See our full introduction to Dr. Jeffery Martin's work here: 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 well-being. He discusses his research and key findings, and the protocols he has developed and tested to help people obtain "fundamental well-being" in a rapid, secular, and safe way.

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About Dr Jeffery Martin

For over 15 years Jeffery has conducted the largest international study on persistent non-symbolic experience (PNSE), which includes the types of consciousness commonly known as enlightenment, nonduality, the peace that passeth understanding, unitive experience, and hundreds of other terms. This resulted in the first reliable, cross-cultural and pan-tradition classification system for these types of experiences. It also led to the fundamental discovery that these were psychological states that had been identified and adopted for thousands of years by many cultures and belief systems. They were not inherently spiritual or religious, or limited to any given culture or population, and could be moulded in many ways to shape the experience. More recently, he has used this research to make systems available to help people obtain profound psychological benefits in a rapid, secular, reliable, and safe way.

To learn more from Dr. Jeffery Martin, please visit:

https://drjefferymartin.com/

Podcast Transcript

Rufus Pollock  00:05

Welcome, everyone to this latest episode of the life itself podcast. And it is the second in a series of dialogues with Dr Jeffrey Martin. Jeffrey is a founder of the transformative technology space, a serial entrepreneur, and a social scientist. He researches personal transformation and the states of greatest human well-being, which he has been doing for more than 15 years. You can find all episodes of this series on our website at life itself.org/podcasts Well, first, welcome back. Jeffrey, thank you for joining me again. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, yeah, really welcome. Now, just to for our listeners last time, what we covered was, first how you Jeffrey came to this work, the empirical research on people who are kind of off the charts on well being what you and colleagues return fundamental well-being or more academically persistent, non-symbolic experience, and what you learn from that. And then when we were ending, where we may start up again, a bit today was that out of this research on the kind of people, the individuals you'd encountered, you became interested in creating a protocol for a kind of a course or a protocol for seeing this, this could be facilitated, supported, or in people who had not transitioned already. And we talked a little bit about that. And just to summarise, I think this extraordinary, an incredible result, which was that in this first effort, you got 70% of people, or a majority of people were transitioning during the programme, ordinary people who hadn't particularly had any prior pre-election were transitioning to fundamental well being. And I wanted to ask them to start today. First of all, what this was, you said, was a bit surprising to you at the time. Maybe not now. But then, right now, it's normal, right? We just take it for granted, frankly. But then it was like a huge deal. 

Jeffery Martin  02:25

You know, I remember when we did our first group of six people, one of which dropped out, and the other five stayed in and the first person transitioned somewhere in the programme, I don't remember where after all these years, but you know, maybe halfway through or something like that. And I just didn't believe her. It just didn't seem possible, I'd set this whole thing up for like, this longitudinal two-year data collection effort, and all of that, you know, I would have captured a lot more data during that initial six-person group, if I thought that was gonna happen. And so, you know, I just, and then another one did, and another one did, and I just wound up grilling these people, you know, because I just didn't believe that it happened. My assumption was okay. They're misinterpreting something. Let's find out what that was. But eventually, you know, I just had to accept that it actually happened. And it just blew my mind.

Rufus Pollock  03:35

Wow. So what, just in terms of giving people a flavour? You probably haven't done the course or know, what was in the original. You called the finders protocol. What kind of things are just to give an idea? It was a four-month, it was a four-month thing. Yeah. What kind of practices did people do?

Jeffery Martin  03:58

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it originally stemmed from our interviews with people, frankly, where they were asked what they did, actually, their intake form more than the interviews, but that whole interview sort of timeframe where we had a more extensive intake form for people. So it really kind of stemmed from this intake form. And on that intake form, it turned out that there were only a few things that people said worked for them and that of those things. You know, quite a few people had done more than one and yet, they were only reporting one and so one might work for you, but not someone else. And it was a very instructive thing, you know because we were able to see that there was maybe only a handful of methods that rose to the top but just knowing those methods weren't enough, you also had to sort of systematically engage with them. And of course, we went from there to experiment with order effects, to experimenting with tweaking and changing the methods based on you know, more up-to-date science and knowledge of human consciousness and brains. And, you know, all of that. And so by the time and all of that had happened in kind of a onesie-twosie way. And the research before these first groups before the first sort of official finders course, experiments began. So we had, you know, refined in order of things, we had figured out some very important things like that some of the things that rose to the top of the research dark knighted people meaning they produced prolong, very negative, even, like suicidal level, you know, emotional experiences for people obviously, can't do much with those in a university research environment, right. Because you, you know, you're obligated as a scientist to put the health of your subjects above everything else, including the psychological health of your subjects above everything else. And so we had to deal with some of that stuff to figure out, could we even keep those methods in the protocol, and we wound up discovering interesting things about the night stuff, like a lot of it related to how depressed or how unhappy someone was before they used those methods. It also depended upon whether or not somebody had had a negative experience with, you know, sort of a negative peak experience, either a negative drug experience, or a negative, just normal peak experience, or even a negative near-death experience, whatever, you know, anything that's sort of in that classification of peak experiences, we don't think about the fact that people you know, some people go to hell, when they have a near-death experience, right? Like the books are published, and all of this white light stuff, you know, there's the tunnel of light, and, oh, we're going through it. But you know, the Christian media, especially the more fundamentalist Christian media, they've got, you know, they found plenty of people, and they've got plenty of books and stuff out there around people who went to hell, not sort of these heavenly type of experiences. And so near-death experiences can be very traumatic negative experiences, we all know, drug experiences, and psychedelic experiences, can be, quote, unquote, bad trips, right? Those are notorious. And what people also don't realise is that you know, peak experiences can be negative. And so we think of, you know, oh, I was standing on this mountain, looking at this beautiful vista. And all of a sudden, I was just one with everything. And I felt blah, blah, blah, right. And so that's the standard view of these things. But they can also be hellish, and just throw people into a very dark place. So the human brain and its ability to sort of do all of these different things has to be taken into account with a protocol like this. And it became clear that we, it was a good idea to have people as happy as they could be before they made it to the sort of gold standard methods. And also that it was important to try to give them a positive glimpse of fundamental well-being, even if just temporarily before they got to sort of the more hardcore methods in the programme. And so as a result of that, it wasn't just the methods that were discovered, from the research with the participants. But it was also an equal amount of time that was added to the beginning, just to mitigate the potential negative emotional effects that could come from people using some of those techniques. And that alone took a year to figure out, it sounds simple now when I say it, right? But you know, if you don't have any idea what's causing that stuff turns out to take a lot of time to try to figure that out. So and then verify it and make sure that that is the case and whatnot. And so by the time we made it to that first group of six, we had about a 12-week protocol that we were initially planning on. And the first part of that protocol was designed to deal with the Dark Knight stuff, the first six weeks, were solely designed to try to get people into a direction psychologically, whereas when they use the methods in the second six weeks, they weren't going to have these dark nights, or at least they were greatly reduced chances of having these dark night experiences. And that's worked very well, you know, knock on wood, I don't want to jinx it, or things like that, right, just sitting here on this podcast. But that work that has worked very, very well, over the years. You know, I remember maybe two or three years ago, checking in with our clinical staff, because some paper we were publishing, the editors asked us, and I said, you know, hey, you know, I just want to verify with you guys, we haven't ever seen any severe, psychologically adverse events during these protocol runs. And they were like, Yeah, I haven't seen that. And so That was really good. And so if you think about this protocol, you'll have to realise that initially half of it was just designed to avoid dark nights. And then the other half of it was actually the methods that were designed to reach to help people reach fundamental well-being. But it actually turned out that some of these methods that were designed to help people to mitigate dark nights wound up actually transitioning them. And so there were methods that were then put into the programme, that didn't actually rise to the top of the research. In fact, what they rose to the top of the research in was giving people a temporary glimpse of fundamental well-being very reliably, and then we then sort of use those in conjunction with other things to make that a positive that lives, you know, be more assured than any sort of negative class. So they would start off. Yeah, good,

Rufus Pollock  10:58

guys. So just to ask you a couple of things, was also in the listeners. So one, just you're using this phrase, and in Dark Knight, just for people listening dark, what you mean is, you're surely dark night of the soul, which in the Christian tradition, or is a classic description, which is that in mystical experience, or something else, that you actually rather than feeling, let's say, God's love, you fill in fact that the opposite, you know, completely abandoned or in suffering? So first of all, just what you're saying that I think it's really interesting, it's to say that these are quite powerful methods. In a way I like to think of it, I don't know how to put it, it's, what you're saying is other things can influence in a way the way that that goes. And that one of the risks that you'd identified from the intake stuff and other things was that these powerful methods could sometimes actually cause that. But I just what I particularly wanted to ask you was, can you give a call or an example of what these methods, just one example maybe of what the kind of methods that helped alleviate, you know, the risk of Dilaudid? So and also, what are the methods just kind of so people have a taste? What are the methods that would go into the course? I mean, no, no, there's they can go and do it. But just as an example, what's in the protocol? Yeah.

Jeffery Martin  12:13

Yeah, sure. And so the protocol is actually divided up to allow people to sample a wide range of methods, because at least at this time, and we've been working on it for years, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually match people to a specific method. And so it's designed to basically be a trial and error structure that people go through, as they go through the programme. And sometimes it's divided, I'll talk about the original protocol, and sometimes it's rather than the shortened newer protocol. But sometimes it was, you know, a couple of methods a week, or a couple of changes and what they were doing a week, shall we say, and other times, it lasted for an entire week, and they would do a method for an entire week. It's also important to note how long when needed to do methods, right? And so some of these methods, they were positive psychology-based methods. And so in the early part of the protocol, especially for the first few weeks, the first couple of weeks, we would bring in these positive psychology methods, sometimes just a one-off method, like a gratitude letter, or a eulogy exercise, or basically the things from positive psychology, which is an academic discipline, in psychology that deals with just making ordinary people happier, basically. So it's like a non-pathological side of psychology, more of like a thriving side of academic psychology. They have distilled down a handful of things that are basically their gold standard exercises. And so we use the number of those as one-off methods as people began the protocol. And so they would do maybe a couple of weeks. As an example, during the first two weeks of the protocol, they would also begin to do morning and evening exercises, which were also some types of forgiveness and gratitude and exercises like that began everything done in a very specific way, obviously, with very precise instructions, and, and all of that, but things like that were also drawn from the leading practices of the positive psychology movement that had really researched how to make things like that work. You know, one of the things about the general self help movement is that they get almost everything wrong, that they tell people to do, because they're not out there conducting a lot of research on people. I think one of my favourite examples is journaling. You know, we went through this phase where there were all sorts of self help books, telling you to journal you know, so like journaling makes you happier and all of that right. And there are academic findings that say journaling makes you happier, but They're very, very precise. Right. And so as an example, if you're journaling, and you're journaling on a bad experience, and the instructions for your journaling are, be very precise about your journaling, you know, just relive the experience, but a very precise, analytical way, right? So you're not just regurgitating or generally reliving or expressing the experience and putting it on paper, you're, as you're thinking back to that experience, you're really carefully analysing that. Write, that actually does make you happier. However, if you happen to get a journaling book that said, to just relive the experience, but not get into this intense analytical side of it, and you do that with a negative experience, it makes you less happy, right? And so these types of nuances generally aren't in mainstream books, unless they're in the books that are written by the academics or doing this research, which is few and far between. Because academics are punished basically, for publishing popular books, you know, I mean, inside the academic world, the only thing that there's a reward for is things like peer review papers and grants. And so you go get grants, which brings in money to the university, and then you write papers based on that, that increase the academic prestige of the university, and the paper lets you get another grant, and you repeat, and you just keep doing that again, and again, and again. And again. And that's effectively your job. Right? Your job is not to communicate with the public, you're not your job is not to publish mainstream books, and you're probably gonna get penalised in your career. If you do that, unless you're like, at the end of your career, and you're some super senior scientists person who's won every award already, you know, whatever else, and it's sort of okay. So conversely, on the journaling thing, if you have a happy experience, and you get journaling instruction that says, just really analyse that happy experience, you know, as you're thinking back to it, that actually makes you less happy, right, and if you just generically relive, and just sort of recount the details in your journal of a happy, you know, a good a positive experience that makes you happier. So these positive psychology exercises that we use in the programme are equally nuanced, right? And so when someone hears gratitude exercise, or forgiveness exercise or something like that, if they want to start using those things, they really need to find the positive psychology scientists that can provide the very precisely detailed instructions on how to not have that actually make things worse for you. I just want to stress that right up front, because it's very easy to hear lists of things like what we'll talk about today, and not realise that if they're not done in very specific ways, they can often be bad for you. Right. So there's at the beginning of the programme, this instruction around positive psychology, and that's just to make people happier, as they're starting the process, which relates to what we said a little bit ago, which is that the happier someone is, the less likely they are to have a dark night of the soul, right, and the less likely they are to have a severe prolonged period of depression come from using some of these more intense methods that come later in the programme. So we front load the programme with things that are designed, and very well scientifically proved to make you happier, as a way to adjust for that we use some, like Buddhist type protocols for meditation, that are also designed to give you I mean, they're really supposed to transition you but they don't really transition people so much. But what they do is they give people really good glimpses of fundamental lobbying, probably the most popular expression of these Rs are, you know, modified, and all of that, but they're close. The most popular expression of these is that people can go and just do on their own is the Go ink of Upasana movement, where all over the world there are like these 10 Day retreats, I think their 10 Day retreats, if I remember, right, it's been a long time ago. But let's just hypothetically say they're 10 days, maybe the two-week retreats, I don't know. And, you know, you go through a series of things, you know, you're meditating on your breath, you're meditating on the outside surface of your skin, you're just doing all of these different exercises. And you're doing it in there for like, 10 or more hours a day, I think, you know, and you're in silence the whole time and whatever else so we don't do any of that. You know, it's an hour and a half a day or so of practices between the positive psychology stuff and the meditation stuff. And so we did that because that was the most effective thing that we'd ever found that produced glimpses have, you know fundamental well-being, temporary experiences a fundamental well-being for people? And again, we're looking in that first six weeks to mitigate these issues, right? And so make people happier, give them glimpses, and then how do you assure that this predisposition to glimpses is positive glimpses and not negative glimpses? And so we use a group exercise. For that, we call it the group awareness exercise. It's also one of those things that appear here and there and various religions, spiritual systems and whatnot around the world. But it's basically like a descriptive exercise, someone describing a certain aspect of the contents of their experience, the thing that's different about this than just doing it on your own, is that it's one of the group forms of it, it's one of the social forms of it. And so people were put into small groups. And they basically do a round-robin process. If, you know, you hear people describing some people in that round-robin process describing temporary forms of fundamental well-being, and they're not freaking out, right, they're not having some horrible, scary experience, it basically Prime's your system to do the same right to have a more positive experience. And so it's that cocktail of things basically, that we were using, and the first six weeks of the original protocol to try to give people initial positive glimpses, and to, you know, to make them happier, so that when they arrived at the methods later in the programme, even you know, people that come into this programme are often not that happy, right? In order to do a really in this, these, these things used to last for four months, right, in order to do a four-month protocol. With this amount of time commitment and whatnot, you've got to be pretty unhappy, you know, you've got to really want to make a major change, right? And so it became very important to boost those people up at the beginning. So as we were running that first group of six, we began to notice something towards the end of this first six weeks, and that is that at least one of the people it was somebody who came in very, suicidally depressed really started to have a downward trend at about the six weak points, and their well being, and so they've had a great rise, but it had started the dip, and it hadn't dipped anywhere near down to where it was when they came into the programme. It was so way, you know, so good. But that dip in well-being concerned us. And so we decided to take a break from the original 12-week protocol for initially a week and it became two weeks to just really sort of deal with that person, but keep everybody together and progressing through the methods as a group, and that wound up staying as part of that original protocol. So it went from six weeks went from 12 weeks to 14 weeks at that point, and it became like a break period in the middle between the six weeks. And that wound up being a very good idea because other people had the same response and about the same timing as that person did when we started to allow, you know, dozens of people and more to use the protocol. And so in that period, we just basically gave them not a break from practices, but a break to sort of go back to any practice or practices that they had experienced in the programme up to that point and find what would sort of elevate their well being again and get it stabilised before they went into the second sort of more heavy lifting part of the programme back then the finders book wasn't out. And they also were reading and kind of we had everybody read hundreds of people read and comment on that draft of that book. That book is like a collaborative book, frankly, to make sure everybody understood it and whatnot. And so they call, you know, they read the book, in like, you know, Word document. And during that time as well. We also used during that time, an audio supplement from Dr. Jeffrey Thompson. From neuro acoustic research, he had this thing that he created for Deepak Chopra for some event for Deepak years ago, called the Sri Yantra, where he basically just looked at and analysed the methods, or the sort of the geometry of the Sri Yantra and turned it into sound. And it turned out that, you know, I was asking him I knew he's like the leading guy in the world on all this stuff for fun sound Ultra consciousness. And so I was saying, you know, do you have anything that we could use with our protocol that has transitioned people to fundamental well-being and this soundtrack had not quickly I mean, people would use it for a year or something. But some of the people that used it for a year did in fact transition. I tell you what, when you listen to it, and you're not in fundamental well being it can be kind of disturbing and freaky, but like it really Does something and then if you listen to it on the other side of fundamentally, your well being, you're sort of like, oh, this is really nice. So there's like some sort of audio alignment in that people can actually just go out to the web and order that. If you incidentally, anytime you're ordering something like your binaural beats product, do not listen to it on YouTube, do not get it in any mp3 type of format, because the compression messes stuff up. And so you need to find an original raw format, like a FLAC format, or some uncompressed WAV format, or something like that. And somebody like Jeffrey will always make that available. You know, generally speaking, these types of people like Jeffrey are like locked into publishing agreements with people. And so they have to, you know, they're they sort of, you know, biting their lip over stuff being available, and mp4 and mp3 and stuff like that, because they just know it's reduced effectiveness, but they can't do anything about it, because they've got these publisher agreements in place, and the publisher is going to do whatever they want with their content. But they still will almost always, if you go to their website have a version of it, that is uncompressed, that is actually as powerful as it can be, that's available and Jeffrey is no exception to that. Okay, so by this point, you know, we're at the eight week point, now, something happened in that first six weeks, that we didn't quite expect, and that is that group awareness exercise. And also, in some of the combinations of the things that we were doing, there was another exercise we put in there for positive psychology that dealt with transforming all of your memories, and about people and stuff into love. So that instead of when, you know, when you thought of somebody that you used to hate, when you thought of them, you would, it would just be the experience of love, that would come up. And so this turns out to this cocktail of stuff in the first six weeks of the programme actually wound up transitioning, a very sizable number of people, roughly about half of the people that were in, the programme will transition off of this cocktail of positive psychology methods. And these methods that were really just designed to get people to ready for the real, quote, unquote, real, it's in the second part of the programme. And then like the real methods in the second part of the programme would pick up like another 10 or 15% of people. And so that's, you know, it's sort of a funny thing that happened there. But it was those methods that were in the second part of the programme would then often deepen people, they would move them further into fundamental lobbying, and things like that. And so, and we would look at the statistics, you know, week by week, session by session, basically, to see where people were at. And so that's how we know things like that. And it's just very consistent over time with the protocol, we can like, you know, to the point where if it's, like, you know, 40 people out of the first half of the programme, you start asking yourself, okay, what have we screwed up? You know, or what's gone wrong in the first part, just because the numbers are just so reliable. And then you discover, Oh, crap, you know, these videos weren't available for some reason, and nobody would do it, of course, or whatever. So, the second half of the protocol was actually the things that were derived were things that were derived from the

Rufus Pollock  28:15

one second, Jeff Yes, because this is amazing, but also asking maybe an aside question, which is the theme. First of all, just to say for me, like I was somewhat, you know, I've done it, and I, I, GA was just, you know, really did it for me, it was, so I know exactly what you're talking about. But the more interesting question is just a comment you made there about kind of percentages and really tracking. And I also remember the programming I fill out every week. And I guess the question I have is, why does it seem so novel? I guess, you know, like, it seems like I know that like somebody will be a bit kind of react, I don't know, I can imagine some people listening to me, like, Oh, my God, it's like, you know, cya. You know, it's scientism. But I feel as though because I feel that you're very committed to the unlined thing and that these mysterious these experiences transcend. You know, it's not like we're reducing them to some kind of like, you know, put them in a box. But it's more like using these tools of inquiry of empirical research, like that point you just made there, which was like, Oh, I can track the percentage. And if it's off, that's kind of telling me something and actually useful. Anyway, to give an example, I talked to people who weren't quite a large retreat, you know, retreats, but it retreats recently, as like, when all the years like you've had like, a probably 10s of 1000s, maybe hundreds of 1000s of people over decades of calm. And do you have any data you've ever collected on just like, you just asked me to do a short survey before they arrive, and after they arrive, or even their well being, you know, like, let alone and you know, what they did or what really worked for them or anything? So I just, I guess that's my question, which is more broadly. Do you think there's an opportunity for more of this kind of data collection of this kind? And why is other people? Or do you know of other people who do that? And why? What gets in the way of it being done? You know, those are maybe three questions there. So, you know, do you think there's an opportunity to do more? Do you know, people who are doing more of that empirical approach? And what gets in the way of people doing it? In this kind of area?

Jeffery Martin  30:20

That's a great question. You know, there's obviously a massive opportunity to do it, we think people are crazy for not doing it. You know, lots of times, things aren't measured, because people don't want to know the answer. And so I won't say who it was. But there was a very large, famous company that implemented a mindfulness programme. And those people worked overtime, it was a very data-driven company, and those people worked overtime to ensure that there was no data collection on that programme. And it's basically because they didn't think it would show anything, and they thought the programme will get killed off, and they wanted it to continue. They wanted people to learn mindfulness, you know, they wanted people to so sometimes it really is that simple. You know, people just aren't confident, and the results, and, you know, they, those, we, we have an open policy of, you know, researching Pete, other people and other people's classes, and their protocols and their programmes and all of that. And almost no one lets us do that. You know, and the reason is, just that they're sure that it's, you know, not really doing much, in many cases, you know, we were in the very early days of the research, before, we had a lot of research subjects, we would ask everybody who was you know, we were dealing with a lot of teachers and stuff like that initially, because the inclusion criteria were very strict back, then you had to have a community, you had to have the inner religious tradition, or spiritual tradition that had a very clear definition of some type of Non-Symbolic experience, persistent non-symbolic experience or fundamental OB, you had to have the people. You had to have people that basically validated that you met those criteria, and so on, right, in order to be one of our participants. And so you better believe we asked, they were out, you know, they wind up being teachers, mostly right. And so you better believe we asked every single one of them for more participants, right, like, Who have you taught, you know, who is, you know, in your sphere of outreach and instruction and whatnot, that you feel would make a good subject, and we almost never got anybody? So I think that there's this kind of,

Rufus Pollock  32:49

what about evaluating that programme? I mean, do you have you ever, that's my other thought is just asking people if you could evaluate, but that's been also rare, you're saying is, but yeah,

Jeffery Martin  32:59

we, of course, yeah. And we have done it, where people let us do it, you know, for sure. And, you know, obviously, we wouldn't be asked to come and often meet with people at their events, or around the time of their events, or things like that, especially foreigners, you know, that were like coming in travelling into America, we would do our interviews when they were in the country, whenever possible, just to save money, basically, back then, of having to fly halfway around the world for someone day interview and have, you know, sabots, cost 5000 hours to do that interview or something, right. And so, we were around for these events. And of course, you know, we were doing on official data collection, right? And so, you know, it would be with this race, we with the people, we'd be going out to lunch with them, we'd be seeing them at the mixers in the evenings, oftentimes, and stuff like that. And so we were constantly collecting data on the people who were at a given event, even if it wasn't formal research, Endeavour. So we did a lot of that. And that's how we also knew that they were kind of smart not to let us do it. Because, you know, they probably wouldn't have wanted those results, put out there from a business standpoint or whatever, right? But then some people were like, please come and do it. Or some people were just like, you know, you totally have my approval. I don't know why you're at the event, you know, you totally have my approval to just talk to whoever you want, and conduct you know, whatever research you want during you can't do it during the event. You know, we'd I don't want my people distracted from the things that I'm having them do or anything like that. And they would some of them would announce it from the front of the room, you know, the Christian mystic named John Crowder, this way as an example, and he you know, right on the first day, right up front, he's like, has me stand up in the crowd, and he points to me and he says, you know, basically, this guy is here doing this research from this university, go talk to him. And that was really helpful, you know, so it was a whole mix of different things and you know, Crowder's crowd, I thought was extraordinary. Frankly, you know, Crowder, had a lot of people and fundamental well-being in his crowd, you know, whatever he was doing from his Christian mystic perspective, it was powerful. So, you know, I think a lot of it related to someone's confidence, Rick Wyman from Vortex Healing was fine with us, you know, hanging around his events. And, you know, they were often small enough that you could basically just talk to everybody at breakfast, and lunch and dinner, you know, at the hotel where they were all sequestered. And all of that and get a good feel for it. And, you know, we were able to see that by a certain class that he represented people would be in fundamental well-being, and by and large, people were in fundamental Well, being by that class, we differed with him on some of his views, like he said that it would happen in this one class. And when we were talking to people and interviewing them, and it often happened in earlier classes, but so what, right, it's a very effective method. For trend, we only found one person, and the class that we went and researched was the one that was supposed to transition you that wasn't that wasn't transition. That's an incredible success rate. Right now, these people have been working on this stuff for years, they've been taking classes for years by that point, you know, and all that. But nonetheless, that's a very high success rate. And so, you know, we do find people out there like that, and that are open to allowing us to research. The other research that's done by other researchers is very sporadic, and it's very small, so oftentimes done. For graduate student work, you know, maybe they've got a student that's doing a master's degree and something related to transpersonal psychology or something, and they'll go out, and they'll research some group. And some, usually, those are healing related, but they'll scoop in some fundamental wellbeing oftentimes, as part of it, or you'll have somebody that's doing a PhD, and a programme like that, and they'll go out and they'll do, you know, five or six people, or sometimes just one or three people or something like that. And so the research is really very sporadic, that's out there largely, were the first real sort of systematic, large scale effort.

Rufus Pollock  37:10

I mean, even just I want to go on about the having, having this kind of more phenomenological description of fundamental well-being, I mean, that's what I want to maybe. So just to come back to the protocol, then it just is one example of a method from the second half, because I only go into detail, I really want to emphasise it to listeners, and you're emphasising that, it's quite important that you do this, do the protocol. And you do that there's quite a thought that's going into this and the setup, but just one example, just so people have a flavour of what was in it that you'd found from your original interviews? Like, what's one example of a practice in the second half?

Jeffery Martin  37:43

Sure, I actually think it's an interesting mix of things, you know, and so like headless way, is, basically leads off the second half of the programme, that's a free thing that they can go out and look up and do today if somebody really wants to, I don't want to talk more about that, or what's interesting about that, because there's kind of a spoiler that will prevent it from working if I do. And so people just need to go try it and experience it and see if it works for them. But the interesting thing, for instance, about that protocol, and that method, and it's a variety of different methods, put out these days maintained by a guy named Richard Lang, who's not the originator of that method that was originated by someone else, you know, 50 or 60 years ago. Now, it's modern, it's new. And it's nothing like a lot of the other modifications and stuff that are out there. But it transitions quite a few people. And what happens is you have these people that come to the research that has been diligent students have some sort of like Buddhist tradition, or Hindu tradition, or Christian tradition, or whatever it is, forever. And have like very little luck with that, right? And they're really proud oftentimes, of their background and how hard they studied and when it expert they are, and this or that tradition, or whatever else. And you know, it's headless way, this really simple, quirky, bizarre little technique that winds up transitioning them after all that work, right? They almost hate that because they don't like, you know, they want to be like talking about how they learned all this stuff. And they're this expert in whatever system, they're an expert in. Right? And they don't want to be like, Oh, but you know, that was all you know, it was actually this bizarre, quirky little method called a headless way that transition.

39:30

It's so funny because people often have psychological resistance to how they had it be the thing that worked for them.

Jeffery Martin  39:36

So there's that and then you know, we use some aspects. And the week after that has a method that comes from an Australia guy in Australia. His name is Richard and he put he has this thing called actual freedom. And it's kind of a broad confusing method to try to use and his system. But for us, we began to become aware many years ago when his method really first started working for people, that this was a method that transition people further in fundamental well-being than any other thing that we knew of you more or less had to be in fundamental lobbying for it to do that. But if you were in fundamental well being this was like an incredible method for that it also would transition people slightly earlier. But he, his group is kind of less interested in that they're interested in their further thing. And so we basically just looked at that method, tried to figure out which part of it was really sort of working the magic, and if we could tweak it in any way to, you know, make it more effective. And then that became the next method. And the programme. And then the programme after that is a mantra based

Rufus Pollock  40:49

one method one question, just, if I can come in just to ask you, it's really interesting. You say, Oh, you came across it, how it used to this group? How do I actually remember looking it up and then coming, I think, don't people come across it? But how did you like it's quite a new thing. I mean, I remember reading it like, how did you come across it you was this from your earlier interviews? And there were some people who mentioned it, or Yeah, how'd you come across new methods? I guess I'm asking.

Jeffery Martin  41:14

Yeah, well, you know, I don't know an unprecedented network of people and fundamental well-being, that is part of the research. And so we're just always hearing about stuff, people are always recommending that we look into something because they think that they maybe they're in a group where it's having some success, or I mean, that's how we found vortex healing, as an example. So sometimes, you know, sometimes I'll just be doing events and random people have come up to me. So in this case, there were we were doing some research on some late location people we had, and we were trying to sort of fill out our knowledge, we'll probably get into these terms later. I don't remember if we did it earlier. And the last thing or not, but we're trying to fill out our knowledge about the location for really. And it turns out that there were some there was a handful of people at this point that had had this method be successful, to transition to location four, and you just really didn't, you know, when you ask people, hey, what worked for you to get to location four? The answer was usually I have no idea. And so to have, you know, a sample of people say, well, it was this, that did it for me, that made that very interesting for us to go and look into. So yeah, it was just part of our normal research, with binders.

Rufus Pollock  42:32

But I think that's actually a really great point to come actually, to the locations people have heard you maybe mentioned it now, briefly. So, to step back, the first, I think one of the first breakthroughs was trying to look at these phenomenological markets, compared to previous research efforts, looking at what could be called transpersonal, psychology, or fundamental Well, being something that's more than just kind of the positive thing that's kind of, yeah, transcendent, you know, or self-transcendence, or, you know, in the Maslow hierarchy. That was the first thing was these phenomenological markers, you know, what was it like for memory? What was it like for your emotions? And I remember you describe that as a breakdown, I think that's a very good point. And then what I'm hearing, and I'm gonna kind of I know it a little bit longer than leading you in is to ask you, so you start out this kind of map is that way you talk about these locations? Could you tell us a bit about what you mean by locations in fundamental well-being? And more generally, like the Martin matrix, maybe this a moment to start talking a little bit about that?

Jeffery Martin  43:34

Sure, absolutely. So what happened was out of the early interviews, what we were really trying to do was sort people for neurological work later, you know, sort them for fMRI experiments, certain for EEG experiments, things like that. And oftentimes, what you have to do is figure out how you're going to conduct an experiment. It's not like you just put somebody in a brain scanner and take pictures of their brain, all this magical data flows out that you can just make sense of, you've got to have very precise experiments based on various specific hypotheses, in order to be able to test and, you know, see what might be going on and things like that. And in a novel area like this, where virtually no work had been done before us, in a comprehensive way outside of, you know, like, the TM tradition had a tonne of research right on Transcendental Meditation. But nobody had really gone across a bunch of traditions before. And so we were sort of left at Ground Zero starting that type of project. And what you do is you start by just beginning simple data collection, so surveys and interviews, and cognitive science-based interviews, you know, what's changed in memory, what's changed in thoughts and thinking, what's changed in emotion? What's changed in perception, things like that? And you're just like, okay, there are these different, you know, broad things that happen in the brain. Let's start trying to figure out where there might be some changes. And then from there, be able to figure out how we might test those changes to see you know, what is actually happening and then have a system and so on. And so what came out of that actually was pretty useful, maybe the most useful thing that we kind of come up with, aside from the protocol for people that want to transition to. But if people don't want to transition, the protocol doesn't matter that much. So the other thing that's very useful is just this map, essentially, of these different types of fundamental wellbeing that emerged from all of that early research, a psychological map, essentially a cognitive science-based psychological map, what we began to notice is that people self-reports began to cluster together, and two different buckets, initially, we call them buckets, not locations, because we have, you know, this person would be in this bucket, this person would be in this other bucket, that type of thing. And so, when we started talking about it publicly, we had to stop using the word buckets. We were not kidding. We're just using it internally for a very long time. And we're like, Oh, crap, you know, what are we going to call it when we talked to other people about this. And one of the things that we've seen is that most of these spiritual systems and religious systems and stuff like that they had hierarchical layers. And so it's like, you know, this was the lower point. And then this was like, where you progress to next, and then you were supposed to progress to here, and then you were supposed to progress up even more, and then, you know, it was like a progressive series of things. And our data did not suggest that that was the way that this should really be optimally viewed, we didn't feel not that there weren't progressions in it, certainly, there were progressions in it that we can talk about in a minute. But that, like everyone shouldn't necessarily be progressing. You know, that's not really what's ideal for everyone's life, you know, it's possible that like, let's say that there's like four stages or something, right? It's possible that like, stage two is the optimum point for most of humanity, right? And so if you have a system that's trying to push you to stage three, and stage four, that can be problematic, potentially just for living your life, you know, and going to work and stuff like that. And we didn't want to be seen as advocating a progression like that. Or validating progressions like that, we've kind of felt like, wherever you land in fundamental well-being, that's great. Some things are great for some lives, some great some things are great for other lives. But it's important to have those sorts of nuances. And so we wound up with the word locations along a related continuum of experience. And so we have this continuum. And Aanand is location one and location two, and location three and location four. Also notice it's not designed, you know, for any sort of book sales, or anything like that, right? You're not the alchemist at location one, right? Or something sexy that people will want to identify with. And, you know, what are you? Oh, you're the wizard? Oh, wow. Well, I'm just the alchemist, you know, but I want to be the wizard someday, or, you know, stuff like people do, right? Or, or, Oh, you're purple, or I'm still red, you know, I hope one day to become green, and maybe someday purple, and maybe even translucent, right? And so there's all these sorts of psychological things that are priming people and making people feel better about themselves or worse about themselves, based on where there are allowing judgments to be made about, you know, I'll look at how that group but there's so little, they're just read, you know, they're so primitive compared to us, and, you know, things like that, we just didn't want to contribute to anything remotely like that. And so he said, it's a continuum of related experiences. And a continuum was a number line, it goes this way, right? It doesn't go up and down. So it's a continuum that goes across basically, and it goes from certainly more basic versions of the experience on the left side, two more, you know, out there experiences on the right side. But that's where so that's where that naming convention comes from. And then at over the, we started off with these locations and talking publicly about these locations, because as far as we could tell, nobody had ever heard of them. Nobody had a frame of reference for them, you know, we knew all these groups all around the world. And what was clear to us is that they all had ranges of this continuum that they considered acceptable. So for instance, if you're a Christian mystic, location three is the acceptable form of Non-Symbolic experience of you know, fundamental well-being, if you're in a location to you're not right with God, what your location or you're not right with God,

Rufus Pollock  49:25

right, what does location three look like just to give people a flavour for people listen to her.

Jeffery Martin  49:28

So it's just it often has a divine flavour to it, it doesn't have to but it can have like can also have a pan psychist flavour depending upon someone, but it often has a divine flavour associated with it. There's a sense of union with that Divine Presence, you know, that sort of all-pervading divinity, if you will. So there's a sense of continually ever-increasing sort of union or merger with it. You never become one with it, because you can't be God. Right God is apart from this world. And you know, the Abrahamic traditions and whatnot, right? And so but you, you are increasingly merging with it, right dissolving into it and, you know, blah blah, right? It's has a single meta emotion is there isn't an expression of personal emotion can feel divine, it's, it's non-personal either way it can feel pan-psychic, sort of an impersonal emotion, but often feels like a divine emotion. And it feels like a combination of love and joy and compassion, things like that, with any given time, one of those more forward, you might be feeling more the love component of it, but the other components are still there, there can be additional components of it as well based on someone's kind of programming from their religious system, or their culture or whatever else. But it's always going to have love and joy and compassion, and those components. And it's like a divine amazing, it's like, you know, it's really like the peak human experience. So easy to see why people latch on to it. And in trying to its tops out everything, you know, when we do all of the when we do a bunch of measures across all kinds of things like, you know, gratitude and stuff like that, if you're in location three, more or less, you know, you're at the apex of all of those types of things, all those very sort of positive human experience type things.

Rufus Pollock  51:21

And what I'm trying to get is just for people listening, these two things really are very useful. So what is you saying this, when you looked at these different factors that were showing up, you know, whether it's about emotion or about cognition, they were kind of buckets. So just to recap your time, I know it was original, I think it's useful to say, it wasn't like just people were all over the map, if you thought there were like three dimensions or even two dimensions, it wasn't like we just had every pupil, there were kind of clusterings, or buckets, which we now call locations. And your second point, which is a bit like a normal map, is that when you look at a globe, when you look at a map, there isn't like necessarily a better or worse place, there are different locations. Now it's true, you know, the way I suppose what I'm saying, if I'm at least travelling by land to go, I don't know, from England, Italy, I need to go, I often will go through France, but I could fly, you know, kind of metaphorically. So there's, there's this also this valley that there is some kind of secrete sequencing, in the sense that your locations are labelled, like 1234, and so on, which there's some kind of sequencing, but the point is, you can jump, it's not that one is necessarily better than the other, it's more like there are countries maybe ever further afield, and often to have got to go to further countries you will have gone, you will likely move on to some nearer countries, right, that's what I'm getting. So what you just described there for listeners is you're saying in this, for example, location three things, there's a kind of cluster of in a sense of union with the Divine or something bigger than yourself This presents, there is emotion versus maybe other lucky for there's no emotion, the emotion is generally a positive love, or compassion or gratitude, etc. And just getting at what you mean by these buckets is this kind of clustering of both ways of perceiving the world, the emotional landscape, the way your cognition is working, and your sense of self and things like that? That's it, you know, to give an example, you know, I guess like location, one, which is the first one is going to kind of have less of those things, maybe, but also just be different in your sense of self. And what I'm hearing is you're saying is what you started to notice your initial work was starting to find this, this map? And why I guess the question I'd ask in a moment is, why is the map useful? Do you think? And secondly, maybe you could talk a bit about how the map became the matrix as a second point. So first, why is it useful?

Jeffery Martin  54:01

Yeah, sure, the map is useful, because it's very helpful to know where you're at, in fundamental well-being. So for instance, you know, locations One and Two and Location One, when you transition to Location One, what basically happens is your survival system gets rewired right. And so the distinction between a finder and non-finder begins at location one, and a non-finder is kind of got a constant process running in the background as all animals do, you know, where you have a sense that somehow at this moment, things are not okay. Something might not be okay. And your system is kind of looking for it. You know, it's on the lookout for it. And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, the ceiling could fall in, you know, any number of things could happen. It's, it's proactive on the part of our nervous system, to be able to, you know, have that experience. However, it's not really in Same with modern life. You know, I mean, the odds of when was the last time you were in a building with the ceiling villain, right? I've never been in the building, or the ceiling building, right? I'm like, whatever, 52 years old now, I like to think that my dad lived his entire life until his 80s, mid-late 80s. And he never had a ceiling falling, right? And so, generally speaking, we're living very safe lives. We're not in a Brazilian rainforest with all kinds of stuff trying to kill us. Fundamental well-being maybe not be such a good idea in that situation, right? But for us, we really live very privileged lives. And we live very safe lives, fundamentally. And so we don't need the wiring from, you know, 1020 30,000 years ago, as a bird does, or every other animal does. Because we're not living under constant threat, we've managed to more or less subjugate all of the other animals and, you know, nothing's gonna run in here and rip my arm off while I'm talking to you or anything like that, in a safe country, I'm in a safe place, there's not going to be gunfire that comes through the window. So there's a transition that happens with fundamental well-being around that type of safety and survival system, from a sense that things are fundamental may not be okay. Not that they aren't okay, but that they may not be okay, at this moment, and what that produces for people, which is often as a background sense of worry, or, you know, anxiety, things like that, that then sits at the foundation of their nervous system. And everything else is kind of built up. On top of that, unless you have normal egoic, you know, for lack of a better word, human culture, which just as we know, not, you know, amazing in many ways, we're all time leading, you know, time in terms of poverty reduction, and all sorts of great things about our current situation, but plenty of things that also seem pretty messed up too, right. Not ideal. Unless you happen to be like one of us living, you know, as one of the top 5% richest people in the world, even if we're like the poorest people in our countries, or whatever, right? And so realistically, what changes is a sense comes in that things are fundamentally okay. And location. And your experience of the world is built up on top of that, not in an unrealistic way, and not in a way that immediately transforms all of your emotional experience to be positive or anything like that. And Location One, you still have a mix of positive and negative emotions, you can still get triggered, you can still get severely triggered if your spouse comes home and says, I'm divorcing you and I'm taking everything, of course, there's going to be an emotional expression in your system from that, and you're going to be able to effectively deal with that and whatnot. But if you pause a look down deep, paradoxically, somehow, at that same moment, there will be a sense that everything is fine doesn't make any sense that you know, the sky is falling in your world. And yet, somehow deep down, your experience is built on this guy not really following everything is okay.

Rufus Pollock  58:09

And how does knowing this? That's the question, I guess for me the location, then that's like location one or generally throughout? How does help know locations? How's that beneficial? Then, I guess is my question. Why is it useful to know that

Jeffery Martin  58:23

it's not a great idea to run a business and location three, you can really, really run an effective business and location one. So if your life is as an entrepreneur, you know, you're reading I think my bio earlier a little bit, just a brief covering of what I've done, I've done a lot of entrepreneurship, right? Thank God, I didn't transition into location three, and just started trying to do entrepreneurship from there. Because having an experience of union with the Divine having, you know, that's all-pervasive divine love for everyone and everything that doesn't make you the best steward of your company's resources.

Rufus Pollock  59:01

Have you seen that happen?

Jeffery Martin  59:04

Absolutely. We've had plenty of people in the research that's discussed that versus, you know, Location One, or location to location Two is probably the best place to run something like that from as an example, right? And so knowing the map and knowing your life, are you going to live alone? Are you going to live with a partner? Are you going to have children you're not going to have children there are consequences to practical real-life decisions. Fundamental well-being is just one aspect of our life. You know, oftentimes people who are religious or spiritual about it, it's like the penultimate thing that everything gets wrapped around. But we view it as just another component of life that has to integrate into with the other aspects of your life and if that includes going to work and going to a job, probably a good idea not to be out at a location unless you really carefully selected that job. For the location for right if that includes having certain kinds of relationships in your life. It's probably better done from certain locations instead of other locations. And so it's very useful, just from a practical standpoint is also useful to help people clarify where they're at. You know, there's all sorts of teachers out there that are talking about their experience of fundamental well-being, even in specific traditions, you know, like, I remember, we made a pass through the Tera Vaada community, which is a sub-discipline of Buddhism a number of years ago, many, many years ago now. And I then they have a very structured map, they have like the arising and passing away and stream entry and first path and second path. And third, it was complex map of enlightened right, then there will, there, there were, their fundamental Well, being isn't like, right, and your work, your way to be an are hot, which is an enlightened person, and all of that. And I would, you know, sit in front of a teacher one day, and get their information and stuff, and we'd be done. And I'd be like, Okay, now, can you tell me for your students? phenomenologically? What is it that a student has to report to you, that you look for, for you to say, ah, they have experienced the arising and passing away, or they have experienced stream entry, or whatever, right? There's a bunch of these. And then I would ask, and different, again, often highly regarded Tera, Vaada, teacher the next day, and they would have totally different answers. For these things, you know, like one person's phenomenological descriptions of the arising and passing away was like another person stream entry. phenomenological descriptions, right. And so they're all deriving this authority from these 1000s of year old texts, and stuff like that. But, you know, we can't understand really something written 150 years ago, in America in English as an English speaking American, right? The culture was just so different, back then. And we're not situated in that culture. And even though it's the same language, and it's technically the same country, and it's technically the same people, you know, any, any period historian, you know, they write their dissertation, you know, in there to get their PhD translating some aspect of something from 150 years ago, that was written into the modern understanding, right, is that you can literally, it's like new knowledge for our contemporary world. You know, that's the requirement of a PhD, like some great breakthrough, amazing new knowledge that has been, you know, afforded to society, right? And so, if that's the case, how can you really expect to get a lot of precision out of something written in a language that isn't yours, maybe is not even a common language anymore, from many 1000s of years ago, that may or may not have even come to modern times, and an accurate original format, whatever else, right. And so what we learned is that you basically have all of these, you know, differences, even within a given tradition. Some people like vortex healing, it's newer, you know, someone like Rick can be very specific with the teachers that he anoints, and you can work with them very precisely, and you can keep everything very tight, right. But for something like Tera, Vaada, Buddhism that came on the scene a really long time ago, that's impossible. And so one of the things that the map helps with is, because it's drawn from actual living, human experience, if one teacher is talking about one thing, and another as teachers is talking and calling out the same thing, but describing it something different, you have like an independent framework, that you can be slotting these people and what they're talking about into, and that helps if you're a sort of a student of this, it helps bring a tremendous clarity, to really everyone that you're ever going to listen, talk about this stuff. And for that, we do have to make the transition from continuum to matrix because the teachers themselves really people do not know about the continuum. That's why we put the continuum at first, and that we made sure that was the only thing that we put out for a number of years, because we wanted to give it time to sort of permeate the, you know, the interested people sort of space. Before we talked about the other axis of the matrix, which is basically depth,

Rufus Pollock  1:04:00

the other the depth. And so because today, I think we probably hit our time, that is going to be episode three, I think, is going to be covering later how how the layers interact with the locations to come the matrix, which I think is a really great topic for next time. I mean, I just want to say I think, first of all again, thank you, I look forward to our next episode. Is there anything you want to say that you want to end with for today and are at our at this moment and with his great trailer for what we're going to cover next? I think that point, I just want to emphasise at the very end, which is this point, that um I suppose what could seem intellectual like having this map, which actually, by the way, many traditional reason have they have their stages or their thing is phenomenally helpful, I think in a sense, and the way I think of it a little bit for myself is a bit of a Like Health Care Medicine of the body, if we have no model even and it's not, it's not the truth, but we don't have a map, or some relatively useful understanding of the body, we're gonna have a lot of difficulty treating it and our understanding, oh, you're at this moment, you know, in your, in your disease. So we should do that. Or you're in this moment of your healing process. So we should, it's time for you to practice walking, you know, if you're recovering from a stroke versus do this other thing. And I feel that that is really valuable, I would echo that I find it phenomenally useful to suddenly make sense of things. And with this grounding back into very empirically verifiable for yourself in a phenomenological experience, oh, I'm having these kinds of feelings or this experience of myself. That I think is also the markings are very clear in that regard, and very new in a way neutral. And so I want to say that that's, I think, a phenomenally important point, again, of this map, and it's the best map that I have seen. For my part, I would say just just for listeners, I would say it's the best map. I've seen him this kind of for my part. So I want to thank you, Jeffrey, I really look forward to our next episode. Is there anything else you'd like to say before signing off today?

Jeffery Martin  1:06:19

No, I think that's great. If people want more information, they can go to their research site, Non-Symbolic.org

Rufus Pollock  1:06:25

And your personal website. Yeah. Dr. Jeffrey Martin. Thank you. I'll put all the links up in the Episode Notes, please follow along on the life itself. podcast, which you can find on all major platforms and our website. Until next time. Thanks so much.