Home / Research
What we do not know
The thirty sessions are not a validated intervention and should not be presented as one. Publishing our own open questions is, we think, the precondition for being taken seriously about anything else.
Position
No effect has been demonstrated
Nothing on this site should be read as a health claim. The material draws on processes that are well described elsewhere — decentring, defusion, acceptance, self-compassion — but the specific composition and progression used here has never been tested. That the components have support is not evidence that this arrangement of them does anything, and we will not argue otherwise.
We would rather state that plainly on the front of the work than have it discovered later.
Open questions
Treated explicitly as unresolved
About the material
- Whether the thirty sessions improve existential orientation or any other outcome
- For which groups the exercises are helpful, neutral or unsuitable
- Whether existential orientation and model awareness can be operationalised as reliable research concepts
- What rate and kind of unwanted reactions the material produces
About the wider questions
- Which ontology best explains consciousness
- Whether spacetime is fundamental or emergent
- Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct
- Whether the brain produces, realises or delimits conscious experience
Method
What a real study would need
If this material is examined in research, at least the following need to be kept apart rather than reported together:
- feasibility and acceptability;
- immediate experience during the exercise;
- change over time;
- functioning and quality of life;
- unwanted or harmful reactions;
- differences between target groups and contexts.
A study we would consider worth doing needs preregistered hypotheses, clear comparison conditions, qualified supervision, ethical review, and active follow-up of adverse effects. First-person interviews can describe how an exercise is experienced, and can be combined with established measures of psychological flexibility, self-compassion, sense of coherence and well-being. Observation, interpretation and ontological conclusion should be coded separately — which is the same discipline the material itself asks of its readers.
Current work
The integration of nondual experience
Experiences in which the ordinary sense of a separate observer weakens are not rare, and they do not belong to any one tradition or setting. They arise in contemplative practice, in stillness, during illness or grief, spontaneously and without warning, and within clinical care. What appears to determine whether such an experience becomes useful, disturbing or simply forgotten is not the experience itself but how it is integrated afterwards.
Integration is the step that has been studied least. Where it is described at all, it is usually as generic psychological support rather than as a specific, mechanism-driven intervention aimed at the change in self-experience that actually occurred.
The working model
A structured integration approach can be built on phenomenological inquiry rather than on narrative meaning-making. Instead of helping someone construct a story about what happened, it directs attention to the experience of being a subject: what, concretely, changed in the sense of a boundary between self and world? Can a separate observer of the current thought be found? The aim is not to persuade anyone that there is no separate self. It is to make a direct, first-person examination possible.
This matters clinically because several of the processes that maintain suffering — negative self-reference, rumination, rigid identification with thought patterns — are self-related processes. If a structured inquiry can affect how a person relates to those processes, the effect should be measurable.
Outcome domains under consideration
| Domain | Candidate instrument | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Feasibility | Recruitment, retention, adherence | Whether the intervention can be delivered at all |
| Acceptability | CSQ-8 with qualitative feedback | Satisfaction, relevance, perceived usefulness |
| Nondual awareness | NADA | Phenomenological change in non-dualistic experience |
| Psychological flexibility | AAQ-II or CompACT | Change in flexibility |
| Rumination | RRS | Reduction in repetitive negative thought |
| Well-being | WEMWBS | Positive mental health |
Instrument selection would finally depend on Swedish validation, psychometric properties and licensing. A pilot would be explicitly exploratory and hypothesis-generating: its purpose is to establish safety and feasibility and to produce effect-size estimates for a later controlled trial, not to demonstrate efficacy.
The intervention would explicitly avoid metaphysical or doctrinal instruction of any kind. The focus is a pragmatic, phenomenological examination of the participant’s own experience.
Collaboration
We would rather hear from you early than late
We are interested in working with universities, clinics, agencies and individual researchers — including, and especially, people who expect to find problems with this.
- Design and critique of a feasibility protocol
- Instrument selection and Swedish validation
- Qualitative and phenomenological interview work
- Ethical review and adverse-event monitoring
- Supervision of any clinical application
Jin is a practising psychiatrist and leads the clinical side of this work. Everything we do is free of charge and non-commercial, which removes at least one source of bias from the conversation.