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

SPEAKERS Rufus Pollock, Jeffery Martin

Rufus Pollock  00:00

Welcome back to the life itself podcast and the third in a series of dialogues with Dr Jeffrey Martin. Jeffrey is a founder of the transformative technology space, and he's a serial entrepreneur and a social scientist who researches personal transformation and the states of greatest human well-being. for over 15 years, Jeffrey has conducted the largest international study on consistent Non-Symbolic experience, which includes the types of consciousness commonly known as enlightenment, non-duality, the peace that passes understanding unit of experience and hundreds of other times. This has resulted in the first reliable cross-cultural and pan-tradition classification system for these types of experiences. It has also led to the fundamental discovery that these were psychological states that had been identified and adopted for 1000s of years by many cultures and belief systems. They are also not inherently necessarily spiritual or religious or limited to any given cultural population. And it can be moulded in many ways to shape the experience. And more recently, his youth this research to make systems available to help people obtain profound psychological benefits in a rapid, secular, reliable and safe way. And we ended just for those of us joining, or who may have missed it or need a reminder, we finished our last episode on the location map of the Martin matrix with this, this map of fundamental well-being or even you could say, a map of enlightenment, a map of these kinds of states. And so, Jeffrey, I wonder if you could, you know, we've already covered that map, you're about to talk about depth, you talked about locations, and you're about to talk about depth? Sure. Tell us a bit about that.

Jeffery Martin  01:50

Absolutely. Thanks. It's great to be with you. Again, I very much appreciate this opportunity to speak with you and everyone today. So the original research that we did uncover the matrix, which is a more or less two-dimensional map. And if you think about the x-axis, which would go sort of from left to right, that is the different types of fundamental aubaine, like the higher classification types, and those are not always in someone, right? And so those deal with rewiring the brain, and things like that, however, there's also a depth or a Y axis. So you could think of that as going from sort of bottom-up above each one of the locations. And so each location has a range of deaths. Now, there are many different locations. And there are more deaths than we'll talk about today, as well. But for the most part, the vast majority of people that will ever experience this will fall within a certain range. And so that's usually what we find it, you know, most important to talk about. So today we'll talk about four deaths, essentially. And that's, again on the Y axis. And so if you really map that out, you think about there being four primary locations that someone might be in for different types of it. And then you have four different essential layers of depth. For each one of those, you start to realise that this is one of those things, that there's a lot of different types of the experience up. And that is more than that. Because for each one of the layers of that, you can be in that layer in a very shallow way or more of a mid-range way or more of a deep way. And so there's a range of experiences, even within each one of these categories, or types of depth. So there are a lot of different ways to experience fundamental well-being. And this is why it can be so confusing. When someone is out there listening to YouTube or reading books or going to workshops, or whatever else. And they're being exposed to all of these different ways. That fundamental well-being is being expressed, and you might have teachers or systems or whatever saying this is what it is, you know, but they often don't agree with each other even within their tradition. As we talked about last time, I think they often don't agree with each other. And so this is the reason it's because it's a vast landscape, when you start to look at it, and oftentimes what people are talking about when they're talking about progressing and fundamental wellbeing is a very small part of this overall matrix. So for instance, yesterday or last time we talked about not yesterday, actually, we shot that a long time ago now, right? But the last time we were together, we talked about location one being sort of the most shallow or simple or basic form of fundamental well-being. And then there's a location two and a three and a four. And most people will land into one of those. And oftentimes, they'll just sort of stick there, they might not, you know, progress or develop, it sort of depends on what's going on with them, there aren't a lot of traditions that would consider Location One a valid form of fundamental well-being location. One is sort of like the poor stepchild matrix. And the reason for that is because it's just not like, you know, some sort of overwhelming type of experience, most of the traditions would either associate location two, or location three or in some rare cases, location four, as you know, kind of a valid spot from a continuum standpoint. And so when we're talking about a tradition, discussing the depth and discussing progression, within its sort of, you know, rule sets and belief systems and dogma and stuff like that, what we're usually talking about is people progressing deeper into a location not further along the locations. And that's a very important distinction that can help people to sort of sort things out in their minds. So as we look through the different layers, Layer One is what we often associate with the mind, frankly, with thoughts or emotions, the layers are often what you are associated with. And so if you are really sort of rooted in to layer one, you're typically rooted into a sense that you are much more your thoughts and emotions and things like that, then not. Now, that may be a surprise to people who know about fundamental well-being and who have listened maybe to our prior conversations, because there's a big shift, of course, it happens from no fundamental well-being to fundamental well-being even just at location, one, with the sense of kind of a fundamental discontentment in the system, shifting to a sense that things are fundamentally Okay, the quieting down, oftentimes of the narrative mind to some degree, you know, negative emotions falling off more rapidly and things like that. However, one if you're, if you're still in location, one, layer one, or frankly, even location to layer two, layer one, I'm sorry, location to layer one. You can still be very identified with your mind very identified with your thoughts and your emotions, you would still basically say no, you know, that's more or less who and what I am, very rarely do you run across a spiritual or religious tradition that says that that is a valid form of fundamental well being right? They're all working on getting people to realise No, you're not your thoughts. No, you're not your emotions, you're not your mind, that type of thing. And so, you know, some places are just sort of excluded from a lot of the religious and spiritual traditions that are out there. If you move up into layer two, layer two starts sounding a lot more like what people have probably heard, and, you know, YouTube videos from spiritual teachers, or maybe their own spiritual or religious tradition or whatever else. And that is, it brings in a sense of spaciousness, a sense of emptiness, a sense of spacious, emptiness for some, right, but you can just have one or the other, there can just be a sense of increased spaciousness, there can be a sense of increased emptiness. Or there can be the two, combined spacious and empty, it feels miraculous, frankly, all of a sudden, you just sort of realise, wow, everything is just here. It's all just sort of here on its own. And there's a sense of the miraculous, that's kind of arising with that, as you deepen into it, you really sort of get a sense, okay, this is all of this, everything that I'm looking at, it's made of this, you know, spacious emptiness type stuff, however, that's showing up for you, I'll just use the combined word. But again, it can just be the spaciousness or just the emptiness or whatever else, right? And that spacious, emptiness is kind of containing everything and is everything. Everything is made of it. It's arising of it. If you go deep enough into it, your own identity will shift and you'll have this aha moment that's like, oh, wait a minute. I'm not my thoughts and emotions. I'm the spaciousness or I'm the emptiness or I am the spacious emptiness and it will feel like that is your identity. That is who In what you are, who and what you're made of, and all of that, as you continue to deepen, and through the layers, the next thing that begins to happen basically on the cusp, more or less between layers two and layer three is the emptiness starts to have a fullness that comes in. And so if this is the emptiness, you start to perceive a fullness coming in. And this is where, if you've been in the spiritual or religious space for any length of time, especially on the eastern side of things, you've no doubt heard people talk about, you know, the emptiness and the fullness, and how the emptiness is fullness, and the fullness is emptiness, and whatever. So that is that point of one can think of it as sort of that point of development, through the layers of depth. On the other side of that, you have the fullness coming more to the foreground. And that's layer three. And layer three, has many different ways that it can be experienced, just as we talked about location being sort of the broadest range of experience, and the many different ways that location two can show up. And some of the other locations, having much more narrow ranges of experience, locate layer three as the broadest layer, in terms of different types of experiences. And so this one comes into layer three, you generally, you know, will start to perceive a fullness. But not everyone will perceive it that way. Some people will just perceive that there is something all-pervasive, literally all-pervasive, right? Now, this may start as just a little sense. And, almost all of the layers, layer two, layer three, layer four, they almost always start as kind of a sense, it's like, you can sort of tell that some property or quality of it is there. But you're not directly perceiving it more fully yet. And then, you know, putting attention on that kind of pulls you over time, into a more full experience of that doing that pulls you more into having an identity shift into it. So there's this kind of progression that goes along with each one of these layers. So as you go into layer three, layer three can feel a lot of different ways, initially to people as they're beginning to sense into it, they might sense that there's something that's all-pervasive, they might sense of fullness, you know, they might be in layer two, as an example, and start to get a sense of fullness and the emptiness or something like that, not one that's being strongly perceived or anything yet, but just a sense of it, just like a hint of a hint that something in that direction might be there. It might be a range of emotions, like an amazing sort of joy, or love, or combination of joy and love, and even compassion or, you know, gratitude can sneak its way in there all sorts of things like that. So So it's sort of a tight bundle of these types of more positive feelings and emotions. And that relates, you know if you remember from if you watched the previous video on this series, that sounds a lot like location three, location three has that dominant, meta emotion if you will, that is a combination of love and joy and compassion, that same meta emotion combination can occur in layer three of location two, the difference between the two is that in location two, you still have personal emotions that are being experienced that meta emotion is not going to be a personal emotion, it's going to be impersonal, you might feel it as divine, or pan psychic thing that we talked about last time or whatever. Nonetheless, in location two, layer three, when you're experiencing that, you can also still have the experience of personal emotions and you don't have that, and location three. And so as you move into location three, you are looking I'm sorry, layer three, you will eventually get to deeper and deeper and deeper into it, right? So you get to a place where there is it does feel like they're sort of an all-pervasive field, or an all-pervasive presence that can have that very positive emotional and feeling component or it can have none of that it can be emotionless, it can be flat. For other people. That's not sort of a guaranteed part of the experience for people and you can tell sort of your system's default directionality from what is showing up regarding those emotional or feeling expressions. If you're getting that love and joy or It can just be one of those, it can just be the love, it can just be the joy, right, or it can be a combination, that's your system is probably more inclined to go to location three. Next, if you are not getting anything, if you have a more flat experience a more emotionally neutral type of experience or whatever, your system is probably more inclined to go up to layer four. Next, you can bias this by what you're putting your attention on. So if you're in layer three, and you know, sometimes you get a glimpse of a little love, but it's generally flat, or sometimes you get a glimpse of, you know, sort of some emotional flatness. But usually, there's a lot of, you know, joy or something, and you want to bias the experience one way or the other, you want to put your attention on what it is that you want to grow and expand. And that will help you to go sort of one way or the other. And so, in going ahead, do question

Rufus Pollock  15:57

one second, if I can, maybe I'm just going to try and share temporarily. My, my mic just to kind of give him out of it. What just as I understand, this would be like something, we've kind of got these, these layers, here, we've got these locations, very crudely, I don't know if you can see that. So just like a lot of people are visualising this and this like, just to recap, there's an x-axis or kind of if you think of a graph with locations, and then there's the kind of layers, which I've given these labels, or if you still use them, but it's kind of like my layer one, layer two, layer three, layer four. And what I'm trying to draw just also is what you're saying there's some degree of connection, sometimes between the layer, you know, like layer three has a kind of affinity with location three, but it's not absolute. I don't know if that was one point you were getting. The point is that if any of these layers are available in any of the locations that would be fair, but it's harder, it's easier like there's a kind of D fatness to the layer and location Association in that matrix or, or not.

Jeffery Martin  17:12

You know, to some degree, if you want, I can see if I have it on my system here because I'm in the studio shooting. And we have a lot of I can probably find a graphic.

Rufus Pollock  17:25

That's better. Yeah. But just to recap, though, when people are listening to this, that they're imagining it from the podcast, you know, there are these locations we talked about, it's like this geographical map, you can say I'm, I'm going from London to, you know, Istanbul, I go through different countries on that journey. But there's also like, you could kind of fly at different altitudes, you know, in those locations, if they're trying to get it. Okay, great. Yeah.

Jeffery Martin  17:50

Sure. So here's the, here's a simple way to visualise it, you have the locations across the bottom, and you can see the gradient shading of the grey, you know, to darker, right to note that it's it is a gradient. And these are deeper, further types. And then you have the layers above them, which denote the depth. You know, this is a more discreet way of viewing it. And so for each one of these, these are, in essence, each a separate experience. And, you know, this is sort of zooming out more deeply into fundamental well-being, versus zooming in more and so sort of a more tightly constrained, less fundamental well-being like more human-ish, sort of like thing, this also relates to stillness, right? So the more still your interior experiences, which more than last comes from stilling the mind, frankly, and the degree of stillness in the mind. The tenant, generally speaking, the deeper you are, and in fact, stillness is kind of the superhighway through which some of the stillness can take you pretty far and is the upper reaches of layer three, which is nice. That just focusing on stillness, just putting your attention on stillness, and letting stillness, build and grow and whatever else. It's kind of like a meta hack, or a meta technique that will pull you up through to the highest, deepest parts of layer three, it generally won't pull you over to layer four, for actually kind of some complicated reasons that we probably, you know, don't want to take time for here today. Let me see if, what else we might have here. So here's another way of thinking about this, right? Each one of these can be viewed as sort of its own discrete experience, you have all of these different types of fundamental well-being. And I'll tell you one other thing that let's see if I can find it here. In terms of how these relate to each other, right? So people are again, we have the locations and the layers, people are more or less able to access these, so they're not all accessible in an easy way, regardless of where you're at location-wise, right? So more people land by far and location, one into layer one than anywhere else. And it's actually really, really hard for someone to stand location one and reach layer three, or reach layer four, these are all these are generally going to be temporary experiences and have very shallow experience of those layers. The one exception is if someone has been very far out in the continuum, and they've come back to an earlier place, you know, their system can be in location one. So for instance, they might have gotten ill, right, someone might have gone way, way out and to say location four, and they might have been in location for a long time, and then they got sick, right? And their system, oftentimes, when you get ill will pull you back down to Location One it like, it's like it wants you in location, one to heal the body. Oftentimes, this is very puzzling for these people, because if they're a spiritual teacher or religious leader, they've probably spent a lot of time telling others that this can't happen, right, that you can't go back, like this to an earlier place or whatever. And so, you know, it's led to a lot of great conversations over the years with people that were very puzzled by this generally not admitting it publicly. Because it would go against a lot of what they said, you know, and the beliefs that they were putting out there and stuff, right? But that's an example of how someone could come back and experience a more full version of layer four in location one, but it's generally not going to happen when you're just starting out and on your way there, it's like, it's gonna happen. If you're, you know, on your way back, you've been way out, and you're coming back. So location two has a couple of different default locations, if someone generally just jumps and just transitions from normal consciousness right into location two, ordinarily, they're going to do that at layer one. If someone transitions, has their initial transition into location one, then when they jump to location two is just part of a fundamental well-being change in their experience, then in all likelihood, they're going to go to layer two, and location two. And so we say it has these two different default things, layer three is highly accessible in location to layer four is difficult to reach. And it's again, often temporary, it's very difficult to get a full expression of it, it does happen very, very rarely, someone will really sort of lock in a foot more full expression of layer four and location two. And there are a lot of traditions out there, especially Eastern traditions that are trying to do that. And so you do see it occasionally. But it's rare. Ordinarily, what happens is, instead of going from layer three to layer four, people will jump bet pulled over to location four, go instead

Rufus Pollock  22:59

up, could you just illustrate because it's like in the abstract, like, what would the location be to just remind people, like you said, or there might be some tradition can use to illustrate where someone's experience would be like in location two, but layer four or so they just or you said there are some traditions that pulled towards that? Yeah, can you put a bit of flesh on the bones? Just I don't want to do any gum here. But it just makes it kind of why is the matrix so so relevant, because also not only for yourself but when you're seeing stuff out there in the world and people talking? You just said on YouTube, whatever, it helps understand that. Yeah, and these are, these are exactly, they're not literal. They're just things but I just think it would give a taster. You know, this is more even metaphor, or, or like we were writing a novel or giving people you know, just an idea pointers. Yeah.

Jeffery Martin  23:52

Right. And we didn't, we haven't talked about layer four yet. You know, we stopped off at layer three, and we didn't fully finish layer three, just to round out layer three. Essentially, when you are in the deepest part of layer three, it starts there's that field, that sense of sort of an all-pervasive presence or all-pervasive field. For most of layer three, it still feels like it has a centre to it. And that's a little difficult to explain if you haven't experienced it. We don't want to spend an hour doing that today. But just take that as a recognition if you happen to ever make it there. If you're listening to it and you happen to ever make it there. As you deepen into layer three that falls away that centre falls away and you're just left with a centralist field or a sensorless sort of all-pervasive presence. And then the final sort of deepening step locate in layer three is a new or enhanced deeper type of stillness. And that's really where the mind has been sort of maximally quieted as much as it can be quieted the in those first layers of experience, and then you have a transition to layer four. And so let's use these slides to talk about layer four and layer edits, because layer four is very hard to talk about it, right? It's basically it's another massive shift. And the progression might look something like this, starting at layer one, you know, I'm my mind, I'm my thoughts. I'm my emotions, you know, oh, wait a minute, you know, the transition to layer two? No, no, no, wait. I'm not my mind. I'm the all-containing spaciousness. Right? Right. That's what I Oh, no, no, no, no, wait, no, no, I am the all-pervasive field or the all-pervasive presence or the all-pervasive fullness, or whatever else. And it does not feel like there is any chance that that could ever go away when you're experiencing that. And it feels like the most foundational reality that could ever possibly exist until it disappears. And so the primary change going into layer four can best be expressed as a loss of all containers, a loss of all separation, even though prior layers, you wouldn't necessarily say that there is separation there. It's just because you're not perceiving it. And so for instance, saying I am I am that or even just I am, that's a separation. There's an AI that is reflecting on something else, right, there's a reflecting on the process that's happening there in consciousness and awareness, it can be very subtle, everybody misses it, right, but it's there. And once you transition over into layer four, it's kind of a different ballgame. And so it's really sort of like is, is a separation, if you're saying this is or that is, again, there's a separation there, something is being compared something being reflected on in some way. And that doesn't exist in layer four, and layer four, the best you can say is maybe just is itself, right, or there's just this and really can't be thought of, or described or anything in any way that extends beyond that. It's, it's very, very difficult to explain. So for instance, in layer three, there's sort of this all-pervasive fullness and field and people describe it in some ways like the clear light of awareness or beingness, the ground of all beings and people get the live version of it. All of those go, neither is being nor not being. Right. And so it's not so that people who are like, oh, yeah, I get it. It's, there's a not beingness nope, that's not layer four. Right? If there's a sense of beingness or a sense of not being this, haven't made it into layer four. Yeah, it's just sort of everything in your system dies, to just this. And that can sound very mystical. Right? It can sound like, Oh, God, he must be experiencing just like the quantum foam. I wonder how they even function in reality, but it's nothing like that. This is just this room. It's just literally what is here. You know, what is being perceived? There isn't an assumption that there's anything even beyond the room or anything, it's just this. And it's as mundane as could be imagined. People often describe it as a cosmic joke, you know, that they spend all this time trying to get to this place, and the laugh is on them, you know, because all they're left with is the most mundane reality imaginable, but in that mundane reality is, you know, such a more spectacular and free way to live. Because what you're doing throughout prior layers as you're, we're working your way out of one distorted layer of perception after another after another, right? So all these mind-based layers of perception are just increasingly going. So there's nothing else except pure existence. And again, that's like, Oh, that's a quantum foam. I can't even imagine what they're experiencing. Right? But it's not it's just ordinary, what's in this room, what's being you know, literally perceived. It's not a big deal. So it knows itself nothing is reflecting on the, the, you know, what is here? Right? So it's self-revealing, in a way self-knowing again, that sounds like some mystical woo-woo magical thing. It's not. It's a mundane expression in language trying to convey what it's actually like. If there's no focal point reflecting on something else, and everything is just here. The only thing that can be the case is that it's somehow self-revealing to itself. Right? Okay, so you get the idea here, I'll go through some of these other things. It's basically beyond all opposites, right? So it's not subject or object, they're both these are irrelevant. Everything, every bullet point on this page is irrelevant. Even non-dual and dual. Right? It isn't non-dual. That's just irrelevant. In terms of a way of looking at things which, you know, for spiritual seekers and stuff. That's probably a big surprise. Okay, so, as I said, it's often perceived as sort of all containers falling away, if we go and we look at the progression of these things, right, coming out of, and through the layers, you have, you know, you're coming from being completely embedded in thoughts and emotions, and you are your thoughts and emotions in a very neurotic way, pretty fundamental well being and all of that, right. Generally speaking, let's say you land in Location One, layer one or something like that. You're still associated with your mind, with your thoughts and your emotions, but it's, you know, far more peaceful, far more fundamental kind of way. And then you start to get some meta-awareness of thoughts and emotions, you start to get distance, from thoughts and emotions, you start getting the sense, wait a minute, maybe I am not my thoughts and emotions. And along with that, after that, you start to get a sense or an awareness of an all containing spaciousness, or emptiness, or spacious emptiness, or whatever the terms that we're using on this slide are more or less, the most complete terms are expressions of the experience. And then, you know, you keep putting your attention on that you keep sinking into stillness or whatever, right? And you get to a direct experience of the spacious emptiness, it's no longer like, Oh, I think something is there, I can almost sense it, you know, it's like, it's right here, just you can almost fall back into it or something, you know, but it's a mystery. Still, you're not sure what it is, you just get a very little sense of what it might be. So all of a sudden, you're directly experiencing it, right? And then you're it you're associated with it, your identity shifts to it. And so you've got stillness and whatnot infused with the container and a deeper stillness pervading and CO varying with the spacious emptiness. And then you start to sense an all-pervasive fullness or field, co-varying with the emptiness, and then you have an association, you know, then you start to, there's one missing here to make the slide shorter. There's a direct experience of the all-pervasive fullness and field and there's the association or the I Am, oh, my God, I got it all wrong, I'm not the spacious emptiness, I'm the fullness, right? And you deepen into that until you hit the centreless spot. And then that last deep sense of it, and then there's a sense of awareness of a layer of pure existence, that's the deepest silence and stillness, within awareness, right? So, you really can't even add a second word to any of these words. And then, of course, there's a middle one here, again, eliminated for the slide, to make it shorter, but there's a, you know, starting to sense it, they're starting to directly experience it, then there's a transition into associating with it being identified with it. And then you can deepen into it. And then there's, there are more layers than the four. But it's extremely rare for someone to make it there. And so I think that maybe will help people to sort of visualise this type of thing. And there are, there are common paths through it, you know, so the least friction path through it would be to land in Location One, layer one, work your way up to layer two, get pulled over to layer two, look to location two, at layer two, you know, maybe start working your way up to layer three, get pulled over to location three, at layer three, which is the default spot for location three, start working on getting up to layer four, get pulled over to location four, because layer four is the default for location four, and so on. So there are sort of these frictionless flows through this thing. Most traditions don't use those flows, because they're often stuck in a spot like Christianity, it's location three or bust. You know, I mean, that's what it's about for them. They want that sense of union, they want that sense of, you know, dissolving into that. And so they will get to glimpses of location four of layer four, sometimes staying in layer three, and then they'll use terms like the Godhead for it, and stuff like that. But again, it's normally temporary glimpses now and then you have somebody that, you know, sort of falls off the end of the Christian mystical tradition, as we talked about last time. With Bernadette Roberts I think, into a location for and then spent, you know, she spent like 30 years or more trying to contextualise What the heck happened there, and how she could still be Catholic, you know, and how there was still God and the Trinity and what all that meant to the confines of a location for type experience, which is not easy, not an easy way to sort of contort the Christian dogma. So you get the idea.

Rufus Pollock  35:24

Yeah, just an example there. That's a really good example. I, you didn't, I think mentioned Bernadette Roberts in this series. So maybe we can say, but this example you, you came across someone or this person themselves, having this context can be very helpful because you're saying that there has to be this challenge. When you don't have the map? You're like, Oh, what happened? You know, I'm. So you're saying in her case, she kind of continued, and then was like, Whoa, this is not fitting the previous example. But weren't, I want it to come maybe that would otherwise take us to feel might put that on the shelf? And come back to that question. I suppose. One of my questions I personally have is, how do you how compatible is development in these ways with a kind of conventional life? You know, what I'm just gonna speak maybe from my own past experiences, that some moments I felt, even, let's say recently, I might be like, Oh, having a sense of deepening in either and layer, or maybe, and they're like, oh, I have some kind of work event, like some, you know, I'm partly an entrepreneur, right. And, you know, it's like, oh, I know to deal with this kind of issue, or there's some urgency of some kind, or it appears like that. And even if, like, often I feel like the beginning, I may feel very kind of Zen, if I put it that way. Like in the beginning, it's like, oh, you know, I can go, you know, kind of old stuff is just sort of arising and I need to go deal with that. But often somehow, I have this metaphor of like paint mixing, that somehow this dye or colouring of the event, you know, or other people's emotion, and that I often even underestimate in a certain state how much that will affect me and kind of pull me if you like, more into my mind, when I'm always wanting to claim my injuries there. But it's somehow the degree to which you're sort of identifying or it's shaping my attention, my experience. And I just kind of I'm intrigued even from your work, what you saw of people who move through the canned kind of the continuum, that what jobs do they do, you know, do you know anyone in like location for who's like, a very active entrepreneur, you know, like, I mean, to say one other person I've talked quite a lot with from he's done the finest course. Now, I talked with he was quite friendly, just like, well, it kind of just fell away, because I lost interest in, you know, I sound like he says, I kind of lost interest in, you know, running the business, you know, I was okay, but you know, because I had been successful, but I wasn't, I just wasn't motivated to play what he kind of said, it's almost a bit like Monopoly, like, it kind of becomes this. You didn't see the point of it. So I just wondering, you know, how, how do you see that like, with people, you know, yeah, not normal life, quote, unquote, you know, a job a family? How to do those things? Kind of, are they compatible? What kind of what kind of jobs? Have you seen people's location for location, three, or location to do?

Jeffery Martin  38:33

That's a great question. And what we tell people is that these different ways of experiencing fundamental well-being, definitely need to be matched up to specific lifestyles. You know, this isn't a situation where a spiritual organisation, for instance, might say to people look, it's pedal to the metal, you know, it's going as far and as fast as you possibly can, you know, and get just as deep as you possibly can, or whatever else, it was very obvious. These, these sort of tendencies right from the beginning of the research with people who are experiencing fundamental well-being and we sat down with a lot of people, and we were in their living rooms, and we were in their lives, and they were telling us about their lives and you can spend hours over a day with someone and not learn about what's going on in their life or what's changed in their life over the years and all of that, and it became very clear to us that in some sense, fundamental well being needs to be you know, contextualised for people in terms of what it's good for, right? That it's, it's, it's not your entire life, it's a part of your life. Just like other things our work is probably a part of your life. Family is a part of your life. Fundamental well-being is a part of your life, and you need to make decisions around each One of those things just like you might make a decision not to be a workaholic, or to be a workaholic, right, or to spend X amount of time in a certain way, with various members of family or friends, or doing hobbies, or whatever else, you need to be as thoughtful about how you're bringing in and incorporating fundamental well being into your life. So from an entrepreneur standpoint, we think probably, you know, Location One is great, obviously, for that location, one is light enough, generally speaking, from a fundamental lobbying standpoint, that it's fine for anything, you know, and a lot of people are very happy, just remaining in fundamental well being and Location One, and do for decades, you know, location two, we think is kind of a sweet spot, in terms of a mix between well being, and operating in the world. And at a larger scale or a more, shall we say, responsible scale or whatever. You know, I come from, obviously, a business background and entrepreneurship type of background, business building type of background. And so I like to think of it as a place where you can still safely be entrusted with p&l responsibility, just like profit and loss statement, it means you know, your responsibility, probably for some revenues and expenditures, and you have a, you have a chunk of a company that you're responsible for the finances of, and for stewarding that, you know, having good stewardship around that. And whatever else that location too, we don't see that as generally being a problem, unless someone goes deep into it, then potentially, there can be some issues with that, what often happens is people will match professions up. And so for instance, it's very, very common for therapists for people to become therapists, that are in fundamental well-being, you know, you can be a perfectly fine therapist and location four, or even later, or location three, right, and location three, probably, p&l responsibility could be a bit problematic for you, because you just love, you know, and you're so generous and giving and whatever else. And, if there's a certain budget, you have to be, you know, able to sometimes tow a very hard no kind of line. That is the opposite of what would be generosity, and another circumstance, right, or looked at from another perspective. And so, location three, is probably not ideal for those types of things, right? But many professions are, you know, as, as someone who builds businesses, right, traditionally, in my life, I tend to think of everything from the perspective of investment and entrepreneurship and stuff like that, right? And so I don't have I haven't traditionally had, I've kind of had to build this up through the research. I haven't even really had normal jobs per se. You know, like, when I was in high school, and I was in grade school, I was like a hacker. And he was like, getting in trouble breaking into things, you know, at 13, or whatever. And I kind of came up with a whole piece of the software industry kind of pretty young. And so I've just been kind of an entrepreneur having my businesses, the closest I came to having a job was when I one point, my parents took away my computer and my mom was a Christian TV show host. And the only other computer that I knew I was a modem was in her studio. And so I pretended to be interested and went through the studio for Apple for the first time. And I kind of got hooked on the TV technology stuff, because it's I just like technology, right? And so I wound up learning all the TV jobs, and then everybody at that studio, like went on strike or quit in protest of something or something like that, and was like me, and the guy who ran the place were the only two people left that knew how this stuff work. And so you know, he's like, hey, you know, after school, would you mind, you know, we'll like to pay you under the table. Would you mind coming down to get late, you're not old enough to work yet. Right? Legally in America. And then they got an exemption from the mayor. So he could legally pay me when I finally got old enough for that. And then finally, I was old enough to work and whatever else, right? And so I love that TV technology type stuff that was probably as close as I came to having a job at various points in television, but I would have done all that for free. You know, it was just a blast, I could care less that I was getting paid for it. And so I've never really like worked at a restaurant or you know, had what somebody would consider a normal job that I couldn't just walk away from, or whatever else. So that has made it in a way from a research standpoint, a little bit difficult for me to put myself in other people's shoes. And to see okay, it took me a while to realise Oh, I see there are these patterns of careers that people are choosing. And you know, there's lots of therapists and stuff like that, but there are people also stay in their company as well. If they're in a big company, and they can kind of, you know, manoeuvre themselves into some sort of position that is safe for them and fits the characteristics of whatever form of fundamental well-being there, and sometimes you do run across, you know, I can't say who it is. But there's somebody who bought a significant groundbreaking company. And this person was, had spent a lot of their time and location working for other companies. But primarily during that phase, they were in location three. And so what happened is they use location three to be kind of a genius problem solver. And they described that period of their life as some of the world's largest, most sophisticated companies, when they would have these intractable problems, would hire this person to come in, and solve them. And it would sometimes take a year or more, sometimes less, you know, this person would, more or less just do the impossible. You know, there's like a handful of people out there, it's known, you give them a tonne of money, and they can do the impossible for you. Right, it was one of those people. And he would describe his workday as getting up having a bowl of cereal or something in the morning, right, and driving to work. And spending the entire day, taking the court system sandpaper that could be found, and rubbing it as hard as he could on his face for like 16 straight hours. And then putting the sandpaper down at the end of the day, going home, maybe having another bowl of cereal or something else to eat, going to sleep waking up doing it all over again, the next day, just day after day after day until that problem was solved. That's how painful he described that problem-solving process and how difficult it was right? In location three, though, that's no problem, right? There isn't suffering, that you're going to experience from jamming that, you know, course sandpaper on your face for 16 hours a day. And so it's what allowed him to be sort of this magical being in these company's worlds, he could come in and do the impossible. Eventually, of course, what happens if you're somebody like that is, you know, venture capital firms and investors and stuff look at you and you're like, Gosh, I wonder what that guy would do. If we just gave him a bunch of money, and said, you know, go solve some problem, that'll make us a lot of money. And so he did that. And he went into entrepreneurship. And he started what has become a company that has been revolutionary, just a truly revolutionary company, the kind of company that touches all of our lives and extends what's possible for humanity. Again, I can't stay anonymous here. But just you know, if you can imagine taking someone who's that level of problem-solving, and be like, go solve anything you want, what they would choose, and what the impact of that would be for all of us. It's huge. And so but now he finds himself in a different role, right, and so let's see, do we hire, he tries to hire a bunch of people like me as firing process where he's trying to find problem solvers that are in location three, he's familiar with our work, it turns out, but none of them has the combination of his level of genius, and that, you know, location three type of nature. And so he, in the meantime has gone to the location because he's realising he has a different role now, and he needs to be a different person. And his best guesses, maybe location four, is where I do that from when he kind of got stuck in location four, which is how I found out about him when I was at this camp, probably I shouldn't say where I was because that could maybe give away where he was. But anyway, he comes up to me, and he's like, you know, hey, this is where I'm at, I need, I feel like I need to get back to location three because my team isn't gonna solve this problem, I'm gonna have to solve this problem, he brought on someone else, to run the company, by that point. And so, you know, this is a great example of how I think finders find their place. And sometimes it's floating around a little bit, sometimes it's struggling around a little bit, he eventually made it back to location three, solve the problem changed all of our lives, you know, all that is only going to increase like what he's done for all of us, it's just going to the effects of that are going to amplify over the coming decades or a century in ways that we can't even imagine. And so, you know, people have to match fundamental well-being to their home life to their work life to their other responsibilities, things like that. So that my class

Rufus Pollock  49:42

got a question which is also don't things I guess also a question I had maybe other people would have is let's pick this person or even myself of other things that will pull them out sorts of the converse question not just like you want to choose to match because you could be in a fundamental well being or an estate If that doesn't make you so functional, but also, conversely, let's say, you know, let's say you've just moved or in a fundamental wellbeing event, right? But then you're in a stressful job, is there not like a chance that could kind of pull you out or like, keep you pretty low? You know, like, deep down, there's a sense everything's okay. But like, each of my days is rubbing sandpaper on my face. Do you know? Like, I hopefully

Jeffery Martin  50:23

people like their work more than that. But yeah, I did enjoy.

Rufus Pollock  50:27

Yeah, but I'm just like, this is an aspect, which is, you know, are there also aspects where, hey, normally, maybe you're not so functional, but it also affects limits to, to where you go. I mean, to me pick another example. Lester Levinson, he, you, you bring up quite a bit in the course, people may be listening, be familiar with kind of Google but you know, this guy was a kind of entrepreneur in the 1930s, early 40s. Has this moment, you know, where he's told he's, you know, he's got this heart attack and is going to die, he has to go home, and that he started to deepen into fundamental well-being, and then like, really deeper in, but because he has a lot of time off. Right. You know, my other question is that aspect, which is, are there also things, maybe you do want to fund it? Maybe we want to move to location two, but does that require like, Hey, if you start in location, one, you know, level layer one, and most the time you're quite stressed, or there's, or you're in, or you're in, or in a family where you're constantly having conflict with your spouse? Is that going to not? You know, are those kinds of circumstances going to hold, you know, hold you back, pull you back, maybe to some extent?

Jeffery Martin  51:38

I think the answer to that mostly depends on how you get into fundamental well-being in the first place, frankly, certainly, nothing pulls someone out more than stress. If I had one tip for someone to do after they've transitioned to fundamental well-being, it's under no circumstances to get into a new romantic relationship. Because those turn out to have some very people have lots of conditioning, there's lots of stress in the system around those types of things. Not a good idea, you're probably going to get pulled out of fundamental well-being if you've just transitioned, and you start a new romantic relationship, you know, give yourself some time to deepen and let that stabilise and so on. And so there are things like that they're just sort of practical tips. One of the things that we accidentally sort of stumbled upon, it wasn't an intentional thing, on our part, is the importance of having the way you transition to fundamental well-being happen integrated into your life. Right. And so what often happens is people will go away to retreats, and then they'll come back to their normal life. And you know, any gains that they may have made on the retreat, it's like it's happening and its isolated bubble. And even oftentimes, by the time someone is back at the airport, you know, they're feeling like, stress and whatever, or, you know, looking at the messages.

Jeffery Martin  52:59

Yeah exactly. And that's, you know, that's not a joke. That's actual research. That's been done to the people back at the airport, right? After retreats, and things like that. And so it turns out, we sort of accidentally protocol wise, didn't do people in person, we did onesie twosie people in person early on in developing the, you know, the protocol to do the AV research and stuff, the before and after research. But when we rolled that out to even the first group, we did it all online. And the result of that was that it was embedded in people's lives. They were doing it in their normal environment, with their normal stressors, and all of that. And that wasn't, I'd love to say, you know, oh, we had this graduate student who had this brilliant insight. And you know, but it wasn't, it was just a total fluke, it was just the way we chose to deliver it when you were looking for a way to deliver it consistently. That would always be the same from cohort to cohort for experimental reasons, you know, and you do that you do it on video, and you don't have people in person with you so you can't buy a SIM in different ways accidentally, one time versus another time, or whatever else, right. So we've just done it for consistency of validity from an experimental environment type standpoint, but it turned out to be one of the most important keys to the whole thing and to having the fundamental well-being really stick for people after they use the protocol because they're doing these practices embedded in their normal life. So if they transition if it works for them, it's working for them in their normal life and in their normal environment. And you know, there isn't some extra isolated bubble of magic somewhere that they go into and come back out of and then get hit by the tidal wave of their normal life as a result of that. So can work stresses As you know, still pull people out, Ken Yeah, you've got to respect this. You know, there's a lot of teachers and stuff out there that will say things like, you know, once you have it, you can never lose it. At the same time, I think those teachers would agree that people have temporary experiences of it, right? And so what they do in their mind is they separate the two, well, the temporary experiences are not the real thing, right? But once you have the real thing, you can never lose it, the temporary experiences could very well be the real thing, it's just people are getting pulled out of them by something, right? And so we have a very different view of all of that. And we think that you have to respect this, you have to, you know, very thoughtfully incorporate it into your life, if this is something that you want, you've got to give it a certain degree of priority. I mean, if you want to learn to do some sport, you've got to give that sport, some degree of attention and some degree of priority in your life, if you're ever going to get good at it, right? So the same with this. So you might have a transition, you might go through a protocol like ours, and you might have a transition that is so powerful, so overwhelming, and so deep, that it's unlikely anything is ever going to shake you out of it. Realistically, you probably don't want that degree of experience, because that type of experience is if it's a very, very deep, powerful, earth-shattering transition into fundamental well-being, there's probably going to be some dysfunction in your life. As a result of it, it's probably taken you and thrown you so deeply in that you're going to need to you know, it's the Eckhart Tolle story about sitting on a park bench outside the Cambridge library or whatever, for two, three years, or whatever it was, you know, trying to just sort of figure out what happened, and return to some degree of functionality, right. So you don't want that kind of transition type of experience, you want a more gentle experience where you're shifted into it. But as a result of that, it can you can get shaken out of it, if you're not respecting it, if you're not prioritising it, if you're not continuing to sink into it, and so on. And so that's why protocol-wise, for us, it's not just about getting people there, but then it's about how to make sure that they are, you know, placing the degree of importance on it to keep them there. Well, otherwise, we would have to transition them all like Eckhart Tolle style or whatever, right? And we don't want to we can, we wouldn't do that, ethically, we wouldn't just create a bunch of people who would have to go sit on park benches for years, that would not be a nice thing to do for people, even though they wouldn't be in fundamental well being, if it messes up the rest of their life, you know? So, that's the way to think about it.

Rufus Pollock  57:42

Yeah, cuz it's awesome because I think that's so. But it brings me to a central question about that of like, context or setting, which I think shows up in many transformational, you know, practices, which is the kind of I often call the self-discipline question. You know, there's, there's often this kind of meta question, you know, of, like, why why do some people get up every day and go to the gym, and some people don't, or it's here like this key point, which is if you want to have agenda, then your circumstances matter and setting set you, your kind of set and setting to support you ongoingly is crucial like many, many people know, that maybe doing a lot of meditation or, or exercise or whatever we want to put all getting up every day to become a novelist or to develop any skill requires this kind of dedication yet. The evidence that I have seen in myself, but I've also seen a lot in others is that it's often difficult, even with like, dramatic benefits of it. And that, in a way, if you'd like to, if the mind is often what's running, the body-mind is just a kind of running thing. And it's kind of like this habit. You know, it's, you know, like a kind of behavioural, you know, X happens then you do Y and you've got these habit loops over kind of your childhood or even our genetic history. And they're there for example, not super wired to do things with high long-term payoffs, but short-term costs. You know, I mean, let us just say my case, I know that if I get up every day, by 6 am, and I meditate for an hour to an hour and a half, that's great for me. And I am quite a disciplined person, and I don't do that, you know, I would say goes pretty well for periods but there are periods where it gets disrupted or I have a call with California 11 at night and then I don't get off right. So I just think this is something this brings me to an area that I mentioned it's like so what, what What kind of collective structures now? You know, there's a cause, but what is it? Have you done any research on the follow-up? Like, what is it of people who come out of the protocol, who like two years later, are still well, in fundamental well-being versus people who kind of obviously relapse, but you know, like, given the warmest day in wherever they are, and they want to deepen, they haven't? You know, what, have you done any work like that? Or do you if you haven't, you have any conjectures, you know, latest put out there for me, I'm like, Oh, I've come to you know, why do people go to monasteries, traditionally. I mean, there's a variety of reasons, but it was like, I want to be surrounded by other people who are all practising in this way. You know, there might be many other reasons in Christian or Buddhist tradition. But that's one. And I'm like, Oh, wow, I need to, you know, maybe it's not physically but I need to be around other people who do this, because kind of you do what other people do, you know, if you just said, You got to prioritise it, you know, if you want to get Do you think fundamental, wellbeing is important. It's like if you wanted to learn to bicycle, and you thought it'd be important to be around other people who do bicycle a lot. So I don't know, that's putting out for your thoughts. But have you tracked it down? Have you got any ideas of what you notice supports people in this ongoing? Their ongoing kind of practice or development in this area? Yeah,

Jeffery Martin  1:01:18

yeah, sure. And, you know, one of the things to think about is, traditionally, when someone would transition into fundamental well-being, ordinarily, people are not in a very rich tradition. And what I mean by that is, like, if you're in like some, you know, Tibetan Buddhist type tradition that has really focused on this from many angles for a very, very long time, and you have access to a lot of good teachers and teachings, and stuff like that, there are there, they have a good map of the spaces of this that they're interested in, and they've got a lot of methods that can help you get there. And stuff like that. Right? What we see is most people who transition don't go much further. All right, and so it's not necessarily that they'll ignore fundamental beings to the point of falling out of it, though, normal people often do I'm talking about people who have, like, been familiar with our research in some way. But if, you know, fundamentally, the thing to do is to at least put some attention to the sense of fundamental well-being inside yourself, right? Well, we call sinking in, as you know, kind of sinking into fundamental well-being, if you just do at least some of that, you know, that is a fantastic stabilising influence, it's very easy to do, almost everybody can do it with just casually thinking about you don't have to meditate for an hour a day or, or anything like that, right. And so actually, people holding themselves in fundamental Well, being with that knowledge that you can, just sinking in is good enough, you know, they're not generally going to slip out unless, like, you know, they go through some crazy life stress that maybe pulls them out, which can happen but, or unusual, or whatever. But what you don't see is progression, or deepening, or, you know, things like that, right? And so, you know, that hour of meditation at you know, six in the morning. That's not a stabilise and fundamental well-being kind of action, as it is a progress and fundamental well-being, kind of action. Right. And so we just see, traditionally in a public way, before our information was out there people are largely stagnant. From a fundamental lobbying standpoint, people that would normally stick in it from a public standpoint, or either they either had life circumstances that supported it, or they had a very powerful transition to it, that made it stick deeper without them even realising that they needed to sink into it and stuff like that, you know, just sort of stuck on its own. But then they didn't really change my action. Now over time, over decades, just having fundamental well-being at the core of their being, where, you know, recondition things and, you know, things would change, it would sort of naturally deepen or whatever, but it was over years decades, that type of thing or unrealistically a lot of that could have been done in months. But just sort of, you know, left to its natural unfolding process. You know, it'll stay, you know, reasonably stable in the right circumstances, but what you just don't see is progression. So we very rarely saw in the early days of the research, for instance, people who had moved locations, you know, people had sort of landed in a location. And over the years, they had their system had sort of increasingly, you know, psychologically reconditioned and triggers deconditioned. You know, things have changed and they've moved a little deeper and to fundamental well-being, but it wasn't like some signify They can profound change, or something like that, since the art materials have been more widely available to communities like that, and a lot of people have watched it and become aware of it that's shifted, that's changed. We've noticed in the research and so now when we run across people, they are often deepening more, they are changing locations more. In the early days, it was, it was very rare to find a research subject that shifted locations. And now it happens all the time. To us, you know, they're coming at us every day. And so, I would say the, the primary thing is the rate of change the rate of progression, the rate of deepening also, the idea that you can optimise this for your life, you know, could be that you land at a location, four out of the blue, right, so you're just again, you can land at any place from one to four. So you're a normal person one minute and boom, and the next minute you're in, you know, location for probably the first thing you do is start visiting a psychotherapist because it seems like something has gone wrong. I'm not kidding, that's not a joke. That's what people do. The psychotherapists are certain, you know, there's sort of do a case study and they're like, Well, you know, you seem D realised or depersonalised, but we can't give you that clinical diagnosis because you're not suicidal like you're not unhappy, it seems like this is kind of about net positive in your life, your life hasn't seemed to have gotten immediately dysfunctional, or anything like that. So we don't have a diagnosis for you, you know, go away. Alright. And that's the uniform experience of people that had a shift out of the blue, and to location for so they're left to more or less figure it out themselves, there's not literature out there, now there is our stuff is out there and stuff, but back then, there wasn't literature out there for them to find, they just start sort of struggling and figuring it out on their own. The ideal thing for someone in that type of situation is to come down to an earlier form of fundamental well-being, you know, basically do the opposite of what spiritual tradition or religious tradition or whatever, you know, might expect. So maybe try to come down, try to reconstitute a motion, right? So that's why in the book, we put that in there, how do you get out of location for we made darn sure that we published that, you know, you, you can feel these things that are sort of like, parts of emotions that never come together into emotions anymore, and location for so put your attention on those things, get them to reconstitute themselves back into emotions, get that to pull you either back out of fundamental well being, which rarely happens, but pull you to an earlier place and fundamental well being and see if that is more functional, you know, a place for you to live your life from Morris or just a place that you're able to, you know, be more comfortable with psychologically Oh, thank God, I love my kids again, you know, or whatever the thing is that

Rufus Pollock  1:07:53

just to give, who would you ever encounter? I mean, obviously couldn't say who they were, but just can you remember one concrete case study of someone who'd just landed in a location out of the blue for themselves? And what was this person doing? Were they was it an odd job? Or was there a spiritual seeker already? Or can you remember one example, like,

Jeffery Martin  1:08:14

there are a lot of examples of that that we have, and our data pool, you know, one of them even, I'm glad that let me think about who I can just permit me to. So because we, you know, the data is anonymous, and we have to, we respect that from a research project standpoint, and all of that. Okay, so here's an example of it someone that I know, he's a fantastic marketer, he's an internet marketer. And at the time, he was, he had sort of a multimillion-dollar plus business and the self-help space. And he'd realised that the self-help space and the spiritual space had a lot of overlapping motivations. And that it was probably really easy to take his existing business infrastructure and map it over into the spiritual marketplace. And so he was just at he just had this idea you know, maybe ran across the sales page in the spiritual space or something and just realised, oh, wow, those are all the same hot buttons that I'm hitting or who knows what it was right? I don't remember that part of the story. And so he decided to get some book he didn't even remember what book it was he decided to get some go to a lot go to the not the library, but go to the bookstore, get some book off the shelf about spiritual stuff, about enlightenment type stuff and read it. So he gets that book he reads you know, a couple of chapters in it, and he wakes up the next morning and location for Alright, that's it. There was nothing more to it than that wasn't a meditator and wasn't spiritual and he just really randomly went to the bookstore and picked some book off the spiritual New Age bookshelf section right? was just beginning as marketing, familiar, familiar. organisation process wasn't even looking at it for anything that related to him. He was looking at who are these people. What are their belief systems, you know, looking at it from a marketer's lens, right? Wasn't even personally interested in it. And wakes up the next morning and the location for it is looking across the table at his daughter, and the location for you can kind of hear your mind still thinking oftentimes, when you're first in it, you're not engaged with those thoughts. You're not the thinker. It's sort of like your metacognitive process. It's kind of watching the thinking going on. And he could see his mind was analysing, okay, that's my daughter across the table from me. While I feel absolutely nothing emotionally for her, is that psychologically healthy? That seems like something has gone wrong here. Right. And so he spent three months trying to get emotion back, and trying to wind his way out of location and described the day that that happened to him as one of the greatest and most important days of his entire life. Right. And it wasn't the day that he transitioned into a location for right if you were like, I don't know, into Kashmir Shaivism or something, right? The day you transition into location four would be like the Hallmark day of your existence, right? For him. It was the day he got out of it. He went back to sort of an earlier form of fundamental well being he's still in it to this day. But that's an example. You know,

Rufus Pollock  1:11:25

one of the questions I have is maybe we're kind of coming towards the end of this episode

Jeffery Martin  1:11:31

is and you didn't know me, and suddenly at that point, you had no colouring of any of this.

Rufus Pollock  1:11:34

Yeah, yeah. So one question I have is a bit about what we would call if people were familiar, maybe integral terminology be like growing up, versus waking up or cleaning up. So one thing I'm particularly interested in, is, what the classic thing is, we might call a foreign growing up, which is like taking other people's perspective, second person perspective. And the famous examples and developmental psychology are the very basic kinds of like children, you know, I have a very young son, who, you know, clearly struggles to put himself in my shoes. Do I want us to put it at 7 am? No, no, I want to show off. But the classic story with Piaget is I'm going to have a ball that's coloured, or, you know, red and green, green, red on one side, green on the other. I show you this if you show it to a young enough child, and they can see red, and you ask them what I'm seeing, and I'm seeing green now, they'll still say red, which is what they're seeing. Now, almost everyone who grows up around somewhere between probably three and six will get that I'm seeing green, and they're seeing red, you know, however, we're well aware that many adults struggle to do that in richer circumstances, including ourselves, perhaps at some point, you know, I don't understand what this other political group that I don't agree with? How can they possibly think things like that, you know, we have this difficulty of taking perspective taking. And often that's considered a hallmark, you know, in the more even traditional literature, a key gern? Or, you know, yeah, the kind of developmental stage that kind of perspective-taking is a part of, you know, healthy ego development. I guess, I'm interested in what is the relationship, if any, between this kind of deepening into fundamental well-being, which often seems to have this association with less attachment to thoughts or opinions with that other, what I would often call kind of growing up in this integral sense, or what you could sort of say is, I don't know, ego, consciousness development in a different distinct different sense of it. Is there any connection? Do you find that people who are deep in fundamental well-being are, you know, less attached to their views and more able to take the perspective of others, and as such, you know, you know, this kind of development or not, and I mentioned this, because I think one of the great insights, for me out of some of the work around integral on this was that waking up and cleaning up with the same, we're not the same, I can have profound kind of spiritual development and still, you know, have trigger issues about my father without realising maybe not realise it even more, because most of the time I'm in suchness. So I kind of this is a different, slightly different area, but yeah, do you? Do you see that? Do you notice a connection or maybe not a connection between those kinds of capacities? Yeah, I,

Jeffery Martin  1:14:30

you know, I did my dissertation years ago on this question to some degree, right? Which is I did, can you develop your way to fundamental Well, being at the time, there was sort of this belief that if like enough of these developmental lines raised to a certain point, maybe you become, you know, in fundamental well being or there's an ego development scale that someone named Suzanne to cook Grider doing her doctorate at Harvard under Keegan You just mentioned at the time I've, I've taken Keegan's class when I was at Harvard, great class very, you know, amazing guy, amazing body of work. She looked at sort of the classic interpretation of ego development and felt like, the highest layer of it probably had a lot of other stuff compressed down in it. And she looked through 1000s of people's responses to sort of extend the scale upward. And when she did that, you had a lot of people kind of jumping on that. Can comment a lot on you know, Susie's work, Ken Wilber and Susan could graders work, especially back in that period, and whatnot, where it did look like the extension of her ego development scale, started to sound a lot like people in fundamental well-being. If you weren't high enough, it seemed right. And so she was always quite clear that she did not think that that was the case that these things did not you know, she didn't, she didn't, she wasn't working with living subjects that were in fundamental well-being giving them these measures. She was analysing historical data that had been collected on these measures, which is how she got those, that extension of the scale, right? And so, but people noticed this, and they start saying, you know, well, this sure looks like you can just keep developing your way to fundamental well-being, you know, you keep the moral development going, you keep the whatever development going, and eventually being, you know, there's fundamental wellbeing for her. And she was very clear that she did not think that that was the case when she saw it, she agreed with them that there were these similarities that seemed to appear. But nobody talks about this. And so I tested this, you know, you're looking for something groundbreaking, potentially, when you're doing a dissertation, right, you're trying to add some significant piece to human knowledge and understanding. That's, basically the benchmark for PhD dissertation. And so you're looking to do something very significant. I'm like, wow, nobody's tested this, let's test this. And so we went out, and we use that same measure, Susie, referred me to one of her primary scores, so that no, no, nobody would look at our work, and be like, well, but who knows if you know, you scored those things correctly. It's like, no, it's like complete Susie's score people, you know, and so, you know, it was like, you weren't gonna come back on the findings. And what we found was that there really wasn't a relationship between fundamental well-being, and thus, that was, that was evident, or that was apparent. You know, there, it was a relatively small sample, it was like 30, something people 32 or 36, or something, it's so many so much research ago, I can't even remember. But whatever it was, it was like in the 30s, in terms of the number of people that took it, and there was a location for a person in there. And the location for a person was the person that scored the highest, actually, on that. But there are also confounds there because it's also known that there are educational differences. So you know, people who are more highly educated, and often more intelligent, are likely to score higher on these developmental measures, as an example, and that person was a PhD level genius scientist, who had run, you know, 100 million dollar research programmes, right at 1000s of scientists working for him because of his degree of ability to be successful with science and engineering and stuff. Right. And so you could say, like, he was the exemplar in the 36 people, you know, in terms of like, you know, development in general, right? And so maybe it's not so surprising, but he's the guy that topped out that scale, right, it could not be related to, you know, location for that he was in, it could be just simply that he was like the superhero of that group of people. Right. So but generally speaking, there wasn't a correlation. You know, they were all over the place, they were way outside of that section of the scale that was thought to relate to fundamental well-being, there was a skew towards we find the same skew towards education and stuff like that, that you see. So,

Rufus Pollock  1:19:18

you guys, my point is, I'm fairly for myself, I'm fairly convinced that is multi-dimensional. What I mean is that there's there can be development in if you like, waking up or in fundamental well-being. And there's, there's different access. You know, I know we talked about the Wilbur Coombs, or Coombs, Wilbur matrix at one point, I think the first maybe briefing the first episode. So My question is more of like, and you're saying that there wasn't this evidence of correlation? I guess. That's my question. I'm fair, I think, if I'm getting it, right, right, it would be a bit more of a stacking which is this kind of debate like oh, it's like you kind of move off the develop this kind of other developmental scale and that leads, I'm more like, I can think of it as orthogonal like you can move along the fundamental well being without, you know, because you could be as you could be a Zen master who's racist kind of classic, you know, you can be more fully developed and highly spiritual and theory that's not in many possible, you should if you're spiritually developed, I get that I guess my question is more Is there any correlation? Is there any association? So I guess my, my, my question, you know, in the crudest senses are these capacities you could develop, but to put it simply, you could develop second-person perspective, without any being in fundamental or being at all or any waking up. And conversely, you may be potential could be quite awake or quite deep and fundamental away well being and not be able to take a second-person perspective. You know, it, you know, those could be uncorrelated. It would seem unlikely, though, right, it would seem that some aspects were moving in some aspects, at least a fundamental being, I would, I would say, give you capacity, it would be not not necessary. It would not be a sufficient condition. But it might be like a necessary or certainly enabling condition in like greater ability to take perspective or less emotional attachment to your views. And I guess that's my, my,

Jeffery Martin  1:21:17

yeah, I mean, there are a lot of ways we could skin this, right? And so like, for instance, one of the things that happen as you deepen into fundamental well-being is you increasingly have a silent or a silenced theory of mind, right? So a hallmark of non-fundamental Well, being people are normal people was not the best word for non-fundamental Well, being people non-finders, right, is that they spend an enormous amount of time building up a theory of mind, right? So that would be me, in this example, building up a very elaborate theory of who you are trying to understand, right? And in many ways, the thing that separates excellent leaders, and people who rise in organisations and stuff from people who don't, or their ability to, you know, really nail down theory of mind, and other people to the point where they can just sort of move them around like little chess pieces, to make projects succeed, and you know, whatever else, right. And so the theory of mind is a big deal. It's what our system spends a lot of time on. So the whole social survival system for humans and you know, all of that, that diminishes substantially and fundamental well-being. And as you deepen further and further into fundamental well-being, it just quiets down. And so you're, you aren't having, you know, a second person perspective, or a third person perspective, or whatever else on other people, because that's tied into the theory of mind system. And for most people that's been shut off, occasionally you meet a finder that's gone through the pain of re-enabling that and remaining deep and fundamental well-being, but it's extremely rare, sometimes they've done it as a hobby, sometimes they die, just because they're stuck in a certain work environment, or a certain personal environment, they're living in a shared house, and that house is all into this stuff, and they're tired of being called a psychopath or something about so they just force their way into that again, or whatever else, right? And so realistically, I think probably as someone develops, they're less likely to have that type of self, you know, that type of reflection or that type of reflective capability and you see different systems deal with us in certain ways, you know, you see some Buddhist systems for instance, deal with it by just stressing the cultivation of compassion you know, because if you can at least programme in compassionate behaviour towards others, and nobody thinks about whether or not you're understanding them or whatever else, right I mean, it's still sort of all worked out in terms of your interactions with people and location three it's less of an issue just because you're so just loving towards everybody and helpful and whatever else it has nothing to do with who they are. You know, you love the rock as much as you love the person standing in front of you right? It's there's no difference there's no differentiation in that field of love. Right but to those people, they feel loved and appreciated and seen and they love being around you as location three person and, and all of that, but the kind of stuff you're talking about, you know, it's not necessarily

Rufus Pollock  1:24:15

it's not the right there's the ability for me if I'm living with someone to get like to to be like, Oh, what are they going to feel if I like to drink the milk in the fridge? And there's a subtlety of that can be like to put in the Piaget model even like hey, I've just shown him what I need to work out whether the robber can see the cop or whether the teddy bear in this position can see the top of the mountain you know, there's an aspect where a lot of what causes like attachment to views if you want to use a Buddhist like type terminology comes from the ego mind right? It might not be. I'm thinking a lot about what the teddy bear can see or metaphorically what my housemate feels about the milk in the fridge, but at least it's the house me It brings it up. I can be like, Okay, you want me to you, you know that I'm thinking about your theory of mind, but you want me to not drink the milk in the fridge? I can. And I'm not going like, oh my god, you want to, you know, you're accusing me of drinking your milk, you know, that has kind of fallen away a lot. Right that kind of defending go I've got

Jeffery Martin  1:25:25

exactly unless you're trying to get rid of your housemate. You just want to drink them out, right?

Rufus Pollock  1:25:28

Yeah, like you just won't drink the milk. Or like, I don't even I can see that Republicans think this way. Do Democrats think that when I'd maybe not got any dog in the fight? And I'm not thinking about the Democrats. You know, my, my sister's Democrats and what does she think? But there's an ability to maybe take that perspective when needed. Do you see what I mean? Or like, I'm not gonna attachment? From my perspective, there isn't that can

Jeffery Martin  1:25:51

that can be the case. And you can also have finders who are diehard conservatives or diehard liberals who get together and fight it out. You know, I remember, there was there one time I was in the middle of nowhere in the heartland of America somewhere and it just so happened, there were two finders in one tiny town and some, you know, flyover type state as the coast people would call it right kind of a forgotten state in America. And one of them was Republican, and one of them was Democrat, and they would get together over dinner and just fight about politics. Right now. Neither one of them was like, so passionate that they were beating each other over the head, I think they just enjoyed the banter, you know, back and forth. But they both had a perspective, you know, that they were coming from one of the things that we detected very early on, and fundamental, well, being people was a dogmatism. Oftentimes, one of the reasons I did not choose to transition until quite several years into the project was because I saw that there were these biases that formed and people that were in fundamental well-being, and I was concerned that it would affect the data analysis of the project. And so I waited until I felt like that would no longer be an issue enough other people looking at the data, you know, big enough teams and stuff being done enough, all of that before I transitioned, because I could not predict what kind of bias might develop in myself and whatever way or what sort of belief system there is this sense of certainty, that we think of it often developing like this, you know, there is a sense of certainty that comes with your experience of reality and an increasing way, in fundamental well being. If you're a finder that doesn't have other finders there, I live my entire life surrounded by finders these days, right and have for a long time. So I'm weird. I'm a unique case. But most people don't, they're like the only finder they know, for the most part, right? And so, you know, maybe there's another one across time that they can fight about politics with, but generally speaking, lots of them, it's like just them, right? So imagine you have to imagine you're that marketing guy, right? And you shift into location four, then you come back to wherever location two, or wherever you came back to. And then you're living your life. No one around you that you know, as is experiencing this, right? You do little tasks, you talk to your wife about it, you know, she's worried that you're gone, something's gone screw loose. Okay. Never mentioned it to your wife again. You mentioned it to maybe a friend or two, they look at you like what's, what are you talking about? You're starting to be weird. And I never mentioned it again, right? maintain those relationships, right? This is how it unfolds, right? In the meantime, what's going on inside you is you realise that you are experiencing a level of truth about reality, that is so far beyond what the other people in your experience can ever even remotely fathom. What do you think happens in the internal system, a bias develops towards this internal feeling of truth, which is an isolated internal feeling of truth, and which can become as extreme as any isolation. I mean, where does extremism common often come from isolation groups being in isolation, you know, not taking multiple perspectives, or recognising the value of different perspectives and points of views, which you're not at that point, because nobody else you know, everybody is like, wow, something's you know, something weird is going on with you. Are you okay? Right. And so everything that they're going to say, you're going to look at his kindergarten, like, yeah, everything's okay. You are like, you know, a pathetic example of humanity or something compared to me, you know, at this point, like I have, I'm experiencing these incredible truths of the universe, or whatever I can, you're not even developed enough for me to have a conversation with like, I'm going to believe anything or, you know, any advice that comes out of your mouth about my life or whatever, you know, that's going to be in any way meaningful or relevant, or I'm going to take that serious ever again, right? You're like way down here, and I'm way up here now in terms of understanding the greater truth of things and whatever else right, and that just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning over here. is a time in two directions where you get very dogmatic beliefs and tremendous certainty internally. And so for some people, you know that their perspective, just enough before that, where it doesn't go in that direction for other people they're not. And they have all these different shades of experience. And you know how that can unfold someone like me, that is, you know, spending their entire day talking to finders. At this point, frankly, I mean, I seldom talk to seekers anymore. It's all finders that we're helping with stuff for the most of, you know, the people that run the protocols that help seekers become finders. That's an autonomous thing practically at this point in my world, right? So I rarely speak to a seeker, I'm always just dealing with all day, my expertise is useful to finders primarily at this point, right, that's where I have the unique value added. So I spent my whole day talking to finders, and I'm forced into a Maltese perspective thing. And I have been since the very beginning of this. And so I'm fortunate because I don't think I've developed that sense of bias or dogma or whatever else, but the odds of you being that person is forced into a pluralistic perspective on this stuff is very rare, you're going to adopt your spiritual beliefs of your, you know, your sect, or you know, you're going to be in isolation, you're gonna spin out in some way there, or whatever else