Founder’s Address — Erkin Bek | Tokyo QM Challenge | Oct 2, 2025

Full Transcript, 2 Oct 2025

Rob Walker – Renowned international sports commentator:
Welcome everybody. Today we invite you to witness the birth of a new frontier, not in the outer world, but in the inner world. The Tokyo Meditation Challenge. The man in the hat in the front row is the brains behind the operation. He has incredible passion. He’s the founder of All Here and the World Meditation League. Don’t come up just yet because we’ve got more compliments to pay you. It’s Mr. Erkin Bek.

Erkin’s one life mission is meditation. He is committed to inspiring the world to meditate armed with science and technology. He’s taking meditation a step further. He’s elevating it to an everyday accessible practice informed by always objective data. Put simply, he’s trying to create something that’s never been done before. So, please welcome the meditation pioneer, Erkin Bek.

Erkin Bek – All Here and World Meditation league Founder:
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, dear friends, welcome. 

Meditation. 

I once had a meeting with one of the leaders of a large international meditation organization, sister Jayanti of the Brahma Kumaris, a large organization from India.
And she asked me a question. What inspired you to bring science into meditation? 

And I had only one thing to say, the truth. 

That’s how the scientific journey has begun. 

So I went to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL, partnered up with the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience with Professor Olaf Blanke to kick off a three-year scientific research project into understandingthese meditative states. I began meditating myself, submitted to scientific research in the faraday cages of the university. It’s the cages that are devoid of electrical interference to catch the clean brain signal. 

I performed a lot of recordings in the research facilities in Switzerland also using fMRI technology. 

And then we have expanded the research. Once I understood what this is. Because one principle that is important for science is scientists they ask you in order to get any scientific evidence you have to be able to enter and exit meditative states repeatedly reproduce the same meditative state.

So I kept training just to capture go into meditation exit go to meditation exit so I’ve done numerous brain recordings, received very clear understanding of the capturing precisely the meditative states then we have expanded our research, we have partnered up with University of Geneva. As a result of this, our chief scientist Christoph  Michel is here and we have included additional means of dynamic neuroimaging.

We have expanded the research further by also adding the Fondation Campus Biotech which is the center that integrates in Geneva as an academic institution for brain research. I went on to India and I’ve lived in India for a number of years. I also went to research institutions in Bengaluru in the technology capital of India. Partnered up with the academic institution that studies yogic meditation and yogic practices. Also meditated in their labs and we started to really capture understanding what is going on in terms of attaining this ability to get out of distractions and to really just be all here.

Then we needed to go out to a lot of other meditation practitioners. So we have reached out to large international meditation organizations. I’ll give you just a few names such as – you may have heard of – the Art of Living organization that is a large – they have tens of millions of followers all over the world – from the United States to Europe to India to the Far East. They have a center here in Tokyo.  That organization is led by the esteemed Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. We have recorded the brain activity of their most advanced practitioners.

Then we have moved on to other meditation organizations such as the Heartfulness Organization, headquartered in Hyderabad that also has tens of millions of followers around the world from California, United States to London to across Europe, Asia, here in the Far East as well. We visited their headquarters and the research centers and recorded advanced practitioners as well. And they have one of the largest meditation halls in the world that can house 10,000 people at the same time sitting in meditation. It’s very powerful to sit there and practice with people over there as well. We carried on to the Pyramid Valley in India.

We visited and worked closely with the research center at the Tibetan monastery, Sera Jey Monastery and worked with Tibetan monks to understand their practices. And all along the way, we’re deeply connecting with learning about other people’s other styles, numerous styles of meditation practice- what are they doing – tracking their brain activity with advanced brain imaging technology.

In order to perform this global scientific research, we have decided to acquire advanced technology ourselves and expand our team. So we partnered up with a company in Berlin, Germany called ANT Neuro that provides the brain imaging technology for clinical applications, for academic institutions. Their representatives are here working to help us with all the technological setup for brain imaging.

And then we moved, we continued to investigate other traditions such as the Theravada Buddhist tradition and the Theravada Buddhism what is very famous is the Jhana meditation. The Jhana meditation that uses very special approach that is a very close also to the original yogic teaching that comes from 2500 years ago which is about developing the strong ability to concentrate. They use concentration. So Jhana is a lot about concentration and then from concentration to the deep state.

So we worked with monks from the Pa Auk Monastery in Myanmar which some people call the Pa Auk Monastery as the Harvard of Buddhism sometimes because it is very structured and it follows the original Buddha teaching that was written in Pali language. So the monks that have contributed to that – such as, there’s numerous people – thank you very much to them,like brother Chan, like Sun, like you know these other people that have joined these brain recordings. We have worked with other very strong Thai forest tradition for meditation for Theravada that also use the Jhana practices and developing this Jhana consciousness.

So we have collaborated with an organization called the Samatha Trust that is led by the elderly Thai gentleman Nai Boonman and Paul Dennison who’s also a great researcher and Nai Boonman went to the UK and spread the Jhana meditation  in England from the 1960s in London, Manchester and Wales and across the United Kingdom. And that’s been a great collaboration as they’re also scientifically researching meditation and they’re understanding what it is.

It’s been really fabulous journey and there are others we came to of course we were here in Japan and we came and recorded the brain activities of the Zen meditators between here in Tokyo and Kamakura. Thank you to our partners here Mikio Shishido and Kouji Miki over there. Zen 2.0 has been a great collaboration of linking the meditation science and technology together.

After having performed this over the last three and a half years an extensive scientific and meditation journey discovery we have then landed in Tokyo to a great collaboration with our dear friend Kenichiro Mogi. We began a collaboration that the Collective Intelligence Research Laboratory at the University of Tokyo by Ken Mogi and Takashi Ikegami. Yoshi Tamura is also somewhere here in the audience. That’s also given some really great further insight into deepening the research into the brain and mind activity.

So where do we stand now? We have amassed this incredible wealth of knowledge of meditation practice that is unique in the world today where we can really bring together the various meditation practices from around the world. This sort of research into both the analytical research and the meditation practices is unique. You know sometimes people only investigate you know one thing or another thing.

We’ve had this privilege and the access to go into these centers and monasteries and we have now at a point where this is very clear how from here we can now begin clarifying and making meditation real with the help of science and technology. 

Therefore having understood how it’s possible that meditation you can really achieve something. It is not just people are sitting and there’s nothing going on. In fact meditation is a very dynamic discipline. You know when people actually you go inside their minds and brain, using dynamic neuroimaging, we can see that the activity of the mind and brain is happening in milliseconds. It’s so dynamic. It is one of the most dynamic disciplines that exist on earth. There is hardly any other discipline even in the external world that is as dynamic as meditation. But we didn’t know this before because the science was not at the level, dynamic neuro imaging didn’t even exist at some point. It’s a phenomenal development in the world and it’s in modern science. It’s been developing with great rigor.

And now this movement, continuous movement in milliseconds of the mind, we can see that what are the meditation practitioners are actually doing. You know you have this – to remember the principle the way of meditation, is you know we live in the world with a lot of objects and a lot of thoughts constantly happening and the economy that is out there – imagine the attention economy that is constantly trying to steal everybody’s mind just to take – there’s a competition to take your mind,competition to really – so that you don’t belong to yourself and your attention is constantly dissected into so many things.

And so meditation becomes very relevant in today’s society. We need to be able to – if we don’t do this, we might actually get crazy with the development of all this attention economy, the development in artificial intelligence – that is constantly improving our external automation – which is a very good thing and that’s all of this is definitely needed- but there’s a danger to human mind to be able not to get lost into a million things and to be able to bring this drive this from many objects and many thoughts. Take your mind. And to remember the way of meditation that comes from centuries ago from the tradition described very clearly.

You take your attention, single object, and you drive your attention towards this uninterrupted flow of consciousness. Sustained, stable move to develop a stable mind not a fragmented. 

So keep on until, through concentration practice we achieve stability and eventually the silence of the mind. 

Meditation began 500 years BC was first mentioned in the ancient scriptures. Fast track to 2025. 300 million people on Earth practicing meditation. And this trend is only exploding. Wellness economy is growing. And the reason why it is unstoppable because the world is becoming fast-paced.

Artificial intelligence and attention economy is really creating challenges for us. They’re doing a lot of great things for us, but at the same time bringing a lot of challenges. So the faster the world becomes, the greater is the need for meditation practice. This market is going to explode and it keeps growing at exponential pace.

So this is a very important moment in the history where we’re catching the wave of global development that is now there’s so much is taking care out of the external domain with the capability of machines but now what about the internal dynamics.

So we need this – to really in this society, it has value and it is now a great opportunity to build a new world. the world of internal dynamics. This is where meditation, science and technology come together.

Join us in building this new world that has the truth of science, the precision. And we’re creating this new sport through which we want to bring the world attention towards this importance of the stability of the mind. The silence. That is really something to strive for. 

We’re bringing the precision and perhaps someday people might even vie to achieve perhaps even a world record in this ability of stability and silence. I invite you to witness today’s quantified meditation in action. QM3 will be displayed today.

So which as you remember how K1 in Japan came out some years ago when they created structure and rules for external fighting. There’s we know about F1 about moving cars. We know about UFC ultimate fighting championship. But now we have QM3, the new and the first very special sport of the mind. Welcome.