A record of significant additions, removals, and methodology changes — so you can see exactly how the collection has evolved and why.
A second batch of hand-picked YouTube awakening stories was added to the collection, bringing the YouTube Mixed archive to 76 episodes and the total corpus to 759 accounts. All new episodes passed the full five-pass tagging pipeline and dual-model cross-validation before inclusion.
Word counts, percentages, and aggregate numbers across the site (insights page, sources page, integration challenges, physical phenomena, NDE) were previously hardcoded and going stale. They are now all driven from the live corpus data at page load — the same way episode counts have always worked. An automated check now blocks any future hardcoded statistic from reaching the site.
Round Trip Death (Eric Bennett's NDE interview show, one guest per episode) and Anthony Chene Production (long-form documentary NDE interviews) were added. Both archives are NDE-focused and complement the broader spiritual awakening accounts already in the collection. All episodes passed the standard five-pass tagging pipeline and dual-model cross-validation before being included.
A source mislabeling bug caused 163 episodes from four sources — Simply Always Awake, YouTube Mixed, Guru Viking Keep, and Brent Spirit — to receive incorrect source context when sent to the AI tagging model. This meant the model was calibrating its analysis against the wrong interview format and tradition. All 163 episodes were retagged from scratch and put back through full GPT-4o cross-validation and adjudication before being restored to the corpus.
19 episodes from Brent Spirit's "Kundalini Conversation with…" series — each featuring an individual describing their own kundalini awakening experience in depth. The series is tightly focused on first-hand accounts and high quality throughout.
After importing 37 episodes from the Guru Viking channel, a manual quality review found that 20 did not meet the standard for first-hand individual accounts — they were too short, primarily educational, or not sufficiently centered on the guest's own experience. Those 20 were removed. The 17 that remained cleared full tagging and cross-validation.
63 episodes from Angelo DiLullo's "Awakening Stories" playlist on YouTube. Each episode features an individual recounting their own direct awakening experience. DiLullo's interviews are patient, unhurried, and focused on the experiencer's account rather than commentary or teaching.
Every episode is now independently tagged by two AI models — Claude and GPT-4o — with no shared context between the two passes. Where the models agree, the tag is confirmed. Where they disagree, a third adjudication pass reviews both tag sets alongside the original transcript and makes a final determination with reasoning. This substantially raises the evidentiary standard: no tag in the corpus rests on a single model's judgment.
Shaman Oaks is a dedicated NDE interview archive featuring long-form conversations with near-death experiencers. Its addition expanded the NDE sub-corpus significantly and introduced the first archive specifically focused on this category of experience.
Public launch with the initial corpus spanning three interview archives: Buddha at the Gas Pump, Conscious TV, and a hand-curated set of YouTube interviews. All accounts had been through at least one full tagging pass at launch. The site has been expanded and refined continuously since.