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Long before I began to explore the arts of yoga and healing, I received thorough indoctrination in the scientific attitudes of quantitative psychology. Technology-based biofeedback as a focus for clinical practice suited well my rational left-brained perspective. Unbeknownst to me, working behind the scenes, Spirit was cooking up other plans.
Like many seekers whose appetite for spiritual sustenance had been dulled by the bitter-sweet saccharine of rational analysis, I was to receive my knock in the head through exposure to paranormal phenomena. I had always cavalierly relegated such phenomena to the supermarket tabloids, so I needed to hear from big guns with impeccable scientific credentials. In my case, this proved to be the Menninger Foundation.
My study of clinical biofeedback astonished me by revealing that Menninger’s biofeedback labs had, in effect, documented ways to train psychic ability. That was not their original goal. They simply wanted to study whether subjects could enhance their creativity by using electroencephalograph (EEG) biofeedback to produce more theta brain waves. Menninger research found an unexpected by-product of this theta training: many subjects started spontaneously opening up psychically.
This was too much for me. It was overturning my certainty about how the world worked: I needed to know for myself what the possibilities were—whether they might be possible even for a rationalist like myself. Fortuitously, I had an EEG-biofeedback device available to me and a professional practice in its infancy: so I had plenty of equipment and plenty of time to dabble.
Well, it turned out not to be so easy to become psychic—at least not for someone as dense as I. Several weeks of experimentation showed that I could train myself to produce only the slightest increase in theta waves. For me it was quite a struggle. In the present brief narrative, I’ll spare you the details and jump to the important learning I did achieve: my familiarity with EEG-feedback equipment and training (and my grasp of its difficulty) allowed me to appreciate a remarkable biofeedback student I chanced to meet who could make the EEG machine dance—and beyond anything rumored in textbooks.
When I first saw this student cranking up his theta output, I ventured to him, “Maybe you already have some experience with meditation?” He admitted that he did. When the biofeedback meters started going through the roof, I started probing more: “Do you meditate a lot?” He said that, “Well, yes, I have been on a very regular meditation schedule for the last five years...” I thought to myself, “Okay, that’s very good persistence.” But the remainder of the bombshell he was dropping was, “...for about five hours a day.” Whew! now I was all ears. Whatever psychic abilities he had or had not developed [I learned more about them later], his achievements were definitely the result of applying some considerable discipline to a definite meditation practice. I wanted to know more.
I eagerly arranged a visit to his home for a couple instructional evenings. They did not disappoint me. Suffice it to say, these evenings were unlike any university experiences. They gave me a metaphysical kick in the pants. That night, reassuring to my left-brained-scientist side, I was able to return home after such sessions and very nearly duplicate on the EEG machine what my friend did from years of five-hour meditation.
Unfortunately, my ability to generate rarified EEG patterns was temporary and dissipated after few days. Or fortunately: I learned that if I wanted such a permanent ability I was going to have to
• Learn the right meditation methods
• Apply them with enthusiasm
Those of you who have taken my meditation workshop have already heard how I was led through the mazes of meditation schools until I was finally shown a classic yoga approach to meditation that could satisfy both my intellect and my heart. I was a skeptic about whether it would ever work for me. But after a painstaking year of preliminary methods, I finally became eligible for training in Yogananda’s classic Kriya Yoga approach to meditation. As a matter of fact, this spiritual approach to meditation didn’t give me theta waves in five years of five hours per day, but that didn’t matter: it awakened me in more significant ways. I lost curiosity in the whole brain wave/paranormal link that had spurred my search.
But about those brain waves... actually, after a mere three months practice of the Kriya Yoga I happened to muse whether any of the changes I experienced in myself were mirrored in brain wave patterns. To my amazement three months of Kriya meditation enabled me to replicate with ease my friend’s original machine-boggling theta wave production.
© Richard Pinneau, 2003 Feedback appreciated: rp@richardpinneau.com |
www.RichardPinneau.com See more at:
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