The Finders Course was truly a phenomenal experiment, and is no longer available. From a practical standpoint, there were a few problems with it. Namely, its length and cost, didn't allow most people to be able to take advantage of it.
However, offering the Finders Course revealed an interesting pattern in its data. It turned out that of the 70% of people who transitioned using it, about 60% transitioned by using only a small subset of its methods. For years we wanted to run another experiment with a modified protocol that focused on this to see how it would go, but we never had the time.
Then the COVID virus hit, and the entire world shut down – including all of our laboratory experiments. Suddenly we found ourselves stuck at home, with plenty of time. It wasn’t long before we identified this as the perfect moment to run this experiment.
We settled on a protocol that compressed the first 10 weeks of the Finders Course protocol down to 6 weeks. Small groups and their meetings were eliminated, and replaced with a cohort wide Facebook group. A number of practices were made optional or eliminated altogether. What remained was an even simpler, 10 session protocol that we initially called the 45 Days to Awakening Challenge and Experiment. The latest and most powerful version of this protocol is the Next Level Challenge.
We sent out a very candid email to our mailing lists, unsure if anyone would even
want to try it. Why would a bunch of people who could take the world’s most proven protocol (the Finders Course experimental protocol was still available at that time) want to give this one a try?
Sure, we were subsidizing it so it cost 83% less, and it only took 6 weeks rather than 4 months, but compared to the Finders Course protocol it was unproven.
To our surprise, hundreds of people replied and joined the waiting list to enroll. We were even more surprised at how many of them were former Finders Course participants who just wanted to give it a try, or existing Finders who were sitting at home because of the virus and thought it might be interesting to explore.
About 65% of people who participated in the first few cohorts of the experiment transitioned to Fundamental Wellbeing. This is remarkable when you consider that about 70% of participants transitioned during the 4 month long Finders Course experiments.
The overall results from the 6 week experiment were clear, and in many ways as surprising as the original Finders Course results. They reveal that a 6 week, online, at home program can not only have a remarkable impact on someone’s wellbeing, but also be highly effective at persistently transitioning people to Fundamental Wellbeing.
Our full results from both studies have completed peer review and are forthcoming from the APA's Psychology of Consciousness journal. Academic good practices do not permit us to provide more detail on this website prior to publication, however you can read a pre-print of that paper on our research center's website.
We've since gone on to improve the protocol even more, with 70-80% of people in a given cohort transitioning within 12 weeks of when they began to use the protocol. In addition, over the past year and a half we've extensively examined what limited the others, and have created optional programs for them that bring the success rate as high as the upper 90%'s. In nearly all cases, there truly seems to be no reason for a seeker not to become a Finder using these research-based protocols.