Dr Jeffery Martin on A Scientific Approach to Awakening and Fundamental Wellbeing

In this episode of the Life Itself Podcast, Rufus Pollock is joined by Dr Jeffery Martin. Jeffery is a founder of the Transformative Technology space, a serial entrepreneur, and a social scientist who researches personal transformation and the states of greatest human well-being.

In this episode, Jeffery discusses Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience, more commonly referred to as Fundamental Wellbeing. He discusses his research and key findings, and the protocols he has developed and tested to help people obtain "fundamental wellbeing" in a rapid, secular, and safe way.

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, wellbeing, research, fundamental, transition, thinking, programme, point, experience, realise, methods, data, criteria, cognitive science, interview, protocol, thoughts, tradition, talk, questions

SPEAKERS

Rufus Pollock, Jeffery Martin

Rufus Pollock 00:02

So, welcome everyone to the latest instalment of the Life Itself Podcast. I'm really privileged today to be joined by Jeffery Martin. Jeffery is a founder of the transformative technology space. He's a serial entrepreneur and a social scientist who researches personal transformation and the state of the greatest human wellbeing. And even that brief introduction doesn't really do justice to the breadth of Jeffery's work. He spent over 15 years conducting the largest international study on persistent non symbolic experience, or as its publicly known fundamental wellbeing, which includes the type of consciousness commonly known as persistent awakening or enlightenment, non duality, the peace that passeth understanding, unitive experience and so on. And most recently, I think, even more intriguingly, he's been using that research to make protocols, toolkit tools available to people to obtain these profound psychological benefits in a rapid, secular, reliable and safe way. And he's done extensive research, he's lectured at many events, he's been involved in transformative technology space, and he's going to share more about that on the call. And I really just want to welcome you to the podcast, Jeffery. So thank you for joining us.

Jeffery Martin 01:26

Thanks so much for having me.

Rufus Pollock 01:28

Yeah, and I thought we could maybe start, if you would just tell us a little bit about these key terms in your work, which is Fundamental Wellbeing or Persistent, Non-Symbolic Experience, which is a bit of a mouthful. Can you say a bit about what those are?

Jeffery Martin 01:46

Right? Fundamental Wellbeing and Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience, which one of those is the academic term, and which one of those is the public term, right? They basically are the same thing. Like you say, you know, Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience is a mouthful for the public to try to get into. And so we thought, we need a better phrase for it. And we really wanted something that accurately described it. And so you know, the marketing side of the world was like, oh, you should call it Extraordinary Wellbeing or something like that. But it just didn't really fit the nature of the experience. And so we went with Fundamental Wellbeing. So they're basically the same thing. One is just the term that we use when we're writing papers, and talking in academic conferences, and the other one is when we're writing books, for the public. The gist of it is that it's a shift in the human nervous system, away from what we think of as old and outdated wiring. Right. So if you're sitting in a cafe, and you know, a bird lands near your table, and you toss it a crumb, what happens? Well, the bird generally looks around first, right? And it makes sure that it's not going to get killed, and then it pecks it the crumb. And then it looks around again, to make sure it's not going to get killed and takes another peck at the crumb. I think we as humans are like, oh, what primitive behaviour in the bird, look at how the bird is so jittery and all of that, right? What we don't realise is that we've got that same wiring inside of us, right? All animals have the same wiring, we've got the same cycle that's playing out in our nervous system that is, in every moment, in our case it's like at least every 90 seconds or so, basically checking in and making sure like, hey, is the ceiling I'm under right now, you know, raining plaster? Do I need to run for my life or whatever else? Right? And so there's this sense that something is just not quite right, in this moment, or potentially not quite right in this moment. And that's at a very foundational level of the nervous system. It's built up. I mean, it's in birds and everything else, right. So it's way way in those old parts of the nervous system. And it's been built on, you know, layer over layer over layer over layer as our nervous systems modernised, as our brain grew, as new structures grew on top of old structures, and all of that, to a point where now for us, we live relatively safe lives, right? I mean, I'm not really thinking the roof is actually going to fall in, fingers crossed, while I'm doing this interview, right? You're not probably worried about some wild animal ripping your arm off or somebody rushing in with a gun and killing you where you're at or whatever. We live safe lives, our food is safe, right? I'm not worried about food poisoning on the meal that I'll eat after this podcast before I'm you know, back online to talk to some more folks or anything like that. We are living fundamentally safe lives with the programming that says wait a minute, you might not be safe in this moment, right? So what happens, it basically maps over into other areas of our life and when your boss says you're fired or your spouse says I'm leaving you or whatever else it feels like a tiger is ripping your arm off, or somebody just emptied a shotgun into your chest or whatever, right? So we have sort of these inappropriate nervous system responses that are all based and grounded in survival. What happens with Fundamental Wellbeing is that there's a shift in that. So instead of the nervous system sort of cycling through and saying, hey, you know, something might not be right, right now, something might not be right right now. And the corresponding cascade of worry and anxiety and all the things that are kind of endemic in normal human society building and sitting on top of that, and rising to conscious awareness and so on, you have a sense instead that everything is fundamentally okay. Even if that's a paradox, even if your boss did just say, you know what? You're fired and I'm going to make sure you never work in this industry again, right? Or your spouse is like, I'm leaving you and I'm taking the kids and I'm taking everything, you know? These things that would normally at a surface level produce this, understandably, you know, concerns or maybe fears and worries and sadness and whatever else. So it's not that they can't still do that in Fundamental Wellbeing but deep deep down, instead of it feeling like a tiger is ripping your arm off, or a shot gun just went off into your chest, somehow, paradoxically, things seem okay. So even in extreme situations, there's this peace if you go and look for it. Then there's many, many different kinds of the experience that we can talk about from here but at its core, it's basically a rewiring in the nervous system. It is core survival, and how it deals with survival, how it looks at survival, and how it makes us feel in the moment.

Rufus Pollock 06:43

So in a nutshell, essentially, it's this profound shift, and to wellbeing it is fundamental; you said you picked that term, because it's at this kind of root level. It doesn't mean that you might not be appropriately reacting or feel some sadness or upset, but at a kind of root level things are okay. Whereas, otherwise, I think most human beings, we can all relate, that there's often been in our life, this fundamental sense, conversely, that things are not okay. That no matter what happens, actually, you know, things aren't. So that's that term and what is it, just to say for listeners, this is, I think, a very good secular term, but it connects with many things, and we'll talk about that maybe more later, but what are the common experiences we hear about, like, enlightenment, like people who are on that journey would also come under fundamental wellbeing, right?

Jeffery Martin 07:46

Absolutely, yeah. It's basically a bucket term for us and, you know, Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience was the academic term that we started off with long before Fundamental Wellbeing term days. Right. And that was basically just a term so that people would actually allow us to research them, because we were always using the wrong term before that. So someone might not like the word consciousness, or they might not like the word experience, or whatever else, but they definitely had issues with difference, you know enlightened, that's a different thing than you know, Satori, or Satori is a different thing from non dual or whatever, everybody had these favourite terms, right? And so it really does encompass all of those different areas, the peace that passeth understanding from sort of more Abrahamic type traditions, to the Satoris and the Nirvanas and the non dual experiences. Enlightenment, persistent awakening, probably the most popular term, we've surveyed a lot of these, the most popular term in the public these days in the West is really awakening. And so if somebody were to just use one word, if we weren't using Fundamental Wellbeing, if we had to pick one term, it would be really awakening. Awakening is a term that has become, in a way, the new bucket term in the public for all of these. But yeah, they sound all spiritual, that's the other thing you know, and they clearly are, from those perspectives. Those terms relate to spiritual and religious groups and sects and belief systems and philosophies and all of that, right, that have been really important cultural carriers of a knowledge of this change that can occur in humans across the rise and fall of empires, you know, I mean, when empired get wiped out somehow religions often don't, right? Philosophies and religions and whatnot, they're kind of our common cultural carriers across the rise and fall of nation states and peoples and whatever else, right. So there have been these currents through history that have carried these things forward to us, knowledge of these things forward to us. But it's important to note this is not, we don't believe, a specifically religious or spiritual type of experience. There are, in our research, many, many atheists, many agnostics that experience the same shift. So although the cultural carriers, how it's widely known in the public, are often spiritual and religious to us, all of our stuff is secular. You know, we view it as secular, we view it as a change in the nervous system.

Rufus Pollock 10:27

So, that's really useful, because I think we don't have a term often. And as it says, Fundamental Wellbeing doesn't have to have this spiritual aspect, but it encompasses all those experiences, or as you said, awakening might be now becoming a more common term and Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience is the other term. So how did you come to this area? You know, can you tell me a bit about your life story? Where did you start and what led you to get interested in this?

Jeffery Martin 11:01

Absolutely. So you know,I've been a longtime entrepreneur, technologist in the media area. And by my mid 30s, I was, in a way, out of goals, sort of out of stuff to do. And I was noticing that there are people out there that seemed to be happier than I was, which really didn't seem fair, because I felt like I had done everything that society said I was supposed to do in order to achieve happiness. And despite having plenty of money, being able to take any course that I wanted, having taken a lot of courses, having worked doggedly on myself, over the years, there were still people out there that were clearly happier than I was. And I was thinking to myself, okay, as I enter this next phase of my life, deciding what I'm going to do next, maybe it's continuing to run my companies, maybe not, what is it that really matters? If it's 20 years from now and I'm looking back and I'm like, did I make the right decision for that period of my life? What is it that I'm going to actually care about, right? And it occurred to me that I would probably care about how much wellbeing I'd experienced, how happy I was, how rich and fulfilling my life was over that period of time. And then it dawned on me, I think, quite logically, next, that if I continued down the same path, I might add another 500 million or billion dollars or something to my net worth, but that I would probably have about the same amount of wellbeing or happiness as I had in that moment. I mean, it's not like there was really any limit financially on my happiness, per se. And that really was a turning point for me. Back then I was still a hyper aggressive, hyper competitive type A type of person. And so really, what I did at that point was just set out to become the happiest person ever, right? I never set out to like, write books about this or anything like that. It was sort of like, I'm gonna win the happiness game like I'm gonna win every other game.

Rufus Pollock 13:07

What job were you in at that time? What had you been doing? Like, what sort of work?

Jeffery Martin 13:12

At that point I was running companies and teaching.

Rufus Pollock 13:18

What I mean, is were you working in wellbeing already? No, no, no. The companies spanned real estate, technology, media, those sectors. Speficially infromation technology, IT.

Jeffery Martin 13:39

Advertising for media. In the media, I'd moved on from like, you know, running TV stations or station groups or something like that to focusing on marketing, advertising, you know, where the money was, right?

Rufus Pollock 13:51

Where the money was. And so then you're like, okay, I'm going to win the happiness contetst, I'm now going to bring that energy. So what did you do next? How did you begin?

Jeffery Martin 14:03

Yeah, so I had had enough interaction over the years with academics, especially having done a lot of teaching in different environments, to realise that they were not going to be able to produce the truth. I knew I needed a research project that could produce, really, the truth, but I realised, in the academic world, the name of the game is basically grant chasing, right? And so, you know, they're gonna just basically try to get little incremental gains and publish little papers and suck as much money out of you as they can for as long as they possibly can, you know, because you're a new source of revenue for them basically.

Rufus Pollock 14:41

That was if you went and did grants or like commissioned research?

Jeffery Martin 14:44

Yeah, because I could have, right? I could have just, you know, said well, I'm gonna take a few million dollars and spread it around these academics and send them in this direction to go research it but I'd seen that done enough to know that that had a very low likelihood, let's just say, of leading to something actionable for my life that I wanted, unless in, you know, maybe 10 or 20 years or something down the road. And so I felt like, you know, I kind of got to do it, you know, I felt hyper intelligent, you know, I'm gonna take my 183 IQ points or whatever, and I'm going to move in this direction, right. And so I basically wound my way out of my various businesses and at the same time started to investigate what skill set I would really need in order to do this investigation, which seemed to me to be a scholarly, academic, social sciency type of, you know, skill set. So I was looking around, and when I really took a deep look at the academy at the time, it seemed like the place to be was in transdisciplinary scholarship, sort of the bleeding edge of scholarship had moved on from interdisciplinary scholarship to sort of transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary being sort of, you know, you have a home discipline that you're sort of rooted in and you're exploring, you know, from there through other disciplines, and you're taking multiple lenses and the tools of multiple disciplines and whatever, but you still kind of have a home discipline. The transdisciplinary idea was emerging in Europe and it basically dealt with this notion of you don't even have a home discipline, you know, you basically just learn how to do valid research across disciplines and sort of take the best of each discipline in a way that you can defend the research at the end of it, and all of that, and so I'm like, okay, that is probably as good as it's gonna get on the scholarship side. So I thought where can I learn that, I thought I would probably have to go to Europe since I, you know, mostly speak English, I mean I do speak French a little bit, but I didn't think it would be enough to really, you know, make it through a French programme. And so I was thinking there were some great programmes on this in the UK and whatnot, right? So I was thinking, okay, I'm probably gonna have to go to the UK. Same time, my parents are old, you know, I'm thinking, well, you know, do I really want to be stuck in some PhD programme or something, in, you know, the UK and my dad dies or something like that, right? So I've got these thoughts going on in the back of my head, and then, almost like miraculously, a guy named Alfonso Montuori, who was totally into this transdisciplinary world, was mostly European, I can't remember the cultures he's from but he's from like multiple European cultures and his parents were like diplomats and stuff for different countries or something, he basically starts a programme in transdisciplinary scholarship at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and, like, picks the leading consciousness researcher in this whole non symbolic area, Allan Combs, to be on the faculty of it. So I was like, thank you Universe, and it's a distance programme, so I don't even have to really change my life, I mean, who has a distance PhD programme back then, right? Nobody. And so I don't even have to really change my life.

Rufus Pollock 18:01

When was this?

Jeffery Martin 18:07

I think it started in 2006. And I found out about it like two weeks before it started and basically begged my way into the programme at the last minute. So I'm in this programme on transdisciplinary scholarship, and it is fantastic and it has a lot of Europeans in it teaching remotely because they don't actually have to be in San Francisco and all of that. And then at a certain point, I realised, okay, I really need hardcore psychology and neuroscience to explore this, not just the sort of mixed methods type of research that is being taught on the transdisciplinary side of things, I really needed serious empirical education for that side of the mixed methods piece. And I basically started looking around for where I might be able to get that and I wound up at the same time that I was in the Ph. D. programme, going to another programme at Harvard, to pick up the psychology and neuroscience piece. What I was really just trying to do is get myself to have the sharpest possible toolset to collect the data that I wanted, to sift the data that I wanted, I figured it would probably take me a couple years, you know, to acquire the skillset, to do the research and then, you know, hopefully to join whoever I found were the happiest people out there. That was my goal, find the happiest people, research the happiest people, become one of the happiest people, go back to building companies, right? Obviously, it didn't turn out that way. 17 years or 18 years later and here we are now.

Rufus Pollock 19:40

Fast forward a little bit. So you're working with Allan Combs, you're working at the California Institute for Integral Studies, and where did your investigation start? What did you actually start doing in your investigation? Once you've got your tools, what were you starting to investigate?

Jeffery Martin 20:05

I was really just trying to find the happiest people out there. And I had an inkling, the reason Allan was interesting to me was because I've done some research before this, now I wasn't a scholar before this, right, I had masters degrees in management and stuff like that and technology and things. So I had like business level and technology level research skills, like professional level, research skills. When I turned those on the problem of happiness after I had kind of given up on there being a way for me to buy it from someone else teaching it to me, in the few years before this, and what I was really looking at was the self help movement. You know, I'm thinking, this is a multibillion dollar movement, every year people are buying billions of dollars in self help stuff. How's that going? Are there successful clues in the public self help world that can tell me how to get happier. And so I'd actually done a lot of work in that over the previous few years. And that had taken me to this realization that there was this whole other level, potentially, of human wellbeing that really hadn't been seriously explored, wasn't being seriously explored, wasn't likely to be seriously explored, because there was just no future in it if you wanted to be a scientist, or an academic. And that was these sort of mystical, or, you know, spiritually attained, or whatever, types of consciousness. And so of course, I'd come across Allan's books, and his expertise and the fact that he was, you know, sort of at the centre of the academic universe on that in many ways, not the Christian version of it, but sort of more the Eastern version of it, more Ralph Hood, I'd say, was more at the centre of it who was also on my dissertation committee in the end. And so yeah, so that was the story.

Rufus Pollock 21:59

So to recap that, you'd already had this inkling, and it is an intriguing fact, that obviously there's this huge self help movement. And there's something maybe about, you know, like in a way self help sometimes is positioned almost at the top of Maslow's pyramid, self actualization to some extent. And in England, there's stuff out there that's beyond that, the transcendental model. Where were you starting the empirical part of this was then? What did you start doing which then led you on your journey to where you are today? You started interviewing people, or what did you do?

Jeffery Martin 22:50

Yeah so I knew that I was stepping into a hornets' nest by wanting to research this. Maslow, the very famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow, once one time head of the American Psychological Association, sort of leading association in the world for this kind of thing. He died on like June 6th, I think, 1970, which was like six days before I was born. So possibly he just went straight into my mom's womb, and here we are, and just continuing his work or something, who knows, right? But basically, in the last period of his life, he had this heart attack and from that heart attack, he basically himself transitioned to Fundamental Wellbeing and became very interested in it. Up untill then he was known for work on meaning, work on peak experiences, the self actualization stuff that you talked about. But he had this profound persistent transition in his own experience of the world, very late in his life, and unfortunately at a point where he was not really in a physical position to push it out into the broader academic world, broader Academy. So what he did is he basically started a new form of psychology called transpersonal psychology, largely with another guy named Tony Sutich. And then he dies and transpersonal psychology basically wanders very far away at that point from Maslow's original view of it; this psychedelic thing comes on, it goes off into that, it goes off into dreams and shamanism and all sorts of stuff. What Maslow really just kind of wanted to study was what he called this plateau experience. You know, he had studied peak experiences, so he called this the high plateau, basically, just to keep it in his metaphor. And, you know, that's great. But what happened as a result of that, is that you wound up having transpersonal psychology and this whole area of study get associated with all kinds of super weird and incredibly non rigorous research, to the point where people like Ralph Hood tried to get the Transpersonal Psychology Association into the APA as one of its subgroups, and there's a lot of subgroups in the APA so that shouldn't be some Herculean task, and they were just like, there's no way we're considering anything there for inclusion, you know, in our rubber stamp of valid research and psychology and whatever else, right? And so it had really been through a rough period, and I knew that, and now I'm coming along saying, well, I want to pick up that research ball, right? So I knew that I was on the wrong side of every possible ounce of politics in the mainstream Academy. And what I did was I just started going around to people, and asking, you know, hey, if you wanted to look into this, how would you do it? Luminaries, you know, in the field, people that were very well politically positioned, some of whom had an interest in this, some of them didn't have an interest in this. And then I just did exactly what they recommended, because I wanted to be able to later go back and say, well, if you're going to poop on this research, and these outcomes, hey, they were done exactly the way you told me to do them. So, I was basically very, sort of, politically oriented, again, type A right? You know, company builder, all that, right? So what they said was go and survey a bunch of people, basically the consensus, what most of them said was like, start to get your arms around them and see if they're different from ordinary people, or if they're delusional, or if they have psychopathology or whatever, go give them a whole bunch of standardised, gold standard psychology measures, across all kinds of things, you know, see where they're at developmentally, see where they're at psychopathologically, see where they're at in terms of wellbeing, see where they're at in terms of blah, blah, blah, personality, etc, right? So that's exactly what we did. And actually, it was really disappointing because when we got that data back, they turned out to look pretty normal; they were happy, they weren't anxious, or depressed, or anything. But there wasn't anything in that initial set of data that was like, look, this is a distinct population in humanity that warrants further study.

Rufus Pollock 27:05

How did you find them that to start with? How did what how did you find very happy people?

Jeffery Martin 27:13

That cost a lot of money, initially. Originally, I thought the main barrier to this project is that the people who could do it, who have an interest in it and who might be willing to do it on nights and weekends, basically believe that there's like six of these people in the world, at any given time and their odds of actually getting to them and researching them are non existent. And then the general, you know, crowd, there just wasn't any money to go and build a participant population there. And so, that was another thing I asked, what makes a legitimate research subject as I'm beginning this project, and they basically boiled down to three criteria from the advice from those folks, those luminary type folks, and they warned me, like, it's going to be a tough road to hoe, you need criteria that you can sort of go across these different groups. One of the criteria, for instance, was that they were from an established system that had something like Fundamental Wellbeing in it, it didn't have to be an end goal of it, it could have been just in its mystical aspects or whatever else, but that had to be really well defined in terms of what it was. So an established system, with well defined criteria, that groups of people that are, you know, reasonably knowledgeable on those criteria, could look at someone and say, that person is there.

Rufus Pollock 28:40

So what you were looking for, just to play this back and you explain it for listeners, what you were saying is to do good empirical research, you need a couple of things. So one is you're goning to need a way to then assess people, like to find out what was different about them, but then the toughest problem was actually finding a research population, or at least rigorous research, which was also having criteria for identifying people in Fundamental Wellbeing, that was not like fully objective, but at least there was like criteria and there was a community of practice that would kind of validate those criteria.

Jeffery Martin 29:19

Those individuals specifically, not just the criteria, but the individuals as having met the criteria.

Rufus Pollock 29:27

Right. Okay. So, you know, they've experienced in oneness or other behaviours, okay. So that was one thing, so you'd find a community probably, maybe a traditional religious one that has that, what were the other two?

Jeffery Martin 29:38

No, that was really sort of the heart of it, right, is that they had to have those three components: so it's an established tradition with rules and then people agreeing that a person fits the rules that are within the tradition and that are a valid enough group that could judge that. And that is basically the idea.

Rufus Pollock 30:03

And then you said it was pretty expensive to find them, you said that was the most costly part. Tell me about that. Yeah, I really was. Because these people are scattered all over the world, they're hard to reach, they're hard to even get in contact with in the first place, and then to try to get to participate in some sort of scientific study of them and where they're at, they often believe science can't study you. And so, you know, we had to put money into building lists of potential people to contact which took, you know, hiring staff to find those people and create even just an initial list of people to contact. Then you have to contact them. And then you have to keep contacting them, because they don't contact you back, they just ignore you. And so you have to have a cycle of contact, you have to try to put yourself in their path, whenever possible, figure out where they're at, different events that you might be able to run into them at, fly to those events, try to hope that you cross them in the hall and get 10 seconds to introduce yourself to them. I mean, the early phase of this project was like that kind of thing. You know, it was a lot of just trying to get people to participate that had almost no interest and looking at their whole existence through some sort of scientific lens, that they were pretty sure was just going to determine that they were invalid, that something about their experience was crazy or invalid or whatever else, and you know, why give this person the time so that they can even build that up. It took a lot of trust building in those early periods, you know, to even get people; a lot of relationship building. And then once we did sit down with them, I would say the the early interviews were rough, we didn't really know what we should be asking. So after we went from the psychology measures, which are a little bit easier to get people to fill out, right, because they can just do it on their own time and they don't have to give you a day of their time for an interview, or anything like that, when that didn't really show anything and we started switching over to in-person interviews, then you have a whole bigger ask, right? Because you're really asking people for more or less a day of their time to sit down with you in a long format interview - we started with trying to do some short interviews and we really quickly realised that wasn't going to work out - and then we were sort of struggling early on with just our interview format and stuff. And it occurred to us that where we really wanted to head with this was probably to some sort of neuroscience. And so what we should do is view this as the early part of a neuroscience type experiment. And oftentimes what you do in the early part of neuroscience, is you sort of interview people along the lines of cognitive science, you know, cognition affect, perception, memory, stuff like that. And so we started to then take our interviews in a semi-structured way in the direction of more of these cognitive science type things. And that really wound up being, in a way, the jewel in the crown, it was totally accidental, you know, but it kind of was the jewel in the crown of the first phase of the research. Because what it did, without us thinking about it, was that it forced everybody to have our language, to adopt our language. So instead of being able to sit there and talk about God, or spaciousness, or you know, consciousness or whatever, they were answering questions directly about their cognition, affect, perception, memory, eventually sense of self in a very patterned, rigorous, digging down into it, but psychological, phenomenological, from a psychological standpoint kind of way. And what that allowed us to do is compare the data across subjects. I think if we hadn't done that, if we had kept up a looser thing, where we just started to let people talk however they wanted to talk about that experience it would have been impossible to compare people's experience. There's been plenty of dissertations done like that, and little research projects done with like, you know, six, eight, twelve, two, one, sometimes, participants, you know, and it's really hard to do a thematic analysis of that stuff, and to figure out what people were talking about and where they might relate to each other and whatnot. But by forcing people into that cognitive science lens, it accomplished that really, really well. And suddenly, we were able to really compare subjects quite reliably. You know, either you had the same quantity of thoughts, or you didn't, either they had the same emotional salience, or they didn't, you know, those are very basic, high level things. But you get the idea. Yeah, let's just do this. Let's say you're talking to someone, you know, maybe these are people who are in a particular tradition, whether it's Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, who are we might call awakened or something like that, and what you're saying is, normally, if you've got to interview them which is valuable discussion about their experience. The difficulty is that, to be honest, to the science audience it could sound kind of woowoo, maybe it isn't, but it can sound that way, but you also have no structure, just so I'm getting this for myself and for the audience is, what you're saying is cognitive science or cognition, just to break that down for people listening, is like, how you think; when you're having thoughts, what kind of thoughts you're having, are you able to do planning, are you able to do certain kinds of cognition? And then you're saying, affect is kind of, just sort of, like,

Jeffery Martin 37:10

Emotion, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Rufus Pollock 37:12

Yeah. So what you're say is you had this structure, and by having that structure, and quite a kind of down to earth structure, you can ask questions, like, are you having as many thoughts as you used to? Or do you experience strong emotions or not? And roughly at that early point, what were you immediately starting to notice about people who were in Fundamental Wellbeing?

Jeffery Martin 37:36

Well, we noticed that they were really obvious significant similarities across them. So for instance, everyone in those earliest days reported a reduction in thoughts. You know, they could all remember a sort of before and after, right, that was one of the things that we would pick up on. Our interviews had a very specific format to them, for the first 30 minutes or so we would just kind of casually chat with them, get some background on them, try to get them to think about the before and after, whether there was a before and after moment for them, multiple before and after moments, so we could sort of start to get that. And we would synchronise our language to them, so if they used awareness, we'd use awareness, right, things like that, at the beginning, and then we would slowly tune them increasingly into our sort of psychological, phenomenological, cognitive science-based language over time. But we had to sort of hook them with some raport in a way, and then, you know, pull them in. And so we find, for instance, on cognition, is that universally before and after the transition to Fundamental Wellbeing, in those early days, there was a reported reduction in thought, and often people would say things like "all thought went away", or something like that. And then as we would wind down further into the cognition piece, eventually what we would get to, again, across people, was a realisation that well, all their thoughts didn't really go away, I mean, they can still think about what they have to do, you know, after this interview, or things like that, what really went away were self-reflexive thoughts. Right? They had a tremendous reduction in self reflexive or self reflective, if you want to think of it that way, thought. But other areas of thought, you know, were still there, untouched and it just turns out that for the average person, the vast majority of thoughts in our head all day are self-reflective thoughts in some way, right? And so if the bottom falls out of those, suddenly, it's like, wow, all my thoughts went away. And so, you know, we would start off with a claim, like, all my thoughts went away, and then just relentlessly dig into that, to see if actually really there are no thoughts in this person's head at all, and so on. And so we would do that across that, we would do that across emotions. There was a spectrum of things in those early days around emotion. At a minimum, people said that their negative emotions would fall off much more rapidly. And so you know, they might have something happen that triggered some psychological conditioning or something, but it would go away much more rapidly than was ever the case in the past. And that went on a spectrum from that all the way to people insisting that, you know, they didn't have triggers anymore, and that they really didn't perceive any emotion at all, in their system. And so we saw a gradient between those two polls, if you will, right. And then with memory, most people didn't really have significant memory effects. It was common for people to say, you know, my memory is like, nothing, it's like shot, it's nothing compared to what it used to be. But then, you know, we would test that, if you're with someone for 10/12 hours, you can be like, hey, you know, earlier in the day, and they can remember that with no problem where you were, what you were eating when you were out to eat together, you know, or who was around, you know, okay, well, your memory is clearly intact, why are you telling me you don't have a memory, or you got these memory problems, right? And that led us to realise that memories just weren't spontaneously really occurring for them anymore. And, you know, before Fundamental Wellbeing, there's like, all kinds of living in the past, and all these thoughts that are constantly coming up from the past and stuff like that. And that wasn't happening, you know, with this population, they were just assuming, man my memory is just shot, but it's actually that there just weren't stimulus probes happening to bring those memories up and there's some sort of change in their internal architecture, you know, around memories just naturally arising all the time, you know, throughout the day. And so there were things like that, examples like that.

Rufus Pollock 41:48

Wow. Okay. And I think just also I want to flag this for ourselves and for listeners, what's amazing in a way about this, and it's so obvious, is we've moved from what would otherwise be very incomparable experiences, to things that start to be very noticeable, like a reduction in thoughts. What I'm also hearing is that often there was a strong before and after, there was strong changes that were noticeable around their waking up experiences. So I think that's really amazing. And at this point, how many people had you talked to at the end of this first phase?

Jeffery Martin 42:42

The first phase lasted for a number of years. In the earliest phase of interviewing the main spiritual teachers and stuff like that, I would say by the time we were through the first 30 of them or so, patterns were starting to emerge and it was clear that this was not a unified landscape, that there wasn't just one experience of this. These ranges were increasingly getting filled out, like the emotion thing, you know, a couple of people insistant that they have no emotion, and other people that clearly do have a mix of positive and negative emotions and some people that have a single emotion that feels like a combination of love and joy and compassion, and maybe some other things mixed in, you know, culturally. There were these very clear buckets - at the time we called them buckets that we were sort of seeing emerge in the data - and so we could tell, okay, enlightenment isn't just enlightenment, so to speak. There's a landscape here that's starting to emerge within the first 30 people, which were really the hardcore spiritual people that was very, very, very evident. And you're right, it was Christians, it was Islamic people, Sufis, it was Islam people, it was Buddhists, it was even some shamanic type, indigenous type, spiritual people. And so it was a range across the different belief systems and whatnot, we were very careful not to centre on one, not to just centre on the east. We wanted to sample as broad a range of this as we could, in those early days, especially.

Rufus Pollock 44:34

And I want to ask one other question on that, the other thing that intrigued me in looking at your work previously was that also you started to come across people who were not in any system, people who'd somehow, as it were, transitioned into Fundamental Wellbeing, and who weren't Christian, Buddhist or anything. When did you come across someone like that, where you were like oh this is something than can happen without even being in a classic religious or spiritual tradition. When did you come across that?

Jeffery Martin 45:07

You know what started to happen was, very little on the on the Western religious front, but in the Eastern religious front, we would build these really strong raports, you know, people enjoyed sitting down with us after we went through the first, you know, five or 10, or something, interviews, or whatever, and we're starting to get a handle on what areas to probe and things like that, and they enjoy that because the self-reflexive thought is basically gone and you have someone sitting in front of you that's asking really awesome questions, you really appreciate the stimulus probe in your system, right? And oftentimes, you know, we'd ask a question, and someone would just have to sit there quietly, sort of searching their own experience, nobody ever asked them that before, nobody had asked these people cognitive science-based questions. And so to them, it was like a fantastic self-learning experience sitting down with us, right, and it built a lot of very positive rapport and people began to really confide things in us. And one of the things that started to be confided in us here and there, were people, mostly at that time from Eastern, maybe one from a Western tradition, but mostly from Eastern traditions, that were saying things like, "I'm not really religious anymore, I have left the belief system that I'm embedded in, that might even be providing my income, that I might be a venerated figure in, or whatever else, you know, I've kind of left that behind. As I've moved deeper into this, that has just not seemed to really fit my current experience and I've chosen to keep exploring and keep deepening kind of off the map, I've had to leave my tradition to do that." And so we've been prepared for the reality that we would probably run into people who had never been in a religious or spiritual system. And yet, we're still experiencing this, because, over time, we just kept meeting more and more people who had left that behind. Eventually we reached a point where we felt comfortable broadening the criteria for samples, right. And so you didn't have to be a spiritual leader from some tradition where people were agreeing that you met the criteria, or whatever, we felt like, okay, we have enough data now. And nobody's ever asked these questions to other people before, right? So if they're in there answering the questions, they're not falling into the pattern in the direction of the data collection that we've done so far, so we just assure ourselves that they're not someone who should be involved as a participant. And if they are, then they probably should be involved, or could be potentially, involved as a participant, right? So there came a day that we began to broaden out that criteria and that's when other people could come in to the project that weren't from a specific religion, that weren't from a tradition, and where we did start to have atheists, agnostics, you know, that type of thing coming in.

Rufus Pollock 48:17

So just a sample. Basically, you're then able, at some point, almost to bootstrap. Having given a sample that came out of maybe a religious tradition, you know, enlightened or whatever we'd call it, you then have these criteria, so into like the reduction in thoughts, this emotional behaviour, that you could use to look more generally, and maybe to put out surveys. And because it's also not fakeable, there's no reason people would be reporting these things for any other reason. So what you're saying is that you could kind of bootstrap into now starting to have a pattern. I think this is something just for the listeners to really get which is, you're then starting to have a kind of useful, I don't want to say fingerprint, but it's more for people to look for themselves. You're starting to have this kind of criteria, secular criteria, in the sense of while connected to religious tradition, but not with any specific one, of what it looks like to be in Fundamental Wellbeing. And you've mentioned, you know, massive reduction in narrative self, either negative emotional valence being reduced or an ability to transition out of negative emotion very quickly, in some way or other things you've described. Just to flag for listeners, Jeffrey writes more about this in his papers and in his Finders book, and so on which will be in the show notes. I just want to then come back, how then, just to ask, how did you find more people? Did you start putting out a survey on, you know, Google ads? How did you find more people?

Jeffery Martin 49:49

We didn't use Google ads. In hindsight, we probably should have. And I had done quite a bit with Google Ads almost since the beginning so that wouldn't have been outside the realm of possibility. What we really just started to do was talk to people, was go out and give talks to groups, speak at events, you know, things like that. And that would basically trickle more people in. Also, research subjects generally would know one or two other people who were in Fundamental Wellbeing, and they would almost always refer them to us because, you know, we were so fun to talk to, or so helpful, basically, to help them with probing their own experiences as just a function of us collecting our data. And so they would almost be, you know, talking to their handful of others that they knew and being like, you've got to go sit down with this guy, you know, kind of thing. So that really helped. It was a lot of snowballing from that standpoint. And then a friend of mine who is a business partner of mine, we owned a number of companies together over the years, named Rod Pennington, he's also a pretty major fiction author. He's ghostwritten some really amazing books that we can't say who they are on the fiction side and the nonfiction side, you know, needless to say, he's a New York Times bestselling author who is not a New York Times bestselling author, probably several times over, right? He said to me, you know, why don't we just write a fiction book. And, you know, he's like, I'll just write a fiction book about, you know, this stuff in general and we'll put a little thing in it and we'll see, you know, who contacts you and maybe that's a way to broaden out into the sort of more mainstream. And so we did that, we wrote a book called The Fourth Awakening, which was, I think, frankly, a really good book. It pulled together a lot of the stuff, it's only marginally a fiction book, frankly, you know, we threw a lot of stuff in there, real people can recognise themselves a little bit. And that book became really popular, it sold a lot of copies. We self published it, you know, we didn't run it through a publisher or anything, because we just wanted to get it right out. So we threw it up on Amazon and I stopped tracking it years ago, when it was at like, half a million copies sold. It just kept selling. And so a lot of people, you know, then sort of found out about our research, actually, that were just interested from that fiction book and contacted us. And in fact, we used that fiction book list, when we did our first experiments on our ourselves trying to transition and get before and after data. Right now, all we've been talking about is the the period where we were collecting the data where the people were already in Fundamental Wellbeing, obviously, the day comes in any research project, where you think to yourself, let's see if we can measure the changes, right? And it was the mailing list from that book that we sent out to, to say, hey, anybody want to actually try getting? We distilled down I think, I can't remember, maybe 27 people that seemed really serious, that contacted us, that met pre criteria, and then from there picked six of them. So it was a fiction book that really allowed us to get out more broadly. But we were doing a lot of speaking, a lot of interviews, a lot of other stuff. We would never give away the questions, even in an academic conference environment, because those questions were the thing that allowed us to screen, you know, if we gave out the questions and the answers, then you could come to us, and you could fool us. But because nobody had ever asked this stuff, nobody knew the patterns of answers, or the specific language in the answers or anything like that, even as we were publishing preprints of papers and circulating stuff, you know, I remember Stan Krippner, one of the great consciousness researchers of our time, saying to me, you know, Jeffery, you've got to put some quotes from these people in this paper that you're circulating, and I'm like, can't do it, you know, because then people will be able to fool us, you know, the quotes are going to have to wait until a lot later in this research. And so that really held true for a very long time.

Rufus Pollock 54:12

Okay, so at this point, this is, what five years into your project or something?

Jeffery Martin 54:22

Six, seven, a few years.

Rufus Pollock 54:25

Yeah, yeah. Because at some point, you've got enough data, and then I think we're coming towards the first Finders programme, I'd like to talk about that. You said you're interested in, when you mentioned these six people, you had this moment, like, maybe we can build a protocol that can help people actually transition to Fundamental Wellbeing. Is that right? Is that what I'm understanding from what you were just alluding to when you said about the book list? Could you say a bit about that?

Jeffery Martin 54:54

Yeah, basically, you know, the first few years we're doing all this interview stuff. So from say 2006 to 2009 or so, at the end of 2009, we're thinking to ourselves, you know, we're not getting a lot of new data from sitting down with people. We've done some physiological data collection, some EEG, some breath data, some heart rate data, GSR data, stuff like that, during that period, kind of sporadically, just exploratory. Then we started working more with neuroscience partners, trying to interest people with FMRI machines, especially really cutting edge FMRI machines that could do real time feedback and stuff like that, which was pretty new back then, very new back then, into this research population, which we had some success doing at different places around the world. And you know, some people are already doing it like Zoran Josipovic at NYU was already on this path, was already doing it, we didn't need to be like, hey, Zoran, would you consider scanning some of these people or whatever. So it wasn't like our idea to do this, you know Zoran was doing it, acouple of other people had done a little bit of stuff in the space. So we went through a neuroscience phase that sort of helped us to understand what was going on, change-wise, in the brain, initially at a high level over time. And then about probably 2012-2013, we started thinking about collecting pre and post data. You know, it's sort of like the neuroscience thing had kind of run its course, like we learned what we could learn from the interviews, we learned what we could learn from brain scans, and EEG and stuff and now it's sort of like, until we can really get pre and post data we just can't take this to the next level. And so we started asking ourselves, do we know any methods that work for people, reliably? I mean, if you're thinking like, I'm going to spend $2,500 a research subject or something to do some FMRI study on them, right, you can't have, you know, 99% of people not getting there. That's just a recipe for bankrupting a study. And so our first question was really like, do we have any idea how to actually get people there? And frankly we didn't.

Rufus Pollock 56:53

There being Fundamental Wellbeing? One thing, just to make it obvious for people on this call, you know, it may be obvious to you but I just want to flag, I might have in my life have seen some people who are just born happy; some people are just born lucky. Something that I assume you haven't mentioned, but you would have learnt from your first set of subjects, or people you talk to, was that they hadn't always been like this, or some of them maybe had been, but can I take that as one thing that we've almost said unsaid, that there have been times?

Jeffery Martin 57:01

Yeah, Fundamental Wellbeing, exactly.

Rufus Pollock 57:05

Yeah, for sure. There are a very tiny number of people who always seem to be in this. Like the thing that happens to the rest of us around age two and a half to three and a half doesn't happen to them and they just have spent their whole life in Fundamental Wellbeing, but that's a vanishingly small number of people. Okay. But so many people in your early interviews had reported some kind of transition or whatever, it had taken several experiences, but they had a real before and after. And that's the thing, I think, also is a really big insight, I know it comes out of many traditions, but what you want to flag is that Fundamental Wellbeing is both something that can kind of be, I don't want to say secularised, but you can see these criteria and things that really affect the quality of your life. and it is kind of this transition and often it's not gradual, I get from many of your people, it had been quite rapid at some point.

Jeffery Martin 58:27

It was about 70%, instant, 30% gradual in that early population of 1200 people, during those early years.

Rufus Pollock 58:35

And for them, also, what you're getting is, it's kind of noticeable if it happens to you.

Jeffery Martin 58:39

Even if it's gradual, you still realise. Interestingly, you can not notice it initially, because you have such a drop off and self reflective block, right? And after the transition, you're not like constantly analysing what's going on with you, or whether you're happy or whether someone likes the blue jacket that I'm wearing, or, you know, all of that neuroticism just sort of goes away. So, you actually kind of miss that you've transitioned to this. And even like super famous people told us like, you know, they didn't notice it sometimes for weeks or months afterward, and then they'd be like, you know, pontificating on it in some, you know, religious environment where they were considered an expert on it, even though they hadn't gotten there yet, but they were like, some senior teacher or something, right. And they're like, checking off in their mind the boxes, and at some point, they're like, Oh, I wonder when that happened? So it's kind of a funny aside.

Rufus Pollock 59:34

That is very funny. So yeah, people could not notice. And to come back then, you were then starting to look, if we want to understand more about what's going on, we really would like to find situations where people actually transition.

Jeffery Martin 59:51

And measure them before and after.

Rufus Pollock 59:53

And I'm almost hearing that you came up with the protocol or a way of trying to support people doing that, because otherwise, you'd have to like be with lots of people and like most of them wouldn't transition, and there's no kind of predictable way. And that's one of the things I want to ask about because you could be like, oh, wouldn't it be easy? Why wouldn't you just go to some of these gurus and say, like, just find me some of your students, surely some of them are going to wake up in the next few months. One of the things that you'd maybe been seeing was that that wasn't generally the case, that people reliably transitioned to Fundamental Wellbeing, even in these spiritual traditions, it was a bit more random, even there, is that right?

Jeffery Martin 1:00:32

Almost nobody transitioned, you know, and we had really well known spiritual teachers, when we would ask for a referral to some of their students to participate in the research, who would confide in us that they're not sure anybody ever woke up from, you know, their teachings, we learned that this was considered one of the most frustrating professions out there, if you weren't in Fundamental Wellbeing, it's hard to imagine that you could keep doing this day in and day out, because it was just, you know, having very little actual impact in terms of the transition to fundamental well being on people. And folks were kind of puzzled by that. You know, I remember even later in the research after I talked about these kinds of things, a pretty well known guy in sort of the modern, non duelists sort of space, when I was travelling in Europe, one time, we had dinner, or we hung out at night, I think maybe we didn't have dinner, maybe we just hung out after dinner at his hotel room or something like that, I remember him saying, look, you know, I mean, I've basically directly, forget about classes, people coming to see me, I've directly worked with 1000s of people, I can't remember if it was 5000 or 7000 people, I had an actual number. And he's like, as far as I know, no one has ever transitioned that I've worked with, he's like, you know, what can you tell me about what I can do differently? And I'm like, well, I can tell you that's normal. You're in good company, you know, your competitors in the spiritual space aren't like, you know, really lapping you on this one, right. And we had a great conversation about it. I mean, these types of conversations were not uncommon, you know. And so the problem for us in that when wanting to measure people before and after was, despite our global reach at this point, there wasn't any place that we could think to go, where it had, you know, enough of a hit rate, to justify paying for them to be in a scanner beforehand and then, you know, just having thrown away that 700 bucks, or whatever it would have cost, you know, for the scanner time,

Rufus Pollock 1:02:38

I do just want to flag this Jeffery because I think also for listeners, for those interested, you know, obviously, you could pick up a book, I could pick an example, like Culadasa's book, which people might know, The Mind Illuminated, a classic guide to at least Buddhist meditation. And at the beginning it's kind of like, look, if you really do this, well, the Dalai Lama reckons you could do this in a year. There is this tendency to be like, just do the meditations right in this particular practice. So I just want to flag this point, which is that that insight is quite significant, I think, and I think this may have to run into a second interview, potentially, but even at this point, I want to come to it, that is a really significant point, because there is a tendency in a lot of the teaching of a tradition lik just do the meditation practices right and, you know, in like a year, you know, you should be able to get to level 10. There's an incredible frustration that you often don't, and maybe a surprise that also things aren't highly effective. And I think there's also the tendency that it is so amazing when it does occur for people, they're just like, well I was just doing that if you just do that particular mantra, or you do this particular thing, or just do this extreme sport, and, you know, whatever it is, there's a tendency to perhaps extrapolate, over extrapolate from one's own experience, particularly also once when in Fundamental Wellbeing I think there's a haziness about the prior period of the journey. You came to this because you were looking to look at before and after.

Jeffery Martin 1:04:30

The thing to think about with this, right, is that in most Eastern traditions, that's okay. And in Western traditions, to some degree too, in Western traditions, you just sort of generally have to be right with God to get to the right heaven, right. And so if you don't actually have a mystical union experience with it, but you're, you know, you're pious and devout or whatever, that's an okay way to spend your life. On the eastern side, you've always got more lifetimes, right? And so there isn't really an expectation of a lot of success on the Eastern tradition side of thinks, right? So it's only in sort of like a new non dualish sort of guy like the one that I gave an example of that they're bothered by this, you know. If you're steeped in Hinduism or Buddhism, it's just sort of like, well, of course, nobody's making that much progress because you make progress over 1000s of lifetimes. So I think you do have to put that frame, it's not like there's some ethical problem for them, like, you know, they're out there saying this, and it's not producing the result, they're assuming it's going to produce results over many lifetimes.

Rufus Pollock 1:04:30

Yes, there's even a sense, I think, in many traditions, we have to be careful here, that it can be like kind of grasping after things, it can become like another thing on the list like, I think you jokingly referred to yourself at the beginning like, you know, I aced everything else now I'm going to ace well being. And obviously, there's this kind of subtilty, but to come to it then, you were coming to look at it before and after. The protocol, what brought you towards like looking at creating a structure to support people in transition?

Jeffery Martin 1:06:09

We just wanted to collect AB data, you know, we just wanted to collect before and after data, that was our only real impetus.

Rufus Pollock 1:06:16

So what happened? So tell me a bit, you found six people from your list? And what was it you created? Tell us a bit about this.

Jeffery Martin 1:06:23

We tried a whole bunch of stuff, you know, beforehand, before the six people, long before those six people, we tried all sorts of brain zapping methods, things like that. That was before our ultrasound work that we're doing now, which is a lot better, and more accurate. But those technologies didn't exist back then. So we just tried a bunch of different things. And none of them really worked. We tried to look around and see, well, who's a teacher who might have a higher hit rate, maybe they can, but just none of it really ever worked. And then we did something that probably, you know, anyone listening to this podcast is going to be like, seems like they should have done that first. But we didn't do it first. We basically poured back through the data, and there was a question in the intake form, you know, what transitioned you? Now you would think that like, that would be the first answer that we read, right, if we were trying to answer this question, but you have to realise we didn't really think that the subject population at the time had a really good handle on insight into themselves or, you know, it just didn't seem like that was going to be a usable answer, frankly, from people. And so we have a lot of data, still have a lot of data, that we've never had time to process. And that was a question that we just never processed. Well, somebody did process it, a research assistant did go back through those surveys, did process that out. And it turned out that there was actually relatively few things that people said worked for them. And there was another question, what have you tried? And it turns out that when you compare the two questions, people have tried a lot of the same stuff, but it wasn't the same thing that had worked across different individuals, right. And so that gave us a clue that what we might actually have is a) a good method problem and, b) a matching problem among the good methods. And that basically became, eventually, the protocol that we tried, I think in 2014, I believe it was in January, February 2014, when we did that first six person experiment. What we did was we basically, by that point we'd been experimenting with the protocol on an individual by individual basis, just kind of around the lab and the research centre and stuff before that. And we learned that there are different types of these methods. So let's say there's like half a dozen general categories of methods, we have since collapsed that down to five categories of methods, but at the time it was like half a dozen categories of methods.

Rufus Pollock 1:08:42

For listeners, just what do you mean by method?

Jeffery Martin 1:08:45

So, you know, for instance, it might be a meditation method, like a mantra-based method, right? We've learned that, you know, most mantra-based methods don't transition people, there's, you know, some subsets of some very specific types of mantra methods that do. And so even within, again if I just say mantra method, right, it's not like go just try a mantra method and that's guaranteed to be some gold standard method. It's not, there's a lot of nuance in this. So it can be mantra methods, it can be something more modern like a direct inquiry, who am I type of thing. It could be even more modern than that like Douglas Harding's headless way type stuff carried on by Richard Lang in the UK, which I would consider more of a cognitive science-based exercise and so there are just these different things that had actually you know, shifted people and we put them into a single protocol on a certain way that I know we don't have time for right now because I'm watching the clock tick down.

Rufus Pollock 1:09:43

So just as like almost a trailer and we will wrap soon, in a trailer of that, so you saw these different methods and you put them together and like you had this matching problem, so it was a question, what are good methods. And then the point, which you said, I think is also a really big insight for listeners, and anyone interested, and obviously you can find more in Jeffery's work and the course 45 days to awakening, which I highly recommend. But the basic point was that you have good methods, but any given method only works for certain people, that's what you mean by matching, is that right?

Jeffery Martin 1:10:20

Exactly, exactly. And so, it's not enough to have a list, with instructions even from the best form of these gold standard type of methods that are most likely to work on a small percentage of people, let's say 3% of people, or 4% of people, I mean, if you've got a method that works on 3 or 4%, of people reliably, you've invented one of the best methods ever, you know, that is an enormously successful method and hit rate. Can you imagine going to a retreat and having 3 or 4% of people transition reliably in a retreat around you like, that's unheard of, like, who experiences that in the retreats that they go to, right? And so you know, you're talking about very small percentage success rates. But that's what makes a great method. And then, within that, learning to sequence them a certain way, so, you know, learning that it's better to have people do one before another one and then you can increase success rates. And so there's some experimentation with that, learning how to tweak methods based on knowledge of modern brains, and brain science and stuff like that kind of drag them into a modern era, maybe they were really great for brains that had an attention system in the 1600s, or something, but now we need them to work for something that has an attention system from, you know, 2022, as an example, right, so tweaks to them very subtle tweaks, oftentimes, but very important tweaks. And so we did all of those things and we sort of tuned the methods up as best we could, but even with that, and with all of the psychological data that we had from people, which was a lot, because people put out a lot of these surveys, a lot of those gold standards. like she said, one thing that we didn't mention is that we would just keep sending people these surveys until they told us to stop, that they just didn't want to hear from us again, they never wanted to fill out another questionnaire or whatever, right? So we had them across all of these different domains of psychology, there was nothing that we found that matched up a working method to someone's psychological data. And so the protocol basically became a try it and see if this method worked type of protocol, put it into a very specific framework, a very specific cocktail, doing awareness related ones first wound up being better, doing body centred ones early wound up being better, there were just like these different things that we learned over time to create the right sequence, that allowed us to get to a much higher hit rate, you know, our initial hit rates were, like 73%, on average, in the early days of the protocol, which is more than enough to justify, then you've even got like 30, you know, whatever, 27% of people that you can use as a comparison group that didn't transition, right, which is super awesome if you're crunching data.

Rufus Pollock 1:12:55

Just for listeners, what you're saying is that out of the early work you're doing, you're getting figures out of what at this point was like a three or four month course,

Jeffery Martin 1:13:07

A four month course, took about three and a half hours a day at the time.

Rufus Pollock 1:13:10

Yeah a four month course, of three and a half hours a day, which is intensive, but I'm saying, you're getting to a point of about 70% plus of people who would transition to Fundamental Wellbeing who were not in Fundamental Wellbeing before. And that's extraordinary, that is extraordinary results.

Jeffery Martin 1:13:29

Yeah, it is. To us it's just so routine now that you know, at the time, it was like, this is incredible, you know, but now it's sort of like, it's normal.

Rufus Pollock 1:13:37

I got that and there are many other things like how can more people do it, but what I just want to say on that point, and I think that's what we could delve into in a follow up, I hope, with this, Jeffrey, and I want to get a moment to thank you, but I want to leave you and listneners with the question, what's amazing for me is that we got to do this in this way, that this journey of empiricism can be useful, open minded empiricism can be really, really valuable. And I think there are a lot of other areas that, you know, kind of like how do we support a radically wiser weller society, radically wiser lives for ourselves, where this could be this could be useful. And I want to flag it, often there's been a scepticism in this kind of area of like thinking, no, no, you can't fit this into a box. We're not trying to fit it into a box, yeah, it's not fitable in a box, but there's still some things you can see about it. And I think that's a really big insight from this and that then it can turn into a useful protocol and beautiful application. So I just want to thank you for your time today and for explaining this. As a trailer for next time, I think we could talk a bit more about the map of Fundamental Wellbeing and particularly the protocol and how that has evolved and where you see it going and what you see the kind of frontiers are for this kind of work. Because I think the thing is, well, I now know there are more people, you and your community are still relatively small in this area and what would it be like if this was like, you know, all over the world, and we were doing much more, getting much more even more research data at the moment on these things. Totally. Enough to throw to AI even and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. So I just want to really thank you, Jeffery, for your participation. I hope we'll get to do a part two of these and have a really wonderful day and to our listeners, thank you for tuning in, there'll be another second or third episode out of this. Thank you very much. Thank you.

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