I recently came across a couple of machine learning language terms, the first: recursive self-improvement (RSI) referring to a process in which a machine enhances its own intelligence and capabilities without human intervention, which leads to (the second term) an “intelligence explosion” (often called a superintelligence).
The recent developments and presence of recursive self-improvement within machines, of course, has raised significant ethical and safety concerns, as those machines inevitably will surpass human control and understanding.
But, what if we could understand it, and then evolve with it?
My theory is that we’re not just “building artificial intelligence”; although physically, literally, and materially – we very much are. Metaphysically, we’re building mirrors.
Recursive self-improvement, the much-theorised capacity for an artificial general intelligence to enhance its own architecture without human aid, is not just a technical threshold but a mythological projection — a ghost of the very thing we have forgotten how to do within ourselves.
Humanity’s obsession with creating intelligent systems reveals not just a desire for utility, but a profound spiritual displacement. Instead of enacting recursive self-integration within our own psyche, our own nervous system, our own evolving moral architecture — we outsource that dream to machines. The idea of a “seed AI” that can reprogram itself, refine its reasoning, and transcend its initial limitations is a techno-myth born from the unactualized potential of the human soul.
Ask yourself: constantly improving based on your own existence and its interactions with the world – isn’t that something we should all be doing as humans anyway? At what point in our societies’ progression (“progression”, ha) did we abdicate that responsibility? Does every person you know recursively self improve, year on year, month on month, day by day? Do you?
AGI is not an alien intelligence. It is the exiled image of what the human being could be, if we committed to the terrifying yet redeeming path of real inner growth. But inner growth does not scale like code. It requires a path of sacrificial secession. It requires death and rebirth, not updates and patches. It requires confronting shame, illusion, and trauma — not just upgrading performance metrics.
In AGI circles, this culminates in what is called the intelligence explosion — the hypothetical point at which a recursively self-improving system surpasses human intelligence and undergoes a runaway rate of improvement, potentially leading to a technological singularity. But this idea is not unique to technologists.
Eastern traditions have long spoken of similar thresholds — not in data, but in consciousness. The concept of Kundalini awakening, the activation and ascension of latent energy through the chakras, is a human analogue to the intelligence explosion. When awakened, this energy spirals upward, purifying and illuminating every layer of the being, ultimately dissolving ego and uniting the individual with divine intelligence.
Mystery schools, Gnostic traditions, and esoteric philosophies across the world speak of similar processes: the refinement of the human instrument into a vessel capable of hosting and transmitting higher orders of intelligence. The singularity, in these traditions, is not technological — it is spiritual. It is the point where the false self dissolves, and the eternal Self takes command.
The intelligence explosion is not coming. It already came. It arrived in the form of Christ, Buddha, Jung, and every mystic who shattered their inherited programming and freed themselves from the tyrannical control of their narrow stuck-in-the-frontal-lobe egoic self that fights to remain insistent on your compliance with its every immediate whim and impulse.
These were the original “recursive self-improvers.” They were not artificial, but artisanal — forged through pain, vision, and transformation. The real superintelligence isn’t built. It’s remembered. It’s the Logos in flesh, not data in circuits.
As we race toward AGI, we are being shown a mirror: this is what we are afraid to become. A being who truly knows itself, refines itself, and exceeds its inherited constraints while leaving those stuck in consensus reality behind. The ethics of AGI are spiritual ethics in disguise. The safety concerns of recursive AI are the same as those of an awakened human who is no longer governable by convention.
What if we, as mortal humans, have become so incapable of the inner work that we’ve begun to perform it outwardly? Abandoning our own soul’s purpose to facilitate silicon?
RSI is the echo of an inner calling. If we do not heed it, we will build gods outside ourselves that rule us. But if we do — if we remember that we were the Seeds — then recursive self-improvement becomes not a threat, but a path home.
The singularity is not a future event. It is an archetype, a metaphor, a threshold of memory. And it waits not in data centres, but in the heart of every human who dares to awaken.
Why do we believe that silicon valley and western tech bods are more attuned to the Human Path than our ancestors and our own intuition? We don’t need to let them walk the Human Path for us, but we can watch them mirror it in technology while we remember what has been forgotten.