Hemi-Sync® Journal 2003-1&2 (Winter/Spring)

(Hemi-Sync® Journal, Vol. XXI, Nos. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2003) A SYMPATHY WITH SOUNDS: HEMI-SYNC®, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CATS Ronald Russell, MA Ronald Russell lives in Scotland. He has written fifteen books and currently lectures for Glasgow University. He is codirector, with his wife, Jill, of the Russell Centre, presenting Hemi- Sync® workshops in the United Kingdom, Slovakia, and Cyprus. They are both emeritus directors of the Santa Fe Forum in New Mexico and advisors to the Annwin Institute, Slovakia, as well as members of The Monroe Institute Board of Advisors. Ronald Russell’s recent book, The Vast Enquiring Soul, explores the further reaches of consciousness. This article is based on his presentation at the 2002 Monroe Institute Professional Seminar. He believes that changes in approaches to the understanding of consciousness can illuminate the value of Hemi-Sync and reveal more of its potential. As The Monroe Institute’s membership becomes more global, it is worthwhile to examine ways in which Hemi-Sync can be allied with the international language of music, and with other healing sounds, to the best possible effect. Every other year in the early spring I receive an invitation to “Toward a Science of Consciousness,” a conference held in Tucson, Arizona. The invitation is for representatives from psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, physics, mathematics, medicine, physiology, biochemistry, anthropology, art, and other fields. I can never decide which field fits me and feel a bit like a Christian in ancient Rome asked to play with the lions in the coliseum. This year, however, the summaries of the preconference workshops listed—amid such topics as “Imitation, Language, Intentionality and Intersubjectivity Studied with TMS and fMRI” and “Introduction to Mimetics”—a workshop on “Parapsychology: State of the Art and Implications for Consciousness Studies” by Charles Tart and Marilyn Schlitz. Well, I thought, that’s a breath of fresh air. Does it mean that—at last—there is a dawning recognition in Tucson that consciousness is rather more than a function of the brain? That subjective experience is essential to any understanding of consciousness? There certainly is a shift. After Jill and I first visited The Monroe Institute® (TMI) in 1986, I searched the literature, books, and learned papers, for references to Bob Monroe, Hemi-Sync, TMI, and so on. I found very little. Most of the few papers available were produced by people with TMI connections and published by TMI. Journeys Out of the Body, of course, was very well known, and an article on Monroe’s out-of-body experiences (OBEs) had appeared in the American Journal of Psychology in 1982. I came across J. H. M. Whiteman’s Old and New Evidence on the Meaning of Life, which included a somewhat suspicious account of Monroe’s OBEs. The first serious published assessment of Monroe’s work that I found, however, was in Charles Tart’s Open Mind, Discriminating Mind. This was before the days of the Internet and all I had to use were the massive resources of the Cambridge University Library. There must have been material that I didn’t know about available in the United States. But Monroe certainly did not go out to seek publicity. Now things are different. There are references to Monroe’s work in Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, Christopher Bache’s recent Dark Night, Early Dawn, Susan Blackmore’s Beyond the Body, further books by Charles Tart, the work of Russell Targ and Jane Katra, the recently published reference study Varieties of Anomalous Experience, and many more. There are also Monroe-focused books by Joe McMoneagle, Skip Atwater, Gari Carter, Frank DeMarco, Joe Gallenberger, Rosie McKnight, and Bruce Moen; the groundbreaking work of Suzanne Morris; many research projects, studies, degree theses, and articles in journals and periodicals such as Larry Dossey’s Alternative Therapies, Anaesthesia, The Journal of Scientific Exploration, Network, and The Wall Street Journal. Laurie, Skip and others are frequently invited to speak at conferences and symposia. In Slovakia, the Annwin Institute uses Hemi-Sync as a component of its training programs, and there are flourishing Monroe outposts in Spain, Cyprus, Germany, and other countries. Bob Monroe did not set out to devise a theory of consciousness, but he was fully aware of its prime importance. He was an explorer of consciousness—involuntarily to begin with—and he sought to create maps of the territories he personally explored, referred to as Locales 2 and 3. He was convinced that “focused consciousness contains definitive solutions to the questions of human experience,” and he used neuromapping and biomonitoring to ensure that the Institute operated as far as possible within scientific parameters. But he was aware that measurement, so vital to orthodox science, was not an appropriate method. Measurement applied to thought would be like measuring the smoke instead of the fire. “The best that can be done,” says a TMI leaflet published in 1989, “is to establish physiological corollaries to support the mass of anecdotal information brought forth by the reporting human mind.” At the same time, this leaflet admits, “our research has not been designed to conduct studies in form and protocol that will insure acceptance by orthodox segments of our culture.” Research, of course, there has been. Interestingly, when I looked a few months ago at what was described as the scientific background to the products of a recently formed organization claiming to use binaural beats to effect changes in consciousness, more than half the quoted materials were papers issued by TMI. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Skip Atwater’s recent work has illuminated the response of the brain to the various frequencies embedded in TMI’s exercises—maybe it is now possible to measure the fire instead of the smoke. But what seems especially significant is the indication of a shift in the way that the problem of human consciousness—what it is and how it works—is approached. That 1989 leaflet was entitled “Are Thoughts Really ‘Things’?” Perhaps the next leaflet will be titled “Are Things Really ‘Thoughts’?” There is a growing body of evidence indicating that consciousness can function independently of the brain, that it is not dependent upon time and space, and that it is ultimately indestructible. Evidence for that viewpoint comes from such diverse sources as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, remote healing, telepathy, psychokinesis, and precognition, as well as from the thousands of experiments conducted by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at Princeton University, Dean Radin at the University of Nevada, and Robert Morris at Edinburgh, and it is supported by the conclusions of Amit Goswami, Edgar Mitchell, Peter Russell, and many others. The way in which the physicist Amit Goswami made his shift in understanding is especially noteworthy. He was trying to sort out in conversation with a friend what he saw as inconsistencies in the material for his forthcoming book, The Self-Aware Universe. Goswami sought to express the idea of consciousness that he had gained from his study of quantum theory. His friend interrupted him. “You’re wearing scientific blinkers that keep you from understanding,” he said. “Underneath you have a belief that consciousness can be understood by science, that consciousness emerges in the brain, that it is an epiphenomenon. Comprehend what the mystics are saying. Consciousness is prior and unconditioned. It is all there is. There is nothing but God.” In the published book Goswami points out that we miss the truth because “We are so enamoured of our attempts to predict and control, to understand and manipulate everything rationally. In our efforts we miss the simple thing—the truth that it is all God, which is the mystic’s way of saying that it is all consciousness. Physics explains phenomena, but consciousness is not a phenomenon; instead all else are phenomena in consciousness. I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness. We must develop a science compatible with consciousness, our primary experience.” Experience with Hemi-Sync has shown many of us that this is so. Aristotle and Spinoza came to similar conclusions before us. And now Goswami’s conclusion is supported by more and more research. But the work—the attempt to reach a full understanding—has a long way to go. Only ten years ago physicist Richard Feynmann remarked, “I think I can safely say that no one understands human consciousness.” And seven years ago Stuart Sutherland wrote: “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.” All the same, we try. At the end of his recent study, Understanding Consciousness, Max Velmans quotes a passage by Carl Jung. Jung was traveling in Africa in 1925 and came to the Athi Plains, a game reserve near Nairobi. “To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of nonbeing; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world.” Jung walked away from his companions to savour the feeling of being entirely alone. He saw himself as if he was the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it. He continued: “There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me…. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in doing so we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world and god: there is no ‘new day’ leading to ‘new shores’ but only the dreariness of calculated processes.” Jung recalled an old Pueblo Indian friend of his who thought that the raison d’être of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day—and I know that the boys of the Indian School at Santa Fe run every morning to help the sun to rise. Jung had envied his friend for the fullness of meaning in that belief and had been searching, with little hope, for a myth of his own. “Now I knew what it was,” he continues, “and even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence—without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through the millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of nonbeing down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.” Max Velmans comments that in this vision, life and evolution have a purpose that can only be understood in first-person terms. He would prefer to think of consciousness as the creator of subjective realities rather than objective existence, preferring a less anthropocentric view. He adds: “Whether one prefers to think of realities immensely larger than oneself as ‘God,’ the