Dane Dormio's account of his first spiritual awakening in 2004 — the experience that revealed the vision behind the Principia Humanica. This essay establishes the personal and philosophical foundation for the entire work: why it was written, what it's trying to transmit, and what kind of knowing it points toward.
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 23 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. 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. Qigong also has three main branches: 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: