The Meta-Meditation Protocol provides an effective way to explore and shift into new states of being with the help of meditation protocols. This protocol is my distillation of what I’ve learned from Jeffery Martin et al.’s research¹.

It is possible to (nearly) permanently shift to different states of awareness²The precise term to use here is hard to pin down: states of being? Awareness? Consciousness? Modes of experience? Getting the term right is not necessary.
- These shifts can involve shifts in one’s baseline state, sense of identity, and how one relates with one’s self-model³.
- Generally, shifts in the direction of persistent non-symbolic experience (PNSE) seem to be associated with heigtened wellbeing and lowered depressiveness.
- I freshly wrote about my experience shifting to early locations of PNSE, also called fundamental wellbeing (FWB) by some.
- The Finders is a brilliant book describing how ‘Finders’ in locations 1-4 of PNSE can experience life (differently from ‘normal’ people).
The primary role of meditation in transitioning to PNSE is to help one experience (glimpses of) non-symbolic experiences (NSEs) that one may wish to shift into⁴There are other beneficial applications of meditation, too, such as “mind administration”..
- Once one is able to experience a desired NSE, one shifts to the ‘meditation’ of holding the NSE in awareness, and allowing it to permeate one’s being.
  - Some find this natural; some find this confusing.
  - One is essentially training oneself to experience this NSE until one can experience (most of) life from the vantage point of this NSE.
  - Rastal provides a good, simple description of ‘sinking in’.
The meta-protocol follows from the observation that one needs to find the meditation practices that work for one in the moment.
- The guidelines are to:
  - Pick a meditation practice and to do it for at least an hour a day for at least a week⁵.
  - Look for signs that the meditation practice is influencing one’s life (for the better) outside of the meditation.
    - If you see them, keep going.
    - If not, try another meditation.
  - Look for signs of NSEs.
    - When found, switch to sinking in.
    - If you need the meditation to find the NSE, then do the meditation until the NSEe arises as needed.
  - That’s all.
Members of the alumni community of Jeffery Martin et al.’s courses, Perfectly Okay, have been exploring ways to refine the approach.
- Because ‘sinking in’ is the essence of the approach, Rastal and Jason are developing techniques that focus directly on this.
- Rastal’s is called ‘deepening’ and Jason’s is called ‘guided shifting’.
- The technique involves fully feeling into the baseline ‘relaxing’ qualities (aka NSEs) of one’s current state, and then going deeper through them, and welcoming the new qualities that emerge.
  - Repeating this process seems to lead one to progress very rapidly and smoothly through locations of NSEs, plateauing around a state people are calling ‘Omni’ where one can simultaneously experience any of the NSEs one has experienced thus far, e.g., emptiness and fullness or dual perception and non-dual perception.
- Beautifully, deepening can both fit into the meta-meditation protocol and aim to refine it.

Personal Narrative Intro: Why This Is So Cool To Me

I first heard about Jeffery Martin et al.’s research into meditators and the meditative states, “enlightened people”, from Ben in 2012. I was intrigued by the survey of such people who seemed down-to-earth and aimed to free itself from the grandiose metaphysical philosophies that often accompany enlightenment. Further, Jeffery even discussed various downsides that such people could face as well as the upsides, making the states seem much more realistic. The research term persistent non-symbolic experience (PNSE) also intrigued me: it almost seemed chosen for its pragmatic use as “not quite wrong” rather than following from some theory of the world as to what this enlightenment stuff is. I’d been very curious about these states as a psychonaut, yet also found it difficult to discern fact from fiction: I wish to trust people’s reports about their subjective experiences, yet there was also wariness as to their objective models explaining said experiences. The heightened wellbeing coming along with some tradeoffs seemed more plausible and enticing.

I’ve tried quite many meditation techniques over the years. I was motivated by curiosity and the claims of amazing benefits. I was frustrated by all the brainfucking claims made about it, including the ethos that “one should not meditate for a purpose, for that will defeat the purpose.” There’s plenty of gatekeeping, possibly with good intents. There’s often an ethos that one simply needs to keep meditating diligently for however long is needed even if there are no signs of progress — not my cup of tea. Even if there are claims that meditation will “overcome any struggle” as if it’s a panacea. I wrote a lot about this in a 2018 post called Meditation.

Thus the idea that there is a Meta-Meditation Protocol that can help one to transition to a state of PNSE (“awakening”) within 18+ weeks of 1hr/day of meditation seriously piqued my interest! This Finders Course was time-intensive and beyond my budget at the time. Fortunately, Jeffery gave a seminar in 2015 explaining the high-level overview of the method so that you could do it yourself, even if guidance is preferable. He mentioned four broad categories of meditation techniques found to be most effective in transitioning people and suggested following well-known schools within these. I sampled each method a few times and became convinced that there just might be something to this.

Time passed without committing to investing the time to do the meta-meditation protocol. In 2017, I decided to more lazily explore meditation again to see what I could experience with only 5-15 minute meditations. Even Jeffery suggested that these can probably work, just much, much slower. But that’s better than nothing! Leo Babuta’s Zen Habits program was fascinating and definitely trained my system to experience various interesting states. Resting in Open Awareness was somewhat of a novel state to me — in hindsight, I can say it was a state of non-symbolic experience, an NSE.

And then in 2020 when covid swept in, I received an email invitation to be a guinea pig in an experimental new protocol aiming to reduce the process from 18 weeks to 45 days. The price was great, too. Knowing the trend of prices rising, I jumped on the opportunity to try it out! I wrote a fresh report on the experience and the nature of awakening a few months after the course. In gratitude, Jeffery gifted me a Precision Meditation course where about 30 “gold standard” meditation techniques are described in detail, many of which weren’t in the 45 days (but could be helpful to try if the methods thus far didn’t work). I very much enjoyed trying out most of them to see what experiences they engender.

So where does this leave us? It seems there’s a meta-protocol as to how to approach meditation to effectively shift into states of persistent non-symbolic experience. This is fabulous news for explorers and meditators, further, the protocol sheds light on one function of meditation as well as dispelling many myths. For example, meditating for a purpose and thinking do not block transitioning. The protocol is both so simple as to be basic knowledge and still appears to be relatively unknown. Jeffery et al. finally put up some description of the core ideas on the website nonsymbolic.org/seekers under the header: the 5 secrets to reaching fundamental wellbeing. I recommend reading it if interested. The meditation techniques used remain behind a paywall as a part of the 45 Days to Awakening course, which I can recommend as providing helpful guidance and structure if you’re happy to pay for it⁶. I would like to see the Fundamental Wellbeing Foundation come out with an app like Waking Up to guide one through meditation and inquiries into how it’s going.

I think that the meta-meditation protocol could be expressed even more cleanly and concisely and that the world may benefit from this exposition. Thus this post is born. It could be the case that my understanding of the protocol is idiosyncratic and not fully identical with Jeffery’s. That could be good. Let a hundred flowers bloom 🌷.

I think many explorers and meditators could both really benefit from this (basic) knowledge and find it interesting! I’d hoped that Jeffery or the Fundamental Wellbeing Foundation would publish a clear write-up describing it so that I could direct others to it. The core ideas are actually described on nonsymbolic.org/seekers now — yay 🥳. They’re under the header: the 5 secrets to reaching fundamental wellbeing. If interested, I do recommend reading them over. Jeffery et al. have a way with words.

Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience [PNSE or FWB]

Briefly, PNSE involves a shift in how one experiences life. PNSE has also been called Fundamental Wellbeing (FWB⁷) in the hope of gaining mainstream understanding. The conceptual idea seems to be that one’s experience of life is often richly entangled with symbolic self- and world-models. This can massively impact one’s wellbeing and lifeflow.

For example, all humans are mortal, including the deceased Socrates, and unless aging is cured, I will die, too. Approximately two people die every second. The loss of a life really sucks. The sooner we develop beneficial AGI, the better. Every day sooner really matters. Letting people die sucks, and my not doing everything in my power to develop AGI even one second sooner is akin to watching children drown in a well. You see how this symbolic world modeling and reasoning process transfers negative-valence judgments onto myself? I wonder: do such cattle-prod motivation techniques cause more happiness or suffering in the grand consequentialist scheme?

Thus the idea is that if one primarily lives from the place of symbolic world models, tying one’s affect and reward systems to them, then one’s wellbeing will be highly contingent on the circumstances. One could experience great happiness for a few decades or one could experience a roller coaster of emotions. Generally, one is then appropriately motivated to work on one’s life circumstances. I call this Location 0. Some unfortunate people report pervasive illbeing where even if their life circumstances are good, they are still unwell. Given that positive “locations” are used to refer to types of PNSE, I might refer to these as “negative locations”; however that’s not our focus now.

An hypothesis is that shifting one’s world model to incorporate non-symbolic elements provides a stabler ground of being to stand on as dancing with life. It’s one thing to say, “ah, I am alive and healthy, so I should be happy and at peace”, and another to actually experience this on a deep, visceral level. The first is ‘symbolic’! 😜. There are myriad forms of non-symbolic experience (NSE) that could become prominent in one’s phenomenal experience of life, in one’s manifest image. Meditation can help one to discover these personally and to integrate them into one’s baseline states of awareness. The different varieties of NSEs and intensities of integration lead to qualitatively distinct locations. Later locations generally involve reports of higher wellbeing. The idea that how one views the world influences one’s wellbeing is not novel; the challenge is to actually step into the views to experience them.

One of the contributions of the research I highly appreciate is in clustering some locations around a few theory-neutral indicators. This allows people to recognize and share experience in a coherent manner, even as there can be vastly different ways to be in the same location. The indicators for Locations 1-4 seem to have fairly stably coalesced, while Location 5+ remains an area of open research and exploration. There’s a good description of the locations on the nonsymoblic.org website.

The term change to fundamental wellbeing (FWB) arises because people report higher wellbeing when in PNSE.

I’ll share my speculation as to what shifts are involved in the locations:

My best guess for Location 1 is that the shift involves incorporating the body into one’s self-model. So long as one is healthy, there should be a deep sense of wellbeing. Thus one will be less caught up in the ebb and flow of one’s life situation according to one’s symbolic world models. Perhaps I have this view because body-scanning meditations helped me to transition.
- Thus there is a sense of wellbeing that is usually present in the background as one lives life “mostly normally”.
Location 2 involves incorporating a sense of spaciousness or awareness, which I termed as “the space in which thoughts dance”. This tends to involve a sense of “non-dual perception” wherein the distinction between subject and object fades: all that is appears to be in awareness. Incorporating awareness into one’s regular state of consciousness and world model, many “symbolic concerns” can seem to fall flat.
- Thus one can still live life mostly normally as many of the usual stressors tend to phase one less.
As for Location 3, I think the NSE is a sort of meta-emotion unifying compassion, joy, and universal love. This is where negative-valence emotions largely make their exit⁸I was only in L3 briefly. Personally, other emotions were enveloped in this meta-love. Perhaps if I resided in L3 longer, other emotions would gradually be transformed into this meta-love entirely..
- As you may imagine, this feels absolutely great⁹. I experienced such a quizzical sense of subjective perfection moment-to-moment.
Location 4‘s NSEs are one’s raw perceptual experiences of this unfolding life! Imagine experiencing every sense in as high-resolution as possible with every ounce of attention you can muster. This shift leaves one in a world with no sense of agency, no emotions, and no self-referential thoughts: one can find oneself speaking without any conscious oversight as to what one’s saying. This represents a culmination in terms of shifting one’s world-model from symbolic realms to non-symbolic realms of experience.
- Surprisingly, dropping all emotions leads to reports of greater wellbeing and freedom still.
Beyond Location 4, it seems that one’s awareness enters and integrates deeper and deeper pre-symbolic parts of the nervous system.

For me, PNSE is about more than wellbeing. I find it quite fun to be able to fluidly shift around to different ways of being in the world. There are also some rare cases of people who report access to PNSE yet without the wellbeing. This suggests that while persistently incorporating non-symbolic experience into one’s consciousness tends to lead to higher wellbeing, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. I also wonder, is a sense of deep, fundamental wellbeing an NSE on its own? It almost seems like the NSEs of Location 3, right?

While there is a reduction in negative-valence emotions and triggers along with a faster recovery time. Large stressors such as divorce or deaths in the family seem to still affect Finders. Even bad sickness can apparently snap one out of these blissful states¹⁰

Anyway, I think having some theoretical ideas and hypotheses as to just what ‘awakening’ is can be helpful as you navigate these paths. And at least I can say that it seems that my predilection for philosophical analysis has not prevented my own transitions. While there is a clear progression in a certain dimension along the PNSE Continuum of locations, I’m not sure how absolutely it should be taken. Every location is perfectly okay in its own way. I rather like thinking and emoting, so L4 is not a long-term habitation for me (even if I can easily *go visit*). Gee, symbolic self- and world-modeling is just so fun and rewarding! There are many other dimensions of experience and growth that can be explored from within Location 2, for example, see the mentions of Rich and Charmed life in the Way of the Dotts post.

Disclaimer: subjective perfection ≠ objective perfection

I said I appreciated how both the pros and the cons of awakening were mentioned, right? I feel a responsibility to mention some of the potential issues that could arise if you weave PNSE into the fabric of your being because I’m providing a high-level recipe. Most of the cons are actually easy to predict using the sort of model I presented above. I’ll stick with the community choice to call people in PNSE, ‘Finders’ because we are no longer actively seeking development on this path¹¹.

First, many Finders report that motivation falls away. Got any fear- and discontent-based motivations? Prepare to have the rug pulled out of under them! Good riddance. Hopefully, new sources of motivation will resurface in their place (if you actually cared about them anyway, not treating them merely as instrumental means to other ends). It seems that motivations do usually return within 2 years.

Some Finders seem to so love being immersed in their NSE of choice that they simply lose track of time and don’t remember appointments. They’ve decided that trying to maintain a balance of symbolic and non-symbolic modes of being isn’t for them — why drain energy by allowing mind-agents to keep interrupting the bliss to check if it’s time to go? It seems that even within PNSE, reducing focus on certain aspects of life increases wellbeing further. My experience is that the average wellbeing still seems boosted even if one allows the usual symbolic routines to operate, and I accept this added volatility. Which choice would you make?

Some Location 4 Finders can report near-zero concern for the approval of others. This can lead to being rather socially abrasive and simply not giving a fuck. How liberating! One can probably find workarounds to incentivize one to ongoingly harmonize with others (or to find the right crowds), yet I think it’s good to know of this phenomenon.

It seems possible to develop a disconnect between the body and mind wherein one feels great in NSE-land while oblivious to obvious signs of physical discomfort or stress. These effects can apparently compound to disturb one’s inner peace eventually. To be fair, non-Finders can also be rather disconnected from their bodies. So if you lean in this direction already, I might suggest keeping it in mind.

Later location Finders report differences in memory formation and recall. First, they don’t spend time actively reflecting on their memories throughout the day. And while recall of already encoded memories seems fine, memory encoding seems to depend on subjective salience. These Finders will not consider the same overtly symbolic details so interesting and thus may not remember them in the same way as they used to.

The absence of (personal) love has apparently caused trouble in relationships where one’s partner wishes to “be loved” and “strong positive regard” doesn’t provide a satisfactory replacement.

Some Finders report finding themselves in a ‘Peace Prison’ where they are afraid of losing PNSE and reductions in their peace to the extent that they scrupulously avoid potential triggers. This seems to be similar to normal people who are afraid of leaving their comfort zone, except the non-Finders may have more nudges to try to leave than people who experience a delightful heavenly realm so long as they play it safe. While one can lose PNSE, I would encourage trusting that one built the PNSE pathways once, and one can probably do it again if needed. Further, PNSE is fairly resilient to stressors: even if one becomes angry, one will probably recover faster than before, and one can work on learning to healthily channel the anger ‘as usual’.

Roles and Kinds of Meditation

In the meta-meditation protocol, the role of meditation is to help one glimpse and enter non-symbolic experiences. Sometimes it’s easy to speculate as to why meditation X helps one to experience NSE Y; sometimes it’s less clear.

I won’t claim that this is the only role meditation can serve. I love the idea I read in Stcherbatsky’s Buddhist Logic of meditation as being a phenomenological experiment! Can I identify the first moment a percept enters my awareness? Let’s see! Oh, and we can simply note tantric breath alignment as a form of meditation, too. Mindfulness seems to provide one with a greater introspective capacity to observe how one is feeling and thinking so that one can better choose how to be and act¹². Given this potential, it’s ironic that some Finders seem to exhibit less introspection even if the PNSE provides a fabulous space from which to introspect.

In the 2015 seminar, Jeffery suggested the following categorization of meditations:

Symbolic Repetition: repeating sounds, mantras, or symbols (such as ang sang wahe guru).
Cognitive Contents: engaging with and noting the content of thoughts and feelings (e.g., “seeing… hearing… thinking… emoting…”).
Cognitive Awareness: observing mental activity without engaging (e.g., “Who Am I?” direct inquiry a la Ramana Maharshi).
Somatic Awareness: focusing on bodily sensations (e.g., body scans, counting breaths, etc.)

I don’t find it obvious how to fit all meditations into these categories. Let’s consider two of my favorite meditations. The Pure Conscious Experience (PCE) meditation involves fully immersing oneself in sensory experience. It’s recommended to begin by looking at something eliciting felicity, such as coffee foam bubbles for me: this leads to naturally joyously engaging fully in high-resolution visual perception. Then one adds in the other senses for a full pure conscious experience. The technique comes from Actualism¹³. This technique often leads one to Location 3 or 4. I suppose it is a kind of perceptual awareness meditation, as a superset of somatic awareness meditations. The Headless Way is another favorite that doesn’t easily fit into these: the practice consists of interactive experiments investigating what you really are at zero distance, i.e., you are headless. Perhaps it fits under cognitive awareness for one is engaging in mental investigations merely as a pointer to non-symbolic experiences.

You become what you give your attention to.
The Art of Living on Epictetus

There is a very special meditation called sinking in that forms the heart of the meta-meditation protocol. One function meditation plays is to train one’s system. Many meditations train one’s capacity to focus on an object of meditation. For example, noting meditation trains one to observe thoughts without necessarily acting on them. Sinking in might be categorized as an ‘awareness awareness’ meditation or an ‘NSE awareness” meditation. The aim is to meditate on a non-symbolic experience or quality of choice and to allow this quality to become a natural part of one’s experience of being. One is training one’s system to experience this NSE. The Resting in Open Awareness meditation is essentially sinking in to open awareness. When a meditation unearths an NSE that one likes, one can switch to the sinking in meditation. Rastal provides a good description of sinking in. I believe that one can apply this methodology as a generic tool for navigating the inner realms of experience. I have applied the technique to sinking in to a sense of adventure, too~!

The Meta-Meditation Protocol

The core modus operandi for attaining awakening to live in states of persistent non-symbolic experience is as follows:

Meditate while looking out for non-symbolic experiences.
- Meditate for an hour a day for rapid progress.
- By one week, one should see some positive effects in one’s life outside meditation. If not, try another technique.
When a desirable non-symbolic experience is discovered, begin to sink into it.
- Continuing with the meditation to access the NSE may be helpful.
- One can sink in as much as possible; however, switching the meditation to sinking in to the NSE may suffice.
The NSE becomes a regular part of one’s lived experience.

That’s it.

The meta-meditation protocol suggests that people tend to try the same technique for way too long even if it’s not showing signs of working well for them. Some techniques work for one person and not another, so a teacher swearing by a technique doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for you. Further, different techniques may work for you at different times in your journey. Further, as one wishes to attain persistent meditative states, it’s important to look for positive signs outside of meditation, not just for enjoying the meditation itself. The qualitative change in the depth of the meditation around the 40-minute mark is interesting: I definitely experienced a further deepening and calming around this point multiple times. The suggestion is that while meditating for shorter durations can work, the lengthier sessions will probably help out much faster.

Personally, I was snapped into a persistent Location 2 “bubble of open awareness”-style NSE after some meditations, which lasted for 6 days, and then a body scanning meditation brought me to Location 1. I’m not so clear on how the snowballing phase change from meditating on an NSE to residing in the NSE goes for others. There’s a brilliant trick to help integrate states/qualities into one’s life: set a random timer to go off throughout the day and meditate on the desired quality for 30-300 seconds. In fact, access to “the space in which thoughts dance”, a sort of figure-ground reversal, when reading The Finders. While I didn’t shift over persistently, if I’d known of this protocol, perhaps I could have jumped to this step without going through the 45 Days to Awakening meditation course.

While the meta-meditation protocol looks simple, I believe that many meditators do not follow it, and that knowledge of it may assist them.

My own causal hypotheses suggest that we can understand why this protocol works, too. One beautiful corollary is that many claims as to “what is needed for awakening” are false. Thinking is totally fine — the point is to focus on the meditation, gently returning focus when one notices thinking. Aside from NSEs of the Location 4 variety that crowd out thought, there is room for thought and inner peace. However, it would appear that thought-chains do indeed increase the likelihood of emotional triggers that move one as well as the volatility of experience (within PNSE). Moral development prior to transitioning is not necessary. Whether it is wise is up for debate: Jefery mentions some degree of worldview lock-in post-transitioning, perhaps, in my opinion, due to not thinking so much about the nature of the world so as to effect a change. I believe this is just a tendency, but it suggests that perennial traditions are wise to mind the moral caliber of the people they support in this process. Personal identity can largely be maintained, too. In fact, it appears that people often retain their personal quirks even if they subjectively report not experiencing a ‘self’ anymore. One does seem to treat one’s identity more lightly even as it can remain, yet the reality appears more subtly nuanced than an absolutist ‘self or no self’ take would imply.

Finally, it seems recommended to supplement one’s meditation practices with positive psychology practices. I believe these can be associated with wellbeing, too. Thus, gratitude and forgiveness exercises are recommended. I say include loving-kindness and compassion from the brahmavihārās, too, for good measure! So long as you feel aligned with these practices, weaving them in can’t be too unwise 😉.

Refining the Meta-Meditation Protocol

You may have noticed that one parametrizable meditation technique forms the essence of the meta-meditation protocol: “to weave X into the fabric of one’s experiential being, sink into X.”

This begs the question: if the service of meditation is to navigate to NSEs to sink into, could there be more direct approaches?

Rastal discovered a very direct approach that allowed him to progress past the well-documented locations (1-4). He calls it the deepening framework. His approach starts from the place of being able to provide a clear ‘yes’ to the question, “Do I, right now, feel fundamentally okay?”, as a pointer to the X to sink in to. Jason aims to adapt the framework to work for people in general, and in his guided shifting framework, he guides one to sink into ‘relaxing qualities’.

The method is to rinse and repeat the following process:

Sink to the current NSE or relaxing quality that you can most readily access. Allow this to naturally fill up your awareness.
“Shift downward through the current experience to discover what’s beneath.”
Inquiry into the nature of your experience to notice interesting developments and support stabilization into the new normal.

The idea that sinking into relaxing qualities can bootstrap a process of progressive transitions through NSE-land is intriguing! Why invest hours upon hours meditating if you can start with ‘the closest qualities to an NSE you can find’ and shift progressively deeper? This isn’t to say that there may not be additional benefits to other meditation techniques. In terms of attaining PNSE, deepening and shifting appear to be a refinement of the meta-meditation protocol.

I must remark that the deepening protocol fits into the meta-meditation protocol: first try this sink in and deepen through meditation, inquiring for signs of progress. If it doesn’t work after a while, try another.

These protocols are an area of active exploration. Thus if you try them out now, you can even be a part of the adventure!

Omni: The Realm at the End of the Deepening

A further interesting point is that this deepening progression seems to plateau at some point. I am personally not sure that the locations paradigm of mapping the continuum makes sense beyond some point, but there are reports of locations into the teens and beyond. Omni is a place where all of the symbolic and non-symbolic experiences one has encountered thus far can be experienced simultaneously. I’m not sure what Location 10+, if any, is associated with Omni. One can apparently integrate layers (hallmark characteristics of locations¹⁴) in earlier locations, too. On the road to Omni, one seems to pass through interesting realms of non-existence and paradox where the intuitive response to, “does this cup exist?”, and, “are you real?”, is “no and no”. Then one becomes “both real and not real”. What fun. I now have a better grasp of what ’emptiness’ means subjectively.

Unfolding Out: Let’s Go on an Adventure

I sincerely hope that this post can enrich our understanding of what ‘awakening’ is and how to get there. Deepening through locations seems to involve some nervous system, eventually bringing some aspects into subjective experience that are not normally present. Layers seem to refer to aspects of the nervous system whether they are integrated into the foreground of one’s experience. This is still an active field of exploration, so expect terminology to evolve. Even the same PNSE location can show up very differently for different people, so it’s not surprising that different ‘inner engineering’ techniques, meditation practices, are needed for different people. I appreciate the very low bar to qualify as ‘awakened’ in terms of location 1: it represents a significant albeit somewhat subtle to pinpoint shift. I could see cases to be made for setting the threshold at location 2, 4, or Omni, too. And I think that the precise demarcation is not as important as is understanding the lay of the land of consciousness.

While developing increasing understanding as to how to navigate the realms of non-symbolic experience is great, neuromodulation shows great promise for helping people to experience NSEs that would normally require meditative practice. The SEMA lab is one research group developing this technology. See their recent publication: “Transcranial focused ultrasound to the posterior cingulate cortex modulates default mode network and subjective experience: an fMRI pilot study.” Introspective ability is a wonderful tool to build up, yet imagine how much more effectively we could help people to live life from their ideal states if we can observe their brain from the outside to make fine-tuned adjustments? If there is still value to inner views, they can be combined with the outer views and tech!

One holy grail state is: deep peace + high motivation. It seems that, like it or not, inner approaches to PNSE can often result in a trade-off between peace and motivation that neuromodulation may be able to bypass!

Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.
Dōgen

Transitioning to PNSE isn’t all sunshine and roses, as discussed earlier. If interested in the early locations of the continuum, I highly recommend The Finders where some interesting side-effects are discussed. Your motivations may change, the nature of your emotional complexes toward your loved ones may change, and more. Yet at the same time, in many ways, you will most likely mostly remain the same as Dōgen poetically notes. I know some people who shifted out of PNSE to prioritize productivity in work because it can be hard when ‘everything just feels subjectively perfect regardless of what one does’. The art of living well post-awakening has not been solved yet, as far as I can tell. Also, personally significant dark content can come up in response to meditation, too¹⁵, so it is wise to be prepared for this¹⁶.

So are you ready to join the non-symbolic gang in PNSE? If you’re not sure enough, I recommend caution. I believe that one can dip one toes in and explore without much risk of getting pulled into the quicksand and stuck out here. I hope that knowing how the meta-meditation protocol works and a bit about locations of non-symbolic experience will help you to navigate safely and interestingly.

I’m so excited to see knowledge of how to restructure minds becoming fleshed out. I hope that we continue to clarify theory as to what is possible in the development of , distilling that which has been perennially discussed by mystical traditions over the eons. I was surprised that so much more is possible via inner operations than I’d thought: I thought this degree of fine-tuning how one experiences life would require technological interventions! I hope this helps us approach the mythical state of affairs where all beings experience life as they see fit.

The Meta-Meditation Protocol for Persistent State Shifts

Personal Narrative Intro: Why This Is So Cool To Me

Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience [PNSE or FWB]

Disclaimer: subjective perfection ≠ objective perfection

Roles and Kinds of Meditation

The Meta-Meditation Protocol

Refining the Meta-Meditation Protocol

Omni: The Realm at the End of the Deepening

Unfolding Out: Let’s Go on an Adventure

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Personal Narrative Intro: Why This Is So Cool To Me

Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience [PNSE or FWB]

Disclaimer: subjective perfection ≠ objective perfection

Roles and Kinds of Meditation

The Meta-Meditation Protocol

Refining the Meta-Meditation Protocol

Omni: The Realm at the End of the Deepening

Unfolding Out: Let’s Go on an Adventure

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