by Dr. Jeffery Martin: While each location is essentially its own unique configuration in the nervous system, there is a distinct division between Locations

1 to 3 on one side, and Locations 4 and later on the other side in terms of how they are experienced and how they relate to the world.

Locations 1 to 3 bring immense changes to the human system in terms of the wellbeing that can be experienced, but without eliminating core human faculties like emotion and sense of agency. This essentially allows one to experience all the richness and dimensionality of being human without the weight of existential meaninglessness, incompleteness, and discontent that people live with before Fundamental Wellbeing. Consequently, these are also the locations where Finders can retain a maximum degree of functionality and engagement with the world, assuming someone isn’t ‘going to the cave’.

While Locations 1 to 3 represent freedom within the world, Locations 4 and later are much more like a freedom that goes beyond the world. It moves more and more in the direction of transcendence, and thus farther and farther away from what is considered important and real by society. Many people in these later locations report that they no longer feel human, and that is really an accurate description of how this deep end of the continuum is experienced subjectively.

While the depth of freedom and peace that is experienced at later locations is extraordinary, it comes at a price. The farther someone goes into the deep end, the more they lose dimensionality of experience, until by around Location 7 there is a total flatness to all experience. In a way, sensory experience fades to the background, and no matter where one looks, all one can see is raw reality.

There is an incredible degree of freedom, stillness, and equanimity experienced from Location 4 on, because emotions falls away, along with visibility into those levels of the system where most psychological conditioning arises. It is the classical “freedom from suffering” that spiritual traditions have sought over millennia. But what disappears to bring about this freedom also takes away the richness, dimensionality, and aliveness of being human.

In addition, these later locations generally entail significantly lower functionality in the world, and how that unfolds largely depends on influences like environment, genetics, and previous conditioning. Unless one’s life is structured to support it, such as involving little interaction with other people or being retired, these later locations don’t tend to lead to positive life outcomes. So there is essentially a split on the continuum between freedom in the world and freedom beyond the world; between engagement and transcendence.