15d (edited) • Welcome
Awakening Spiritually Through The Tao
Have you ever experienced a spiritual awakening?
My first spiritual awakening happened in 2004.
I grew up as a rational, materialistic atheist in the Bible Belt, and for the first 22 years of my life I had no conception whatsoever of spiritual consciousness.
Something I was deeply passionate about (you might say obsessed with) from very early on was martial arts (I basically wanted to be a Ninja Turtle). So when I was 10 my parents signed me up for lessons at the local taekwondo chain school. It was the kind of place where I started at age 10, had a black belt at age 12, and a second degree black belt at age 14. After that I branched out into other martial arts, including Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian, and Filipino styles. What they all had in common was that they were all external styles, meaning that the emphasis was on athleticism and external results: lots of jumping around, kicking high, and doing various kinds of stunts.
Something else that interested me from a very young age was ancient stories and mythology. I enjoyed reading the Greek myths, and I found and read copies of the Panchatantra and the Tao Te Ching. I thought the Panchatantra was really cool, but at the time the Tao Te Ching didn't make any sense to me and came across as a bunch of gobbledygook.
In college I studied math and physics, but I went to a small, private liberal arts school where you had to learn a little bit of everything. The class I took for my religion elective was Buddhism. I learned about the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama sitting under the Bodhi Tree and experiencing satori, the “instantaneous awakening”, and arising as the Buddha, the “awakened one”. They were cool old stories, but at the time meant nothing to me beyond that. I also kept learning new martial arts, including Japanese, Chinese, and Brazilian styles, all still externally focused. I tried out a tai chi class, but found I didn't have the patience for it at the time.
For graduate school I moved to the west coast, still studying math and physics, and still on the lookout for new martial arts to learn. One day I saw a flier for a place called the Kung Fu Academy and decided to check it out. It turned out this was a school that taught internal kung fu, largely rooted in the tai chi classics. If it had been called "the Tai Chi Academy" I probably wouldn't have gone, due to my earlier boredom when I tried a tai chi class, but I found the training to be very effective for where I was in my development.
In internal martial arts, the emphasis is on what’s going on inside the body, and the focus is on sensation: relaxing, moving slowly, breathing, and cultivating a state of meditative awareness. What I didn't understand at the time was that I was actually playing with fire, in the sense that the foundation of internal martial arts is qigong, which is one of the oldest enlightenment practices.
"Qigong" means "energy work", and is one of the three main branches of traditional Chinese medicine (along with acupuncture and herbology). It’s basically a combination of exercise, breathwork, and meditation, also known as the three regulations: body regulation, breath regulation, and mind regulation (AKA exercise, breathwork, and meditation). Qigong also has three main branches, which are medical qigong (which emphasizes health, wellness, longevity, and stress reduction), martial qigong (which emphasizes performance enhancement and flow states, and is the basis of internal martial arts), and spiritual qigong (which emphasizes refining the vital energy and cultivating higher states and stages of awareness). When I first started getting into it I wasn't aware of any of this, however, and was just looking for some cool new martial arts to learn.
Then, after about six months of relaxing, moving slowly, breathing consciously, and paying attention to the sensations inside my body, a curious thing happened. I was in my room practicing one evening, which I had come to spend a lot of time doing, when all of a sudden there was an instant when everything changed, yet everything was still exactly the same. It was as if the entire Universe, or at least my mode of perceiving it, had gone through a sudden phase shift. The first thought that went through my mind after this happened was "Oh, that's what that was! That’s what all those old stories were talking about!", and I immediately realized that this thing that people spend years, decades, and even lifetimes seeking and striving after, and that I didn’t even believe in, had just fallen into my lap. Like, who ordered that? But I now realize that the fact that I wasn’t seeking it was probably a big part of the reason that it happened to me.
Imagine reading a written description of a giraffe, but never seeing a picture of one, and then going on a safari and seeing one in real life. You would be able to recognize it as a giraffe even though you had never seen one, if the description was detailed enough.
In that instant, I recognized that I had come face to face with the self evident and undeniable foundational bedrock of reality, and I could never again unsee it.
I also recognized that this experience had happened to others throughout history, and that some had written about it, or had stories told about them.
There are three aspects of the satori experience that are well documented. The first is the initial awakening, when the portal of perception is flung wide, which is instantaneous. The second is the peak state, where the portal remains open, which may last for hours, days, or even longer, but is always transient. The third is the residual awareness, which is permanent and can never completely go away, as you can never unsee what you have seen. It’s as if once opened the portal of perception can never again be completely closed.
In that moment I experientially realized a number of things all at once, among them that:
- The entire Universe, and everything in it, is alive, aware, and intelligent. There’s no such thing as inanimate matter.
- There is just one consciousness and we are all it. Each sentient being is a distinct instance of the Universe "I"ing itself, through itself.
- Anything is possible.
- Human potential is unlimited. This includes my potential, and yours.
- All people are natural teachers and healers.
- The entire Universe, and everything in it, including me and you, is continually evolving and improving.
- Joy, growth, and learning are our natural state.
- The furthest reaches of the cosmos and the deepest reaches of the psyche are one and the same.
- What we normally think of as reality is an illusion.
- All of reality exists within consciousness.
- There is a stream of energy, information, and consciousness flowing through all life, including me and you.
- The Universe has always been here and always will be. It can't not exist.
- In three dimensions there’s a past and a future, but in four dimensions the entire past and future coexist simultaneously.
In my case the peak state lasted about three months, during which time a number of interesting things happened. It was a lot like what happens in the movie Limitless, which is about a little pill that “unlocks the unused 90% of your brain”, except that it was on all the time and there was no little pill involved. Some of the things I experienced during this time were:
- I felt a constant flow of energy through the center of my body, as long as I maintained internal congruence. But if I deviated from internal congruence in any way, even for a second, by thought, word, posture, or deed, I would immediately feel the flow of energy cut off. This strongly motivated me to maintain internal congruence at all times.
- It seemed as if my reticular activating system was rubber stamping everything. The 95% of sensory data that normally gets filtered out of conscious awareness was all available to me. There was nothing that I perceived but didn't notice. This imbued every detail and each moment with a profound sense of significance. It also gave me an acute awareness of what other people were thinking and feeling, and the flows of interpersonal energy.
- In addition to my present perceptions, it seemed as if everything I had ever perceived but not noticed in the past, essentially my entire subliminal memory bank, was available to me. For example, I began writing pages and pages of insights and equations about neural nets, even though I had never formally studied them and hadn't realized that I knew anything about them.
- My martial arts underwent a dramatic improvement. Up to that point, I was like an afficionado who collected all the best tools but had no idea how to use them. I could do all kinds of tricks and stunts, but I had no idea how to actually use my body effectively, and I couldn't have fought my way out of a wet paper bag if my life depended on it. However, I suddenly gained access to a much deeper level of control and sensitivity in my body, and learned how to use internal strength for the first time. It was as if I had finally gained access to all the tools I had been collecting and became able to use them effectively. I realized that in studying all the different martial arts I had, I was really just studying different subsets of tai chi, which deals with universal principles of movement, and I was finally able to synthesize and integrate all of that knowledge.
- I read the Tao Te Ching again, and this time everything in it made perfect sense to me. It seemed as crystal clear as if I was sitting down in the same room with the author, having a direct conversation, or even more than that, an inter-generational Vulcan mind meld, as if I was directly absorbing the wisdom and perspective of whatever individual, group, or open-source collaborative effort gave rise to the work. This is when I recognized that I was a Taoist. I also recognized that Taoism and Buddhism are essentially the same philosophy in different clothing, and that Taoism is more my style, but I’m okay with being identified as either.
- I had the sense that everything was a mystery and that nothing was, or that everything was a surprise and nothing was. All of my previous philosophical and existential conundrums had come unbound, and I had no questions that were unanswered. Whether God exists, what happens after we die, the mind/body problem, the existence of free will, and other such classical philosophical ruminations became obvious non-issues for me.
- I realized that I was not the only one who had had this experience, and I became able to recognize others who had through their writing. For example, I came across and read Siddhartha around this time, and recognized that Herman Hesse was among my peers in this regard.
- I also became able to recognize other people who had had this experience through direct contact. The knowingness is conveyed through eye contact and presence rather than verbal interaction.
- I realized that humanity was on the verge of an enormous transition, and that it would take place within my lifetime. This transition is of a nature and magnitude such that those of us currently living on this side of it aren’t equipped to imagine what life will be like on the other side, and those born on the other side of it won’t be equipped to imagine what life had been like on this side. What we call human civilization will be so different on the other side of the transition as to be almost unrecognizable. (Later I learned about the concept of the technological singularity and realized that I wasn’t the only one who had come to this realization.)
- I saw clearly and distinctly, from the highest level, what my purpose is in this lifetime, which is to publish a comprehensive work called the Principia Humanica, whose express purpose will be to unify all academic and intellectual disciplines, guide many individuals to their own spiritual awakenings, define a clear shared purpose for the existence of humanity, and help usher in the new era of human understanding and existence. This vision has been further revealed to me in stages through other awakenings over the years.
This event I have been describing was the first major spiritual awakening of my life, and the largest one, but I’ve experienced a few other openings of comparable magnitude over the years. One that came a few years later was triggered by listening to the audiobook version of Getting Things Done by David Allen, which provided a major upgrade to my cognitive operating system. Another over a decade later coincided with a spiritual emergency that manifested as a manic episode that crashed into suicidal depression, and which I overcame by reaching out to both my spiritual and Earthly allies for help. The most recent one, which happened in early 2025, revealed to me that I was finally ready to begin writing my magnum opus, the Principia Humanica.
Since my initial awakening event, I’m even less inclined than before to identify with any kind of label, or even with myself as an individual, or with anything other than a particular instance of Universal Consciousness. I think of myself as an Earthling rather than as an American, a Southerner, a socioeconomic class, a political party, a career, or an ideology, philosophy, or religion.
I can also see now that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have already awakened to their true nature and those who haven't yet. Within my lifetime, the world has gone from entirely offline to mostly online, via the birth and expansion of the Internet. I foresee a similar expansion of human consciousness on the planet, such that within my lifetime most if not all of humanity will have undergone a spiritual awakening experience and realized their true nature. That’s what all my life's work is dedicated to in one form or another.
I believe that a complete mindbody practice, such as qigong, is not only something we all require to maintain our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well being, but also a key part of our individual and collective transformation. This is why my mission on this planet is to help as many people as possible establish a personal daily mindbody energetic hygiene practice.
In my work as a coach and teacher I primarily emphasize the practical benefits of qigong for performance enhancement, as well as health, wellness, longevity, and stress reduction. And while I certainly can't guarantee that adopting this practice will lead to you becoming "enlightened"…I can’t promise that it won’t, either! 😉
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Awakening Spiritually Through The Tao
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