![[DMR 2 waking up 20250129.m4a]]

So let's talk about the waking up dimension and I'm picking this next because I think it's one of the most obviously independent domains or dimensions from the cognitive complexity one.

That people would generally be: "Yes, its clear there are people who could be really waking up, really spiritually out there, developed (if we want to use the term), advanced, enlightened. And there are people who can be very cognitively complex, but they're not very spiritually interested even or advanced, and vice versa.

So, for example, Ramana Maharishi, an incredibly great Hindu sage, seems to not necessarily be cognitively complex at all. I mean, he didn't speak very much, so how do we know? But that would maybe be plausible.

Then you have someone like Sri Aurobindo, who was perhaps actually advanced in both dimensions, a brilliant writer, thinker, wrote a lot of material, and seemed to have gone a long way in fundamental well-being, along the yogic path developing integral yoga.

Now this is also a domain where we might be skeptical of how much science can do. Is this an area where we can use scientific tools?

Certainly, it's an area where we can have an empirical approach – though certainly in some of the traditions it's pretty sacred and religious, it's mystical. But let's take Buddhism. Here, we have an empirical approach, it has pretty thorough set of guidance for meditation with detail of stages long contemplative path, what kind of experiences you might have and also practices (rafts). They certainly have a kind of map and they have a raft in this area. One example of a modern version of that, distilled from traditional Buddhist texts, is Culadasa's Mind Illuminated. [insert picture here from the Mind Illuminated]. So I think that's… That's one approach there that's useful.

Fundamental Wellbeing and the Martin Matrix

And so I'm just going to set out here what I think is a very interesting result recently, which is the work of Geoffrey Martin on fundamental being and the map of the waking up dimension.

[Aside: And I should also maybe mention here's Ken Wilber's map classically maybe I have this in the appendix.]

Martin is the Martin matrix which I think is significant. Martin's work is very recent it's quite scientifically oriented and it's definitely yeah it's kind of empirically based interviews with actual people you can listen a lot more in our podcast but briefly Martin went out to look for people who he felt were really well, really happy, and he felt that these were people often on a deep spiritual path, and he then actually got hold of people in those traditions in quite a rigorous process of searching for people, interviewing them, and then built up this kind of neuro-phenomenological map.

And what I think is significant here is it's not based on self-reports of, well, I feel or I feel one or things like that. It's trying to ask people much more specific questions like what's your memory like? What emotions do you have? What experience do you have of the self or an ego if any And systematically kind of classifying this he identified these different locations Now I like also want to observe I like the term locations He's not saying these are stages. Location four is not necessarily better than location two. You don't even have to go through the sequence. Some people jump straight to location four. Some people jump to location two. People move around potentially a bit between these locations. so I like that sense of it and it's quite rich and he's now got this natural matrix version where there's these two dimensions now and finally what I want to mention is that out of this also came work on Raft by having a map kind of almost by accident in doing the mapping Martin started to ask people what were they doing as a practice when they shifted into fundamental being oh and by the way I should explain about fundamental well-being as kind of the generic term it's got a nice secular term that Martin has or persistent non-symbolic experience and the benefits by the way of having standardized terms like this for for what's going on so Martin was asked people what happened when you shifted into fundamental well-being and he started to get this sort of list of practices and it's kind of intriguing I mean so and he that they were many sometimes weren't so well known some were well known but they were even ones which were not you know considered standard he also discovered which i found classic buddhist meditation is not very effective at least uh in the waking up path of his the fundamental being and though it is an important part and what he then did was put together these practices, you didn't invent new ones, but put them together kind of in a cocktail as you do a protocol. You put a bunch of them together and they surprisingly effective at least according to his claims And I found that personally I did the course I found it very effective and intriguing that a given practice really worked for me others really didn So I think, yeah, that's another point, which is that one of the things we don't do at the moment is have a very rigorous empirical approach to practices. And I want to maybe have a coda here, which is the whole Martin experience. is illustrative perhaps of the kind of breakthroughs we could be having if we had a more rigorous empirical approach to examining practices. What cleaning up practices go with what waking up practices would be really important. So yeah I could dedicate a whole session to Martin really and say a lot more, maybe I will have time for that. Just to kind of bullet point things that I would mention is I think yes this model of creating a protocol, combine the protocol in his case with basically positive psychology practice to avoid dark night of the soul, which is really important. Having the map and the location helps you look at what practice helps you go where and to know where you are and to assess kind of where you are, which is useful. Also very important for martyrs is the discovery that many people are going into fundamental well-being outside of any religious or spiritual tradition waking up in a sense of i would say the broad sense of kind of move into less ego less less sense the general sense that everything's all right is um quite quite plausible Yeah, it just happens to people even a bit randomly. Okay, so that's a lot about fundamental well-being.

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