The most common reported catalyst — stillness that opened into something else
The most commonly reported trigger in the collection. For many, awakening didn't arrive through dramatic circumstances but through the ordinary act of sitting — a meditation session that suddenly opened into something entirely different from what they expected.
What distinguishes these accounts from ordinary meditation experiences is that something shifted that didn't shift back. The silence or awareness that opened in that session became the permanent background, or a recognition occurred that fundamentally changed the meditator's relationship to their own mind.
And so yoga and meditation are stultifying suppressive practice like sitting in church.
And in meditation, say say you're just doing a breathing awareness.
Someone's with you on a train or a plane or something sat across from you, and they find out you're a meditation teacher, and they say, "Oh, man, you know, I've been I've tried meditating so many times.
And I guess the way that I think about that, which I think is quite congruent to at least some of the things I've read from Ramana, is I think what most people, what is often commonly thought of as meditation is really the work that it takes to get to the point where you start meditating.
Experience types that appear most often in accounts with this trigger.
Other triggers that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.