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Spiritual Experiences Through 4-Channel Biocybernaut Alpha Training
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.
Across the nation there is a large and growing
interest in spiritual experiences. Witness the popularity of Michael
Murphy's books describing spiritual experiences that occur on the golf
course. While these golfing experiences are rare relative to the
numbers of golfers, Michael Murphy believes that a contributing factor
to these spiritual experiences is the alternation between intense
focus and release of focus inherent in the game of golf. This factor
is also present in Biocybernaut alpha training as an alternation
between two minutes of eyes closed auditory feedback of EEG alpha and
8 seconds of eyes open display of the digital integrated amplitude
scores. Given that alpha feedback enhances brain waves that are known
to be related to meditation and prayer, it is understandable that
spiritual experiences are quite common in Biocybernaut trainings.
Indeed, much of the development of Biocybernaut technology and
protocols has been directed toward increasing the opportunities for
trainees to have spiritual experiences and spiritual growth. This
report describes the spiritual experiences of three people and follows
up with some of the beneficial results that changed their lives.
The first trainee was a pregnant 15 year-old girl
who had left the church, was at odds with her family, and who was
intending to drop out of school and to marry the father of the unborn
child in spite of his ongoing relationships with more than a dozen
other girls. She also was very fearful of dying while traveling by
car. The second trainee was a pregnant mother of 3 children whose
pregnancy was unplanned and strongly unwanted. She referred to the
growing child within her as "the alien" and was resentfully
estranged from this child in her womb. She also had an excessively
protective attachment to her 3-year-old child leading to some neglect
of her 10 and 11-year-old children. The third trainee was a creative
artist, a grandfather, whose Christianity had a driven quality, who
was overburdened by guilt, and who worked excessively, spending little
or no time with his family or grandchildren.
Each of these people had profound spiritual
experiences in the course of their Biocybernaut alpha training, which
will be described in some detail. Each also had life transforming
results from these spiritual experiences. The 15-year-old girl
reconciled with her family and returned to the church. She also
realized that the child's father was not a suitable husband, to her
family's great relief, and she allowed her mother to care for the baby
so she could continue her education. She also transcended her fear of
car travel. The woman with the "alien" within her, an
unwanted pregnancy, had a merging experience with her fetus and her
entire attitude toward the fetus was transformed. She also used her
alpha training to accomplish creative design projects for her work.
After this child's birth a wholesome relationship among her four
children ensued. The creative artist had spiritual experiences, which
put his guilt into a more healthy perspective, and he did profound
forgiveness of himself and others. Following this, his creativity
exploded. One measure of his expanded creativity was given by his
assistant who counted 80 significant pieces of art produced over more
than 10 years of work for his major client. In the two and a half
months following his Biocybernaut training he produced 110 significant
pieces of art for the same client. In addition to this phenomenal
creative output, the man was also finding more time to spend with his
grandchildren.
The ability to produce spiritual experiences and
the attendant beneficial life changes are among the more valuable
attributes of properly applied intensive neurofeedback training.
Introduction
I would like to acknowledge Michael Murphy for his
urgings to publish the spiritual dimensions of my neurofeedback work.
In 1985 Michael Murphy sat me down with George Leonard and the two of
them urged me to write a book on this work. Michael also offered to
pay me $10,000 per month if I would put one of my advanced 64 channel
EEGs at his Esalen Institute. My business partner, at the time,
thought Esalen was a bit too fringy and New Age for the image he
wanted for my work, and he turned down Michael's kind offer and kept
me busy in our startup, so that writing a book was not an option. In
April of 1998 Michael and I reconnected. I attended a talk and book
signing he was giving for Golf in the Kingdom and Kingdom of
Shiva's Irons, books he has written that tell of spiritual
experiences that occur spontaneously on the golf course. As we
visited excitedly after his talk, he again strongly urged me to
publish the spiritual dimensions of my work. He said he would contact
Jeremy Tarcher of Tarcher publishing and urge Jeremy to publish a book
by me on this topic, if I would just write the book.
At that time I was packing up my training center
and completing some new technology developments and preparing to move
to Illinois for the next 7 months. Two months before, in February of
that year [1998] I had trained two company presidents from a large
privately owned set of companies. They had been so excited by their
training that they wanted to send a long list of people through the
training, ... people from their companies, their shareholders, and
their friends. But they calculated it would be $60,000-$70,000 for
airfare and hotels to send all these people to my training center in
California. So they offered to build me a training center in one of
their buildings if I would move the technology to Illinois. I was in
the process of packing up the training center for shipment to Illinois
and was committed to a full schedule of trainings over the next 7
months on a schedule of 7 days On [in training] and 3 days Off.
However, I promised Michael that when I returned to California and set
up my training facility again, that I would
write the books that he was urging me to write.
All of the EEG feedback trainings I did in
University settings, at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and
UCSF in San Francisco, from 1971 to 1991 all had tape-recorded
interviews after each session. This treasure trove is now being
transcribed. The reports in this paper are samples of the spiritual
experiences in alpha EEG training which will be a major component of a
series of books on spiritual awakening through EEG feedback training.
To provide a little context for this work I would
like to quote from William James classic 1902 book The Varieties of
Religious Experience:
"There can be no doubt that as a
matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to
make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your
ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances
of his country, whether it is Buddhist, Christian, [Jewish], or
Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others,
communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by
imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study
this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the
original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass
of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can
only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit,
but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are
"Geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other
geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for
commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have
often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than
other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal
psychical visitations. ... [F]requently they have fallen into trances,
heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities
which are ordinarily classified as pathological. Often, moreover,
these pathological features in their careers have helped to give them
their religious authority and influence."
With neurofeedback ordinary people who are not
isolated by "a religious life, exclusively pursued" can also
have profound spiritual experiences. They can hear voices and see
visions, and the brain activity underlying these transcendent
experiences can be documented and known, and then can be used to train
others. Indeed, these patterns of brain activity can then be trained
in others seeking similar spiritual inspiration and guidance with the
result that these remarkable, life-enhancing and life-transforming
experiences can then be attained by greater numbers of people,
including people who thought they could never dedicate the time and
effort to the more traditional methods of prayer, fasting, chanting,
meditation. And, intriguingly, people who have had these remarkable
experiences discover an interest in prayer and meditation and they
begin to find that they can make time in their busy lives to pray and
to meditate.
Neurofeedback may also have a democratizing
influence on spiritual practice. Instead of simply reading or hearing
stories about the spiritual experiences of others, people can have
their own direct and personal experiences of God and of angels, and of
divine love and forgiveness.
Details of the Experiences
See Pregnant Girl 
See Pregnant Mother
See Artist Grandfather
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