Why I Can't Give You a Clean Stack Trace of How I Got Here
[Level 1: Transitional] I tried to debug my own spiritual awakening (it didn’t work)
I’ve spent the past couple days trying to write Part 2 of “When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief.” I originally thought I just needed to dig through my journals to find the next strange occurrence after that vivid dream in December 2022 and summarize that arc.
It sounded fairly straightforward. All I had to do was look back at my own field notes, the documentation that I had been recording along the way like a breadcrumb trail. I knew I had even tried to add specific emojis at the top of “important” entries as I went (with a legend to decode what they meant) for when I assumed I would want to reference them again in the future.
Except...
I dove into months—years—of my incoherent, messy, fever-dream-like journals split between Logseq and Obsidian (my fault for not just picking Obsidian from the start), trying to piece together what got me to this point.
I realized I was trying to debug my own mind with a stack trace that was literally hundreds of “pages”, hundreds of kilobytes of information not even all sequentially linked.
Then I had a further realization after hours of digging through this textual junkyard crossed with a literary sewer, trying to extract something coherent:
I can’t.
As much as I want to treat my brain as a computer to debug, I can’t. Real life is a mess. And I don’t have the system dump of where exactly things started to go off the rails—or if they even did.
What I did find
As a headache formed from hours of digging through journals and cross-linked files, I found:
A disclaimer at the top of the main page: “I believe I generally present as a mostly sane person. This is a page dedicated to my secret insanity. Like Jung’s Black Books I’ve been keeping this closely guarded out of sheer terror of being misunderstood or seen as nuts.” Also: “There will be shit in here that makes absolutely no sense” (yeah, no shit), and “I don’t literally hear voices for the ‘dialogues’.”
Pages of arguing with myself (or something that felt increasingly NOT like my usual self)
Some variation of “am I going crazy” sprinkled in throughout the months (including wondering if I accidentally made a tulpa)
Half-formed thoughts that made sense late after a late night meditation session but are more or less incomprehensible now
Long-winded rants about work stress
Philosophical musings that seemingly go nowhere
Dreams I can barely remember but seemed significant enough at the time to note down
Parsing through the sometimes funny, oftentimes agonizing entries, I kept thinking:
“If I can just find the pattern, I can explain this period coherently.”
“If I can trace this back to the root cause, I can write a logical narrative of what got me here.”
“If I can debug this from my own log output, maybe I can help others understand their own.”
But the more I exhausted myself reading through my own raw stream-of-consciousness data, the more frustrated I got until I went to bed late yesterday, defeated by my own field notes.
What my own mess taught me
Today as I was reflecting on this failed endeavor, I realized:
Spiritual experience doesn’t work like code. There’s no clean stack trace. No clear “panic: runtime error at line 247.” No single moment (or even moments plural) where you can say: “THAT’S where it broke,” or in my case, “THAT’S where awakening happened.”
Some people can point to a near-death experience (NDE) or some $PSYCHEDELIC trip that induced it.
But for me, it was just... messy. Incoherent. Cyclical. Gradual.
But that’s how it has to be if you have a life you’re not ready to blow up. A job you don’t want to lose. A marriage you don’t want to leave.
Maybe I’m not supposed to give you a clean stack trace.
Maybe I’m not supposed to document every step like a “Getting Started” guide.
Maybe the job isn’t:
“Comprehensively chronicle the 3.5-year journey from agnostic engineer to ‘I moonlight for God.’”
Maybe instead, the job is:
“Share the moments that landed, the ones that can’t be explained away, the ones that changed me—even when I don’t know why.”
Not the entire tangled mess of seeking, but the points that caused me to question the narrative in the first place.
My approach going forward
I’m giving up on the comprehensive stack trace. I can’t make coherent what is by nature cyclical and beyond any single root cause.
Instead, I’m going to tell you about the moments that mattered, even if I can’t connect them cleanly. Even if it looks like I’m just... leaping from one inexplicable event to another—because that’s what it WAS.
This path has been a series of inexplicable events that somehow (over 3.5 years) added up to... whatever this is. And as much as it frustrates my engineering brain, I can’t give you a reproducible set of steps. Instead, I’m sitting here in my junkyard of journals with a handful of weird moments I can’t explain away.
So that’s what I’ll share: not a linear journey or how-to guide.
Just the moments that made me question everything I thought I knew about reality.
The moments where the boundary between “coincidence” and “something else” got uncomfortably thin.
The moments I can’t explain… but also can’t dismiss.