Episode 120 : Using Technology to Deconstruct The Pathway To Enlightenment - 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 experience. 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.
In 2007, Jeffery conceived of and created the Transformative Technology space. Since that time he has worked to catalyze the space by bringing together makers, scientists and other researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, companies, educational institutions, non-profits and NGO’s, public policy experts, and investors. He is a co-founder of the first academic lab dedicated to TransTech, its first conference, taught the first university-level course and established the first graduate program in TransTech, and many other firsts.Jeffery is a successful serial and parallel entrepreneur with a 25+ year background at various intersections of wellbeing, media, advertising, and technology.
Audio Title: Ep66 - Ep120 - Jeffery Martin
Audio Duration: 01:19:19
Number of Speakers: 2
[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome the Heroes of Reality Podcast, a podcast about the game of life and the hero's journey we all experience. Let's jump in with our host Dylan Watkins, as he introduces today's guest.
[00:00:14] Dylan Watkins: Welcome young adventurers. And on today's podcast, I have Jeffery A. Martin, PhD. Jeffery is an academic researcher, serial entrepreneur, technologist and investor who specializes in advancing the highest forms of human wellbeing. For over a decade, he's conducted the largest international study of fundamental wellbeing, which includes the types of consciousness, commonly known as: enlightenment, non-duality and the peace that passeth understanding, unitive experiences, and hundreds of other terms. This resulted in the first reliable, cross-cultural and pan-traditional classification system for these types of experiences. 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 ways.
He is also the founder of Transformative Technology space, which has grown to become a multibillion dollar ecosystem promoting the use of science and technology to sustainably rise the human mental and emotional wellbeing. He's conceived the space, co-founded the first academic TransTech lab and is the first conference, taught the first university level course, organized the earliest investor meetings and many other firsts.
He serves as a formal and informal advisor on a wide range of companies and other organizations in the space, and is an actively early stage investor and is a frequent public speaker of TransTech-related topics. And without any further delay, I would like to welcome Jeffery A. Martin.
[00:01:42] Jeffery Martin: Hey, thanks for being here.
[00:01:44] Dylan Watkins: Hey, brother. Thanks for being on the show.
[00:01:45] Jeffery Martin: Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:46] Dylan Watkins: Yeah, yeah. I'm super excited to dive into all things technology, transformative and wellbeing and learning about all of these esoteric and non-dual non symbolic states. It's quite a range of topics.
[00:02:06] Jeffery Martin: Go wherever you want.
[00:02:07] Dylan Watkins: So my question with this is first, I want to go to the beginning and I want to understand what was your journey on highlighting to kind of get you into this kind of unique high technology wellbeing, esoteric space? Can you talk to me just a little bit about what are some of those milestones that led you onto this journey?
[00:02:26] Jeffery Martin: Yeah, it's the same for a lot of people, including me. And that is high performance unhappiness. You know, so I reached a point basically where I had, you know, met my goals and then some, you know, I was just inventing new goals because like my life goals were all in the rear view mirror, right? I was in my thirties at that point, early thirties. And I had a really great run, you know, a really successful run and was just, you know, not as happy as I really felt like I should be. And I wasn't miserable, you know, I wasn't like, you know, looking for my next heroin fix or something, you know, trying to just grasp with existential whatever.
But it certainly seemed to me like there were people who were happier than I was and I just didn't really think that was fair on the one hand because I knew I was working harder than they were. And on the other hand, you know, as your classic type A, you know, I didn't want anybody to be happier than I was, right? Like I had to be the happiest person in the world, if that's something that I chose to head in the direction of, right? And so like that competitive side and the other stuff and whatever else, and it was just like, man, if, you know, if I keep going down this path that I've been on, which at that point was more or less just, you know, companies and start-ups and stuff like that, and investing and whatnot, you know, I really felt like, you know, in 20, 30 years, I mean, I'm sure I'll have even more cash, but I'll probably feel just like this, right?
And I don't want to feel like this. I want to feel like that person over there, it looks like they're a lot happier than I am. And up to that point, I've done a lot of personal development, you know. I don't think anybody really gets – unless they just get lucky, I don't think – and everybody does to get lucky to a certain extent that is successful. But unless they just get really lucky, right, like, you know, I don't know, somebody walks up to the street and hands them the winning lottery ticket for a billion dollars or something, right?
Personal development and personal growth is obviously what you have to do. You know, you can't – it's that old statement that I think is pretty true and that is that, you know, you can't get to the next level as who you are right now. And so I'd done a ton of personal development. I'd been through every course. I've just done everything you could possibly do, right, over the proceeding period, probably starting from when I was like 13 or 12 or something on, which is when I really started my first businesses, serious businesses and stuff, as crazy as that is to think about.
And so, you know, I reached a point where I was like, crap, you know, I'm out of stuff to take. I don't know what I could take that would take me to the next level. That person over there seems to be happier than I am and I'm not okay with that. And, you know, what am I going to do? So I changed my life completely, really. I sold everything. Some things of course take time to wind your way out of and all of that. But within a period of a few years, more or less, I was out of all of the business side of things and, you know, I was headed in a different direction. I was going back to school and I was, you know, studying psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, transformation, how people and things change, all of those types of things, everything that I thought I could possibly need in order to answer this question for myself because it didn't seem like anybody else was going to answer it for me. You know, I'd already paid everybody that I could pay that might have an answer for me, right?
And so, you know, then I – as a function of that really just was like, okay, well, who are they? You know, let's go find the happiest people out there, the people that have the most wellbeing or the people that have sort of the most – seem to have the most awesome experience of life and figure out who they are, what's different about them and whether or not it's possible to join them, whether or not I could personally join them. It was personal quest, really.
You know, now our work's affected, you know, zillions of people all around the world or whatever, but back then it was like entirely, just solely for me, right? And so that's the story. That's where it all started.
[00:06:21] Dylan Watkins: It's beautiful. Beautiful. What I love about that is the irony of the kind of the American style, like I'm going to be number one, I'll be number one happy. I'm going to meditate harder than anybody else. I'm going to achieve you. I'm working harder than you.
[00:06:36] Jeffery Martin: Smarter, not harder. Smarter.
[00:06:38] Dylan Watkins: Yeah. But there's that combination of like, you're like, you feel like you deserve it and you owe it to – and that there's that entitlement of like, I'm working so hard, why do I not have your happiness? And there's this like self-righteous hatred that you have for other people that are happier than you, right? There's like this like, I am going to be able to beat you. And there's this you're trying to like – it's like trying to, it's trying to …
[00:07:04] Jeffery Martin: Competitive for sure, yeah. Not hatred necessarily but competitive. Yeah.
[00:07:08] Dylan Watkins: Well, it's competitive, but there's this thing of like a combination on both sides of the fence of like, oh, how is it I'm working so hard and that person's happy and he's not working as hard as me? It's not fair. It's not okay, right? I don't get this. What am I doing wrong?
[00:07:24] Jeffery Martin: Yeah, fair jealousy, you know, those types of – yeah. That anger around the jealousy a little bit, right? That's the fuel. And so, yeah. I wouldn't say hatred, but I would say those other things. Sure.
[00:07:36] Dylan Watkins: Well, it's hatred. But there might be a bit of possible self-hatred or a point of like self-upsetting with like, what have I been doing with my life so far? Like you've …
[00:07:46] Jeffery Martin: Maybe. I think I was entirely too arrogant to have a lot of self-hatred. I mean, my like – you know, my teens, my twenties, my early thirties, they were spent with me being really arrogant. And so I don't think there was a lot of – there was definitely a lot of entitlement. There was definitely a lot of a sense of, you know, I've got to be better than that person. There's no way that they – if they can do that, I can do that way better kind of thing. But it was like that – I had sort of that version of it, you know.
[00:08:19] Dylan Watkins: About that too, is one of the things that we do as we go through these levels, right, of evolution is like, it's, you know, it's either I suck and everyone else is great. And then you go to I'm great and everybody else sucks. And then, you know, you eventually go up the ladder to ultimately I'm awesome. You're awesome. We're all awesome. Right? That's the whole unity. We are connected. We all want to know global good.
But you went out to set this and find out what were the happiest people doing? What are the patterns? So what were some of the revelations that you saw? What are some of those aha moments that you came across that fundamentally kind of shifted your perspective as you move up this ladder of awakening?
[00:08:52] Jeffery Martin: Great question. You know, I think for me it was who they were, who they wound up being. They were people I never really thought about much. And that was, you know, they – as you read that list of phrases, right, enlightenment, non-duality, persistent mystical experience, the peace the passeth understanding, you know, God consciousness, unity consciousness, right? These were not things that I had spent an enormous amount of my life thinking about as you might imagine, right? And so I think the thing that surprised me the most is who they were – who they seemed to be initially. And I got to tell you, when I started researching these people, I thought for sure, I was just going to find out that they were psychopathological in some way. They were self-delusional probably or whatever else based on the type of things that they were talking about.
You know, the project was really kind of approached from that angle frankly. It was not like a friendly, let's just go out and ask everybody how they're feeling and, you know. I mean, it was like a hard core falsification, you know, data-driven, empiricist type of research effort. It was just designed to more or less prove everything anybody was saying to us wrong. And then see what was standing at the end of the day. So I was really, really surprised when it was that group of individuals that, you know, turned out to rise to the top.
[00:10:14] Dylan Watkins: So when you see these patterns, right – well, one thing is why I find always very interesting, there is a very powerful source of energy that people get with I'll show you, I'll prove you wrong, I'll be able to like, let me, like I'll, you know, like, I think you're lying. Like people are just really smiling as they're holding down all these like balloons of negativity going, everything's great. I'm going to – you know, you're like, I know, I'm smelling your bullshit, right? But it might be just a bit of your own internal work, right? Then you see that in other people and you realize that they actually have something.
But there is a power in using this seemingly negative energy, but as an energy source, it kind of gets you to a place that you need to get to. Have you seen about – I know a lot of people in the space, they try to only stick with the light, but really we're two sides. We're both the dark and the light and it's not necessarily one's right or one's wrong, one's good or one's bad, right? Can you talk to me a little bit about any thought patterns you have about what you'd seemingly say, negative or dark energies versus light energies and how does enlightened beings use these things or reject them? Or can you talk to me a little bit about that?
[00:11:22] Jeffery Martin: Yeah, for sure. You know, so primarily these days, I mean, I'm still an investor, obviously, I still do stuff. But primarily these days on this side of the fence, you know, I'm just a cognitive neuroscience, psychology type guy, right? And so what I've noticed and, you know, the direction that we've sort of come from has been this type of direction. So one of the things that I noticed very early on with these individuals, and we should say right up front, it's not just spiritual people that experienced this, you know, although it started off with terms like that and sort of people. We're ultimately cultural carriers, you know. Over the rise and fall of empires, it was really sort of religious and spiritual systems that sort of kept these – I think of them as brain states, you know, how brain networks are wired, things like that – really alive, knowledge of it alive, knowledge of how to maybe get to it alive, knowledge of what to do with it alive, all of that, but it's definitely not just spiritual and religious by any stretch of the imagination.
You know, there's tons of atheists, there's tons of agnostics, there's just lots of people out there who experience this of every possible stripe. And so I think that's one of the first surprising things that people, you know – people often think of these people as like sitting on some mountain somewhere or in some cave, you know, or it's like the, whatever, you know, somebody, who's some meditator who's been at it forever.
That's really not true. I mean, you know, you could work in a meat packing plant in Oklahoma, or, you know, you could be a janitor in Florida or you could be a PhD student in, you know, U of I at Champaign or, you know, you could be a lawyer or an addiction counselor, or just a lots of average people have this, lots of average people experience this.
I mean, from this community, you know, from the tech community, there's tons of tech people who experience it, there's major investor in the space, you know, who experience it. I mean, all of that, it runs the whole gamut really across society. And so what we noticed from a psychological standpoint is that after the transition to it, you are kind of on a different, psychological, developmental track than the rest of humanity, right? So the rest of humanity is kind of on that old traditional – people often think of it as egoic. You know, everybody's heard of the term and go, even though if you look into Freud's work, you discover that that was kind of misused as it came to America. So let's just pick that word. Let's just center on that word, so we don't have to use a bunch of different words, right?
And so that standard sort of egoic type of self, you know, that is a really well published developmental track in our world, right? Your parents have it, they develop you in it, your neighbors develop you in it, right? The schools develop you in it. Society develops you in it. Like the whole – we don't really even have an appreciation for the degree to which we are in this giant developmental environment involving that certain way of developing the human nervous system.
And so when you transition to what we call fundamental wellbeing, publicly, just a bucket term for all of this stuff, when you transition to fundamental wellbeing, you really kind of get off that developmental train and you very much get on another developmental train. You see some religions talking about this, right? Like you see the phrase born again, I think, is a really interesting phrase and a very true phrase and a very real sense. You're kind of born again under this other developmental track. But frankly, not a lot of work has been done on it and not a lot of people know much about this. There's a lot of work that's been done on how to get there or how to deepen in it, right, or whatever else, but how much work that's been done on how to integrate it with your normal life and, you know, just sort of what that looks like.
And so as you think about the positive and negative stuff, or the light side, dark side type stuff, or whatever, frankly, where we really think that matter – those types of ideas matter the most is in the post transition development of this, just like it does for any human, right? I mean, you wouldn't just let a kid be raised and, you know, never tell them that it was bad to kill other people or steal stuff from them or, you know, sort of whatever else, right? There's even just at that level of rudimentary behavior, there's a shaping process that goes on. What often happens is when people transition to this, it feels so amazing and so much more true than anything that they've ever experienced before that they just start sort of letting that deep sense that comes along with it kind of guide them from that point forward. And we think that's really akin, frankly, to leaving your kids sort of, you know, with wolves to be raised or, you know, whatever, you know, outside of sort of the levers of human culture and the psychological development that it's designed to do.
So we think that there has to be a very active process involved in that. And it deals a lot with your psychological conditioning that you accumulated beforehand, and a whole bunch of other stuff, right? And so that stuff can all go really dark. You know, there's no shortage of these well-known gurus out there who are, you know, constantly criticized for sex with their devotees, spouses or kids or stealing money or, you know, whatever else, right? It's not that I don't – I think probably they are in fundamental wellbeing, right? But they went down a different developmental track than they probably should have on the other side of it.
[00:16:55] Dylan Watkins: It's the dark side of the cult, right? Because you have that – when you're looking at the dark side of the cult is also – we're tribal beings, right? And we have typical tribal natures. And one of the things that you have is there's this king monkey, you know, let me have sex with all the other primates around me, right? That type of thing. And then it just is a thing that if you let yourself slip into that pattern behavior, then you always know all cults seem to boil down to that fact of, okay, now, great. Thanks for coming here. We're for a higher purpose and let me have sex with all your wives, right? That seems to be the pattern of behavior.
[00:17:26] Jeffery Martin: The good ones anyway…
[00:17:27] Dylan Watkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the …
[00:17:29] Jeffery Martin: Or possibly the ones with large checkbooks that continue to build more ashrams. Yeah. Could go. Yeah. And so I – you know, that's – I think that's true. And there is something to be said for sort of, when you start to remove some of the egoic conditioning and programming and stuff, some of those deeper aspects, one could even say more kind of animalistic aspects of our nature are able to rise more to the surface. And there's all sorts of genetic variance in that, in terms of people's preferences and what they're more or less likely to do, and all sorts of stuff like that, right? Yeah. So that is a thing.
And you've got to kind of, you know, as you are going through the conditioning – the deconditioning process that happens in your psychology on the other side of this, you've really got to kind – it's better if you can manage this in an active reconditioning process that takes things in the right way. I think that's the most important part of our work really. Nobody focuses on that part of our work really. Not that many people. Everybody's really interested in, how do I get there, right? And we're like well known as the science project that basically figured out how anybody can get there, right?
And so that's what everybody focuses on in relation to us. But, you know, I don't think that's actually the important thing that we've done. I think the important thing that we've done is gotten our hands around this developmental stuff on the other side of it. Not that you didn't see people wrestle with it before this. Certainly you saw individuals wrestle before it, but the problem is they had a smaller end, right? There were fewer people that they were really working with. They weren't conducting actual research, you know, working with data and things like that. They were just observing it in their however many devotees that they had close enough to be able to actually see it in, right? Or you have someone like Ken Wilber whose work I really respect and who I personally like, you know. And he picked up on it from his broad swath of philosophical and, you know, just sort of this massive study of mythology and psychology and philosophy and all this other stuff that he synthesized together, right, plus the people who were around him, you know, that experienced it, that informed it for sure.
And so we're not the first ones to notice this, but I think we were the first ones to really put some work into what that might, you know, really – what the cycles are involved. There's two-year cycles, three-year cycles, seven-year cycles. There's just all kinds of complexity to it that's useful to know about if you're on the other side of it, you know.
[00:19:44] Dylan Watkins: So there's a couple things you touched on that I think is interesting that I want to kind of dive into. One, Ken Wilber's awesome. Right? He's got the integral method. He's got these four boxes, right, talking about different things. And I really look at it from a perspective of what I say is we primarily live in three realities. We live in the internal reality of our own internal states, our narrative stories, the world we tell ourselves, our mental constructs of what we think this reality is. Then we have the physical reality or the virtual reality, these things that we see around us in this environment and virtual reality is a hundred percent real. We can always dive into that. And then the other one being is the social reality, the reality that me and you are currently constructing together and we have these different layers of reality that we all construct together.
And one of the things I think is very interesting that you're talking about is in order to have a fundamental identity shift, right? So if you're going to be moving up Maslow's hierarchy or up this biodynamics, or up from going from the ego to the super ego, into these fundamental shifts, right, you're going along these paths. So a lot of things, what people do is they go on a journey, they go on a hero's journey, whatever it is. Like my own personal journey was 2017 was going down to, you know, typical Peru, ayahuasca, iquitos, two weeks in there, although I had an Oura biofeedback ring. And for some reason when I – man, and I felt like I connected with God, I had five and a half hours of REM sleep. I was being reported. I don't know what that means personally. I'd love to get your opinion on that. It is interesting. I was also going through personal development books at the same time, but I was there with a core group of people in a new reality, having my own internal landscapes, being reshaped and reformulated.
And it was very interesting that when I went back to my old reality, right, on the hero's journey, I came back and I had that, you know, that first ego of, you know, strife, profit, all that stuff. And I went there and had a fundamental awakening and shifting into, I don't necessarily – I realized that negativity was just an addiction. And then I came back to the space and I got re-exposed to it, and I was like, wow. I was like, this is my life. And I was like, do I want to keep, do I want to reopen this old bullshit and go back into it or do I want to try – and I think I didn't stay at the top of the mountain. I maybe slid down like halfway. And then I'm on a pursuit of slowly climbing back up, you know, kind of like a wave sign style going to where I need to go.
So I'd love to talk a little bit about these patterns of how do you take – you know, because you go on this journey, right, to the supernatural land and you come back to be the hero of your story. And sometimes you slide back to your old ways. How do you integrate that? Right? How do you keep that? What are those typical signs that you've seen that people, oh, maybe you're descending into an old egoic pattern or not? But I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
[00:22:22] Jeffery Martin: Yeah, that's a great, great question. Boy, there's so much to unpack in what you just said there. This is a series, right? We have like 92 hours. It's going to …
[00:22:31] Dylan Watkins: Yeah, yeah, let's go. Let's go. Okay. Buckle up.
[00:22:35] Jeffery Martin: All right. Part four. So if you think about it, there's first of all, the transition from fundamental – to fundamental wellbeing from egoic, normal human wiring, if you will, it's fundamentally a shift at a deep level of the nervous system around survival, around sort of urgency if you will, of survival. And so, you know, there's this – I often use the example of, you know, you're sitting outside, you're in a cafe, you have some bread, you toss it to a bird. What does the bird do, right? The bird pecks at the bread. And then it looks around to see if it's safe to take another peck, right? Is anything going to kill it? And then it pecks at the bread again, and it looks around to see if anything is going to kill it. We all have that. That is the basis of our nervous system, right?
No matter how far you think you've gotten from that, no matter how much you don't think that you experienced that, if you're alive and you're an animal and we're all animals, as much as we don't like to think about humans being animal, we're all different, right? We're separate somehow from the lower animals or whatever, right? We're all just animals. And we all have that basic wiring. And so one of the things that seems started to happen, who knows how many thousands of years ago, it's tough to say, it seems to be throughout recorded history. So probably before that was, some individuals began to have shifts in their wiring away from that level of moment to moment fundamental discontentment if you will, right? A sense that our nervous system better keep in mind that right now, something unpredictable or possibly predictable could be happening that could kill us, right?
And so there's always that background tension in our nervous systems that we – it's just the water to us, right? We don't feel it because – we don't think we feel it any more than we think we don't feel the air on our skin, right? But if you take the air away from your skin, you're like, whoa, that's different, right? And so it's one of those things, right? So one of the things that happens with fundamental wellbeing is a shift at a very deep level of the nervous system away from that and to a sense that things are fundamentally okay. And I don't mean that in a nonfunctional way, I don't mean that in a, you know, someone bursts in here with a gun and you're not able to react appropriately, probably act more appropriately, frankly. But because you don't have all the junk in your head and the survival panic stuff and whatever else preventing you from acting clearly and rationally and whatever else is needed to, you know, get out of a situation like that, right? Or at least to have a better chance.
And so I don't mean it that way, but it's like having the air removed from your skin, you know, and a lot of people have had temporary experiences of that with drugs or with other types of peak experiences or sometimes near death experiences or whatever else. And they're like, holy crap, how do I get more of that, right? Sometimes in meditation, whatever. So the shift is really towards a feeling that deep down that everything's okay – now, you know, your spouse could be leaving you, taking you for every penny and your kids, you know, swearing you're never going to see your kids again. Your boss could be ruining your career, like any number of disastrous, whatever the disastrous things are in your life that you think could be happening, those things could be still be happening and you could still be having emotional reactions to them on the surface, right? But if you stop and you look deep down, somehow, paradoxically, it still feels like there is this sense that everything is okay.
So you can't imagine the weight of the world lifting that comes with that type of shift and the nervous system. And there are a few things that go along with that. One of them out of your three things, one of them is a lessening of the importance of narrative. In fact, we call that the narrative self, it's like the narrative self dampens down, or in some cases seems to maybe even sort of you lose any visibility of it all, really. And so that's the thing that most people have, it's talking, you know – I know Nichol was on your – Nicole Bradford. Nichol was on your show not long ago. And, you know, she used to say this in the best way. You know, she said, you know, imagine that you're in an elevator and you're with someone else and that someone else, you know, somehow the voice in your head has been transplanted to that other person. And then the elevator breaks down, right? And you're going to be like stuck with this person just constantly chattering away, you know, about what's wrong with you or doubts or, you know, sort of a lot of the stuff that is the standard voice in people's heads, right? That would be hell, right? People would be like, oh my God, I would do anything to get out of that elevator, right?
But you are stuck with it 24 hours a day in your head, right? And so like that's just a normal part of human existence. It's funny how you can talk about it like that and people will be like, oh, that'd be horrible. But on the other hand, they're literally experiencing it all the time, right? So that stops. That type of thing that – and an importance of narrative stops. It's common for people to stop giving a crap about watching movies or watching the news if they were news junkies before that, you know. I mean I was in the media in the '80s, '90s, and I've done thousands of newscasts among many other things, right? And you know, in that period was when the news was going from actual news to primarily entertainment, you know, thanks to sort of Bill O'Reilly and competition from Hard Copy that was coming in, and this whole genre was changing, right? You had to keep up with the other – had to keep up with the ratings. And so it became an entertainment show, and it's all story driven and people are like, I don't understand why I don't really, I'm just – I don't have this obsession with the news anymore. It's because that was just their sitcom, right?
And so realistically, if you think about this from the standpoint of story, when that story goes – when that attraction to story goes down, two other surprising things happened, first of all, your own story becomes a lot less important. We spend, you know, prior to the transition of fundamental wellbeing, I was more or less doing what everybody else does with their life, which was spending my life building up my personal story, right? I mean, that's what we all do. We're all engaged in this process of kind of building up this personal story. And now I don't really care at all about that. That's a big change that occurs in people and one that has to be managed properly and, you know, all sorts of things, right?
The other one is primarily human relationships are story-based, right? Like we're friends because I go out to dinner with you and I listen to your stories and no matter how crazy they might be, I validate them so that you will then listen to my stories and validate mine. And as long as we keep validating each other, we're going to be great friends, right? And then we'll go through some rough patches where you do a little less validation because you're trying to talk some sense into me about something, but on the whole we're basically – we're into each other's stories. We're validating each other's stories.
When you have a transition to this and stories don't matter anymore and you're hanging out with your friends and they're talking about all these stories that just sound to you, just like they couldn't possibly be less interesting or important, that's a big shift in your life that you've got to know how to navigate. And a big shift that you've got to know how to navigate into continuing to remain successful in the world, you know, dealing with other people who are entirely story based and story driven and just looking to add to their own stories, and you know, all of that, right? And so, there's a lot of complexity around this type of stuff. Even from just your very first, you know, one of the three things that you mentioned there, that's a big change that occurs in that with someone that goes into fundamental wellbeing.
And then if you think about that in the context of environment, right, it's exactly what happens. And so you have this transition and usually with our stuff, we kind of force people to have a transition in the course of their daily life so that they don't have to return to the back to their normal world, right, because that helps it to stick better. But what most people do is they go to the Peruvian jungle and, you know, gulp down some ayahuasca or whatever, right? But they're on retreat, so they're doing whatever, right? And then they return to the normal world and it's just like, you know, it's just …
[00:30:48] Dylan Watkins: Old bullshit.
[00:30:49] Jeffery Martin: Yeah. And we're conditioned systems, we're stimulus response systems, right? Like you have no idea why you're doing that with your hands and your arms right now, while you're sitting a certain way or whatever. I have no idea why I'm gesturing with my hands. Like you can't see them, they're off camera. Why the hell am I hands gesturing, right? Or why am I sitting with my legs, you know, the way they are. Or whoever's watching this, you know, think about it for a minute. You have no idea why you're sitting like you're sitting, unless you're like on the edge of a cliff or something, watching this on your phone, balancing on a rock, trying not to fall off, you know, except for the handful of you that are in a weird situation like that, you have no idea why these various body parts are in a position like they are.
Well, here's why. It's because our behavioral system inside sort of this one part of our nervous system, what it does is it's constantly conducting experiments, you know? So it's like, hey, when I fluctuate my voice like this, do people pay more attention? Or should I be talking like this to Dylan. Is this really the thing, right? And so everything we're doing, every action we're taking, it's a result of trillions of experiments that our nervous system has conducted at an unconscious level, which means that we're primarily communicating with each other at an unconscious level. It's the result of all of those exchanges that we're communicating with.
I am not actively varying my voice or my head or my gestures or my facial expressions or, you know, anything. And neither are you and neither is really anybody else most of the time, right? And so it's all unconscious communication, basically, that is primarily flowing between two people at any given times. And that comes down to us being in a stimulus response situation, primarily at an unconscious level, in our nervous system. So when you go back into an environment, right, that has all of those old stimuli in it, guess what happens in your highly programmed trillions of experiments have been performed system, right? It immediately wants to throw those reactions that are programmed deeply in it, right back out, you find your behavior. You're like, whoa, what's going on with my behavior here and all these amazing insights and whatever else, right? And it's just like, you're stuck. So environment can really matter. It can really, really matter.
[00:33:08] Dylan Watkins: Yeah. What's interesting about that with all things you're talking about and you're right, there's a lot to unpack all those things. And I do wave my hands. I'm an Italian, I embrace it. I like to move my hands around. I do not know why. Hey, you know. But I don't know. I have no idea why I enjoy this, but it's something that I feel like it's about connection, expression. And really, I feel like I'm more congruent with myself when I move my hands about and wave them frantically. And one of the things you were talking about I think was interesting is that we're all about communication. We are social beings. We are social creatures much as like, when we say, oh, I'm a complete individual. And I am complete autonomous in my decision making process, that is a hundred percent a lie because you are not only in a relationship with others, you're also in a relationship with yourself.
And so the way that we communicate, the way that we learn, the way that we transfer data is stories, stories, both knowledge and emotion coming together. The more intense the emotion and the better the lesson, the more that we retain and it carries on. Hence, why you gulp down a bucket full of ayahuasca and you would get thrown through the cosmos, you tend to remember those lessons where you come back and you might say to something like, oh, I understand, I just need to be myself. Well, you could get that exact same thing by scrolling on Instagram, but you don't have the depth of emotion. You didn't go through hell and back and deconstruct your soul and come back with that lesson. So it doesn't have that imprint, right? The story isn't as meaningful without the emotion that's attached to it.
And what I think is really interesting is what you're talking about is deattaching the emotional impact and the judgment behind the stories, both with other people in your sociality and then in terms of your own reality to where you no longer identify, you no longer have an emotional impact, where you feel like you are your stories, you are the judgments of others. And that awakening and that deattachment is that ability to really say, I am not playing this game because constantly we are trying to figure out what game we're playing. The game of friendship, the game of I'm winning a business, the game of life, the game of like being a supportive friend. And so we're telling our stories because the stories create the meaning for us to play the game of life.
And if we look at this and we are talking about, you can play a better game by just detaching from that and realize, oh, I'm actually a lot happier when I don't have all of these mental and social pressures, trying to push me into a direction that's not congruent with driving my happiness. And because ultimately, we have this great fear, if I do something wrong I will get kicked out of the tribe and I'll die, right? My wife will leave me, I'll get kicked out of the tribe and I'll die. My business will fail, I'll get kicked out of the tribe and I'll die. And almost always results to that then I'll get kicked out of the tribe and die.
And so we have this balance of this one, be congruent self, completely expressing and wholly our own, but we are also social creatures that are bound by social constructs and rules that we've created because, you know, a millennia of this type of stuff. And so we are both of these things trying to hold. And one of the things I've realized from large doses of plant medicine was that both truths are being held at the same time. The truest trues are polar opposites being held at the same time. Are we individuals completely free or are we social creatures bound by social constructs? We're both. Are we individual specs of nothingness or are we all connected to the university and the cosmos? We are both, right? And being able to hold those two things at the same time, I think is one of the things that you talk about these maybe dual or non-dual states, but I don't really understand the actual symbolic, non- symbolic definitions of that. But I'd love to get your thoughts around that and what that means and how those detachments work.
[00:36:47] Jeffery Martin: Sure. Let me back up to one thing first. And that is that if you ask someone, why is your hand in a certain position? They'll always have an answer, right? So like you had your Italian answer, right? Well, the research shows is that answer has nothing to do with why your hand is in that position. It's funny, right? Because the mind like instantly creates a story about it, right? Like just to highlight the whole story thing, right? And everybody will do it, you know.
[00:37:10] Dylan Watkins: It's so true.
[00:37:11] Jeffery Martin: It's so fun. So, you know, what's interesting to me as I was listening to you talk about all of that, you know, it is so – I don't even remember living like that anymore. You know, I've been in fundamental wellbeing now for so long as a result of this project that it's hard for me to even remember back to life being like that, which I think is pretty amazing if you think about it, given that that was a hundred percent, you know, I'm sure of my daily reality moment to moment for however long, you know, whatever 30, 40 years, however long it was. And so, that's really quite an amazing change. And it's actually one of the issues with being in fundamental wellbeing is that kind of the longer you're in it, the more you're so removed from, I guess, sort of the pain of ordinary living or the – I'm not even sure what you would call it, right? Like, to me, it looks like pain.
I used to live in downtown Palo Alto in California. And so I used to go out of the house and I would go for long walks around downtown. You know, whenever I felt like going for a walk, I didn't want to drive to the redwoods or something, or maybe it was late at night or something, I would just walk around because there was always something going on in downtown Palo Alto, you know? And on Friday and Saturday nights and stuff, you know, that place was just packed. And I would walk by all of these outside tables where people were talking about stuff and I would walk past their tables if they were talking about them. And I would be like, my God, these poor people and their reality, you know, and what they're tortured by and caring about. And I mean, I was – it was just like, it was such a distant thing, even though I knew that however many years before who knows at that point, it could have been like five years before, or two years before, I don't really remember the timelines. Because you're also sort of living in the moment, so timelines aren't my specialty anymore. I'd have to really look them up on calendars and stuff these days.
But, you know, I couldn't recognize that I had been exactly in that same position, you know, not long before. And now it was just almost like walking among an alien species. And my heart just went out to them so much every time I would go on those walks, you know. I mean, I would just feel just such tremendous sympathy for the fact that that's the way that they had to experience life, you know, and that we weren't living in a culture where they were like, where, when in school, you just find out that there's this whole other alternative, you know. You know, the thing that I study isn't even in the conversation, it's not even in the TransTech conversation really.
You know, I mean, years ago we started TransTech. I sort of conceived of it back in 2007 and it was primarily to find people who wanted to work on engineering this, you know. And then over the years, it broadened out and broadened out and broadened out. It kind of became the space for technology and wellbeing. And, you know, even in the TransTech space, I mean, I'm less than – the kind of stuff I'm interested in is probably like less than 0.1% of it really, which is kind of crazy, you know.
[00:41:10] Dylan Watkins: What is the stuff that you're interested in?
[00:41:11] Jeffery Martin: Well, it's this type of shift. It's a shift to this type of other way of experiencing the world, you know. I think there are basically three ways of experiencing the world. One is the way most people do it, which is just letting their nervous system do whatever the hell it wants with them. And so, you know, it's just sort of like you're at the unconscious whim, frankly, of your nervous system. It doesn't feel like that, but you are. The second one is when you kind of realize that and you're like, oh crap, I should do something about that, right? And there are some great people that have done a lot of work in that area of the, oh crap space, people like Martin Seligman and the whole positive psychology movement, for instance, where it's a lot of empirical awesome work around what really makes people flourish, and all of that.
But the seed of it, right, is you can't really change this fundamental thing, right? And so it's a question of like, how do you help people flourish while they're living with this, you know, moment to moment sense if you will, of fundamental discontentment? Where that's really the foreground for them, or really in the background for them or where they've repressed it and it's, you know, affecting them and their behavior and their life in unconscious ways or where they're more conscious of it. Whatever's true of that, it's still there, right, because they're an animal. If they haven't had this rewiring to fundamental wellbeing, then that's the story for them.
And so I think people like Marty have done a fantastic job. Sonja Lyubomirsky and so many others, Ed Diener, you know, these major figures in the psychology space are really figuring out if you're going to live with that, how do you best live with it? What does that look like? And that to me is door number two, right? The second option, if you will, that someone can walk through.
The third one is the thing that I work on, which is how do you just get rid of that problem? You know, instead of trying to like constantly sweep it under the rug or get a more comfortable mattress, you know, that hopefully won't feel the pee through or whatever else, right? You know, how do you just rewire your systems such that you're kind of human 3.0, right? Because we don't need it. Like I'm not going to die during this interview from some fucking wild animal ripping my arm off, right? Or I'm not going to starve today because I didn't make it the next berry bush, or I didn't catch enough fish on the beach behind the house, the ocean, or, you know, whatever else, right?
I mean, if anything I'm trying to like not have a brownie sundae, right, at dinner so that I don't have a bunch of empty sugar laid in calories that just like puts weight on me or whatever, right? We have the exact opposite problem. Our societies are conspiring to keep us safe, to keep us alive, you know, all of that. We don't need that old wiring anymore where it's like at any given time, some tiger could just come and tear my arm off. We're not that bird that we're throwing those crumbs to, right?
And incidentally, here's a funny story about the birds. A friend of mine – I was talking at some conference, I don't remember where it was because, you know, I talk all the time. And a friend of mine was in the audience and he was like, you know, as you were telling that story, I was thinking to myself, I have a bird. And this bird has lived the safest existence imaginable, right? It's been in a cave. It's been in a cage in their house. There's no animals that are going to eat it. You know, no animals ever get into the house that could threaten it, right? Basically, this bird has no threats and it still eats the exact same way. And that's exactly what we're all doing as humans. You know, we're living in that cage where we don't have any threats and yet we're still controlled by that nervous system thing.
So the third thing for me, and the thing that I really work on is how do you get rid of that? And where do you go from there with life? I mean, life can be so much more extraordinary, sort of like the Roger Bannister thing, you know, where everybody thought you couldn't break the four-minute mile and then one day Roger Bannister eventually breaks the four minute mile. And then tons of people start breaking the four-minute mile. And now the four-minute mile seems like a ridiculous benchmark that was ever considered true, right? We're in the same place with how amazing the experience of being human can be.
And you've kind of got, you know, as much as I love and respect their work, sort of the positive psychology, traditional positive psychology movement sticking at the four-minute mile, you know. And we're sort of over here, like, hey, you know, that four-minute mile is imaginary. You guys ought to experience life this way. But, you know, practically nobody's heard about it and, you know, we're not really in the business of spreading it per se. We're researching it, right? I mean, it's not like I'm asking myself, how do I get a talk show or something?
[00:45:54] Dylan Watkins: Well, I want to dive in a little bit. Let's look at this a little bit. So one, I mean, you're talking about the science of sadness, the fact that we're just inherently wired this way, and this is what makes sense, because this is the way that allowed us to survive. I mean, the reason why we're here is because all of our ancestors did that. You know, when the bush rattled, they turn around and they ran the other way. The other guys who said, oh, I wonder what that is and the tiger jumped and then ate their face. That's why they're not here. And that's why we all have a little bit of this neurotic, you know, energy and, you know, the science of sadness where we pay much more attention to the negativity than we do positivity. And we were in an area of scarcity and now we're in an aberrance of abundance. And so now we have these issues where we now have diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity. And that's one of the things that we have to fight against because it goes completely against our own programming. And so that we understand that there's that piece of it, right?
But then if you go into the other side of things, right, and well, I want to tie into this because you talked about this a little bit. You said, this is what you're studying. This is what you're understanding. This is what you're talking about. This third door, this deattachment, this new way of existing, this thing of being able to actually deattach from the stories and be able to embrace this non-dualed state. Can you talk to me exactly the practical tactical, I mean, is that working with your vagus nerve? Is that working with your psychological states? Is that journaling throughout the day? Can you talk to me about, in what ways do you actually get and stay into that third doorway?
[00:47:13] Jeffery Martin: Sure. Yeah, we think there's a couple ways to do it. The modern technological ways – it's not been worked out with like PEMF or, you know, neurofeedback or any of those things. And people have taken really solid tries at a lot of that stuff. In some cases we've taken really solid tries at a lot of that stuff. But there is an emerging technology that seems promising and it's called transcranial ultrasound, transcranial focused ultrasound to be more precise, right? And so we put together a project in the Valley that brought together some of the leaders in that space for a period of time to sort of incubate and try to really sort of launch.
There's kind of a lull in funding and interest and stuff on our version of that. You know, if you were working on Parkinson's, you could still get money, right? Or if you were an academic and you were working on, you know, epilepsy or something, there was money for you. But if you were working on like, you know, human thriving and emotional stuff and whatever else, there was nothing for you.
You probably know Tim Chang. You know Tim Chang?
[00:48:23] Dylan Watkins: No.
[00:48:24] Jeffery Martin: An investor in the Valley from – anyway, so Tim is an amazing human being first of all. I just can't possibly say enough good things about Tim. You should definitely have him on your show if you get a chance. He's a VC. So, you know, VCs often take sort of hard knocks in the public view. But he's just an amazing human being. And he has been instrumental really in a lot of the transformative technology type spaces and really making sure that that great stuff gets funded, great stuff gets attention. So we were looking at – so I was looking to do this project, right, where we did transcranial focused ultrasound and we brought people to the Valley and whatever else and, you know, I thought, well, we'll just do it standard style, standard Silicon Valley style, right? We'll just get a house and we'll put everybody in the house and we'll just jam for a year or something, right?
And so that's what we did. But it was hard to find a house, right, because you would like deal with these landlords and the landlords are like, let's see, I have a bunch of AI programmers who are not going to cause me any liability. And then I have you people who are doing what to people's brains? Right.
And so, we had basically no luck. We tried so hard, went through so many attempted landlords. We had amazing people in the Valley fronting us with those landlords, right? I mean, it shouldn't have been like the issue that it was, but at the end of the day, they're like, you're zapping people's brains. Yee, that sounds like it could cost me my house. I think I'm just going to rent to these AI guys. And so, you know, finally Tim actually had a spare house and so we wound up renting a spare house from Tim in Redwood City and putting this project in his house. He was so gracious. That's just an example of like what an amazing person he is, right? I mean, he's just like all in. He's like, you know, this is important. We need to get this advanced, you know. Here's a house, you know, kind of thing.
And so, we all get together in this house and over the course of that year, I don't think any of us left not feeling like you can absolutely zap people into fundamental wellbeing. And so that's coming, right? Now, you know, frankly, FDA has very little idea what they're going to be doing with this analogy. It's going to be in a highly regulated space. I mean, there's all sorts of issues with that because it's, one, even though it's very low energy and you can't really, you know, it's very safe and all of that, it still falls under FDA, under the FDA's, you know, world, right? And it's very new and, you know, they're just not – it's going to be a while before that gets regulated. So, consequently, it's going to be a while before that's widely available outside of a research project like ours or some of the others that are going on out there. So that's, I think, the coolest TransTech one, right? Go ahead.
[00:51:25] Dylan Watkins: Just real quick. I want to dive into that. I just want to make sure I understand you. And then I have a question for you about this. So what you're saying is what you're doing is that you're basically –you're hacking the game of your brain by literally hooking up a sonic device and blasting your brain to trigger some sort of awakening state so that you, more or less, with the push of a sonic button, you're reprogramming your brain to say, okay, enlightenment go. And that's essentially what you did. Is there any research papers on this? Can you see this so I could …
[00:51:53] Jeffery Martin: That's where it's going, you know? And if you think about it, it's – from the standpoint of it's just part of the evolution, right? And so if you think about this research project, right, it started by just getting your arms around these people and then figuring out what may be going on in their brain and then doing some work and collaborating with a whole bunch of others to get more work done, to figure out what's really going on in their brain, right? And then you have a target map and then you're sort of going through what can you target with it? Can you do it with neurofeedback? Can you do it with this brain stem thing, that brain stem thing, right? You know, how can you hit these regions of interest as we call them, you know, in the brain, these ROIs in the brain?
And then, you know, we've gone through – I mean, I we've been working with stimulation technologies since, geez, I was in Hong Kong maybe 2010 or 2011, I don't remember, with Mikey Siegel. I don't know if you know Mikey. I hope you do. He's a great guy. If he hasn't been on your podcast, he should totally be on your podcast. It's his birthday today, actually, as I make this, so that'll date this episode, but happy birthday, Mikey, if you're off there.
[00:52:52] Dylan Watkins: Happy birthday, Mikey.
[00:52:53] Jeffery Martin: He's having a giant fest at the moment, actually, a big party. And I'm out of the country, so I'm not there today. Otherwise we would not be talking today, right? And so, you know, back then we were doing it with tDCS. We were doing it with magnetic stimulation. We were trying all kinds of stuff, right? And we've tried all kinds of stuff over time and it's going to come down to this TUS stuff, to this transcranial ultrasound stuff. Transcranial ultrasound, transcranial focused ultrasound if you want a different acronym, it doesn't matter. A bunch of acronyms are used. Okay. So that's something that people can experience, which is more or less going to be in a research environment for right now, or it's going to be an ayahuasca type thing where you go to Peru for it, you know, you get outside of a Western regulatory environment for it.
The other thing, the thing that we're using every day, you know, that has transitioned thousands and thousands of people. I don't even know how many, to be honest. I'm just not up to the speed on that part of our project much anymore because it's like an old part of the project from years ago. But it's still churning, you know, we still have people working on it. And that is we needed at a certain point to be able to measure people before and after fundamental wellbeing, right?
It's one thing to be able to – we started off doing what exactly what you would think, find people with fundamental wellbeing and measure them, right? Measure them physiologically, their brains, all that, right? But at a certain point, you're sort of like, well, gee, I wonder what changed here, right? Not just what's different in these people than other people, but like, if you could take someone before and after, what changed? And so, you know, by that point, the project had been going for years and I knew that there wasn't really anything out there that we'd seen that could reliably do that.
And if you think about, if you're going to spend like $2,000 or $3,000 or more a subject, right, you can't have a lot of failures or, you know, you have a very bankrupt academic, you know, lab project very, very quickly, right? So we needed to have something that would successfully transition people just on the basis of pure economic survival from an academic research standpoint. And so that's what we created. We wound up looking through all of our data and basically creating a protocol that did that. And I thought, of course, I fought for forever that this is going to be a technological solution. It's going to, you're going to put it on your head, you're going to push a button, it's going to do its thing. And I think that's going to be true and it's going to be through, you know, transcranial ultrasound or something newer that might come along after it. But we're not there yet. You know, you can't do that, right? Or you could come to the lab and, you know, whatever. But most people can't do it, like a billion people aren't going to do that tomorrow, right?
And so the question is what is something that a billion people could do? And we needed something that could be done at scale across a lot of people for research purposes. And so what we wound up doing was basically coming our existing data and in that data, we'd asked a question that I'd really ignored. Well, we collected an enormous amount of data on each subject. It was an insane amount of data on people. So it's not surprising. There's all kinds of questions and measures that we still haven't scored, looked at, whatever else that are in that. It's waiting for some PhD student next year to want to do their dissertation on X, Y, or Z, and use that data kind of thing, right?
So one of the things that we asked was what worked for you, right? So we have people that are in fundamental wellbeing. And I just thought, just throw in some questions, right? Like what worked for you? Now, I didn't think they could tell us in an accurate way, which is why I didn't pay much attention to that question. I thought that was going to be more of a sociological question for like somebody's sociological dissertation someday, you know, something like that. I didn't think that that would be a meaningful answer. But we had a research assistant go back and categorize all those answers when we were out of brain stem options back before transcranial ultrasound. We had somebody go back, look at all of that. And it turned out there weren't that many answers. You know, it was like, there were just a few categories of things that people had tried.
They were mostly meditation based. Not entirely. There were some like cognitive sciencey hack type things in there. And we thought, well, geez, if there's really this few of them, let's just start seeing what happens when we have people do them, right? And over the course of a year, year and a half or so, we were able to basically iterate our way to sort of cocktail of these different methods.
And so one method, for instance – there's methodological categories, right? So if you think about a meditation method, for instance, might be a mantra-based method, but there's like thousands of different or millions, who knows, of different mantra-based methods, right? And so how do you know which mantra-based method? Well, there's two main types of mantra-based methods. One is one that you just repeat, like one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, right? And that's it. You're just sitting there and you're just repeating it. It's quietly, out loud, whatever.
And then there's another one where you basically are like, one, and you sort of try to just see what happens in your system when you throw it kind of that what I would think of as a stimulus probe of that word one, right? It could be any phrase, whatever. I don't care what it is. And then you kind of watch what happens in your system with that and then you watch it die down and then you kind of stimulate it again. This is a very shortcut, you know, instructions, but I'm just saying there's these two main sort of branches of mantras. And it turns out that the latter is insanely more effective for fundamental wellbeing stuff than the former. The former is really useful for other stuff. I mean, you want to relax or whatever. It's great. But in terms of actually getting to fundamental wellbeing. So there were a lot of distinctions like that, that became instantly very clear in the data.
Another thing that became very clear in the data was that you could have tried a bunch of these things, but only had one of them work. And so it wasn't like if I just tell you this mantra one and you go out and use it, that's guaranteed to work for you. There was clearly a fit that was that were looking at, what we call the fit problem, right? And so the first thing is you have to have, you know, sort of the list of stuff that works, preferably stuff that's been changed and tuned to modern brains because a lot of these methods have not been updated over time and our cognition have changed and, you know, just modern media changes our cognition and stuff. And so our brains have changed and the methods haven't from these traditions haven't really kept up. So, you know, some slight tweaks can sort of make a world difference on a lot of those methods. And so a list of methods, right?
And then you've got to basically just plow your way through those methods and see which one is right for you, right? So it's kind of a simple two-step process for people and that's all our protocol did, initially, was it basically had people walk through the methods and then we were able to sort of, you know, it's – we don't have the time for it today. I'm looking at the clock. But, you know, we basically would tell people, here's how you can tell when one is working for you in the right direction, right? And the goal was to just help people to find that.
And then the third step was these methods, you know, people really misunderstand, I think these methods, and that's not their fault. Nobody's out there telling them this, except us probably. We're not engaged in some sort of massive public project to tell people, right? We're researching this stuff. And so the third component of this that really matters more than anything else is what we call sinking in. And so if you think about it, the list of methods is there so that you can iterate your way to a method that might be working for you in the right direction. When a method is working for you in the right direction, it delivers an actual experience to you at least some of the time when you use it.
Now, what most meditation people say is just ignore whatever arises and just keep going with the meditation. That's a recipe for not transitioning. I mean, there's a reason why, like, you know, half a percent of their people that ever come to them transition. And it's because it's the wrong advice. The right advice is when you get that glimpse of something that's in the right direction, stop meditating and put your attention on that glimpse that's in the right direction, right? So methods are basically designed to get your system kind of orienting in the right direction, even if it's just for a moment, right? And then what you've got to do is you've got to put your attention on that. You've got to communicate to your brain and nervous system, hey, that experience there. Yeah. I want that. Right? Versus continuing to meditate, you know, not letting the things, you know, affect you and, you know, basically what are you communicating to your brain in that case? You're communicating, I don't want that stuff. Just give me more of the meditation, right? But you don't want more of the meditation. You want the results that the meditation is supposed to produce.
[01:01:46] Dylan Watkins: What feeling …
[01:01:46] Jeffery Martin: And so the third part is really sinking in.
[01:01:49] Dylan Watkins: Just real quick. I want to say that when you're talking about this, when you talk about sinking in, what is the actual experience, what do you – because from what I'm understanding is this, there's multiple different modalities of meditation or transcendental meditation or whatever the things might be, where you're basically you're hitting a tuning fork and then you're paying attention to what's going on in your system.
And then when you're finding something that actually signals, when you get a bite on the reel of your attention, then you pull on that attention. You say, okay, this is where I'm going towards. But how do they know what that thing is? Like, when you say they get a glimpse of the thing that they should be going towards, how do they know? What is the experiential thing? What are they experiencing? What are they going through to let them know that this is what I should be paying attention? I should dive in that direction.
[01:02:28] Jeffery Martin: Yeah. And that's what we have to do quite a bit of education around to help people actually realize and know, right? You know, one of the things that I think is very interesting – I'm not in the psychedelic space, but a lot of my friends are. Whether they're at the investor level or the business level or the science level or whatever, right? And it's just like, their stuff sounds close enough to our stuff that they're kind of been interested in our stuff over the years and, you know, we've become friends or whatever. And so I don't know that much about psychedelics except what I know sort of secondhand from these folks, right, and from dinners and hanging out at their house or whatever, right?
And so one of the things that is interesting to me though, is that it looks like – I often wonder why psychedelics aren't more used for this, right? Because what it seems like happens is people will have a psychedelic, take a psychedelic of some kind, and they'll sort of have this peak, you know, experience, if they're lucky, right? And then they'll be like, that's the goal, right? It's like their system like takes that glimpse as the goal, right? But that's actually, usually not – I mean, I've heard a lot of those described, right? And so it's like – and I've heard a lot of fundamental wellbeing described, right? And I've experienced a wide range of fundamental wellbeing in depths. And so, you know, I can tell that what's experienced with the peak there is not the goal, right? But I've talked to enough of these people that I can tell that there's a point further on the come down that is in the direction oftentimes of the goal, right? And so if instead, even if you're like in the psychedelic space, if you just forget about that peak at the top of the curve and you pay attention to sort of the coming down part, on the coming down part of the curve, like there are points in there that absolutely match the type of things that we talk about. I don't know how much you want me to – I can talk about this. We're going to be longer. You want me to do it? I can do it.
[01:04:31] Dylan Watkins: It's fascinating. Please, let's get into it. I know we're going to slide slightly over if you're okay with that. I just want to just – but this is a very fascinating, interesting topic that we're talking about. Being able to – what you're talking about is that settling in phase. It's not the contraction of the peak, but it's the releasing where you can actually kind of lean into it. Almost like a skydiver kind of leans into the air and you can be in faster velocity by going through that kind of slip tunnel. But that's my own interpretation, but I'd love you to explain a little bit of it. Then we can start to wrap this up.
[01:05:00] Jeffery Martin: For sure. And so one of the things to keep in mind about fundamental wellbeing is that there's a lot of different types of it and there's a lot of different degrees of depth of each type of it, right? And so we put out – one of the very first things that we put out, which took us 10 years of working on it and getting it iterated and getting feedback on it and all of that, was a book called The Finders. And the reason we chose that to be the first piece of information that we really put out is because it talks about the four major types of fundamental wellbeing. And virtually everybody's going to experience one at the first two. It's rare for people to experience the third one. It's even rarer for them to go to the fourth one. That's why we don't even bother talking about the fifth one, sixth one, you know, and so on. Like they're just so extreme. They're already rare in the population. It's like half a percent of people that experience this in the first place, right?
And so you can imagine it's like a tiny percentage or, you know, you get the idea. So one of the things that you have to keep in mind is that there's a lot of different ways that this can show up. There's a lot of different things that are in the right direction. And that's why it takes us a little bit of time to sort of educate people on it. And what we've done over the years, is we've tested doing this in two different ways. We've tested doing it in a zillion ways, right? But it's boiled down to two that really were worthy of testing a lot more. And so one is here's the matrix of like the qualities of what it feels like in each one of these or what the experience is like in each one of these different types of fundamental wellbeing at different depths even. We've started to educate on depths and stuff for the first time in the last year.
And then the other side is not really talking at all about. And instead just using very general language around things like a feeling of beingness or presence or isness and talking about really what those are, that those are not abstract ideas. One of the things that was most surprising to me when I sat down with people that were in fundamental wellbeing at the very beginning, was they would, they might use a word like isness, right? Or they might use a word like presence or whatever, right? And I would, from my standpoint, and definitely in egoic consciousness at that point, you know, my mind would just go crazy, trying to understand what they might be trying to convey with the word presence, right?
And what it took me a while to realize was that that word was being used by them because it was the cleanest possible single word or phrase, sometimes it was a phrase, that relayed to the direct experience that they were having, right? And it wasn't a concept. There's no concept to this notion of presence as someone uses it from the standpoint of fundamental wellbeing or isness, or, you know, any of the other sort of more general terms that you might hear. What they are, when someone from fundamental wellbeing is talking to you, what they're doing is they're finding language as best they can that directly refers to their actual experience. They don't have that story-driven system. They're not making up metaphors for you, unless they've a teacher and they've learned to do it over time and people have, you know, they've picked up good stories or borrowed good stories from others and whatever, right?
But generally speaking, if you're just sitting down with the average finder, the average person in fundamental wellbeing, we call them finders, because they're not seekers, you know, it's a very literal conversation with them, right? Like the words that they're saying, especially about their own internal experience, are just as literal as they can possibly be. And what you've got to do is kind of prevent your mind from making more out of them than is actually intended. And so if I say to you, well, there's this feeling of presence, right? Your mind starts going through the entire encyclopedia in your brain of presence and what it might mean and how would that relate to perception versus whatever, right? And it's like none of that, right? None of that. None of that matters and none of that is going to help you.
So what we do is we introduce some words like this. We introduce a word like isness or a word like presence or a word like beingness. And those are our three favorites, because generally speaking, those are three categories – there's kind of a few different categories of this and it relates to the layers of depth, right? So you might pop into a brief experience of a layer of one depth versus a different one, right? It's kind of random. You're not going to start off at the least depth one probably every time, or maybe ever. You may never experience the one that's the least depth. You might just pop into a later one, right? Especially, if you're using some really advanced methods or psychedelics or whatever, right?
And so what we try to do is provide words that sort of relate to three key layers of depth that people are most likely to encounter, regardless of where they're at across the different types of fundamental wellbeing. And those three words really are beingness, isness, and presence. And then we say to people, I mean, we're obviously a lot more elegant in terms of – this is off the back of my hand and this shorthand, right? But the gist is, you know, do not let your mind try to figure out what those are. Just keep in mind there's something called presence, there's something called isiness, there's something called beingness. I can never understand that. I can never think my way to understanding that. I can never build a conceptual structure that is so good for one of those that one day it'll be so accurate that I can just step into it. None of those things will ever happen to you.
What you can do is keep those three words in mind, and as you have an experience, realize, that one or the other of them, or whatever seems to fit it, right? And so if you're having experience in meditation or on psychedelics or on whatever, right, and one of those three doesn't seem to really fit it, don't bother sinking into it. But if you're having an experience and there is some aspect of it, and you're sort of like, you know, yeah, I could kind of see a beingness thing. It's not like what my mind would've thought about it, but yeah, I can kind of sink into it, right?
And so, you know, you can go crazy on understanding all the categories and the depths and all of the phenomenology and well, all of that, right? And that's, I think, a great thing to do. It doesn't hurt to do that, if somebody's got the time and the inclination, right? But the shorthand way that we like to do it, to make it easier for people, is just using this.
[01:11:54] Dylan Watkins: That's fantastic.
[01:11:55] Jeffery Martin: And we've tested it all just across thousands of people.
[01:11:58] Dylan Watkins: What I think is beautiful about that is there's a lot of things about connecting yourself to your, if you want to call it, super ego, to your higher consciousness or things like that. And we're talking about is that we have an interpretation layer, which is this narrative driven stories. And what it sounds like what you're doing is that you are cutting out that narrative layer, that thinking, judging, feelings, that situation where you say, okay, this is what this means. This is what it's like. And the thing is people think that we're thinking machines that feel, but we're really feeling machines that created thinking as a way to be able to get through this reality.
And so you're basically cutting off that thinking piece and you're connecting directly to the experience, not interpreting it, not understanding it, but just literally feeling your way through to where you're almost merging yourself and that experience into one. And you're basically cutting out that middle man, which is the person, the narrative in between.
And then that's why you're talking about the beingness, the isness, the presentness. And then every time you try to tell the story, you say, no, no, you're not a part of this conversation. I am connecting with myself. I am a connection with myself and beyond the language. That is just a means to connect, but it's a deeper, more fundamental understanding, getting this and that's kind of – and so when you're saying, when you get that, you sink into that, you don't try to interpret it. You don't try to go through it. You don't try to do it. It's like, you know, it's like, for example, an orgasm, oh, I'm having an orgasm. As soon as you remember that, you get out of it. It's like flow states, right? As soon as you become aware that you're in a flow state, you drop out of that flow state.
So essentially you're saying is that you cut out the narrative and that is what keeps you – that's how you can kind of fast track your way into this awakening and keep yourself …
[01:13:30] Jeffery Martin: Yeah. And you can sink into orgasm and you can sink into flow states, right? And you cannot – you can become aware of them and sink into them versus aware of them from a mind level, that's analyzing them or thinking about them or asking, how can I extend this? Or, you know, whatever else. Is this the thing I read about in that book or whatever, right?
[01:13:48] Dylan Watkins: Is this it?
[01:13:49] Jeffery Martin: Yeah. The thing that prevents people from getting to fundamental wellbeing that are trying to, like the spiritual secret crowd and stuff like that, more than anything else, is them spending a lot of time learning about it. And so it's so funny, but we've seen it again and again and again, over the years, right? You could have somebody who has been, you know, they've practiced Buddhisms, forms for 20, 30 years. They've done Vedanta stuff. They've done all this stuff, right? You name it, they've been through it. They'll come to the program. It'll be, you know, and they'll transition.
But next, they'll refer like their friend, right, who has never studied any of that, doesn't know anything about any of it. They just come and they just do these exercises in the protocol, right? And they transition like super quick and painlessly compared to the other person, right? Who's like struggling with it. It's like, okay, well now I'm kind of experiencing this certain thing, but is it really this thing? Or is it this other thing, you know? And they're like mentally torturing themselves for no reason. They're just allowing their mind to torture them. They're in fundamental wellbeing, but now they're like doubting where they're at and how far along am I? And oh, I got to get into – it's just like crazy, you know. And at meantime, their friend is just like, wow, this is a lot better, you know, thanks for that recommendation.
[01:15:02] Dylan Watkins: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:04] Jeffery Martin: They just moved on with their life in like this new, extraordinary way, right? It's just so funny.
[01:15:09] Dylan Watkins: Well, that's a stepping into – it's not what people call beginners luck or whatever you want to call it because there's no thoughts behind it. There's no judgment. They just step into it and they in it. There's a great book called The Inner Game of Tennis that talks a lot about this. In order to learn something, you can't have this judging, thinking, critical mind doing it. You really just got to embrace it and be in the moment of the situation and just be aware of what you're doing without the judgment. The more you can be aware of what you're doing and just understand what you're going for and just feel your way through the thing you'll get there so much faster and better. But every time you try to layer judgment and thoughts and stories and narratives and all that stuff on top of it, you actually create a wall between who you are and where you want to go, essentially, which I think is fantastic.
Jeffery, this has been incredible. I really enjoyed this conversation with you. I really enjoyed going super deep in this slip stream of consciousness with you. It was very fun. With all of that being said, is there anything else you'd like to let people know about before you tell them how they can get a hold of you, or if you want to tell them how they can get a hold of you?
[01:16:09] Jeffery Martin: No. No, I don't think so. I think this was great. This was a fun conversation. You know, I had a great time today. How to get a hold of us? Really, our research site is nonsymbolic.org. So N-O-N-S-Y-M-B-O-L-I-C dot org. That's kind of the epicenter. I'd go there if I were people and they were sort of curious about this. If somebody wanted to try one of our research protocols, they're available as classes these days. They can go to nextlevelchallenge.com or 45daysto awakening.com.
We don't really have that much available and out there per se because everything really is a data collection effort to us. So it's not like we've got a thousand programs or, you know, tons of whatever, you know, free eBooks to download or, you know, or little eBooks to buy or anything like that. You know, we make our protocol available. We're continuing to collect data because I think if we can – we won't need more data from a human science perspective, right? So like in terms of just people running stats on it and stuff, the numbers are just – they've been consistent for years.
But I think it's worth continuing to collect, to make the protocols out there, first of all, because they help people. But second, from our standpoint, from a science standpoint, I should stop after that, right? I should just have a better public face. It's like, well, we make them available just purely to help people because, you know, that's what we do or whatever. But actually in my mind, I kind of want them out there because if we can get to a big enough learning curve, because I would love to throw them at AI, you know, and see what AI finds in all of this, that, you know, human researchers are now going to come up with. But, you know, you know how it is. That takes like just a mountain of data.
[01:17:50] Dylan Watkins: The labeling and stuff. Yeah. The labeling, the training of the data takes forever.
[01:17:56] Jeffery Martin: Yeah, exactly. To create that initial corpus, you know, that you can train the system on, takes a lot of data. And so we're a long way away from collecting that kind of data. And so we make the transition protocol out there, you know, for that kind of thing.
And then we have other stuff for people that, you know, transition in the programs to help them and things like that. But generally it's not stuff we make publicly available. We just make it available to the research subjects that go through the protocols in the first place.
[01:18:22] Dylan Watkins: I love it. The journey continues, even though you're so far off the mountain, you just keep climbing and I can tell that it's someone who truly, you know, embraces the actual journey and the discovery process and things where you're, you know, we're here, and I'm going to keep going that way, because it doesn't end. It's one of those infinite cycles of growth and potential. So, Jeffery, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming in the show. I appreciate your time. I appreciate it.
[01:18:46] Jeffery Martin: My pleasure. This is great.
[01:18:48] Dylan Watkins: Yeah, super fun. And much love, much appreciation. And I'll see you on the other side.
[01:18:53] Jeffery Martin: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
[01:18:55] Dylan Watkins: Absolutely. Thank you. Bye now.
[01:18:59] Outro: Thank you for listening to the Heroes of Reality Podcast. Check out HeroesofReality.com for more episodes. While you're there you can also take the hero's quiz to find out what kind of hero you are, or if you have a great story and want to be on the podcast, tell us why your hero's journey will inspire others. Thank you for listening. See you on the other side.
