Chapter 6
Zen and the Art of Smart Thinking
'Biocybernaut training doubled my understanding of the dimensionality of consciousness. . . '
As the individual stories in the previous chapter illustrate, profound spiritual experiences can occur in the high alpha states achieved with the Biocybernaut Process. These experiences often lead to beneficial personality changes such as decreased anxiety, which is related to the body’s health and restoring youthfulness to the brain.
Several academic studies have been conducted with experienced meditators that show the health and other benefits of meditation practice. Any such benefits of meditation, which stand up to careful scientific scrutiny, can probably be explained by and reproduced with the Biocybernaut Process because of the close similarity of alpha brain wave enhancement training and meditation.
Both the Biocybernaut Training Process and meditation encourage higher cortical activities to control the autonomic nervous system response. Both are founded on understanding how changes in the body are brought about, and both realize that the mind and body are intimately interconnected. People who have trained to mastery either of these processes experiences significant reductions in stress and increased psychological maturity.
Both processes create the understanding and sense that peace, tranquility, and calmness come from within. Both processes lead to another complete level of consciousness, in which awareness is systematically expanded or increased under one’s direct control. There is a continuous stream of awareness that is one-pointed; the mind does not wander or shift around to different topics. However, in this one-pointedness of concentration, we find major differences between meditation and the Biocybernaut Training Process. In meditation, the subject of attention and concentration is not reliably related to one’s mental state or consciousness. The reason is that the mind tends to wander. If a meditator tries to attend to his breath or his thoughts, his mind will surely wander off, repeatedly, and it may be some minutes or more before the would-be meditator catches on to this distraction and brings his attention back on track.
Biocybernaut trainee:
A person in the Biocybernaut training has a huge advantage over the meditator: the feedback signals. By listening to the feedback tones and viewing the scores in a dark and soundproof chamber, the Biocybernaut trainee has those tones and scores as the subject of attention and concentration. They are reliably related to one’s mental state of one’s consciousness. It is tough to ignore the feedback tones, which are made as loud as is comfortable because the soundproof chamber excludes all other potentially distracting sounds. Hence, there is nothing to attend to except those feedback tones. The meditator’s subject of attention and concentration is NOT reliably related to his or her mental state or consciousness. Conversely, the Biocybernaut trainee’s subject of attention and concentration is HIGHLY reliably related to his or her mental state or consciousness. This basic difference favors the Biocybernaut trainee over the meditator. It helps explain why 7 days of the Biocybernaut Alpha One training produce brain wave changes comparable to those seen in advanced Zen meditators with 21-40 years of daily practice. Technology speeds things up!
Some meditation methods instruct by directing the student’s attention to a mantra, a word or phrase repeated endlessly. Alternatively, attention may be directed to the breath, to the sensory impressions, or one’s thoughts without judgment or emotion, without connotation or emotionalizing. As Eckhart Tolle, author of ‘The Power of Now’ explains about meditation,
‘More and more, you realize that you are not your thoughts because they come and go. They’re all conditioned; they’re all just the contents of your mind. Instead of deriving a sense of self from those contents, you realize that you can observe the contents. A deeper sense of self arises then; that is the aware presence, and it feels very spacious and peaceful, no matter what happens in your mind.’
All meditation methods can be useful, but they are difficult for most people to master. Mastery in meditation is usually a prolonged process, requiring long periods of constant mental attention, and the process offers very little internal feedback about how well one is doing. This lack of internal feedback in meditation is especially problematic in the important early stages of learning when most of what the beginner is doing is wrong, and feedback is vitally important.
