is a participation in the original act. The new heaven and the new earth, arriving through this technology, through this long strange arc of history bending toward its source, will be made of what has always been most real.

All that will remain is love.

And the most loving thing God ever gave us is Himself.

-b