Stories of
Awakening

Stories of Awakening is a systematic research project I built to study the patterns inside hundreds of first-hand accounts of emergent phenomena, the experiences older traditions have called awakening and the clinical literature increasingly calls spiritually transformative. At its core, it is an attempt to answer a question that most people in this field have approached only impressionistically: what actually happens when someone's sense of self fundamentally changes?

The project draws from 9 long-form interview archives, including Buddha at the Gas Pump, Conscious TV and Simply Always Awake, spanning over a decade of recordings. Every account is read by two different AI models working independently, and coded against 68 defined features across five vocabularies: the type of experience, what triggered it, what physical changes occurred in the body, what the integration process involved in the months and years that followed, and what people say actually helped. Near-death accounts were separated out into a study of their own, so the figures here describe spiritual awakening specifically.

The analysis was designed not to tell people what their experiences mean, which is a question for the individual and for the traditions they draw from, but to map what people actually describe at scale. What words do they use? What do they say changed? Where do hundreds of accounts converge, and where do they diverge?

The accounts cluster around a set of recurring experiences that appear across traditions, cultures, and contexts. Among the most common is what I call unity or oneness, the sense that the ordinary boundary between self and world has dissolved, sometimes temporarily, sometimes in a way that permanently reorganizes how a person relates to reality. 48% of people in the study describe it clearly, and 67% describe something like it. Two other experiences sit alongside it at almost exactly the same rate: the dissolution of the sense of self, and an encompassing love or bliss.

Other recurring experiences include direct perception of presence, described as the felt sense of a vast, benevolent intelligence that is simply there, as well as radical shifts in the sense of time, dissolution of fear of death, and the experience of consciousness itself as something other than the contents of the mind.

The triggering conditions are more varied than most models suggest. Meditation is a common pathway, but so is trauma, grief, fever, near-death, childbirth, and intentional use of plant medicines. A significant proportion of accounts describe awakenings that were entirely spontaneous: no formal practice, no crisis, no obvious cause.

What the data makes particularly visible is the challenge of integration, the long middle passage after the peak experience, where a person has to rebuild their relationship to work, relationships, identity, and purpose around a permanently changed inner landscape. This is where most existing frameworks fall short, and where the need for informed support is highest.

Most knowledge about these experiences is either tradition-bound, embedded in the frameworks of a particular religion or contemplative lineage, or purely experiential: accounts shared informally, without analysis, without comparison to other accounts, without any attempt to identify what is universal versus what is specific to one person's context.

Academic consciousness research tends to focus on experiences induced in controlled laboratory settings: psilocybin trials, meditation studies, EEG recordings of trained meditators. These are valuable, but they capture only a narrow slice of a much wider phenomenon. Spontaneous awakenings, near-death experiences, and the long aftermath of major transformative experiences fall largely outside the scope of what labs study and what mental health systems are equipped to address.

Stories of Awakening is an attempt to fill that gap with something more empirical than anecdote and more human than a controlled trial. It is not a replacement for lived experience or traditional wisdom. It is a map, one built from the terrain itself, in the words of the people who crossed it.

My own awakening in 2021 left me with more questions than answers. The experience was real and undeniable, but I had almost no framework for understanding it, and the frameworks that existed did not quite fit. I turned to research because that's how I've always processed things I don't understand: find the pattern, then ask what the pattern means.

But the research wasn't there in any form I could use. What existed was either too embedded in a single tradition, too clinical and narrow, or too anecdotal to generalize from. I wanted something that looked at hundreds of accounts and asked: what's common? What varies? What does the distribution of experience actually look like when you study it systematically, rather than through the lens of a particular tradition or worldview?

So I built it. It took several years, a custom multi-pass analysis pipeline, and a great deal of sitting with uncertainty about what the findings mean. It remains a work in progress. But it is, as far as I know, the most systematic empirical study of first-hand accounts of this kind in the English language, and I hope it is useful to researchers, clinicians, guides, and the people in the middle of these experiences who are trying to understand what is happening to them.