Full Transcript, 2 Sep 2025
Jessica Fellowes – Forum Radio Host & Interviewer: Hello, and welcome to Forum Radio, the podcast series in which we enjoy conversations with different forum members wherever in the world they may be.
This week, I’m talking to Erkin Bek in Geneva. Erkin is the founder of All Here Organisation and the World Meditation League. And recently, some forum members, including founder Simon Jaco, enjoyed an intriguing day at the All Here Centre, their brain waves measured and analyzed.
As a scientifically accomplished meditation practitioner, Erkin collaborates with leading institutions and has pioneered research on silent mind and quantified meditation practices. But I am going to let him explain what that really means.
Erkin, thank you so much for being with us today. I know you encourage people to lean into silence, but I am going to ask you to talk. Could you please tell forum members something of your path from entrepreneur to all here?
Erkin Bek – All Here and World Meditation league Founder: I started out as an entrepreneur in my early 20s. And built an international business spanning several continents. And have done quite well in my professional business career.
That was something that brought me a lot of what I like to refer to as external fulfillment. And that sort of external fulfillment “is something that gave me quite a lot of happiness as well. But this happiness was of temporary nature.
You can have something that can satisfy you for a short period of time. But there was something that was not enough inside. And no matter how much external success, no matter how much more money I could make, the internal hole was there.
That final satisfaction, somewhere inside me, something was still missing. And I felt that the internal holes needed to be addressed differently from external pursuit of material things. And so, I started to look for this internal fulfillment through meditation practice.
I was introduced early on to the Chinese practice of Tai Chi. Then I moved on further to India and Bali to learn deeply about meditation practices. And in Asia, I have encountered a lot of different meditation approaches.
After a long period of crossing India from east to west, from north to south, from travelling in China, Japan, Korea, and all over the world, eventually learning about various approaches to spirituality and meditation. Finally, what I was looking for out there all over the world, eventually I came to a point where I have discovered that it was actually not there to look for, but it was something that was actually within me. And I found it right here, the Home Within, inside me.
And I found the fulfillment that this was the most natural place to call home, something that is inside you. When I discovered the home within, then wherever I went, I just always thought then, the home. At this point, when I found it all inside me, I have discovered that all is here, nothing is there.
And since that moment, it is all here. When all is here for you, then you are great, I am great, everyone is great. There is not a better person or better other thing or better something else.
All is right here. This is only shifted from external fulfillment of an entrepreneur to a lasting internal fulfillment that I like to call that All is Here.
Jessica: What took you from fusing that meditation practice with science?
Erkin: In short, truth, the pursuit of what is true. Not because I may subjectively tell you that medication was good for you or you should practice notes or that objective metrics. And science is something that can connect us all and make meditation universally adaptable by everyone.
Jessica: I’m just curious about this because as you said yourself, you were seeking a way of filling a hole or something that was not yet satisfied by the external sources of fulfillment and it sounds likea spiritual journey that you went on. And that’s how most of us think about meditation or those kinds of practices. It’s about the spiritual.
So, introducing the science to it is something that’s not really been thought of or spoken about before. Why do you believe in God? You can’t possibly believe in God.
You just have to have faith. So, everybody says, surely that’s it with meditation. In introducing science to it, is that introducing an element that interferes with it in some way?
Erkin: Once you start bringing a scientific approach into the space of meditation, you really start to call things by their names. You no longer need to stick with the realm of spirituality. You really shift from spirituality to consciousness.
And I vouch for lucidity of consciousness and something that can be observable through modern tools of science and technology. Surely, at the moment, we cannot observe everything inside the inner workings of the human being. But we can very clearly, as a minimum, observe the pug marks of what is that invisible world.
And we can make that inner world visible through scientific methods. And as a result of this, using scientific methods, we have kicked off a three-year, small collaboration, small research study with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL. We really wanted to get to the bottom line of the scientific side of what is happening in that deep thing or in our deep thinking?
Why should it be practiced? And should it be even objectively, is there anything that we can really see? As a result of this three-year study, we have really seen some very clear ways to capture, transition our distracted mind and a noisy mental space can move towards the silence.
Once we have established how we can measure this transition from a noisy mind to a stable attention and then to a 心の静寂, we have been able to develop benchmarks of what the transition looks like. We have eventually created and developed what we call today quantified meditation, to which we can really objectively quantify how practitioners are moving towards the deeper state.
Jessica: What is the real benefit of going into that deeper state?
Erkin: What we are finding is that meditation training is effectively a brain stimulation training, because what you are doing through this training, you systematically access the same networks in the brain, and you are constantly training accessing the self-attention networks. You are reducing the noise of the mind wandering that is spending its resources of attention inefficiently. And by going to the same meditative state, you are accessing the same attention networks in the brain.
And so, you keep systematically training your access to these brain networks over and over again. So this is something that allows you to also build this long-term cognitive capability and maintaining your cognitive capabilities, because you are not leading the attention network behind, and you are constantly accessing them, and systematically this is why meditation training should be pursued sooner than later,
so that you are really training your brain not to stay idle, and to really go deeper, and keep doing something that is critically important for your overall mental well-being, but also keeping your brain healthy. Thanks to science and the repetition and reproducing the same state, is how we can apply the methods of quantifier meditation, and it allows us to see how the practitioner is actually performing.
We can really get inside and see, is this effective, what you’re doing. So today, science and technology allows us to create this ability to track the performance. Meditation really becomes a kind of performance, showing how you are training and accessing systematically these brain networks.
We have also developed an EEG-guided brain-computer interface technology that allows us to see practitioners’ performance in real time. I hope I have given you enough encouragement.
Jessica: Yes, absolutely. I’m not very good at meditation, but I definitely believe in the benefits of it. What would have been the most exciting discoveries that you’ve made in your studies so far?
Erkin: The brain awakening, brain stimulation, the ability to maintain your mental and brain health over a
long period of time and preparing yourself to stay in shape. People talk about longevity, people talk about well-being. Mental well-being today is the forefront of everything that we do.
It is the key to longevity; it is the key to physical well-being, mental well-being. And the scientific discoveries that we have seen the most important ones, is that it allows us to systematically develop and maintain our mental health and mental well-being. And if you do it, you know, what we have is the methods of quantification for science and technology, allows us to be in an objective fashion.
Jessica: Did you go into this feeling like you knew what the answers would be, or have you been
surprised by things?
Erkin : When I discovered All Here, you know, earlier I mentioned about the shift from external fulfillment to internal fulfillment. In the arrival of the internal fulfillment, when that happens, you feel that something important has happened to you. You do not really know scientifically what that means.
I have been able to get this measured and quantified with scientific methods and make it really objective.But we have done a lot of research throughout different traditions. We have traveled around the world to meditation centers in India, to the different centers, we’ve been to Japan, South Korea, across Europe and our research is expanding.
This is clearly showing that systematically, we reduce the noise of mind wandering, we keep training our attention network, and it is something that is crucially important for today’s age, where our attention is distracted and taken by the distractions of the digital economy. So, this is becoming abundantly evident, so that this is the fusion of our health and the well-being of all people around the world.
Jessica: You recently held the Geneva Meditation Challenge as part of the World Meditation League.
Erkin: What a great success that was, because we have been working for a long time, working for a consortium, you know, we will do the consortium of scientific partners. As I mentioned, we work with this Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL. We work with the University of Geneva.
We work with the University of Tokyo in Japan, with research institutions along India and in Germany, and as well as the UK. We have been able to build this incredible brain-computer interface technology, allowing us to bring people and to test us from different meditation traditions. We had a spectacular event where we had practitioners from various traditions, such as you might have heard of transcendental meditation, people coming from very large established traditions, like Heartfulness, the Art of Living.
Some of these traditions, they have followings of more than 50 million people each around the globe. We even had practitioners flying in from London, for example, that are practicing in Kabbalah, or some spiritual practices from Israel. We had people that are practicing yogic practices, we had people flying from South India.
So, there was a real showcase, a mixture of various meditation traditions. And we have been able to see that this is really unprecedented.It’s the first time this kind of event has happened on Earth, where we can see multiple people sitting in meditation, we in the meditation hall, while we project them out of the meditation hall in real time on the for spectators watching on the screens, people entering into their deep state.
And in addition to that, we have large screens running with the brain activity being visualized using this brain interface technology, seeing how they’re reducing their mind wandering, how they are accessing their self-attention networks, how they are increasing their concentration. And to see all of this happening in real time, which was absolutely mind blowing, because it is, you can see people are doing
something so personal and private to them, and you see in the real time what is actually happening inside them at the same time. We have put together live commentary for spectators, our Chief Scientist,Professor Christoph Michel along with myself and our team have commentated for the spectators what is going on during this meditation, being able to comment on their traditions, on their posture, on the kind of practice they’re doing.
And to see what are these, how it is happening all in real time, it was truly fascinating and people really loved it. So, this is how we,using this kind of technological methods and methods of Quantified Meditation is how we would like to inspire more people to meditate using these innovative and objective metrics and using these modern tools of science and technology. It was an absolute marvel.
And after the success of this event and the incredible feedback from the audience, we plan to take this event on a global tour. And our next challenge is coming up in October, October 1st, 2nd in Tokyo, where we will hold the Tokyo Meditation Challenge, where we’ll have further traditions, joining that from Japan from, we’ll stage it between Tokyo and Kamakura, the birthplace of Zen, where we had built incredible network. And Japan will allow us to further spread this international.
We are also in talks to organize a challenge in Los Angeles. So, Los Angeles Meditation Challenge is in the works. We’re talking to people in the Emirates, from Saudi, but just had incredible visits from Indian institution, all the leaders in meditation and scientific research to organize the future 2026 event, bring on stage the much larger event in India and continue building this global movement of inspiring people to meditate with science and technology.
Jessica: We have talked about the benefits of meditation. And I know that meditation has become something that’s more talked about in mainstream media and in recent years. But I think a lot of people are still very daunted by the idea of it. It sounds like a very difficult thing to do. So how do you suggest people get started?
Erkin: That is very true. Meditation is something that is not easy to embrace. It is so true that the meditation community is sitting out there, the mainstream public is sitting on the other side.
We have been developing innovative ways how to bring people to the meditation space. One of such ways is to introduce the shorter periods, something that people can experience in a more impactful and a dense way. Rounds of meditation, what we are unveiling here is the three minutes training programs and utilising your attention to do something with a very high quality within a shorter period of time.
Take a break one minute, go back three minutes again. Put all you can do within this short period of time, not only to do something really high quality, but how you can utilize your attention within this short time. Then you take a one-minute break, and you keep doing this multiple rounds.
And it is important to train to go back to the same systematically. This is how we can train accessing the same brain networks. The three minute meditation training program by All Here is how we want to get people out of this conservative way of thinking aboutmeditation, that you have to sit there for hours and hours and to do “something that is really hard.
There is a different way to do it.
Jessica: And can they access that online, this three minute meditation course?
Erkin: This is being unveiled in the shortest period of time. We will be launching our three-minute training program for the All Here app, that can be accessed by Forum Club members and other people interested in the form and the short, impactful, and quantifiable fashion. There is another way how we also look at engaging people into the meditation schools, using technological tools.
So, we have developed the XR Meditation Experience Platform. XR stands for Extended Reality, which uses tools of virtual reality and augmented reality. And now the Forum Club members have been able to experience it firsthand and really enjoyed and given us incredible feedback on that.
We have been also showcasing this technology conference last December in Tokyo at the SIGGRAPH Technology Conference that showcases some of the latest innovations of such that we have received amazing accolades of the conference. We have also just come back from showcasing our XR technology at a very specific mental health-oriented event in Berlin. Last week, we had an event called the “Mind XR,” where we have engaged and showcased our technology with various research from across Europe.
We’ve made great progress and really impressed, actually, a proportional crowd of scientific researchers that were working on applications of the virtual reality technology. This is proving to be quite an interesting way to get people that are closely linked to tech to experience meditation in this innovative fashion.
Jessica: Thank you so much, Erkin. And I would recommend people go on to your website. Can you remind us of the website address?
Erik : allhere.org.
Jessica: Thank you so much, Erkin, for giving us your time today. That was a fascinating interview. Thank you for listening. Until next week, goodbye.
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