Читать книгу The Quickening - Gregg Unterberger - Страница 14

“Tones and sounds will be the channel through which the coordinating of forces for the body may make for the first of the perfect reactions . . .”

Edgar Cayce reading 758-38

Eckhart Tolle likes to tell the story of J. Krishnamurti, the Hindu philosopher who was instrumental, among others, in bringing metaphysical concepts to the Western world in the twentieth century. Reportedly, after an extensive tour of America, at one of his lectures, the enlightened teacher leaned forward conspiratorially towards the microphone and said, “Do you really want to know my secret?” A hush fell over the audience members. Here was the ultimate spiritual truth. Were they ready? Could they grasp it?

Krishnamurti said, “I don’t mind what happens.”

At first blush, that hardly sounds like a revelation, from the man who had a reputation as a “world teacher” and hobnobbed with physicist David Bohm and author Auldous Huxley. In fact, it sounds like someone who is apathetic. But Krishnamurti was hardly that. He was often truly at peace with whatever was happening around him.

Can you imagine what that would be like in your life? Your partner is angry with you, and you can keep your peace. You lose your job, and you can keep your peace. You win the lottery . . . and yes, you can keep your peace. You can even keep only about half the lottery money after taxes, and after hearing that . . . you can still keep your peace. Sound like some kind of esoteric Eastern skill? What about the Serenity Prayer that asks God for “the serenity to accept the things that we cannot change,” as prayed by millions in the Western tradition known as the Twelve Steps?

But usually, we are anything but serene in the face of things we cannot change. We furiously demand that life and world affairs be different. Our friends and families are expected to become what we “need” them to be. We even attack ourselves: We are not skinny enough, not smart enough, not responsible enough, not spiritual enough, and then we condemn ourselves for being too hard on ourselves!

Our righteous judgments not only interfere with our peace, they often separate us from the people we would want to love most. We are angry that our children or grandchildren have purple hair, got a tattoo, or worse, listen to Justin Bieber. We are angry that our spouses dare to notice someone of the opposite sex. We are angry that our friends did not remember our birthdays. So, we proceed to shut them out of our lives and then wonder why we feel so hurt and alone.

So much of the time, we see peace as something that is dictated by circumstances beyond ourselves. I will feel peaceful when I get out of high school; when I finish college; when I get married; when I get divorced; when I get remarried; when I have children of my own . . . no, wait a minute, make that when the kids move out, oops, they’re already gone; I mean, when I see the grandkids again . . . and on and on it goes.

The Bible talks about “the peace that passeth all understanding.” To me that speaks of two aspects of the quality of this peace. First, that peace is so intense or so deep that it transcends our normal sense of peace. It is beyond the everyday two-margaritas-and-it’s-all-good experience. Second, that particular sense of peace is apparently beyond rationality. By definition, it doesn’t make sense. What do I mean by that? Well, given that we believe that outer circumstances must dictate our moods, then, we believe if circumstances are perfect, then we experience peace. But this kind of peace occurs outside of that domain, when life hands us bologna sandwiches, not surf and turf. Or, for my readers who are vegan, tofu and kale.

Imagine you are sitting on your favorite Caribbean Island with a frosty adult beverage in your hand and your favorite romantic partner by your side. Your retirement is set, you have millions in the bank, you are healthy and vital, your children are successful in school or at work, you have the best friends in the world, and you feel . . . well, pretty freakin’ good! Satisfied, maybe even peaceful! And most everyone would say, “That’s understandable.” That is the peace that is understood by all.

But what about a peace that is beyond understanding, when things are bad? How could we possibly have peace? Wouldn’t we just be repressing our feelings? Isn’t that denial? Or just plain Pollyanna?

My dear friend Kathy, I often joke, is the most spiritual atheist I have ever met. She was diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer and, understandably, her feelings leading up to her surgery and chemotherapy were a mix of terror, anxiety, depression, and confusion. Simultaneously, her mother was on hospice, death lurking around the corner. There was no guarantee her surgery could save Kathy’s life. Like most of us, she had some difficult family relationships. Financial stability was an issue; her inability to work due to illness and the medical costs were a one-two punch in the purse. Her life was a perfect storm of bad news and tough circumstances. We would talk at length about how life would still continue, even while the crisis would move toward some resolution and her life was still right there in front of her. While I encouraged her not to avoid her painful emotions, I also reminded her that even in the worst of times, there were things to be grateful for.

One day, she called me excitedly. “I was at Whole Foods Market today,” she told me. “And I was looking at all the beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables and enjoying all the people around me shopping, and the music they were playing was just incredible, some of my favorites from the eighties. I was literally dancing down the aisles. And suddenly it dawned on me that I was happy, genuinely happy. I was amazed. How is that possible? For probably fifteen minutes, I “forgot” that my Mom had just died a month ago and that I was about to have major surgery and one of my best friends is getting a divorce. How is this possible? And even when those things came back to me, I still felt good!”

Kathy “did not mind” her life circumstances in that moment.

It was the peace that was beyond all understanding. Yet here it was. “My peace I give to you . . . not as the world knows it.” And it was happening to a “godless atheist!”

By the way, Kathy did live through her surgery and continues trying to be grateful for her every moment. She has good days and she has bad days, but without question, learning to think this way has made all of her days better days.

These experiences should throw a steel wrench into the gears of our typical thinking. It does not mean that we should feel peaceful or can always feel peaceful in the midst of a crisis. Nor does it mean that if we do not feel peaceful or calm when things are difficult then we are a failure. It does mean that peace really might be possible even in our most painful moments.

That is good news, because life is going to hand us a lot of crap.

Oh, I am sorry, what I meant to say was “opportunities for growth.”

Yeah, right.

But it means something even more powerful than that. If peace is possible during times of trial, then we can train the mind, with practice and effort, to catalyze that state. And, by extension, this means we can live in the world in such a way that, increasingly, we are not the emotional victims of our circumstances. Instead of all the frenetic, anxious, exhausting, and crazy things we do to control the uncontrollable in our world so that we can feel okay, we could give that up. We could begin to really “accept the things we cannot change” and experience that peace that we all aspire to. Right now.

It is a revolutionary, radical way to think that is as ancient as Buddhism and as fresh as the latest Eckhart Tolle bestseller. Now, this does not mean we don’t have goals and preferences, sitting listlessly about. It does mean that, en route to those goals, we are not relegating our experience of peace or happiness to something that will happen someday in the future “when I [fill in the blank]” but instead bring more enjoyment to the moment right now. As the T-shirts say, “The journey is the destination.”

Strangely, I remember one incredibly successful individual saying to the media, “Getting here was a lot more fun than being here.” If that is true, aren’t we missing a great ride on the way to the top?

I think traditionally when we talk about cultivating a quiet mind, we think in terms of endless meditation or centering prayer. In the Cayce tradition, we think of the readings that advise us to “watch self go by,” meaning we step back and create a conscious awareness of the flow of our crazy thinking. The notion of “mindfulness” has become integrated with newer forms of cognitive behavioral therapies and is changing the way people think, literally. But still . . . it takes time.

To be sure, it would be nice to have the peace that passeth understanding twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But, if you are like most people, that seems to be something that would take years of meditative practice. Maybe, at present, you can barely sit still and say, “There’s no place like OM” for five minutes. It would be nice to have it right now. Too bad there is not some mental switch we can flip that would kick us over into Guru Consciousness.

As it turns out, there is a switch, and we can learn to flip it. And relatively quickly, too.

First, we would have to know—qualitatively and quantitatively—what was going on at a neurological level for someone who was experiencing a deep peace, so we could figure out how to reproduce it in others. It would be wonderful if we could look into the head of a Tibetan monk, who has been meditating hooked up to a Peace-O-Meter, and find out how blissed out he is . . . and then figure out how the heck he got there. I wonder what that would look like. Cue the harp music as Gregg strokes his bearded chinny-chin-chin, his eyes looking heavenward . . .

Futuristic computers flash and beep nosily in a control room that overlooks—through a plate-glass window—an experimental station straight out of the Jetsons. A slender monk in ochre robes is seated in a single futuristic tubular chrome and leather chair illuminated by a solitary down light and hooked up to electronic dealie-bobbers, while other monks solemnly chant long “Ooooms” in a semi-circle behind them with one of those big-ass horns blowing a long low note, filling the room with harmonic resonance. Our experimental monk, deep in meditation, smiles ever so subtly and as we gaze at him . . . is that a soft light gently emanating from him? Meanwhile, behind the plate glass, uber-geeks with pasty complexions in starched white short-sleeved shirts and skinny black ties intently monitor scores of screens and winky-blinky lights. They gaze dumbstruck at the read-outs until one head honcho, sporting a burr haircut, a pocket protector, and black horn-rimmed glasses (sounding amazingly like the pilot on your last trip to Atlanta with his mouth too close to the microphone) ominously breaks the silence.

“Uhhhhh, Mission Control . . . I’ve got Thupten Rinpoche here hitting an 8.9 on the Dalai Lama Scale. Uhhhh, yeah, he’s red-lining right now. Roger that, we’ll keep monitoring him, but at this rate, we anticipate an ETE [Estimated Time of Enlightenment] of about ten minutes. He’s gonna start bending the needle and may well vibrate out of his body. Affirmative, we are talking about a total Celestine wave dispersion here. He’s throwin’ an awful lot of low Theta waves here and kicking up some Hypergamma besides. Let’s move to Yellow Alert and have chanting monks and the horns stand down and the Reiki Masters on deck to attune him so he doesn’t Nirvana outta here. Uhhhh, Stand-by RMs to energetically ground the subject on my mark: In three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Okay, okay, you’re right. I’ve seen too many Star Trek reruns as a child. Okay, I’ve seen too many Star Trek reruns as a child and as an adult. But the truth is these kinds of experiments have been done extensively, just without the Ken Adam movie sets. Through an EEG, we can measure the electrical activity of the brain, and we can recognize various states of focus as they correlate to certain kinds of brainwave activity. Our brains actually generate enough electricity to light a ten watt light bulb, which, I guess means we are all pretty dim, if you take that at face value. But, as it turns out, it’s the kind of electrical activity that counts. After decades of research, studies have demonstrated that different brainwave patterns directly correlate to different states of being. According to sound researcher Dr. Jeffrey Thompson at the Center for Neuroacoustic Research, although there are no universally accepted standards for where one state breaks into another, science on our planet has traditionally divided brainwave activity into four major states:

•Beta (13-30 Hz) Concentrated mental ability, concrete problem solving, speaking

•Alpha (8-13 Hz) Calm and relaxed

•Theta (4-7 Hz) Deep meditation, dreaming, creative states, access to the unconscious

•Delta (½-4 Hz) Sleep state, access to intuition and psychic phenomena

Now, if you are not a sound engineer, don’t let the “Hz” throw you. Hz simply stands for “hertz” which means cycles per second or how “energetic” the electrical activity is. Once again, imagine that you are at the beach. Déjà vu, huh? When you watch a wave, you identify it by seeing the trough immediately before it, which then rises to a peak and then goes back down again. From trough to peak to trough again is one cycle. Simply put, a higher Hz level just means choppier waves, going by faster: more waves per second. And a low number of cycles per second would be like those subtle slow swells in the waves that you see farther from shore. It really just reflects faster or slower electrical brainwave activity, which makes sense when you think about it. When we are anxious or excited, we are thinking “lots of thoughts” and when we relax, our brains “slow down” and our thinking feels more spacious.

Of course, at any moment, you have lots of different kinds of waves in your head, but one range of wavelength is typically more dominant than others, so if you have a lot of activity in the 13-30 Hz wavelength (i.e., a lot of waves going by), we would say you were in a Beta state with your mind and body alert and engaged with life. You are probably talking or shopping or thinking analytically about that loser you went out with last night and how you are beginning to wonder whether you should have spent all that money on online dating after all.

Now, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and exhale, saying the Universal Mantra of Relaxation: “Ahhhhhhh.” You are now beginning to generate slower alpha waves.

Did you do it? Feels nice, huh? See, you are more like the Dalai Lama already. Look at you, leaping ahead on your spiritual journey, even before you finish reading this book, you rascal, you.

If we had you hooked up to the electrical spaghetti swim cap wired to the Univac that they call an electroencephalograph or EEG, we would see more activity in the 8-13 Hz alpha range. Enough alpha waves that you will find yourself feeling relaxed, but focused. This can be useful for light meditation, internal mental reflection (i.e., “pondering,” if you will), and, if the alpha state is not too deep, maybe doing some really effective studying.

Legend has it that Thomas Edison so valued this creative twilight arena just before deep sleep that he would nap in an armchair with metal ball-bearings in each hand, positioned over steel bowls. As he dozed, his hands would relax slowly until, eventually, he dropped the ball bearings into the bowls. Their clatter awakened him in the middle of what was very likely an Alpha state or light Theta state. Judging by the, oh, one or two productive ideas that came out of his head, I would say it worked for him.

Edgar Cayce had a name for this zone between wakefulness and slumber; he called it “pre-sleep.” He said that the mind was very amenable to instructions in this state, and he helped a young mother successfully cure her child of bed-wetting by having her make audible suggestions as he drifted off to slumber land.

The next level “down,” Theta states (4-7 Hz), involving long, slow brainwaves, are associated with deeper, visionary states of meditation, spontaneous problem solving, and psychic experiences, including out-of-body experiences.

Delta states (.5 to 4 Hz) are associated with sleep, but also shamanic or mystical experiences—important to know if you want to do some shape-shifting or soul retrieval. (Where the hell is that thing? I swear I put it my jacket pocket when I left the house. God, I hope nobody stole it! Talk about identity theft! Jeez.)

So now that we know where we “need to be,” (neurologically speaking) to access mystical experiences, greater intuition, and deep meditation, how do we flip the switch?

Well, first we have to climb into our time machine, fire up the flux capacitor, and go back a few years. Relax and get in. The leather bucket seats have bun warmers so you won’t get cold. I bought it used with all the options. As you can see, there is a lot more legroom in here than in the Back to the Future car. Bear with me while we leap backward on our spiritual journey.

The year is 1839, and the handsome Prussian gentleman before you with the moustache and graying temples is one Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, known as Hiney to his friends, I am sure. If he were from Texas, like me, where everybody has two names, they would probably just call him Richey Bill.

But I digress.

Perhaps you noticed.

Richey Bill, er, Heinrich was quite the man of letters, now regarded by some as a pioneer in the field of meteorology, early experimental physics, and natural sciences. There is even a crater on the moon named for him, the Richey Bill Crater.

Just kidding, it’s called the Hiney Hole.

Okay, so it’s called the Dove Crater; it’s just north of the crater Pitiscus. Inquiring minds want to know.

For those of you not laughing, I am aghast, aghast, I tell you, at this brief detour into scatological humor. How this escaped my editor is completely beyond me. Spirituality is very serious business. Shame, shame on me.

For those of you smiling, thank you for remembering that we take all this enlightenment stuff too seriously sometimes. Come and see me at my next workshop. We will laugh our butts off and leap forward.

So, before you are gone too long from the present and your jerkwagon of a boss thinks you are on an extended Red Bull break, here is what is important about Heinrich. He noted that if you sent a musical tone to one ear of, say, 200 Hz, and then another slightly higher tone of, say 210Hz, to the other ear that this confused the brain, which then manufactured an experience of a “phantom tone” which was the difference between two frequencies, 10 Hz. You might remember from high school biology that the nerve endings in the right ear connect up with the left part of the brain and the nerve endings in the left ear go to the right part of your brain. Apparently, Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, decided it was a good idea for us to be born with our wires crossed. In any case, since both hemispheres of the brain were involved in the experience, your entire meat computer begins to attune or entrain to this frequency and starts buzzing along at 10 Hz. Hiney called the phenomena binaural beat frequencies, now often abbreviated BBF. It sounds like something nightclub disc jockeys with too many pierced body parts generate on weekends. But, stay with me. Binaural simply means “two ears hearing,” like you ladies always wish your husband would do.

But, what Richey Bill did not and could not grasp at that point is the application of this technology. Class, do you remember what state you are in when you have lots of 10 Hz activity crackling in your noggin? (You can check the chart. It’s okay; I only give open-book tests.) That’s right, alpha state. Send two detuned tones to two ears and in a matter of minutes, whaddya got? Instant meditation!

Now, hang on while the g-force pulls the corners of your mouth towards your ears as we leap ahead on our spiritual journey to 1973. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn is at the top of the pop charts and it’s a dark, dark day for rock ‘n’ roll. But on balance, this year marks the publication of “Auditory Beats and the Brain” in Scientific American by Dr. Gerald Oster of the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. The article puts together current research and historical findings about BBFs. Suddenly, BBFs become more than just an interesting anomaly and transform into something more credible and useful in the eyes of the academic community.

Around the same time, sound pioneer Robert Monroe was researching BBF. Monroe, an engineer who spontaneously began having out-of-body experiences in the 1950s, believed that BBF technology might be able to help people relax, accelerate learning, and even facilitate astral projection. He manufactured the technology under the brand name, Hemi-Sync®, short for hemispheric synchronization, since he noted that when using BBF, there was a more balanced, coherent neural firing of both the creative/artistic right hemisphere of the brain and the linear/rational left hemisphere. Voila! “Whole-brain thinking” on demand!

Zip!

And now we are back in the twenty-first century . . . and my fly is closed. You are saying, the little BBF history lesson was fascinating, Gregg, and thank you for closing the barn door, I was beginning to worry about you. But what’s in it for me?

Let’s say you wake up in the morning at eight o’clock, only to discover that the coffee pot’s broken. Damn, you say to yourself, how will I find my way to work without my java? Thinking quickly, you toss on your headphones and start to listen to a Beta audio recording on your iPod. The BBF tones feed into each ear, resonating underneath a bed of lively up-tempo music. Sure enough, within just a few minutes, your brain is chugging along at about 20 Hz, solidly in the range of Beta waves, and you feel bright and alert, without the cost of a $15.56 cup of mocha latté soy Frappuccino extra grande venti with a shot in the dark from Starbucks.

You go percolating through the day, energetic, alert and feeling pretty good, until your jerkwagon boss (the one who got pissed off at you for being gone too long in my time machine) reminds you about a project that is due. And he doesn’t want it right, he wants it right now. Whipping out your iPod from your purse (okay, it’s not a purse, it’s a satchel like Indiana Jones carries), you turn down the lights in your crappy vestibule that passes for an office, close your eyes, and breathe like your favorite yoga instructor, while jacking into an alpha state BBF audio track with haunting minor key music and groovy ocean sounds for fifteen minutes, catalyzing an Edison-like state of mind sans ball-bearings. After reinventing the light bulb and the telephone, you remember that what your boss wanted was the specs for the new electric dog polisher. In the alpha state, you can hear every word of your muses and spontaneously solve the problem and buy small, inexpensive gift certificates for them as tokens of your gratitude.

After a tough day at the office channeling Tommy Edison, you decide it’s time for some spiritual sustenance. You put on a Theta track with low harmonic musical tones and in fifteen or twenty minutes, you find yourself meditating at a depth something akin to Tibetan monks with twenty years of training. The more you listen to the Theta tracks, the easier it becomes to catalyze this deep meditative state, whether you are listening to an audio or not. With repeated listening, perhaps you find yourself calmer in stressful situations, more empathic with others, experiencing more intuitive flashes, and maybe even meeting angels or spirit guides and doing some astral cruising.

Now, it’s seven thirty at night and your jerkwagon manic boss calls, but you are in such a Zen state, you don’t panic: “You don’t mind what happens.” As it turns out, it’s all good. “I love the work you’re doing!” he screams into the phone. “The specs for the dog polisher are perfect. And I love the idea of running it with solar panels attached to the canine’s haunches and taking advantage of the tail wagging to store kinetic energy. Genius! We’re gonna kill in the green market with this! I’m giving you a raise and moving you to the corner office!” You smile broadly as excitement courses through your body. But as the evening wears on you wonder if you can get some sleep after all this drama. Your mind is racing. How will your life be different if the Electric Dog Polisher gets picked up and marketed by the As Seen on TV folks?

You reach for your ever present iPod and put on a Delta track with night crickets and slow tempo music that catalyzes long, low delta waves in your brain. You have learned to wear ear buds while you listen to the sleep tracks so that you can roll over on your right or left side without shoving a whole headset up your Eustachian tubes. You sleep soundly, dreaming of all the money you saved on Ambien and thinking that no matter what Big Pharma says about safety, people are sleep-driving on that stuff, and it really might be a “benzo in a chicken suit.” You awake feeling rested, refreshed, and excited to blow your new paycheck and see your corner office overlooking the parking lot and the decrepit air conditioner on the roof of the nearby Dollar General: The Good Life is yours.

All thanks to BBF, your new BFF.

I am, of course, allowing for some hyperbole here. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I don’t think that there is any guarantee that BBF audios will get you a corner office or help you to invent a Solar-Powered Electric Dog Polisher (although the one I bought on TV has some serious design flaws and somebody really needs to address this, and soon). But there are decades of research into BBF that suggest it actually does catalyze these states for people and can be used to deepen meditation, sharpen focus, boost creativity, and help people sleep. Is this all exaggeration? Here is UCLA neurophysiologist John Liebeskind talking about BBF research:

“It’s difficult to try to responsibly convey some sense of excitement about what’s going on . . . You find yourself sounding like people you don’t respect. You try to be more conservative and not say such wild and intriguing things, but damn! The field is wild and intriguing. It’s hard to avoid talking that way . . . We are at a frontier, and it’s a terribly exciting time to be in this line of work.”⁴

New brain scans are showing us just how powerful these states of mind are, and the incredible potential that resides in all us, if we can but catalyze these states.

Functional MRI and advanced EEG research have been conducted into different forms of meditation with the assistance of the Dalai Lama at the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin.⁵ A lifelong meditator, who studied various forms of contemplation in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, demonstrated some startling results. (See, Star Trek or not, I told you I wasn’t making this stuff up.) Not only did the meditator show lots of slower brainwave activity during certain forms of meditation, there was also a striking increase in a higher vibrational electrical activity above Beta: the newly-christened gamma and hyper-gamma waves, also seen in research at University of Birmingham. Current findings suggests that when there is a lot of gamma activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain, subjects report feeling energetic, joyful, bright, alert, and yes, exceedingly happy. This pattern was specifically linked to the kind of meditation he was doing, a technique to awaken compassion.

I can’t help but wonder if this new kind of state of being that is both bright and alert and also deeply connected spiritually is somehow related to the optimal state of “flow” that star athletes, artists, dancers, and yes, witty therapists, experience when they are completely in the moment.

In addition, in a series of tests, the Buddhist meditator earned the highest recorded scores in his ability to recognize the emotional states of individuals in photographs flashed for one fifth of a second or less. Talk about theta states being able to improve empathy! And amazingly, our monk demonstrated something researchers had never seen before: the almost complete absence of a startle response in his facial muscles while in a meditative state when exposed to the sound of a gunshot at close range. In these tests, not even police marksmen with years of experience with firearms could suppress this startle response.

Wow, when a gunshot can go off next to your head, and you don’t flinch, I guess you really “don’t mind what happens.” Truly, this is the peace that passeth all understanding.

Interestingly, newer iterations of BBF technology, such as Dr. Jeffery Thompson’s Gamma Meditation System, capitalize on this recent research and entrain gamma and hyper-gamma waves. Imagine a mental workout that gets our mind in shape to think happy, compassionate thoughts, with no monthly gym charges, just a one-time CD or download charge. Plus, just think, you won’t freak out so much when the next drive-by shooting happens in the neighborhood.

My experience with BBF has been quite positive. When I first heard of these audio recordings, I was so excited that I told myself I was going to listen every day. Well, that turned out to be three or four times a week in reality. But within a week, I noticed that I could stay more focused on my clients during sessions, my meditations deepened, and I experienced more intuitive flashes. Additionally, I found that my meditations were deeper, even without the headphones. Although I am new to the gamma and hyper-gamma audios, the first time I used them, I experienced a number of head rushes, similar to Kundalini-type experiences that I had had in other settings.

At times when I have had difficulty sleeping, I have found delta sleep audios a godsend, although I don’t always stay asleep with them, they almost always get me to sleep.

Where to start?

A good introduction to this work is a beautiful CD by Dr. Andrew Weil, called Sound Body, Sound Mind. It has an almost hour-long track that starts in Beta, meeting you in regular waking state, gradually taking you down to Alpha and Theta, with thirty minutes in “the deep,” a lovely little sonic tonic, that helps you relax, regroup, and may well boost your immune system. Then it gently returns you to your regularly scheduled program of waking consciousness in Beta. Whenever I feel myself getting sick, I use Sound Body, Sound Mind to head off colds and flus, and it usually does the trick. It’s also helpful when I have grief I need to attend to. Yes, I know that is not the same as a randomized double-blind placebo controlled study that might constitute a bit more proof, but since we are getting so close, I thought you might like to know if it was good for me.

Dr. Jeffrey Thompson’s Brainwave music system offers the listener journeys into alpha, theta, and delta states in a setting of tranquil tones and the sounds of nature. Let’s not forget Hemi-Sync, the company that pioneered the technology. Go to their website and you can peruse BBF CDs and downloads that offer everything from focus and concentration to (theoretically) astral travel. Sorry, but my out-of-body travel is limited to brief excursions catalyzed by listening to political pundits on TV.

But . . .

For more than twenty years, our government pumped millions of dollars into a remote viewing program in which trained soldiers, who had demonstrated potential intuitive skills, were to become so-called “psychic spies.” After some preliminary preparation, the first place they sent trainees was the Monroe Institute, to listen to—you guessed it—Hemi-Sync audios to boost their psychic abilities. Legion of Merit award-winner Joseph McMoneagle, widely regarded as the most accurate of the military’s remote viewers, also worked with Monroe audios using Hemi-Sync to both improve his abilities and also better control his spontaneous out-of-body experiences. After all, Cayce said that everyone “has clairvoyant, mystic, psychic powers” (Edgar Cayce reading 1500-4), but they had to be developed. Why not put the very best training tools in your corner?

Welcome to the future of your mind.