What people place immediately before the shift, across people. Every account was read twice, by two independent readers working from the same rulebook. The first figure for each trigger is the share of people both readers marked. The second is the share at least one of them marked. The gap between the two is how far apart they landed.
The solid bar is where both readers agreed. The pale bar runs on to where at least one of them saw it. A short tail means they read the same thing. A long tail means they did not, and the figure should be held lightly.
Read this page for its ordering rather than its exact values. Of everything on this chart, only psychedelics was described clearly enough that the two readers marked it in close to the same people. Every other figure here rests on a judgment the two of them made differently often enough to matter, which is not a flaw in the reading so much as a fact about the question: where a practice ends and a cause begins is not written into an interview.
Nobody in this collection nearly died. Accounts in which somebody came close to death moved to a separate study, which is why nearly dying sits at the foot of the chart with nothing agreed at all.
Each figure here is the share of people at least one of the two readers marked, so these are the widest counts on the page. The chart above shows the agreed figure alongside it.
"No single route accounts for most of these awakenings. Meditation is the one named most often, and even that runs from of people where both readers agreed to where one of them did. Everything else sits below it."
Contemplative practice, reading, being with a teacher, personal crisis and nothing the person could identify all appear across the collection, in numbers close enough that the ordering matters more than the gaps between them. Second only to meditation is the group who could name no cause at all: of people on the agreed reading and on the wider one. Whatever else awakening turns out to require, it does not appear to require a tradition, a practice, or any preparation the person could point to.
Read that as a shape rather than a measurement. Only one figure on this page, psychedelics, was solid enough for two independent readers to draw the same line.
Observation across people · 2026