About this app

The problem with an app like this is obvious: it puts words next to a living person’s ideas, and the easiest way to get that wrong is to blur the line between what he said and what someone else thinks he meant. So every piece of content here carries a label, and there are only four of them.

A few phrases that circulate widely as Campbell quotations could not be traced to any primary source during research, so they are not used here at all, however well they would have fitted. Where the research left a genuine gap, this app says so instead of filling it.

It will not ask you to believe any of it. That is not a stylistic choice — it is the one instruction Campbell repeats more than any other. His stated position is that My Big TOE is nothing to be believed in, that if it is not your experience it cannot be your truth, and that the right stance is open-minded scepticism: open enough to learn something, sceptical enough not to swallow it.

So the model is presented here as a model. Test it against what actually happens when you sit. That is also why there are no streaks, no scores and no badges in this app: under Campbell’s own account, what gets scored is your intent, and sitting down in order not to lose a number is precisely the wrong intent.

Everything you write stays in this browser. There is no account, no server, and no analytics — nothing to sign up for and nothing being collected. The practical cost of that is real: clearing your browser data deletes your journal permanently, and it does not sync between devices. Export a backup from Settings from time to time.

Campbell’s own position is that there is nothing to fear about meditation at all — that it will not put you anywhere frightening, and that fear encountered in it is self-created. That is a claim about his model of reality. It is not a clinical one, and it is the single place where this app should say something he does not.

Meditation is not uniformly benign. In a population-based US survey, around a third of people reported some meditation-related adverse effect, most often anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing, or heightened emotional sensitivity; about one in ten reported effects lasting a month or more, and childhood adversity raised the risk. A systematic review across studies put the overall rate at roughly eight per cent, and noted these can occur in people with no prior mental health history.

Worth holding alongside that: in the same survey, people who reported adverse effects were just as glad to have practised as those who did not. This is a reason to know what can happen, not a reason to avoid it.

One family of experiences is worth naming specifically, because this course actively cultivates it. Letting go of the body, disengaging from the senses, and holding a point of awareness with no location are — described neutrally — depersonalisation and altered sense of self, which the research on contemplative experience catalogues as sometimes destabilising. For most people it is unremarkable and passes. If it does not, that is worth taking seriously rather than pushing through.

Nothing in this practice requires you to endure distress. If sitting consistently makes you feel worse, stop and talk to someone qualified. This app is not a treatment for anything and nothing in it is medical advice.