EA - Meditation course claims 65% enlightenment rate: my review by Kat Woods

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Meditation course claims 65% enlightenment rate: my review, published by Kat Woods on August 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR I eliminated my impostor syndrome and dramatically reduced my work-related anxiety. I did this in a way that I think can be replicated. Different techniques work for different people. If you want to get the benefits of meditation, you should experiment widely, then drill down on the methods that work for you. Don’t just try the same technique for months or years and hope you’ll eventually “get it” or give up and say meditation doesn’t work for you. Explore then exploit. Loving-kindness meditation is underrated and should be the main-course meditation for a lot of people. This 55-minute video is the 80/20 of the course. If you like it, you will probably like the rest of the course. I recommend the Finder’s Course for most people. If you follow the instructions, you will very likely become happier. If you prefer and are good at self-directed learning, you can do your own self-directed course and get similar benefits. What makes the Finder’s Course different: methodology Applying science to meditation isn’t unique to Jeffery Martin’s course. Fortunately for the world, there’s a whole movement around this. That being said, I haven’t heard of anything that seems more likely to figure out how to actually achieve enlightenment (or fundamental well-being (FWB) as he calls it, which I prefer). Most science I know of is doing things like putting meditators in brain scans and seeing if anything is different from regular brains, or running RCTs to see if meditation makes you happier. This is foundational and important to do. However, it’s very black box thinking and doesn’t give you any gears-level understanding of how to achieve fundamental well-being. Meditation classes usually teach a variety of different techniques. Which techniques are causing the change? Most studies focus on averages, which ignores the thing we’re most interested in - those outliers who don’t just start feeling less stressed but have eliminated suffering. Who are living in states of profound bliss and serenity. How does that show up on a psychological item asking “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?”? The Finder’s Course on the other hand clearly followed a methodology that was truly trying to solve the problem. The way he did this was to find over 1,000 people saying that they had achieved fundamental well-being, and he went and interviewed all of them. The interviews would often last up to twelve hours. He asked them what their experiences were, what had gotten them there, and ran them through batteries of psychological tests. From this exploratory research, he started pulling out patterns. You can read some of the results of his research in his book. He took the top findings out of his research and turned it into a course. It was formerly called the Finder’s Course (a play on the usual spiritual terminology of people being “seekers”). He continues to do science on the course, and this is part of what most intrigued me. It’s mandatory for the course to take a whole battery of psychological evaluations before and after, such as PERMA, satisfaction with life scale, CES-D Questionnaire, etc. After doing a week of each technique, he also does a shorter survey. The results from this he claims are that 65% of people who finish the course achieve fundamental well-being. This is an incredible claim, and I figured it was probably just hype. Then I spoke to a friend he said that he’d recently done the course and could now go into fundamental well-being at will. This is what inspired me to give it a go. Before I started the course, I publicly pre-committed to writing about my experience, regardless of how it went. Usually, people only write about somet...