* Experiences in Brain Neurofeedback
* Ego/Higher Self/Personality Self
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My Experiences at The Biocybernaut Institute
This writing is only about my experience - no one else's. Each person will have his or her own very personal experience. The challenge for each of us in sharing certain areas or places from our past is we become aware of our own vulnerability in the sharing of our personal life events. So we can see we are at a paradox before we begin! Dr. Jim Hardt and his Trainers at The Institute make this as gentle as each of us can allow. I attended the Alpha Neurofeedback Training at the Institute in May, 2007.
I was there to learn how to raise my alpha state in my own brain and to see and hear the sounds as my mind worked to allow new alpha waves to become a part of my brain. It was truly exciting and a great adventure into myself. I soon realized that my past was the only thing that could affect my new adventure. Dr. Hardt explained that all of us have issues in our past that we have not fully released or resolved. As all the trainees became aware of these frozen time bubbles of emotions, we were asked to enter into a process of forgiveness.
The trouble for me was: where was I supposed to look? After 20 years of working on my issues, I was not exactly sure where any frozen emotions were held. There were others in the class; two were younger and another individual who was extremely evolved, now working on his fifth level of training. Listening to him very carefully, he was able to express emotion almost as poetry to change the sound of his dance. With those present in the training, it was easy to see the many issues surrounding parents, work, friends, lovers and how much resistance this would be for any of us. These are after all, some of the same issues that prevent us from connecting to our Higher Self, which is where our creative self lives. It does not matter who we are, what position we may have in the financial world, how great our spiritual growth has been; all of us in the past have been many people with many unresolved issues. The reason we would have unresolved issues, relates to our inability to gain resolution with the other person. When I was finally able to locate an event or a circumstance and forgive those present and myself for any part that I had played, my alpha brain wave scores went up: louder sounds, brighter colors, all very positive stimulation to an unpleasant memory and feeling.
Neurofeedback training is about taking a journey into the self. I call that a challenging experience. Looking at it objectively - there was at best, a lot of resistance. I had no idea what I was stepping into; the doing is not an easy thing. The theme of forgiveness was throughout - the battle of ego vs. forgiveness is a shared battle. After all, our personality/self wants to continue to hold onto everything it knows, everything it thinks it knows, everything it has worked towards, everything it believes, everything it feels - to the last stand, without surrender and without withdrawal. At The Institute, the personality/self is called the EGO. Not an easy word to deal with and definitely not anything any of us would want to admit we even have.Yet, if the truth were to be told - ego/personality/self is the necessary basis of our very life. This is the life force that makes us put one step in front of another and keep walking. Anger, rage, frustration, control are all emotions held by the ego. Some of you have read the article I wrote awhile back on letting go of rage. The Buddhists say that rage is the last thing one needs to release in order to gain enlightenment. It is within the control of the self that rage exists. Surrender and release of rage is to release everything that defines us, release the need to control anything. Buddhists believe that they must release rage in order for the spiritual or higher self to shine through. Yet, it is what we have come to believe is our spiritual self that forms and is part of yet another ego - this is the One ego of all, of everyone. If we are all indeed One, then we each share the same ego. It is in Oneness that the Self exists and it is releasing that ego that I believe the Buddhist monks speak about.
So there was a resistance to think of my personality/self as my ego. I have to admit I also had confusion with any suggestion of ego vs Higher Self - that every idea or opinion was as a result of ego alone. We surely have all been in the presence of someone who identified their ego as their Higher Self - so now they become a spiritual ego using something outside of themselves to justify their own state of spirituality. 'I can do this because so and so (my guides, my angels, etc.) told me so...' OR 'I am special because I connect with this most spiritual being'. So who/what is talking - the ego or the Higher Self? My question became: Why would our Higher Self need to experience any of that? This inquiry became a whole process that I had to explore. I asked myself the question about all my past experiences - was everything my own ego? Was everything I have experienced and now hold as my belief only my ego talking? In researching some of the psychological definitions for self, ego, personality, I found an interesting perspective. The words and definitions are shown at the bottom of this newsletter.
About the third day of my alpha training, I experienced what can only be characterized as the most powerful event of my life. It was its own consciousness and to use words only limit my experience. I was in the chamber, listening to the harmony of sounds as my brain waves played beautiful music and all of a sudden, there was an overwhelming love for the sounds. This felt like the deepest love and became extremely emotional. Tears of joy streamed down my face. Suddenly this energetic, powerful force rose upwards in my spine in three separate waves of energy. Earlier in the morning, I had worked on opening my heart and merging it with my soul. I also centered in my pineal gland. The first wave came up, then the second and when the third wave came, it was with uncontrollable force, filling every cell of my body. Seventy trillion cells illuminated at the same time; something that I still find hard to describe. There was no longer any desire to occupy a space where there was any type of structure, either physically or mentally. This was a complete transcendence of my consciousness. Was this what a true kundalini experience meant? There was no sexual sensation, rather a full body illumination. There are many ways to interpret this. I needed time to understand the emotions that were coming to the surface. This was a perfect example of one process not completing itself before another process comes in; so the processes tumble onto each other and time is needed to separate the different experiences themselves which, for me, could take hours or days to put together. This experience is timeless.
During the training there were past events that I found needed review. One was the emotion of anger that I have felt with religion and spiritual teachers. This emotional state was very charged for me. While I have always accepted that different people require different ways in which to learn or experience, it has been difficult for me to continue being objective. Over the years, there have literally been millions of individuals who were hurt by the methods or philosophies of various teachers or religions. People have been told there was something wrong with them, without being given any tools to help themselves. That has made me angry. Eventually, some of these people have found their way to me and to others in the hopes of being repaired. It appears that only a chosen number find their way out of the maze of societal thinking.
As shared in other newsletters, I feel my own healing work has gotten more challenging to find an ease of acceptance by the general masses, for it is perceived as different, not comfortable for some, and not a quick-fix in this modern world of fast food. Self-empowerment is also not easy to accept as it requires one to do his or her own work, not going to a guru or teacher for a magical enlightenment. Total personal responsibility does not leave anyone else to blame other than ourself. That is not a popular teaching! So you see, I was looking at letting go of everything, including my work, and that had made me angry. I also felt anger for the way people treated other people, how the world continued to function with the weakest people getting hurt the most.
I thought about my anger and also my own path of healing for a long time. Lucid Dreaming has always been the space where I can get answers easily. So for about 5 hours in my hotel room the next morning, I continued to ask my question. The answer was: There is something hidden behind a major event, such as a program or a thought.
My autobiography tells the story about my kindergarten friend who, one day after playing in the water with me, had drowned. When I was about 10 years old, another friend and I were playing in the creek. He then got polio and died. In viewing these situations from my past, I had learned and realized a program that said for me, ‘playing was very dangerous’. My issue then became finding people who would play fairly and not leave. That day in the alpha training chamber at The Institute, another program came to the surface. My friend who died of polio was the same friend that used to help me in the garage with my dad's work project. We would earn money, putting clamps together for bed frames. In re-visiting the circumstance where he died, the old issue of 'playing was dangerous' came up and then the second issue became clear, that ‘money was dangerous’ too. This was a huge break through, for I had never before put those two realizations together with the same event. I was glad to be able to release those programs and emotional charges in the training chamber.
There was yet another issue that came up. Even now I have a challenge in sharing this for I do not want anyone to feel that I am in anyway suggesting that the present terror in the world is insignificant to my past events. Back in 1969, I was a college student in Oakland, California and a member of the National Guard. Many of my friends were students at the University of California-Berkeley. One day, my National Guard status was activated and I was part of a team sent to Peoples Park at the University in Berkeley, to quell the rioting taking place on campus. There were thousands of people demonstrating for what they believed to be right. My Company was sent in to break it up. When we arrived, the bottles of acid that were being thrown at us, breaking on our helmets were deadly. Immediately, my friends were dangerous and had become my enemies. We marched down the street and broke up into one long line; bayonets fixed. We were to move the crowd back. We had no previous riot training. There were people putting flowers into the barrels of our unloaded guns; however, our bayonets were real. One soldier/army friend away from me, a person tried to run around him and ran directly into his bayonet, getting stabbed in the shoulder. His scream contributed to the chaos unfolding. The Lieutenants, who also had no previous riot training, in panic began throwing plastic cylinders of gas which exploded in the air. We immediately had to put on our gas masks and the crowd broke into a terrified frenzy.
I had re-visited this event hundreds of times and yet, had not gone beyond this particular point to realize how surreal the next part of the event was for me. Literally the panic, chaos and fearful emotions had frozen and locked this event into my psyche. My Higher Self had said to go behind the event or beyond what I had previously witnessed. So I looked further and allowed the event to continue to play out in my mind: I had on a gas mask and everything was in a white haze; we continued to march forward in our line. After we got to the end of the building, I looked in horror at the 100-150 people lying crippled, having literally been trampled by the crowd in its panic. Emergency medical students began helping the injured. I remember the red cross they wore. Viewing the entirety of this event, suddenly everything in my healing path made sense, all my choices fell into alignment. It was at that moment in time when I set an intention to always help the person in need.
At 23 years of age, the purpose of Heart and Soul Healing was set into motion, which would become reality some 15-18 years later. At least I had found another piece of the energy behind my passion puzzle. You could say that my work helps people injured while in battle, directly from the front-line of life experience. We do our best with all the information at hand to address their immediate needs, patch them up, stop the bleeding, take care of their wounds and help them get safely to their next place; whether that be back into the battle, to the hospital or at the most, a place of choice. The work that is done at The Biocybernaut Institute is the hospital where one has the benefit of the surgeon with his full team of specialists and all the proper machines.
Within
five hours of leaving
the Institute, I had my first
test; a check up with
my doctor for
my blood pressure.
We had to quickly walk up two
flights of stairs and
when the waiting nurse
first took my blood
pressure, it was high: 154/94. My
physician
and I enjoy an open
exchange doctor/patient relationship
over these years. In
the exam room, she took my
blood pressure again:
138/84, still too high. We had
just discussed my alpha
training. She pushed
back her chair and told
me to go into the deepest
meditative state and
lower my blood pressure. Within
about one or two minutes,
she re-took my pressures
again
and they had lowered
to 122/78. I really knew at
that moment
I had learned a lot.
Here are some helpful
hints for those of
you who are
drawn to
The
Biocybernaut Institute trainings.
After just a couple
of long days
(anywhere from 12-14
hours of working),
I realized how
important it was that
I had prepared my hotel
room with available
food and
good water and was
removed from
outside or stressful
day-to-day experiences
by being alone.
The only thing
for myself is that
I had prepared by taking
a full
day of rest
before the training
began.
I recommend that
you allow at least
2 - 4 days of complete
rest for the body
and mind to be prepared
for this type of training.
Three
words are
also
helpful:
a deep, meditative
state.
That is what I learned
was the best focus
for inside
the training chamber.
It is the experience
of
a lifetime.
What The Biocybernaut Institute trains the brain to recognize is releasing the fear from the personality/self in order to give power back to the Higher Self; to get rid of anger, release hidden agendas, and allow a washing of the brain to even surrender the spiritual ego. The feelings of peace, joy, love are the vibration from the One Higher Self. Any emotion or feeling other than true harmony is from personality/self/ego. The experience is nothing that can be conveyed in mere words. It truly is an awakening on many levels of consciousness. After all, isn't that what our journey is all about?
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Consciousness: The Ego or personality with which we normally identify. The quality of being aware of what is happening around us and responding in kind.Psyche: Term describes the conscious and unconscious parts of the person.
Ego: The conscious
part of the psyche
with which
we
normally identify;
the personality.
Persona: The face
or public mask, we
present
to the
world. The
lens through
which we project
our personality and
carry
on our daily
activities. How we
wish to be perceived
and how we are perceived.
Personality: The Ego. It is the conscious core of perceptions, attitudes, habits, fears, likes and dislikes that we have acquired from birth, the basis of our persona.
Self: The essence of a person. The essential being and developing aspects. The central point within the psyche to which every part is related.
Shadow: Resides in the personal Unconscious, wherein are contained the complexes resulting from repressed desires and emotions. According to Carl Jung, the Shadow is the inferior part of ourselves, the part that contains all of those things we want to do, but do not allow ourselves liberty to do. It is the basis for the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde complex. It represents a primitive part of our nature, the uncivilized and uncontrolled part, the guilt ridden part that we are ashamed of, and all that we do not want to admit about ourselves. The Shadow surfaces in situations where we feel possessed by an intense emotion, an uncontrollable rage, or commit an act for which later we are terribly ashamed. Anytime you have said "I don't know what came over me"; "I was not myself" you have witnessed the Shadow side of yourself.
© Copyright: Clear Light Arts, ADL