I gained so much from my experience of JTF2 Selection many years ago. When I left Canada’s special forces, I couldn’t get out of my heart that billions of dollars and many of the world’s greatest minds have researched, tried and tested what has become military-grade methods of transformation (with a clear government issued agenda.)
I thought, if I could do this legally and ethically, must this psychotechnology be gate-kept? Maybe it could be used for a different purpose.
In 2019, my wife and I set out to create an experience for men that would help them reap the benefits of one of the most difficult challenges on earth. It became a looks-like, feels-like experience of going through JTF2 selection (without being like our selection and giving up any of our secrets).
But the most important aspect of it would be that these methods wouldn’t build supersoldiers. This would help men become superhuman in the way of aligning their values with their actions by helping them cultivate insights and breakthroughs for their higher good.
And that’s what today’s submission is about; how we at the Special Forces Experience help men have these meaningful insights. And hopefully, this helps you understand how you might recreate this in your own life if The Process isn’t for you.
How do we create meaningful insights?
If you read last week’s newsletter on the “Mechanics of Insight” you may remember that to have meaningful insights, ones that are transformative and life changing, you need to do two things:
- Train yourself to have them
- Create the right condition for them to spontaneously occur
If you haven’t read that yet, please do so here.
We now know that the mindfulness techniques of meditation and contemplation train us to have better, more meaningful insights. But if I told you to imagine a mindfulness retreat, The Special Forces Experience is probably the last thing that comes to mind.
Well surprise, that is actually one of the largest functions of this event. Like you parents sneaking greens into your kids’ meals, you’d just never know from the outside how nutritious this wild, adventurous and seemingly chaotic event actually is.
Let me explain.
In the schema above, we have 2 axis:
- X is a transparency to opacity shift / opacity to transparency shift
- Y is breaking down the gestalt to features / Turning features into the gestalt
Y
- The gestalt helps us see the big picture.
- The features help us see the parts of the whole.
- Both are important in understanding different perspectives and building new understandings about a problem or a situation.
X
- In addition, looking at your outer world (the opacity) is as important as understanding the lenses (the transparency) you’re looking at it through.
- Our inner world distorts how we see our outer world.
- Our outer world shapes our inner world.
To build our capacity for having insight, we must train ourselves to shift and flow between these states effortlessly.
They say meditation is the training needed to understand our lenses (transparency) so we’re not constantly looking outside (at the opacity of the world) because that’s just half of the story. It also helps us break the gestalt into features. John Vervaeke calls this “scaling down.”
Meditation. But make it an agent of chaos.
It turns out you can’t force people to meditate in the traditional way. A Clockwork Orange-like stand comes to mind and I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. But what we can do is get a similar outcome in a completely different way.
Meditation is often perceived as a serene practice aimed at achieving peace and calm. But at its core, meditation is actually about cultivating extraordinary presence.
So all we need to do at The Process is create the conditions for candidates to get into a state of being completely engaged and aware in their current moment regardless of the surrounding circumstances.
No problem. That we can do on Day 0.
Sharing this event in its raw form is difficult because I can only show what goes on during Day 0 and 1 to preserve the integrity of the unknown aspects of this initiation. And on those days, there’s a lot of this:
This relationship between cadre and candidate can look disturbing. Believe me, I get it. But creating the function of meditation is one of the main reasons why we do it.
It’s a combination of:
- Psychological priming
- The candidate’s intention set in the prior months in their workups
- Repetitive and exhausting physical movement
- Psychological exhaustion
- Guiding the candidate in and out of high entropic states
- Careful timing and alignment or disruption of his natural bio/neuro-rhythms
- And, most notably from outsiders, a barrage of external negative feedback and noise (always done with intention and control)
That magical combo has a mysterious way of practically forcing a man to see his inner world with clarity very quickly.
The edge of their comfort zone suddenly appears over the horizon.
The boundaries of their capacity come into focus.
One is both fully absorbed in his body’s demands while also keenly aware of what’s needed of him in the present moment.
Even though he is “doing,” the “doing” eventually becomes autopilot and he enters a state of “being.”
The key is, don’t quit before your first contemplation or you may be running from the exact answer you came in looking for.
Which brings us to the other part of the schema, contemplation.
Initiatory-level, Military-Grade Contemplation
Contemplation is a reflective process which involves deep, sustained, enduring considerations of usually philosophical, spiritual or existential questions.
This is fairly easy to facilitate.
When was the last time you sat on the dirt in the middle of the wilderness for minutes, or hours, and did nothing? Given the form of “meditation” you just did, consider the complex ideas and deeper understandings that would come to you out there.
“Insights come to those who make space for them.”
That means insights occur when we dwell more in our unknowing.
This is another reason why I don’t let my 1 person marketing team share practically anything about The Process (and I know it’s the worst business practice – sorry Jess) but to not know what’s coming next or when creates the most fertile ground for meaningful insights and that’s clearly our goal here.
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Thank you for reading this article. And thank you to the 100+ men who’ve trusted our team enough to put them through this process.
5 years after our first event, I’ve researched and written hundreds of pages like this that I didn’t think anyone would see until I committed to writing this newsletter each week.
They’re getting quite long, so I may either shorten them for readability or just link to our website. It would be great to continue to get feedback on how these are being received and if there are ways they can be improved. I really appreciate it.
Cheers,
Jeff Depatie
Chief Course Architect
PS We’re coming up on our first official and organic SFE reunion in August and I’m really looking forward to the fun void of the separation between cadre and candidate. Bliss is another way we can grow, but I do think you need to go through the fire first and we’ve all happily gone through it. Looking forward to the laughs, guys.
PPS Applications for The Process are still open. Are you in? Apply here.
