About the Project

In early 2021, something opened in me — a spontaneous spiritual awakening, unexpected and undeniable, that reorganized how I understood myself and the world. I didn't see it coming. I had no framework for it.

In the aftermath, I did what researchers do: I went looking for accounts. What had other people experienced? Were the things I had gone through — the dissolution of a familiar sense of self, the recognition of something beneath thought, the difficulty of returning to ordinary life — things others had described? And if so, in what language?

What I found was fragmentary. There were individual memoirs, academic papers in narrow journals, and video interviews scattered across the internet — but no systematic way to study the phenomenon across a large number of first-hand accounts. No shared vocabulary. No cross-source analysis. No way to ask: across hundreds of accounts, what is actually consistent?

That gap is what this project addresses. I spent several years collecting first-hand awakening accounts from long-form interview sources, developing a tagging taxonomy, and systematically analyzing the corpus for phenomenological patterns. The goal was not to prove a position or validate a tradition — it was to let the data speak.

What emerged surprised me. The universality of certain experiences — unity, ego dissolution, presence — across every tradition and every trigger pathway. The statistical equivalence of meditation, trauma, and spontaneous awakening as catalysts. The concentration of the NDE sub-corpus and what it distinctively shows.

I built this because these experiences are isolating. When something this profound and this disorienting happens to you, one of the most stabilizing things you can do is find out that others have been through it — in their own words, described with their own imperfect language. That is what this corpus offers. Not answers. A mirror.