Jhourney’s “super secret” master plan
Jhourney’s initial product is a meditation retreat. In the past ~12 months, we’ve created a modern school for learning how to have joyful meditative experiences. We teach in a week what was previously thought to require hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. We’ve also catalyzed public interest in deep states of meditation. Two years ago, the public was debating whether these experiences were possible. Now, millions have read about them in magazines like Time, The Atlantic, Vox, and Asterisk.
While this is great progress, we see meditation retreats as just a stepping stone to building a bigger movement. We’re not simply a retreats company aspiring to teach thousands of people meditation. We’re an applied research company aspiring to change the lives of tens of millions.
Our vision is based on three simple ideas:
Some people experience dramatically higher levels of wellbeing than others
It’s possible to learn and grow into extraordinary wellbeing, especially with meditation
Most people don’t because they don’t know it’s possible, and it’s hard
The implication is that showing the world extraordinary improvements in wellbeing is possible, and making it easier, would be tremendously valuable.
That’s the plan. We started by building a school that makes advanced meditation easier using modern pedagogy to deliver extraordinary wellbeing. From here, we’ll build a lab to research ways to make it easier and faster, inspiring more people to join the cause. Eventually, we’ll develop novel deeptech for wellbeing that goes beyond meditation retreats.
The Vision of Superwellbeing
Most approaches to wellbeing focus on (a) fixing problems to restore a “normal” baseline and (b) making incremental improvements (e.g. reducing anxiety, managing depression, or coping with stress). These are meaningful and important endeavors. But what if we could go beyond "normal" and access states of consciousness that are orders of magnitude better than our everyday experience? What if we could persistently shift our everyday wellbeing in ways hard for most of us to imagine?
This isn’t just hypothetical. History is littered with people describing extraordinary states and transformations. Meditation teacher Shinzen Young puts it:
If I was given the choice of living one more day experiencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy, celebrity sexual athlete, beloved by everyone but not experiencing what I experience (vis a vis enlightenment), the decision would be a no-brainer–I’ll take the one day of enlightened living. IT’S THAT GOOD, DUDE.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of stories of people can be found online describing dramatic transitions. Some recognizable names include monk Matthieu Ricard, who has become the so-called “happiest man in the world”; author Viktor Frankl, whose profound sense of meaning helped him survive and go onto thrive after the Holocaust; and psychologist Abraham Maslow, who late in life added “self-transcendence” as an even higher form of wellbeing than his prior seminal work on “self-actualization.”
In a world with a global mental health crisis, these claims are big if true. Imagine if with a little practice, you could radically reduce anxiety or suffering, transition to a persistent optimism that improved decision-making, or easily access flow states.
We envision a movement worthy of the name “superwellbeing” to complement superintelligence and superlongevity. The promise of superwellbeing is to not just fix what's wrong, but unlock latent human potential for joy, peace, and fulfillment. It will be a field dedicated to finding levels of extraordinary wellbeing hard for most of us to imagine, reverse engineering their experience, and replicating it for others.
Meditation: A Proven Path to Superwellbeing
Conventional wisdom is that contemplative practice may lead to something akin to superwellbeing, but only if you dedicate years to practice living in a cave. Not so.
For years, it’s been an open secret among advanced meditators that some psychotechnology is more powerful than others. The jhanas, for example – meditative states of bliss and peace so strong they can bring you to tears – are nothing like garden variety meditation on Calm or Headspace. They’re powerful enough they can leave you persistently lighter and at ease, almost like medicine-assisted psychotherapy. They’re under study at Harvard, McGill, and Berkeley.
Today, the secret that life-changing meditation can be accessible to everyone is going mainstream. The jhanas alone have been covered in major publications this year. Testimonials are hyperbolic. We’ve seen hundreds of quotes like these from people who learned the jhanas on our retreats:
"To know there's this infinite resource within me that's accessible without external conditions...it's just crazy. You can't unsee that."
“This is f*@#ing amazing. The secret nobody is talking about… the 2020s will be about AI and the jhanas.”
While the jhanas are trending, they’re not the only psychotech out there capable of transforming wellbeing. We expect the jhanas to be just the start.
The Challenge: High Barriers to Entry
If these states are so amazing, why isn't everyone doing this already? The simple answer is that few know it’s possible, and it’s hard.
For millennia, some of the brightest minds in the world dedicated their lives to developing psychotechnology to transform wellbeing. Typically, they worked within contemplative traditions, which meant few people were exposed to the technology in earnest unless they were born or converted into these traditions.
This is starting to change. Contemplatives are making their tools more available to secular audiences, and scientists and the public are more readily embracing extraordinary claims of wellbeing as not yet understood, rather than dismissing them as “woo” or exaggerated.
But even as awareness grows, learning to use psychotech like meditation is still hard because it requires so much guesswork. Unlike other domains from swimming to astrophysics, where a coach or results provide quick and confident feedback, the nonverbal and invisible nature of meditation makes everything slower. Imagine going to the gym but you could only talk to your coach on the phone, could never see anyone else workout, and you couldn’t see your muscles growing. It’s unlikely we would see a fitness industry or Olympic performance remotely close to what we have today.
Our Solution: Making Superwellbeing Accessible
Our solution has a few parts:
Build a school to demonstrate that it's possible to transform wellbeing with meditation
Invest the money and attention from the school into technology to accelerate that process
Deliver superwellbeing more quickly and reliably
To do step 1, we built a school getting dramatic results. We started with the jhanas because they’re uniquely appealing (who doesn’t want infinite bliss-peace on tap?), can be transformative (they make it easier to be the person you already aspire to be), are relatively discrete and measurable (if you’re questioning whether or not you’re in a jhana, you’re probably not in a jhana), and were ripe for innovating with modern pedagogy.
“I've been so happy (my bf constantly comments on)...the super harsh voice of my inner critic is just.... gone. Like it just disappeared sometime during the retreat and it hasn't been back since.”
“Possible most EV [expected value] thing you can engage in in your LIFE (other than getting married, having kids, etc.)”
In step 2, we’ll build a lab. We’ll publish research and open source data on student characteristics predictive of jhana learning outcomes, teaching methods, safety outcomes, and more. We’ll also integrate and publish on neurotechnology like transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) and biofeedback to accelerate learning.
The lab and school will make a virtuous flywheel – with each new batch of students, the school allows for groundbreaking research, and lab results will improve student outcomes. Within the first months of running retreats, we’ve already been able to do research nobody else has been able to do. We saw hundreds of people attend our retreats – far more than any academic study on the jhanas done to date – and discovered that prior meditation experience is not correlated with success.
We’ll turn this flywheel to teach more people meditation, faster. The full potential is massive. The secularization of other forms of meditation, such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) in the 70s led to tens of millions of TM meditators. The development of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction led to hundreds of millions meditators (depending on how much of the modern mindfulness movement one credits to Jon Kabat-Zinn). We expect the same playbook, applied to the jhanas, to reach millions.
In step 3, we’ll take the lab beyond jhana retreats, into deeper tech for superwellbeing more broadly. Over time, lessons from developing pedagogy and neurotech tools to make the jhanas more accessible will lend themselves to inventing new approaches to superwellbeing. If the jhanas prove to be a killer application for tFUS, for example, or neurofeedback allows for jhana helmets to be shipped to people’s homes, we’ll double down on those investments.
…
Until now, superwellbeing has been neglected because few people believe it’s tractable. We’re making it tractable, and in doing so starting a revolution in human wellbeing. Imagine a world where more people experience persistent joy, where stress and anxiety are dramatically reduced, where we unlock levels of human flourishing previously thought impossible.
That’s the super secret master plan. Like the jhanas, we don’t expect it to stay secret for long.
