Brainwaves and God

Bill Harris

Bill Harris is the President and Director of Centerpointe Research Institute and the creator of Holosync audio technology. For the past thirty-five years, Bill has been intimately involved in the field of personal growth, with a specific interest in the effects of neurotechnologies on human change, evolution, and growth. Since 1989, over 150,000 people have used Holosync’s binaural sound engineering.

 

Bill Harris is the President and Director of Centerpointe Research Institute and the creator of Holosync audio technology. For the past thirty-five years, Bill has been intimately involved in the field of personal growth, with a specific interest in the effects of neurotechnologies on human change, evolution, and growth. Since 1989, over 150,000 people have used Holosync's binaural sound engineering.

Research suggests that there are at least two concepts necessary for an adequate understanding of consciousness: states and stages. Every human being, including infants, experiences the three great natural states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. States can also be non-ordinary, such as in meditation, creative reverie, or peak experiences. It is the development through stages that allows one to transform temporary states into permanent traits.

An integral approach to how brainwave technologies might affect stages of growth is the following: brain-mind machines induce changes in brain states (Upper Right), which are correlated with changes in states of mind or consciousness (Upper Left). Repeated changes in states of consciousness accelerate growth through the stages of consciousness.

As Ken points out, these stages of consciousness are actually structures in consciousness. Because these structures are themselves not part of the subjective content of one's experience, they can be very hard to spot, even though they organize and determine the possibilities of that first-person phenomena.

For example, you can sit on your meditation mat for 20 years, but mindfulness training alone won't allow you to identify whether a thought is moral stage 1, moral stage 2, or moral stage 3. A sophisticated kind of testing and measurement is required to notice and identify these structures. Researchers such as Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, Abe Maslow, Robert Kegan, Clare Graves, and Jane Loevinger (among others) have all devised ways to measure stage growth, though they are each measuring a unique developmental line (such as morals, values, self sense, needs, etc.). No line of development can be reduced to any other, but getting a sense of where an individual is at on even one line can tell us an enormous amount.

As Bill and Ken discuss, trying to know what stage someone is at isn't an attempt to pigeonhole them—it's an attempt to engage them skillfully. Most developmental stages fundamentally disagree with each other, and they each have their own unique language, or way of speaking. Whether you are trying to market a product, teach a skill, or give a dharma discourse, you'll more likely succeed if you can speak the language of the audience you're trying to reach. Rightly applied, the awareness of stages of development is another avenue through which skillful means can flow.

But what stage-growth tests exist that we can apply right now in the real world? How can we make them short, sleek, sexy, and accurate? How can we integrate them into websites, training programs, and coaching work?

This dialogue is at the cutting edge of all of those questions. We hope you enjoy the ride towards the future of conscious transformation....