Awakening & Integration, with Sanjay Manchanda

[Music] Welcome to the Black Barrel, a podcast with intelligent conversations about Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality. I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Sagaro, a professor of Asian history and health humanities, a Penn State's Armington College outside of Philadelphia. Today I sit down with Sanjay Manchanda, who's an adjunct professor at California Institute of Human Science and also teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sanjay is an awakening facilitator, a practicing psychotherapist, and an inventor and technologist with a PhD in computer science. In this conversation, we talk about the importance of integration after awakening, shadow work, psychedelics, and a helmet that pulses infrared light into the brain to facilitate spiritual experiences. Along the way, we raise the important question of whether we will ever be able to create an enlightenment machine. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about Asian religions of medicines, then subscribe to Black Barrel wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out our members' only benefits on subsac.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show. So welcome to the show. Why don't you start us off just give us a couple of sentences about what your professional position is, what you do, just to introduce yourself a little bit to the audience and we can get into the details in a bit. Okay, yeah, I have a private practice in psychotherapy and I also teach some meditation. I'm a wakeening teacher and I've been doing that for over 30 years before that I was a professor of computer science and then I quit that and had a major awakening and I trained in different modalities and started my private work with people. I also book with technology for meditation and awakening. It's about 20 years ago. I started adding neurofeedback to my practice, which led to using neuro stimulation with low power energy devices, magnetism, electricity, light and that has been developing over time and I'm currently studying a company that uses infrared light, infrared headsets to support meditation and integration. Interesting. And then I also saw that you're an adjunct professor at California Institute of Human Science. Yes, I'm a associate with CIRHS down in San Diego in Enseditas and I'm also currently teaching transformative leadership program at CIRHS, California Institute of Injugal Studies. Good, so lots of different hats, technologies, some teaching and coaching. Yeah, and many different things. Yeah. And I also run an ongoing integration group for the last five, six years. So you meet every week and look at different topics and integration and awakening and it's very experiential. We do some work together. Yeah. We just define for the listeners what awakening and integration are just to catch people up to speed if those aren't terms that they're familiar with. Sure, yeah. Or I guess even if they are familiar with them, how are you using those terms because people can use those terms differently? So the way I think about awakening is primarily as a shift in identity. So awakening is waking up to the fact that you're not the limited identity you thought and felt and believed. You know, my traditional way of saying it is you're not the character in the story of the life you thought you were. There's a lot more to you than that. And you're waking up to letting go of that maybe initially to a sense of the awareness that's in the background, but then you can go much deeper than much broader than that. Yeah. So just because of the sort of multidisciplinary background that you have, I'm curious if you're thinking about awakening primarily neurologically or primarily psychologically or primarily through more traditional frameworks. I have a multi-dimensional approach. My Monday group is called the multi-dimensional integration group. So I don't think of it as one way. Certainly is psychologically, certainly is neurologically and certainly at the belief level and at the feeling level or specifically as well. So I had a major awakening in '91 and right after that I realized I needed therapy which I never considered before. So that's when I actually started doing therapy work. And that's a fairly common experience I think that I've heard a lot of people talk about is they have some kind of major spiritual opening or deepening or awakening and realize how much work there is to do in the psychological cleanup. So that relates somehow to integration, right? Yeah. So the key way that I think about integration which is what I focus on a lot with people is for example, the question is how would a wake and be deeper and broader in your life? And the key question we're looking at is how are you not awake? Instead of focusing on awakening itself which is amazing, powerful and effective, we also spend a lot of time looking at, okay, can you notice how you're not awake? Or what limited sense of self is showing up right now? And then we use understanding of awakening to connect the two. That the access to awakened experience and understanding can meet the place which is not awake. It's like constantly waking ourselves up just like we were, if I was a teacher and I would be talking to a student and waking them up, doing the same inside, it's the inner sense of. So from the psychological point of view, accessing places which are limited identities and acknowledging them and allowing that meeting to happen of the deeper understanding and the limited understanding. So an awakening can happen at all levels of to be. So that's how I think about integration. And so there is a lot of psychological component to it, and I'm a psychotherapist. So, but that's a major focus of my therapy is not just healing which is there, but it's really allowing whatever psychological material to come up and to notice that there's identity that was hidden and let that release into deeper freedom. Yeah. And so in terms of traditional kind of viewpoints or philosophies or practices or understandings, are you aligned with any particular Buddhist Hindu, Christian, etc. approaches or is this more what we might call modernist, eclectic? I don't know what words to use to define the kind of practice that you do. Yeah, my background originally was Buddhist. I started in Buddhist practice. And then I had my major awakening in the non-dual tradition and invite the Vedanta and the Maharishi, Vamanam Maharishi lineage. And so I definitely am along the lines of the modern non-dual teachers, but I'm not at all a non-dual traditional teacher. You'll see I don't have a lot of lectures talking about the nature of self and what awakening is. So I'll be doing that and focusing more on some more integration work, you know, has a much more end to an integration approach. So there's definitely a lot of inclusion of different ideas, including psychology and psychological techniques and. And if a red light, I can't think of any traditional gurus that. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So at this point, it's very eclectic, but still the non-dual tradition and the fundamental understanding of not self informs my work deeply. Cool. Yeah. So I think earlier I said your multi-disciplinary approach, but I think maybe it's more interdisciplinary approach because you're really not compartmentalizing these different approaches, but using them in tandem. Yeah, I've always found it hard to separate these various dimensions. It's such a. Like the way that I do the season for the recordings that we do is I have in mind a little bit of like a trajectory, a journey, an arc, some kind of narrative structure that we're like working our way through, but it also kind of unfolds a little bit spontaneously too depending on the person and what they talk about it. Where exactly in this season I'm going to fit you in. I'm not exactly sure yet. We have lots to talk about you and me and there's a lot that you're interested in so many different things and there's a lot of different directions we could go with this. Well, so tell me what the narrative has been. Yeah, so the current season that we're in the midst of right now is about, you might say like the dark side of spirituality, the kinds of things that people normally are not prepared for or not thinking about when they're getting into spirituality and then these things come up and it could be trauma, it could be psychological stuff, it could be. Yeah, I can definitely speak to that. And I think you could speak to that quite well. But next season, we're going to get into models of awakening, methods of awakening, your technology stuff, your helmet, all that stuff I think would fit quite well there. So what if we had a conversation that sort of bridged the two things and then we keep it on the shelf and pull it out when it's time for sure in the next six months, we'll put it out, but I'm not exactly sure where it'll fit in the conversation. It just kind of depends on what we talk about today. So you have this interest in awakening, this interest in integration and in processing and therapy and so forth. But then also this interest as a technologist in how technology can be optimized. Support the soul process. Support, yeah. I'd love to talk about all of that with you. Where do you think we should start in terms of your own? Given the current topic, we could start where you are. I'm happy to talk about the issue of the surprising things that happen when you. do spiritual or secularism. where I go or energy, you know, when you use any of the techniques, whether you use energy techniques or meditation techniques, so you're getting to therapy or you're psychedelics, there is, I think, not insufficient warning labels or idea about what to do because things will come out. Symptoms will arise when I call symptoms, things that are troublesome to people. And that happens a lot, and that happened a lot in my life. That's how I got into therapy. And that's how I brought into staying in therapy for myself, as well as working with people. Often people come to me because they're having a problem, and that problem was partly precipitated by the spiritual work, doing some strong spiritual work of some kind, and then they don't know what to do with their life in some way, or what happens in their body or their mind, as a consequence of that. So, for example, when I was working with energy devices, I can think of a couple of different things. One is that after I had a major awakening in India, then I went into a deep bout of depression. That's when I realized that I needed therapy. It was dog mode of the soul kind of experience. And I realized I needed to do something about that, and I had already signed up for a workshop with Ani Mendel, who was like a physicist, turned a Jungian psychologist, turned Shalan, and I went to his workshop, and we did this shammadek in a visualization work, I was so right on in connecting with what was going on in my psyche, and working with it, I felt a lot, and that's when I decided to become a therapist. And so, I think that if we stay in a certain system of thinking, or in, for example, in India, in India, wisdom is amazing, you know, the spiritual wisdom is amazing, but it's not psychologically wise. That's not what they focus. It's just all karma and clashes, some scars. And you're just supposed to clear it. You're just supposed to get rid of it or purify it, and you're talking about something different than that. They're more like, stay away from it, even the methods, they stay away from the content. You're supposed to associate from the content almost, right? It's like, it's like. Yeah, exactly. It's a very dissociative start, cultural start. And it fits with the traditional cultural ideas of living a life apart from society if you're going to go to this path. But that's not what we're doing here this time on the planet. And so, my goal, especially since, for me, even I always had serious symptoms when I was growing up, I had anxiety disorder since I was young, I had depression, when I was young, man. Oh, what are my goals? It was to not just be awake, but be very partial. And so, my deepening has been along both those paths, actually. So, for me, deepening into greater freedom and deeper understanding and living it doesn't mean stepping away from the world. It means being more in the world in a clear way, or being in the flow of life itself. So, going back to the thread where I was talking about it. So, yes, so people have all these things that come up and they don't honestly have the tools to deal with it, or even the framework where, you know, the problem that's coming up doesn't fit the model they're in, or it's not, it's something that you have to get over. This is a correct perspective, but it's not seen as an essential part of the path, and they may not have all the tools to deal with it. So, I think this idea of people go to retreats and they get into depressions, or they have this Kundalini openings that then produce all sorts of body symptoms, or they have a lot of fear come up, which is an important part of the path because you're losing identity at some level. So, being able to look at that as an essential part of the process of deepening and also integrating into your life is, I think, key. So, having methods that work with whatever's coming up in a way that helps the person the most is individualizing personalizes important, as well as acknowledging that these things will happen. The medication's just not about getting deep re-relaxed when you get deep re-relaxed, other things can happen, and it's more than that anyway. Yeah, in a way, it's quite similar to, I think there's also a conversation around integration with psychedelic use also, right? Like people can have very powerful consciousness-altering experiences with psychedelics, and then they become destabilized and need to have some kind of therapeutic work in order to integrate that back into their ordinary life. Exactly. I mean, one way to think about the psychedelic trip is that it's like dropping yourself in the third or fourth or fifth day of a meditation retreat, and just take it's like a speed you up, put you there and brings you out quickly, but now you're different. You have to then deal with that. I have found people, for example, taking five MUDMT, only I don't need less than 20 minutes, but it's like, for some people, it's like a bomb that went off in the psyche that keeps reverberating for years. Yeah, and so your work is to help people to digest those experiences and assimilate them into their lives and understand what these experiences are going to mean for them going forward in an adaptive way. Yeah, and often we'll start with what seems to be a symptom or a problem, what's happening in your life right now as a consequence of what happened. How is it showing up in your body? Could be a pain in the body or energy movement that's disturbing or motions or past memories arising and we start with whatever shows up and be able to look at what's being suppressed for what limited beliefs identities are coming up to consciousness and how they fit into our overall understanding of awakening and healing and how we can integrate them. Yeah, so you've mentioned that you had this kind of major awakening experience not to get into all of the details and so forth, but let's give our listeners kind of a sense of the impact or the power of an experience like that that came from meditation or from self-inquiry or some other kind of spiritual technology because I feel like our listeners probably would be familiar enough with the idea that you could take a psychedelic and have this kind of mind-blowing altered state of consciousness. But what kinds of mind-blowing altered states of consciousness are happening through something like meditation or something like self-inquiry from the Advaita tradition? Can it be as powerful as a psychedelic experience? Yeah, of course. Sadly. The question is a leading question because-- Yeah, right, right. I've had plenty of those myself so I know what personally what they're like, but maybe you can give us a little taste. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of people participate in meditation for decades and nothing really happens. It's just they get relaxed and it's kind of like, that's it. And then other people for some reason, we maybe don't do very much meditation at all or we do just a little bit. And suddenly we're like having some kind of very dramatic mystical experiences or spiritual experiences. Yeah, usually by deeper experiences for me have been doing retreats. I've gone on thing day retreats or two week retreats. And for example, doing like, be bussiness, I retreats, where you do a lot of bodies can. And one of the things, what are the initial insights for me was just sitting and having my thanks hurting. This is pretty traditional. I assume meditate on the floor. And then at some point the pain just breaks up into weight. You have an experience of pure energy and freedom and there's a real relief in the being. And that can then globalize to just a letting go of sense of separation, and movement, and doing experience of love and oneness. And that's a very strong experience where you start your meditation. So there's a real sense of suffering or contract itself there. At least I was dealing with it in my life. And then it just all goes away. There's just vibration and openness. So, suddenly had that experience in retreats. And that's one level of awakening. But the deeper level of identity shift that I would say a real identity shift happened with my teacher in Lucknow. And at that point I had done a lot of meditation but I felt stuck. And just doing the techniques wasn't working for me. So, he's the Navarra Mahalali tradition. And I found him. I went, took a year off. He quit my job as a professor. Took a year off from travel around India. And so I heard of him, went to his house at that point. He was teaching at his house. And he always asked people the same question. I said, "Okay, in version of who are you?" And in my case, we had this dialogue. And I was feeling pretty depressed and desperate at that time. It was a lot of negative emotions coming up. And then he looked at me and said, "Okay, I want you to tell me who you are. But are you really willing to do that deeply?" I said, "Sure, of course." And he said, "Without using a single concept, tell me who you are." And he looked at me and he said, "This is this tremendous energy transmission from him." Well, he's saying that. It's not just a "I do a question." And I was really focused on it. Looking for the answer, "Obviously, what can you say without a single concept?" "Absolutely nothing." So the mind stopped. And that was his fundamental teaching anyway, all the time. And the mind completely stopped. And that was, there's a moment, you could say, a cessation of some kind. And immediately, in my sense, a burden disappeared. There was just an opening into lightness of being. And I laughed and he laughed. And that was the beginning of this major identity shift. And finally, enough, the next day, I had all this energy coursing to my body. And I wanted to tell my clothes off the mind in the streets and say, "I'm free." "Free." So I have a hand to him and I told him, "That's how I felt he's in." What's stopping you? This is India. Nobody's going to arrest you. Yeah, you could probably get away with that in California as well. Yeah, exactly, right? There's a bunch of Californians there. They said, "We'll go with you." Oh, that's great. But I want to add that since then, it wasn't that it took away all my suffering permanently. But since then, I always had access to this place that was not in the phenomenology, not in the story, not in whatever was happening. That access was always a bit. So that was the initial shift here. And so when you're talking about integration, then you're talking about. You have this access to this place that's beyond concepts, but then you also have to live with concepts in the world as a human being relating things like your job and your family and your history and so forth. And so it's about integrating those two things together. Yeah, and so more, even more concrete leave for me, especially at that time. I didn't know there was a lot of trauma history that I had that I didn't know about because it was from pre-bud close to birth and pre-bud. So there were three times when I would be really suffering. Now I could access this place and so part of integration for me is bringing them together and then developing techniques to do that more effectively. So that would actually relieve the suffering and kind of wake up the parts of me that was still in trauma and limitation and literally have this awakeness be not just something I access but living through this system. So it's one thing to think about accessing this experience that's here all the time. You know, you could just experience the background of experience that's here all the time. Another thing to just know yourself and live yourself as it. That's just the deeper way of being. Yeah, thank you. So you talked about awakening experiences and they talked about integration and you are experimenting with various types of technology and you've been around in communities or in groups where people are experimenting with all sorts of different technologies for facilitating both awakening and integration or is it more focused on the awakening technology? Our focus was more in the company was more on awakening but my focus has always been more on integration. Part of it because of my own process needed that. So I think it works for both especially if you don't use energy technologies. It really works through the body and that has an actual effect of needing integration, warning integration. For example, I did a lot of almost it like I over did working with frequency technologies because I was experimenting with it and for a while that caused this huge energetic disturbance like a whole Kundalini movement in my system and that was like an unintended side effect. It's one of those negative effects of doing something using spiritual technology in this case and so then I had to really work with integrating that into my B and also these technologies have to be they have to be used in this context of understanding of awakening and deepening and healing is sort of we really doing so the context and setup is already that and I can't really separate very well awakening and integration because I mean sequential certainly you want to awaken but then after a while they come together as you integrate you awaken more and as you awaken more you may need to integrate. A lot of things you're saying are interesting but one thing that popped out to me is we I think are familiar with the concept of set and setting for psychedelic use that you need to have this kind of supportive framework in which to do the experience so that it has the maximum benefit or transformational potential. I think we have a similar viewpoint in spiritual technologies for example in Buddhism and some traditions anyway there's a lot of focus on the view right that you want to have right view you know is a very critical part of being the practice you know in those traditional formats you know jump into meditation without having the whole view laid out and really understanding that so what about with the technology because we'll talk about what the technology actually can do but are you concerned to have this kind of framework. Absolutely and it's the same problem with the even with teaching of meditation in rest and society there's being this whole idea of stress reduction that's the set in setting but there's not a sufficient set in setting and that's why people have troubled you know they can meditate and have some deep shift but there's no set in setting no understanding of and framework to hold that or even either to support them afterwards and for technology becomes even more critical if it's going to be a powerful technology if it does something then the setting is very critical and we did spend budget time thinking about that when we created the company and we continue to do so in our work and I continue to do so in my work. What are you able to provoke in people's brains or in people's minds through the cutting edge technology that we have right now are you able to flip a switch and somebody has the Papaji style realization of what you really are. That would be rare right now. Can you put somebody into a jhana? Can you put somebody into a Kundalini awakening? What's what's what are we what are we talking about? Let me say it's ongoing research but let's say what one of the things that we've found with the infrared technology so far. One of the ways we do that is we pulse infrared light into the brain which firstly has some health benefits and generally has some power because the infrared light acts like food for the mitochondria and the cells. So the infrared light in the mitochondria helps the donation of electrons and creates more ATP the energy molecule in the cell. So literally creates where energy reduces information improves blood flow so it's a very powerful healing technology for the brain but in terms of meditation use what we do is we pulse it and when you pulse it that has its own entrainment as well as physiological effects and the pulsing effects the Iongated channels at the cell membranes and starts to change the functioning of the cell. And what we found is that when you pulse it at a high frequency it has these more expensive effects on the system. So we've experimented with this high frequency pulsing into the brain with experienced meditators. The typical report of an experienced meditator with using this high frequency program is that it's like dropping deep into some of the deepest places that go into life being on day three four, a meditation retreat or being able to go into a deep state that they used to going into in 20 minutes instead of taking days to do that. Or if they're a jhana practitioner being able to go to the deepest jhana that they can already access. So there would be just in the first session that they could do that. So it's not producing a novel kind of experience but it's putting them into like the deepest experience that their brain is already configured to have had. Yeah that's the primary thing and the reason it would produce more novel experiences over time but I'm talking about like day one experience walk. Got it got it. And the reason the way to understand what it could or could not do actually is to think of resonance. It's a resonance device. It's a frequency resonance device. So it's literally if you think of different consciousness states as having some sort of frequency signatures in your system and in the brain but also it also has a body you can have a whole body experience of energy with it. Then it's literally as you tune it to a higher frequency it literally helps you catch that frequency in your system. If the frequency is available it will resonate with it like the tuning fork idea and you can catch it quickly. If it's not really available then your system is out doesn't have that resonant frequency available. So you're not going to catch it. It's going to either do nothing or if it's sort of available it's going to agitate your system a bit to try to take you there. Does that make sense? Yeah you know I don't know enough about science to know if it makes sense from a scientific standpoint but I understand the words that you're saying. Yeah it's very similar to that. A metaphor is pretty good. So what we actually help people to use it in their practice is to go to the highest frequency that you can already go to and then stop to tune it up. And so you can use it to deepen in your practice. So what about people just off the street never done any meditation before they put your helmet on they turn on the volume and turn on the dial and what presumably you don't turn it all the way up right off the mat you start slow. Yeah we do we actually go through a sequence of stepping up the frequency. So what kinds of openings can people have in a in short order with this? Well we're still working with that but it will take people to what's naturally available to them in the first session and then we will encourage them to use it. Some people report nothing because they're just not sensitive enough at this level. It's that very invasive. That's also why it's very safe. So some people will report nothing. A lot of people will report a deeper meditation experience that they have some opening to and some people have natural opening to deep meditation but they don't know it and they'll have a really deep experience. Other people report things like the mind was very quiet you know like a classic initial meditation experience of some sort or the my report oh you know I access this place I went to in this last psychedelic trip by the or if they're more experienced than the my report greed is a deeper state that so that's how to vary but most people will experience something some sort of quieting the mind or I think experience of energy moving in the body. So Jason Winetti at the research on directing ultrasound into the brain which is presumably a different physiological process altogether but I'm curious if you've compared notes as to for red versus ultrasound. Yeah yeah you know we have friends I'm a friend of the lab that he works with here at the University of Arizona. Yeah I mean they're both energy technologies you know low level energy transfer to the brain. Now ultrasound is focused and it can go deeper into the brain than light can and so literally they're using ultrasound to turn off parts of the default mode network like the posterior single cortex and so that can basically shut off the internal dialogue for a while using that method and with the infrared I can help people to do that as well which has a different mechanism. It's not going directly to the PCC to do that. So absolutely you compare notes and we've talked about how combining the two would be even more effective. So we're playing it out with the idea of first doing the light helmet because it's non-base it and then we can go deeper into the brain and even use the idea more like a turn off switch for people and again that's done in the context of it you know it's done in a setting, setting context all of that. Great so all of the I think I've now set you up for the big question. The big question, I think we already know how you're gonna answer it. Why can't we have an enlightenment machine that somebody just steps into the machine, it blasts their brain with whatever, and they come out like fully awakened, completely enlightened, totally integrated, ready to roll. Why can't we do that? Of course, that's the fantasy, right? That's the utopia and technological fantasy. - No way I see that happening. - Right, and how about that? - Yeah, yeah. Walk me through, walk us through why that couldn't work. - You think of the initial awakening as simply realizing, stepping out of a usual system of reality making and getting access to something that's behind it, then that you can do, that machine is possible. It's not quite here now, but that's definitely possible. That's the way I see it. But if you're talking about full enlightenment, that's like living a whole life of a deeper understanding, freedom, and I would say even life flow, or what we call an indecid somebody. That's shifting a whole system completely, and that could kill you. I mean, literally, because everything is interdependent in your system, your psyche, your beliefs, your energy system, your nervous system has to rewire with each opening and awakening, your nervous system rewires. So this is whole process of deepening and integrating that happens over certain amounts of time. Certain people seem to go through it really fast, most people don't. So there's these biological, psychological, emotional limitations that we're dealing with that we would have to blast through. It's all connecting. So, literally, we're talking about a reconfiguration of your biology, of your atoms, of your electronic circuits, a different emotional body, a different energy body, and even a different physical body. Then we can see that there's a wide gap. Yeah, no quick fix here. I think people who are deeply involved in spiritual practice already know this. I think it's the fantasy of people that are beginning getting into spirituality for the first time. That's a completely normal fantasy. Yeah, that we're going to be able to just be free from all of this suffering right away. Just click. You want to be free from suffering and we want to live the best life we can, and of course. And that's also the promise of spirituality or that's also the advertising tagline that a lot of people use. And actually, your story is exactly it. Why do I have to sit here and meditate for 20 years? Can't I just go find a guru and have him look at me in the eye and transmit the energy and suddenly I'm awake, right? Or can I just take this pill or can't I just wear this helmet and flip a switch and suddenly I'm free? Yeah, I guess I might characterize mature spirituality as spirituality that's moved past the fantasy that all my suffering's going to fall away and I'm going to be like, light's going to be shining out of all of my pores and I'm going to be the Buddha to kind of a much more realistic, oh, at the end of the day I'm just a suffering human being and I need to learn to be okay with that rather than transcend that and become some kind of superhuman mythological figure. That's very important, actually. And only that is we know at least for a lot of us on the path. Initially, the suffering can seem to increase in certain periods because I think for a lot of us, things that have been pushed down and suppressed in the psychedies' experiences that are hidden in the psychie will come up for acceptance and understanding. And so shadow work becomes really important, suppressing and experience, where you may or may not have known about it, whether it's tremendous anger or love or joy or some transpersonal experience of the goddess, whatever it might be, there's some positionality, there's some beingness himself that is limited and is resisting, that is craving an aversion or a sense of limitation, that places you, that place you're not awake. There's this duality of something that's resisting something else. So there's an expression of separation and then there's something that's resisting the sense of limitations, a separation and it can release into unity. That's part of integration. The resistance goes away and there's this flow of that experience and an understanding that comes with it, the sense of being lighter and more awake and having more energy or being more in the flow in your life. - Yeah, just a little bit ago, you mentioned how integration is not only transforming psychologically but also energetically and also even physically. I'm wondering if you can give us an example or what would a physical integration or an integration of awakening into the physical body, transformation, bodily transformation, what would that look like? What are some things you've seen? - Okay, well let's talk about chronic pain. So that's a common complaint and sometimes pain increases as response to doing some self-sufferant stroke, psych-bosicle work. - So what are the key things for example, I had to work with in my own body. As I went along the years, I became more aware of pain in the body that was always there. And I had this chronic pain going on. And then as I continued to work with my psyche and my body, I started to realize that there was a lot of psychological material in there, experiences from the past of different kinds and then a major component of clearing that was actually dealing with repressed emotion. For example, many times we'll work with chronic symptoms and chronic pain and we have to work with the emotions of rage and anger in helplessness. And certainly sadness and all, but a lot of it, a lot of spiritual people certainly I did would repress anger. But as I realized, I had no choice but to, if I recognized it as that, I would be experiencing pain and I would acknowledge it as anger and in a way allow it, align with it. And literally, energetically, something that was held in the system, experiences as a block was literally now experienced more than the streaming energy flowing in the system. And over time, acknowledging that allowing it and not identifying with it is just an experience that's happening. So especially when you have this awakening, you have access to being dissociated from your body and your psyche. Yeah, and it's very tempting to just rest there. But typically these are the kinds of things that ask for your attention. Oh, I'm having a chronic disease. I'm having a chronic pain. I noticed, for example, that I studied with a teacher while back I will say the name. It was very useful for me. But all his star students will be wanted to be teachers, had some chronic illness. And I thought that was very significant. We were dealing with things like environmental illness and things that basically had no medical solution. And I could see that it had to do with this kind of repression that I'm talking about. So integrating into the body means being able to allow the flow of energy in the body, being able to allow the flow of repressed emotion, accepting it, or if some stories coming out then learning to not identify, doing any trauma work that's necessary. And then you experience the body is light and free. So that's one level of integration into the body. A lot of spiritual teachers of a very high level have some kind of chronic illnesses or sometimes acute sort of conditions, a lot of autoimmune type stuff, a lot of other sorts of things. And I'm just wondering in your experience, I guess you're confirming that you have noticed that too, that that is something that is a little bit rampant. - Yeah, the way I think of it is, it's just a generality. But sometimes some symptoms you can think of is a gap. One part of you is moved on to a deeper understanding and the other part is trying to catch up, but it's unconscious. So it shows up as a illness. And sometimes doing the work will increase that gap and create more of a symptom. And also that in a more usual Eastern understanding or even in regular psychological understanding, we haven't really understood till recently, try to understand this nature of the psyche in the body. And this was crucial for me right after my awakening and went to this workshop without even doubt. And it here off the book, The Dream Body. This was way back in the 80s, here at the book. And now we're getting even clearer on this sort of the role of trauma in symptoms and chronic illness and autoimmune disease and so on with all the recent understanding as deepened about this. I mean, I had a bunch of body issues. So I found just the right person to start talking about them and starting to understand this connection. Then working with the body and the unconscious becomes really part of the awakening and integration process. What I think of as waking up your whole being, you know, in spiritual teaching that has not been the focus. And I think certainly, consciously, we are in a time of wriggling with that. Yeah, in traditional spirituality, there are forms of spirituality, certain sectarian groupings and so forth that are. Oh, yeah, they actually do this work. Very much focused on that. Like the Tantric Hinduism in yoga and some Taoist traditions as well that are very body-centric. Yeah, that's very much true. It hasn't been so much in our society in the last decades in the Son of Spiritual Renaissance. Yeah, I guess we do have a fascination with yoga, but it's more just purely physical. Yeah, it's not deep enough to really reach that level. Yeah. And then we have a lot of meditation that's very just focused on mental health and the mind. So mental health has been very much mental. Yoga has been just more physical exercise. There you go. The spiritual work has been more dissociated. It's time for them to come together. And those traditions, you just mentioned the Tantric traditions. And of course, a lot of things in Tibetan Buddhism, it has everything. They really walk in a way and integrate it in a way. Yeah, so what haven't we talked about yet that you feel like we should get into a little bit? The only thing that comes to mind was we could possibly talk more about the light technology. I don't know that's relevant. How did you come up with the idea to beam infrared light into the brain? Was that something that you was already researched on that or is this something that you came up with? Or what's the origin of that idea? I would go back to how I started working with the brain in the first place. So I had a client and we were working together. And then he said to me, I found these meditations that are very much in line of what you're doing. And it's called Open Focus by the Sky-Gurlis Femme. You know, it's like a body scan, but there's a lot of focus and spaciousness and infinity. But he's a biofeedback researcher as well, and besides being a Zen practitioner. And he discovered that in his work with sort of alpha-training, training the alpha-waves in the brain, that they would create these kinds of spaciousness in the being. So I looked him up, and I was fascinated by the islands I looked into the field. And then I discovered more about the idea of different EEG bands being related to different states of consciousness. So I realized at that time I was more depressive, and I had a lot of sinking mind happening. And that if you trained what is called the beta band, which is like a. If you think of the brain as a symphony of different waves, then there's these slow waves in the big range and the high notes. And so the beta is some kind of higher notes. That if you could use a machine to look at the volume of your high notes playing in the symphony, and you could increase it, then you would become more present, actually. And you'd have more energy. So this gave me a whole new understanding of the idea of meditation of balancing different factors, like balancing calmness, quiet relaxation, with energy and inquiry and joy. These are more like. think of them as more activated, higher frequency states. And you think of relaxation, calm and concentration is more. Increasing the low frequencies, and there was this correlation. So this gave me a whole new idea, you know, how to teach meditation and then how to support it, and people's habits in meditation. So that's how I started going into it. And then we got into the idea of not only like doing a training for people, but actually feeding them these frequencies, like feeding a parent in a high frequency to stimulate the brain. And a very low energy level, so it was safe. And so that led me to the idea of light. And so people already creating light headsets for health reasons, because the light infrared light itself is healing for the system. Any of the tissues. But I was fascinated with what if we pulsate at different frequencies? Is this going to do something similar? So that's how I got into it. And then I would experiment with different frequencies, a lot of experimentation with, okay, what happens if we try to put a really high note into the system? Or try to train up really high notes. So what happens if we train up low notes? And so with this very playful attitude, we start to notice that we can combine these things and be able to use them as an index into different states of consciousness. So that's where it comes out. That light is particularly good at helping people to get into high frequencies. Some more effective than just doing biofeedback, for example, using current. And so we actually use a combination of low and high frequencies just as you would in a balanced meditation state and where you want the state of relaxation and high energy that writes on it. And so that's the basic principle in the helmet. We use a combination of low and high frequencies. And we use light that's healing for the body. It also activates the energy system. People will often feel the flow and movement in the body that's happening as well as a sense of resonance that these states that are possibly available in your system being resonantly triggered. And that's how I studied frequency healing and that's the fundamental idea of frequency healing that you can use a small amount of energy and they can have a large effect because estimulating something that's already natural in your system. So you can have a large volume effect as a resonance. So these are the main principles. Yeah, I mean, it sounds a little bit like I'm thinking of some spiritual traditions have you do one type of meditation and just do that very deeply and just focus on that. But I think most meditation traditions or most spiritual traditions have sort of like a package of things that you do, some of which are more concentration oriented, some of which might be more visualization oriented, some might be chanting, some of them might be physical exercise or whatever and you have a suite of practices that do different things and you're practicing them together over time. But like you said, to have this kind of multi-level stimulation of the brain or the mind, I don't know. Yeah, this is like energy practices of an in a modern context. For example, you know, I had a person who was very experienced in jada's really adept jada practitioner into the helmet and as we dialed up the frequency every three minutes, he was like, okay, now I'm in the fourth jada and I'm in the fifth jada, we just kept going deep into the jada's corresponding to the frequency. He was fascinating to see that. Are you putting people into brain scans as well to confirm that their brains are. Yeah, we wanted to try to correlate. So that has been less successful. Originally, our idea was to actually just use the brain scan. Like, you know, scan people, awaken people, we did this. We took readings of people, awaken people, try to find out what's common and if we can train that, that turns out to be non-trivial. We did find some factors and some of them were that they had more of high frequency activity in the brain. So that's another reason why I'm doing it this way. But training them into those states was not easy to do. It seems more effective to do what I'm talking about now. And we didn't have this like clear, eagie-pattern. Eagie is a very tricky thing. We didn't have this clear eagie-pattern. No, this is the awakened eagie-pattern. Can't say that. There's some common elements we can point to, but we don't have sufficient canonical signature, not in terms of eagie. So what are you most excited about in terms of cutting edge research in the spirituality tech space? Of course, your infrared light helmet is where your attention is and you're excited about that, of course. But I've just said what else has out there? Right, I'm definitely excited about that. I think mostly I'm interested in the. And technologically it would be the ultrasound and the infrared and then the synthesis of various techniques. The synthesis produces a much more powerful formula. So that includes something psychological, meditation, myzer, inquiry. And do you think these are potentially. I know there's a lot of research going on in a lot of excitement right now about psychedelics. Do you think that the kinds of technologies that you're talking about are more precise, more safe, more reliable than psychedelics, or are we talking, is it really apples and oranges and they're doing totally different things, or how do you see the relationship? Well, they're not totally different. For example, psychedelic research shows that in high frequency activity in the brain consistently. I think it's really consistent, of course, it's less in techs. They're not picking you out as deep as quickly. And so they're safer that way. Certainly light is very safe. And if an ultrasound is still being researched for safety purposes, and I think some level of synthesis is where it's at. So do you foresee a future where traditional spiritual techniques and psychedelics and various kinds of energy technologies and so forth are all sort of on the menu and people can combine them together in ways that are optimized for best for them? As I understand it, when people in each technology and the combinations will increase and start to see how they're addressing different dimensions of the same thing. The missing piece there would be to have a way for an individual person to know which kinds of interventions and technologies are going to work best for them. Like, you know, maybe for me it's this particular meditation coupled with this particular psychedelic and that particular helmet is really, you know, fine-do all that. It's going to be amazing, but it's hard to find the exact. One thing is it's really what are people attracted to naturally. But that's not always. it's not enough, but that's one simple thing and then the other is looking at the makeup and the body and personality type, how they're formulating their idea of awakening with the heart next. And then the part of it is just some trial and error being open to that. That we're going to let them try a few things and see what's working for them. One thing for me that just based on the kinds of stuff that I've been thinking about writing and talking about recently, that this is the idea about more individualized, customized spiritual practice, you know, maybe you could say personalized awakening, right? That's the way to go. Yeah, I'm on board with that. Do you like publish about your findings or your work, kind of nuts and bolts? No, I used to be an academic, right? But I become much more of a hands-on clinician and so I haven't really published. I think it would be useful that I've been really taking that direct. I'm just curious what I might want to point some audience members towards in terms of your body of work. That's tricky because I don't have a strong presence in terms of written material. But do you take clients or is it something that maybe I. Yeah, definitely. We can give people some reference to if they want to work with me. So that's been like a personal predilection as I've avoided publicity and I have never had a website of any kind and it's changing and apparently creating a website for the helmet to websites. One for the health aspect of the helmet, another one called Meditate with light in which we'll use, provide these technologies along with guided meditations and then my own personal website. So there's more desire to serve a wider audience and so I mean the process of that happening. And I have a paper that's going to be published on the research I did on the proto-biomodulation headset and long term meditators which has finished the study of presenting results of the science of consciousness conference in Barcelona in July and we'll help with paper that will come in. So we'll definitely link to all of that in the show notes and so people can connect with you and find out more about your work. And there's a couple of talks in YouTube and there'll be more. Okay, great. Yeah, we'll link to anything that you want to. Yeah, I can give you some links. Great. And another thing we do is a member's area of our substack where we like to give people a freebie of some sort. When it's a scholar usually it's like one of their articles, one or two of their articles or members might enjoy. Now that's something that we can do as well. Definitely we can do that. So I say this was this was a lot of fun. Really happy that you spent some time with us here and really happy to get to know you and shoot some ideas back and forth like this. Yeah that was a lot of fun. And I'm happy you're doing the work you're doing. I find it useful and it's useful for everybody. Thank you. Fantastic. We look forward to more collaborations and conversations in the future and all that we've connected. Well been touched. That's it for today from us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us on one of our partner podcasts, you can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or look us up on Substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierce, El Gero. I'm produced and edited by me, Landley. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time, be happy, be safe and be well.