We owe our base knowledge about Fundamental Wellbeing primarily to religions and spiritual systems that took an interest in it. As empires rose and fell, they lasted through the ages – and along with them their knowledge of Fundamental Wellbeing.

Fundamental Wellbeing is one of the few things about human psychology that hasn’t been comprehensively explored by science. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow was hard at work on it when he passed away in June, 1970. In fact, he’d established yet another new branch of psychology to study it just prior to his death. Unfortunately, the rigorous study of it died with him, and wasn’t resumed until the last 20 years or so.

Before things are explored by science, they are largely in the realm of magic and myth. Few of us today would ask for an exorcism when we are sick with a bacterial infection. We simply reach for our antibiotics. Likewise, it’s not likely that you’ll go get some leeches or take a knife and start cutting into yourself when you have a fever. Though bleeding people with a fever was once common practice, modern science has given us ways of handling this that are actually effective.

Until very recently, this had not been done with Fundamental Wellbeing. It had been left to the realm of the magical and mystical. The very myths covered here are a testament to this. For example, Fundamental Wellbeing is nearly impossible to reach, they tell us. No, it isn’t. Our scientifically derived research protocols routinely transition a majority of people who use them. And on, and on, it goes.

We’ve spent over 15 years researching this from the ground up with the tools of modern science, literally dispelling one myth after another as we went. Often, we didn’t even know we were doing that. We’d learn after the fact that this or that aspect of our research was seen as revolutionary by various religious and spiritual groups. Often, we’d learn about it over dinner with leading religious and spiritual scholars who wanted meet with us.

The reality is that we didn’t actually need science to tell us that Fundamental Wellbeing is perfectly happy existing in secular form. Over the years, our project attracted many atheists and agnostics who had transitioned to it. Their data was fundamentally the same as our religious and spiritual subjects. Once under the hood with modern scientific tools and methods, it didn’t seem to matter what someone’s belief systems or perspectives were, except when it came to preferring one type of Fundamental Wellbeing over another, or accepting one or more as the “correct” type or types.

This is what allowed us to create the first truly cross-cultural, pan-tradition map of the psychological territory of Fundamental Wellbeing, as you can read about elsewhere . It’s given us a set of modern methods that allow a majority of people to transition in short periods of time, instead of years, decades, or not at all. And, it’s taught us that a whole lot of the dogma that it has been wrapped in over the years simply does not matter at all, as we’ll see in the Myth #4.