One of the strangest discoveries I made after my own bhumi had nothing to do with me at all.
It had to do with history.
The more I tried to understand what had happened to me, the more I began seeing the same pattern appearing in the lives of people who had walked this Earth centuries, sometimes thousands of years, before I was born.
They came from different cultures. They spoke different languages. They described their experiences through different spiritual and philosophical traditions.
Yet beneath all those differences was something remarkably familiar.
In Buddhism, awakened beings are often described in three ways.
A Buddha is one who fully awakens and then reveals a path for others to follow. By this definition, figures like Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and Krishna were all Buddhas. They experienced a profound transformation in their understanding of reality and devoted their lives to sharing what they discovered.
A Bodhisattva is someone who touches that same profound truth and then returns to the world, using their gifts in service of others.
This is where I began seeing people like Rumi, Carl Jung, Nikola Tesla, Mozart, and other great creators and thinkers. They did not necessarily build religions, but they transformed humanity through the gifts that emerged from their deeper understanding. Their awakening expressed itself through poetry, philosophy, science, music, art, and discovery.
An Arhat is someone who experiences deep realization and liberation but may never become a teacher, leader, or figure remembered by history.
Many Arhats were lost to time, not because their awakening was less profound, but because history has always been selective about whose stories were preserved.
Women, especially, were often denied recognition even when they experienced profound realization. Many stood beside history’s greatest spiritual teachers, influencing their journeys and carrying their own wisdom, yet their stories were often absorbed into the names of the men around them.
We know the great teachers. We know far fewer of the women who walked beside them.
The same pattern appears across spiritual traditions.
In the stories of the 84 Mahasiddhas, many women who achieved extraordinary realization are barely known today. Their awakenings existed. Their wisdom existed. Their influence existed. But history often preserved the names of the men around them instead.
These forgotten Arhats reveal something important.
Awakening and recognition are not the same thing.
A person can experience a profound transformation and still disappear from the historical record.
What fascinated me was not the titles themselves. It was the thread connecting them all.
The bhumi was the common experience.
What happened afterward was what made their lives appear so different.
Different languages.
Different symbols.
Different gifts.
But the same fingerprint.
A radical shift in perception.
A deeper understanding of reality.
An ability to see connections others could not see.
And a desire to bring something meaningful back into the world.
Once I began looking through this lens, the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Then I noticed something else!
Awakened people rarely make life more comfortable.
They challenge the status quo.
They question assumptions.
They disrupt old stories and force us to see ourselves differently.
Sometimes they are inspiring.
Sometimes they are infuriating.
Quite often, they are both.
They also share another unusual trait: they often struggle to explain what happened to them. Not because they are trying to be mysterious, but because some experiences simply refuse to fit neatly into ordinary language.
That is why Zen masters answered questions with riddles, Socrates taught through questions instead of lectures, and mystics throughout history relied on stories, symbols, poetry, and paradox.
Their goal was not simply to provide answers.
Their goal was to transform the way people saw.
That realization changed the direction of my own investigation.
I stopped asking whether awakening was real.
I had already experienced it.
The question that remained was a different one:
Is there a path that can lead someone toward a bhumi?
This book was created from that question.
I cannot promise that following these patterns will lead everyone to a bhumi. Life does not work like a formula. There are forces at play that are far beyond our ability to control. Call it grace, karma, fate, divine timing, or something else entirely, but there is always something larger involved.
What I can say, with complete honesty, is this:
There are doors hidden in plain sight.
And sometimes, all it takes is learning how to recognize them.
I did not set out to find them.
I was simply trying to understand what had happened to me.
The deeper I looked, the more clearly they appeared.
I do not claim ownership of those doors or this path.
I think of myself as a witness more than anything else. I was taken on a very strange journey, one I never asked for and never could have imagined, and I came back with a lot of questions.
Mostly, I wanted to compare notes.
You do not have to believe me.
Actually, I would rather you didn’t.
The world does not need more people telling others what to believe. It needs more people willing to stay curious, ask uncomfortable questions, and explore what they find for themselves.
Because curiosity has always been one of humanity’s greatest superpowers.
It is how we discover new worlds, uncover hidden truths, and occasionally find ourselves standing somewhere we never expected to be.
If you are curious, if you enjoy asking “what if?” and if you are willing to wander into some very strange territory with me, I would love for you to join me.
