Engineering the Future of Human Wellbeing
What Persistent Non-Symbolic Consciousness (PNSE) and Meditation Mean for the Future
You may be familiar with the numbers… The WHO estimates that by 2030, depression will be the leading disease burden globally. Every year, more people commit suicide than are killed by terrorists, soldiers and criminals combined. In daily life for many people, stress is accelerating — across countries and age groups. Stress can lead to illness and lost productivity. The estimated negative annual impact of stress in the US alone is $350BN. And we’re one of the most medicated groups of Americans in history…
Clearly, alternatives are needed — we must have scalable, accessible, affordable means to support mental and emotional wellbeing. Excitingly — due to science & tech, merging the old with the new, and updating approaches to the human mind — these tools are being created.
One source of inspiration and data for these tools are group of people, who experience life differently than many of us…
- Persistent shift from anxiety, worry, and fear
- Thoughts do not equal = mood
- Live in the now versus past & future
- Sense of deep connection to life and others
- Not ruled by the narrative self or ego
- Great sense of joy
These people are experiencing a psychological condition known academically as PNSE. They are not savants, but, can focus and concentrate deeply at will. They are not Extreme Athletes, but report long or constant periods of flow. This is life flow, not task flow. They are not Navy Seals, but their inner critic is quiet or non-existent. They were discovered in a global psychological study of 1200 people that set out to find the happiest people on earth.
A few lucky people, reach this state by accident, but most work for it through meditation.
And as a group, they look more like this…
..People around the world, of all faiths, atheists, people of all kinds.
There could be one even sitting right next to you as you read this text.
Maslow tracked these people too…his actual hierarchy had another level, Self-Transcendence, but he died before he published on it at depth. (So for those of you who are self-actualized, you’re not quite at the top yet. You have another level to go. No pressure.)
SO why do these people matter?
1) They informed an approach to meditation that can accelerate its adoption, and thus its positive impact.
2) They may provide the key to retaining our humanity as we begin to upgrade towards the 2nd cognitive revolution.
My story is this…Four years ago I ran operations for Blizzard China, including World of Warcraft China, a massive business. My org had 70 employees and my departments set the policies that directed the work of 1K people every day.
Then I went on a meditation retreat and had a powerful psychological shift. One, I was incredibly happy — unrelated to circumstance and two, I had little to no psychological fear for an extended period of time. But, not everyone on my retreat had the same result. WHY NOT?
I wanted to understand what had happened to me so that I could scale it — to make happy and fearless widely accessible. To do so required making the subjective, objective and so began my journey. Which is how I found the PNSE study and the scientist who led it, Dr. Jeffery Martin — and together we went on to build systems and a community around creating new tools to support human psychology.
Meditation has tremendous benefits — for health and more — but if you don’t do it, you don’t get the benefits. For example, meditation has proven to be highly effective for stress and anxiety with some studies showing efficacy as high as 90%. But people often fail at meditation.
Most people fail because they think that meditation doesn’t work for them. The real problem is that most don’t know that there are 1,000 of techniques, sortable into 6 major families. People will try one technique, experience no change, and write off developing a practice. Not knowing that if they had found the right “fit” — the right technique, they’d get the real benefits. So, we set out to solve the problem of finding the right technique efficiently, in order to increase the attach rate.
Finders Course is the result of this. FC is the largest crowd-sourced, crowd-funded experiment on meditation. It’s an 18-week intensive trek through 26 different techniques drawn the original PNSE study, sourced from across the 6 major families, and taught with ZERO dogma, religion or beliefs.
We take hours of quantitative and qualitative data and now in some cohorts biodata — HRV, GSR, and EEG — and have accumulated one of the largest data sets on psychological change through meditation. Our results are dramatic, we see major positive shifts in depression, stress, anxiety, but also happiness, life satisfaction, meaning and joy.
Here’s what we’ve learned with hundreds of students — that you can use today.
· Fit Matters — A lot.
· Try something for 7 days, 1 hour per day — if on the 8th day you hate it. Move on
· If what you did doesn’t seem to be working anymore — it isn’t. Move on.
· Fit is essential for transformation — and transformation is key to navigating the future.
Making meditation easier to adopt is one aspect of my work, but creating even more tech based solutions is essential, which leads to Transformative Technology.
We have a simple mission:
1) to support and expand the mental and emotional wellbeing of humans
2) to provide a new mirror, through data, sensors, and feedback to better understand ourselves and others
3) to create new tools to shape our psychology, positively
Our outer world has been deeply redesigned by technology but our inner development hasn’t…until now.
This is how we see the world for TransTech. On one end, you have people who need support for anxiety, stress, and depression. In the middle, you have those needing skills to navigate happiness, loneliness, connection, compassion, empathy. And on the far side, you have people pushing the limits of human performance and ability through the mind.
We track 11 areas of Transtech, and the boundaries between them are blurring. From digital medicine to support cognitive development, to mood management, behavior change and emotion tracking, I see new use cases every day. What’s happening now is far, far beyond the neurofeedback of yesteryear.
Our inner landscape is one of the next great frontiers for technology — though not one without traps. In order to use tech, to heal and shape our minds, we will on that journey develop the ability to directly affect our psychology and capacity. When we can turn the knobs and levers of our mind at-will, most likely we will have entered the 2nd great cognitive revolution.
And with that power, if we haven’t matured past the “chasing of sensation” to use the Buddha’s words. Or to use Maslow’s words, if we haven’t realized that the “self” we have actualized (and the way that we think about it) must also go for us to be truly free
If we still have a gaping “hole” that we seek to fill from outside ourselves. Then we face a danger of becoming lost, of losing authority to the very algorithms that will help us engineer our pleasure. So, we must actually “wake-up.” We must finish what the wisdom traditions discovered 1st.
We must actually seek to reach the “end of suffering” and mental liberation of all mankind. The good news is — humans have created maps and described what it feels like to be there. We can modernize the process — accelerated by technology, minus religiosity, and informed by data. We must go all the way to the end point, en masse. We must mature internally to match our power.
If we want to create an abundant future for our children rather than a dystopian one then we must push towards a world wide awakening.
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