Chapter 5
Expanded Spiritual Awareness
'I want to know God’s thoughts: the rest are details.'
Across the nation, there is a large and growing interest in authentic, individual, unique spiritual experiences. Given that alpha feedback enhances brain waves, which are known to be related to meditation and prayer, it is understandable that profound spiritual experiences are quite common in Biocybernaut training. Indeed, much of the development of Biocybernaut technology and protocols have been directed toward increasing trainees’ opportunities to have spiritual experiences and spiritual growth. In this chapter, I will share with you the spiritual experiences of several people.
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 his country’s conventional observances, 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 search for the original experiences, which were the pattern setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. We can only find these experiences in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit but rather as an acute fever. But such individuals are ’Geniuses’ in the religious line. Like many other geniuses that have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the biography pages, 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.
. . . frequently 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.’
Brain Wave Training Process:
With the Biocybernaut Brain Wave Training Process, 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 be attained by much 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, or meditation. Intriguingly, people who have had these remarkable experiences during brain wave neurofeedback training often discover an interest in prayer and meditation, and they begin to make time in their busy lives to pray and to meditate.
Brain wave neurofeedback may also have a democratizing influence on spiritual practice. Instead of simply reading or hearing stories about others’ spiritual experiences, people can have their own direct and personal experiences of God, and of angels, and divine love and forgiveness and the Peace That Passeth All Understanding. The mystical experience and the alpha feedback experience share several basic dimensions. For example, Dr. Arthur Deikman surveyed the mystical literature and identified five hallmarks of the mystical experience:
- Intense Realness, 2.Unusual Sensations,
- The Experience of Unity or Oneness with all things,
- Trans-Sensate Phenomena, which come to the person from beyond the realm of the five senses, and
- Ineffability, or the difficulty or impossibility of describing the experience in words.
Some or all of these phenomena are reported as a natural part of the profound alpha and theta EEG feedback training experiences in Biocybernaut training.
My work for the last 30+ years has been fueled by the desire to share the profound experiences that I have had with others. In a powerful transformational experience described in detail on the Biocybernaut website www.biocybernaut.com/tale-of-self-discovery/ nav1top, I went into a crude basement closet feedback chamber in Joe Kamiya’s lab at UCSF in San Francisco as a physics major. At the time, I had one year of psychology training; I was a Protestant Fundamentalist [Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod]. Suddenly, I experienced things that cannot be described in words-it was ineffable. This experience did not fit into the framework of everything that I knew and believed. It was transformational and beyond what I knew and what I understood, and what I believed possible. It’s wonderful, it’s blissful, it’s liberating, and it is a heck of a lot of fun.
This research’s path has not been easy; there have been many stumbling blocks and walls and people who hindered and even tried to impede my progress. But I have persisted because of the profound experiences this training brought to me and which I can now bring to other people. Let me give you a brief example.
On New Year’s Day in 1992, I was at my training center with a volunteer technician who hooked me up to try out a new technological marvel- the latest enhancement that added feedback information on my brain’s Hemi-coherence. Said, it allowed me to know when more than one quadrant in my brain was producing the same type of brain wave simultaneously. There were bugs in the software, as usual with a first release, so knowing how it was written and how it was supposed to work, we worked around those bugs enough so that I could test the new Hemi-coherent feedback functions. I then did three 10-minute periods of feedback on the Hemi-coherence. I had an incredibly profound experience, which is described in the Bible as the Peace that Passeth All Understanding. This experience produced another profound alteration of my life.
January of 1992 in San Francisco was stormy, dark, and dreary. A recession was stalking the land. I didn’t have a job; my company, MindCenter Corporation, had just folded; I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life and my life’s mission. It poured every day; everything was bleak and gloomy. Yet there I was, standing in the kitchen looking out at this bleak, gloomy reality and just bursting into laughter about how incredibly wonderful I felt inside.
January of 1992 in San Francisco was stormy, dark, and dreary. A recession was stalking the land. I didn’t have a job; my company, MindCenter Corporation, had just folded; I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life and my life’s mission. It poured every day; everything was bleak and gloomy. Yet there I was, standing in the kitchen looking out at this bleak gloomy reality and just bursting into laughter about how incredibly wonderful I felt inside.
It was an almost complete disconnect between events in the world and my experience. It completely affirmed the view of meditative and spiritual traditions that you feel is related to your inner being and NOT to the outside world’s events.
This was a wonderful affirmation of everything I had read in the spiritual literature.
No matter what spiritual tradition you follow, the Biocybernaut Process will deepen the experience and understanding of your path. The following are several stories I would like to share with you to illustrate the connection between enhanced alpha waves and expanded states of awareness and spirituality.
