About the company

Old wisdom, spoken again.

Sages of the 4th World LLC is a small California company with one purpose: to spread mindfulness and happiness in the world by bringing the great contemplative teachings of humanity back to life, in sound, for anyone with a pair of earbuds.

Why we exist

Our founder has spent more than twenty-five years building software in the healthcare and mental-health fields. Over that time one thing became impossible to ignore: modern life leaves very little room for stillness, and almost no one is ever shown how to sit quietly with themselves. Mindfulness is talked about everywhere and practiced almost nowhere.

Yet the instructions for exactly that have existed for thousands of years. Monks in Sri Lanka, poets in Persia, anchoresses in medieval England, sages on the banks of the Ganges, philosophers in Rome, hermits in the mountains of Tibet and China: they all left careful, practical, beautiful accounts of how to quiet the mind and open the heart. Most of those texts now sit unread in library archives and public-domain scans, known only to scholars.

We think that is a loss the world cannot afford. In a fast-paced, high-stakes modern life the wisdom of these sages is more useful than ever. So we bring their words out of obscurity and make them something you can simply press play on.

What we make

Our Sages apps take old and often forgotten contemplative pieces and turn them into spoken meditations you can listen to while sitting, walking, or falling asleep. Each sitting is built from the source text itself, read faithfully rather than paraphrased, then carried on ambient music and long, unhurried silences so the words have room to land.

Today the catalog holds well over a thousand sittings drawn from more than twenty-five wisdom traditions, including guided deep practices, teaching stories, and two-voice dialogues between a teacher and a student. The first product is Sages for iPhone, a meditation player designed for deep listening with AirPods. Alongside it we are developing Sage Presence, an immersive meditation experience for virtual-reality headsets, so the same teachings can be met in a quiet, candle-lit virtual space.

How we work

The founder

Fred Jabre

Fred Jabre smiling with his husky, Falcor, at home in California
Fred and Falcor at home in the mountains.

Fred Jabre lives in the mountains of sunny, beautiful California with his husky, Falcor, who appears in most of the photos and none of the meditations.

Fred has been developing software for more than twenty years and holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Lowell (now the University of Massachusetts Lowell). He has spent over twenty-five years building technology in the healthcare and mental-health fields, and came away convinced that a few quiet minutes a day are worth more than most people are ever told, and that almost no one is shown how to find them.

His own spiritual journey began the way many do: with a life that looked full from the outside and had quietly led to unhappiness. After a period of personal loss and tragedy, Frederick began looking elsewhere for answers to life's big questions, and the search took him deep into the contemplative traditions of the East: Buddhist meditation, Taoist stillness, the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. Where he finally came to rest was Advaita Vedanta, sometimes called the direct path. Advaita means "not two." It is the ancient teaching of the Upanishads that the awareness reading these words right now is not separate from the awareness that is everywhere, and that peace is not something to be achieved but something to be noticed, because it is already what you are. The living voice of that teaching for Fred was Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala, whose one question, "Who am I?", turns attention back on itself. Modern teachers in the same lineage, Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira and Eckhart Tolle, helped him hear it in plain contemporary language.

Sages of the 4th World grew out of that journey. Once you have been helped by one sage, you start to notice how many others have said the same thing in their own way, and how few people ever get to hear them. The company is Fred's attempt to put those voices into as many ears as possible: Ramana and Shankara, Rumi and Milarepa, Lao Tzu and Teresa of Ávila, Ajahn Chah and Meister Eckhart, and hundreds of lesser-known sages whose words deserve to be heard again.

He builds the apps himself, with the help of a small circle of collaborators, and reads every piece of listener mail. You can reach him through the contact page.

Company details