Excellent Article Pertaining to Altered States of Consciousness

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Nostic

I found this website today and it has some of the best info I've ever
read about altered states.

The site is http://www.biocybernaut.com/index.htm

And the article that really sparked my interest was the following:

Tale of Self Discovery Part 1
How Alpha Feedback Works
Part 1
[Published in Megabrain Reports, May, 1994, edited for the web]
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.
The Biocybernaut Institute

The following story is to give the reader a personal experience of how
Alpha feedback works. The physiological processes of Alpha brain waves
are strongly coupled to our experience of conscious awareness. Alpha
waves reflect even very subtle shifts in awareness or consciousness.
This story will help to share with the reader some of the insights
into consciousness which flow from doing Alpha feedback. As you read
it, try to note the development of the perspective of the "Witness"
and to imagine how such a perspective could be useful to someone who
knew in advance what would be happening to him or to her.

In 1968 I had been a subject in Joe Kamiya's Alpha feedback lab on
three prior occasions when our story begins. The three prior sessions
(part of an ongoing study) had been on three days earlier in the week,
and each day had featured about 50 minutes of actual feedback time. A
laboratory technician had affixed the scalp, ear, and ground
electrodes, escorted me into the sound and light reduced chamber, and
monitored the equipment from an adjacent room. When instructions were
given or the end of the session was to be announced, the technician
spoke over an intercom.

But this fourth session was to be different. Having been intrigued in
the formal experimental sessions by the warbling tone said to reflect
his brain's activity, I returned to the laboratory to find that no
experiments were scheduled, so I requested that I be "hooked up for
feedback" and allowed to explore, on my own, with the feedback
signals. The lab technician was agreeable, affixed the electrodes,
escorted me into the experimental chamber, and then left, closing the
door. She then started the electronic equipment, and, unbeknownst to
me, went upstairs and became involved on another project, since I was
not generating data for any of the ongoing studies.

Several hours later, apparently forgetting the trainee in the
experimental chamber, she went out to lunch with the rest of the lab
crew. While she was at lunch, she suddenly realized, 3 1/2 hours
later, that she had not checked on her subject. Everyone left the
restaurant in a rush, and hurried back to the laboratory. Then the
technician and 8 to 12 others came bursting into the feedback chamber
in some alarm and interrupted the last stages of an incredible adventure.

Tale of Self Discovery Part 2
Dr. Hardt's Adventure in the Chamber
Part 2 - continued from part 1
[Published in Megabrain Reports, May, 1994, edited for the web]
James V. Hardt, Ph.D.
The Biocybernaut Institute

To help the reader participate more fully in this adventure, I shall
tell the story in the first person, starting at the beginning of the
session as soon as the feedback tone came on.

As I closed my eyes, I sat straight and perfectly still, and I
relaxed, for I had learned in my first three sessions that this was
helpful in making the feedback tone louder and steadier. If I could
sit quite still for one of the automatically timed 2 minute epochs, I
would be rewarded by seeing a large score when the three-digit
illuminated display lit up as the tone briefly shut off. The scores
were derived from the integration of the amplitude of my Alpha
activity and represented the total Alpha energy I had produced during
the previous 2 minutes. If I had to cough or move or if my attention
wandered from the task, the tone would decrease, and that epoch's
score would be smaller. I was most interested to know what made the
tone stay on and what turned it off, so I listened very closely to the
minute fluctuations and tried to relate them to something:, anything,
... how I breathed, how I sat, what I was thinking.

And there were little successes along the way. When I breathed more
slowly, the tone was a little louder and the score a little higher. If
I relaxed fully into the emptiness of the bottom of each expiration,
that would sometimes help too. If I opened my eyes, even though it was
totally dark, the tone and scores were sharply reduced. So I had some
control. I could probably have produced statistically significant
differences between "enhance " and "suppress " conditions if I had
been asked to, but I still didn't feel as though I really knew how to
enhance Alpha. Pleasant relaxation helped, but there were tantalizing
bursts of very loud sound that I would have liked to have sustained. I
would even have been happy to know how to produce such bursts at will,
- even if I couldn't sustain them. When such a burst would occur. I
would mentally leap at it to analyze it, evaluate it, and thus, I
thought, understand and be able to reproduce it. But alas, it was not
to be.

A year later I was to hear Ram Dass say, "the burning gem was in my
hand, but when I reached for it, - boy, it was gone. " But for now I
was in a rut and didn't understand how to get out of it. The tone
would come on strong, and I would focus my attention on it, and it
would retreat into relative silence. It was almost teasing me. I tried
all sorts of maneuvers. I tried "reaching " for it slowly; it
retreated slowly. I tried to remember what I'd been doing just before
the tone burst began, and I discovered, to my considerable amazement,
gaps in what I had always thought had been a continuous and unbroken
stream of my conscious awareness.

Now I had two challenges instead of one: (1) The first challenge was
that I could not grasp, analyze, or fully control a tone originating
from my own Alpha brain waves, and (2) the second challenge was that I
had discovered gaps GAPS! in my stream of
consciousness, lapses of awareness, which I could not explain or
account for. Moreover, I suddenly noticed, while intensely considering
the implications of this dual (frustrating and disturbing) dilemma,
that there was very little feedback sound in the chamber, and my
scores were quite low. I realized that while my mind had been racing,
my muscles had tightened up, and I was taking fast and shallow breath,
instead of the preferable slow, deep ones.

So I started at the beginning again: I relaxed, I watched my breathing
to make it slow, deep, and regular, and I again noted the tone getting
louder and louder. I tried to puzzle out my problem while remaining
relaxed and slow breathing. When I finally succeeded in separating my
thinking process from an uptight body, so that I could concentrate
without noticeably tensing or shifting my breathing rate and depth,
then I began to notice that thinking itself was what was blocking my
Alpha and reducing the tone. Now I realized that the lapses of
awareness which preceded those interesting, loud Alpha bursts may
actually have been instrumental in evoking or permitting the emergence
of the bursts. So then I tried not focusing on the event of a burst
when it occurred. That was hard.

I was sitting in a dark, soundproof room, and there was little to do
besides listen to the tone. The tone would start one of its bursts,
and I would try to ignore it, but I could only do so for a fraction of
a second before my attention would swing around and focus on the tone.
When it did, the tone would shrink like a balloon being squeezed by my
conscious attention. But that fraction of a second was a wedge for my
understanding. By slightly prolonging each burst, I noticed that my
scores were getting larger, so I persevered. I didn't know it then,
but I was practicing the Witness, distancing myself from the processes
of my consciousness, and there was no mistaking success for failure.
If I failed to keep my attention from focusing on the event of a tone
burst, that burst would be dramatically and immediately squelched.

That kind of almost instantaneous feedback accelerated a most
difficult self-awareness learning process which might have gone on for
years with less success if it had lacked the feedback. As the scores
got slowly larger and the tone remained loud for a longer fraction of
each 2 minute epoch, I began to notice a strange sensation of
lightness. Where my body had pressed against the chair and the floor,
the pressure began to give way to the sensation of just a gentle
touching. When I "noticed " this and focused on it and began to
reflect upon it, I was at once alerted by the tone, which got softer,
And I had another clue: reflective or analytical thinking got in the
way of Alpha enhancement.

That clue helped enormously, because I hadn't fully realized up to
then that by adopting an attitude of "not-noticing, " I was suspending
rational and analytic thinking. I realized that I had, in fact, been
aware of tone bursts even when I didn't focus my attention on them.
The real work was in being aware of, but not focusing on the tone
bursts with the egoic, analytic modes of consciousness. A certain part
of me, that ego center which was concerned with DOING things, with
success or failure, suddenly realized, and I watched myself floating
above the chair, which was in the middle of a little room, which was
filled with the loud Alpha feedback sound. Floating above the chair?
Floating!?? My relaxed detachment evaporated, and I awoke back into
rational and analytical consciousness almost as from a dream. Of
course, as I did so, the tone volume decreased sharply from its loud
intensity, so I knew I had been awake and not drowsy or asleep while
experiencing this "floating ". If I had been asleep or drowsy there
would not have been a loud tone (indicating lots of Alpha) to vanish
as I "awoke " to rational awareness.

"I was floating above the chair, " I marveled to myself. I realized at
once that my mental focusing on what had been happening had terminated
the happening, so as quickly as possible I readopted the detached
attitude and the tone again started to increase. Before long, I was
again looking down on my body from a position near the ceiling of the
room, although how I could see anything in the total darkness I cannot
explain. It wasn't a normal kind of seeing.

I was almost afraid to deal with the fascinating situation because I
had learned that conceptualizing the situation I was in would catch me
and pull me down, and reduce the tone and my scores. So I merely
floated and observed, and tried to fend off the constant temptation to
evaluate, speculate, analyze, reason, congratulate. This last one was
especially troublesome. After a particularly sizable series of
increases in the scores, which left me feeling indescribably high,
light, mellow, clear and pure, I slipped on a fleeting prideful
thought. I permitted a conceptual thought to flash through my mind,
"Gee I'm doing pretty good. " And crash! I was tumbling back into my
normal consciousness. The conceptualization caught me and pulled me
down. While I was struggling to regain the disinterested composure of
the high Alpha state and its loud tone, I noticed the gradual
intrusion of the demand of my body for air. I wasn't breathing. I was
living sufficiently detached from my physical body, that there was not
enough consciousness left to run my respiration processes.

I then remembered seeing, as a child, a man on the Ed Sullivan TV show
who had breathed pure oxygen for several hours before the show, and
then was able to remain submerged under water in a glass tank without
having to breath for almost the entire show, which might have been 45
minutes or more. I longed for such a breathing aid so that I might
dwell more permanently in this high Alpha state and not have to be
concerned with breathing. I did the next best thing. I alternated
between periods of slow deep breathing and periods non-breathing with
enhanced Alpha. For a while, I would steal part of my attention away
from the detached state and use it to regularize my breathing.

As a child I had done extensive long distance under water swimming, so
I knew how to hold my breath. I would restore to my body an ample
supply of oxygen by consciously pumping my lungs slowly and deeply.
Then I would withdraw my attention from my breathing and enter into
the detached state in which I could just float and feel ecstatically
high. I had an image of this process of alternating between breathing
and enhancing Alpha: I saw the world through the eyes of a white bird,
and my pumping of lungs was like the bird's flapping its wings.
Flapping and pumping carried both of us to a great height. Then I
could cease to consciously breathe and the bird would stiffen its
wings and soar outward while wheeling and turning ecstatically and
gradually drifting downward in effortless circles while my body
gradually drifted downward to poorer blood oxygen levels and,
eventually, the necessity to begin to consciously breathe again.

During that drifting downward of the body processes, that which was
really me (for I had ceased actually to identify with my rational ego
self) would be off soaring in feedback enhanced Alpha. I could see
that the essence which was really me, was different from my body, and
was even different from my thoughts, for I had actually ceased to
identify with my rational ego self and with the thoughts in my mind. I
was off soaring in the bliss of feedback enhanced Alpha.

I was able to exist outside of time, which flowed past almost
unrippled by my presence. The only time-like phenomenon was the
alternation between willed breathing periods (which I entered only
reluctantly) and the detached states of pure being I entered so
joyously and eagerly each time as soon as I was oxygenated enough to
cease from breathing. Even the briefest and subtlest conceptual
thought which intruded into my mind during those periods resulted in a
faltering of the feedback tone. With this infallible indicator of
egoic thoughts, I was more and more able to non-think. But non
thinking did not mean non-awareness, contrary to everything my
education and experience had lead me to believe. I discovered thoughts
to be multi-layered constructions. - artifices of a certain egoic
relationship to the world, ...to myself.

A sheep is still a sheep after the wool is shorn. In many ways its
perception may even be enhanced by the removal of the insulating wool.
The warming sun and cooling breezes are probably felt more readily
after shearing. With thinking gone, the wool was removed from over my
eyes, and the new awareness seemed vast. Gradually, I even became able
to be aware that a person was in a feedback situation, and that a lot
of Alpha activity was happening. In an inner secret sort of way, I
even realized that if I were to think about it (which I now knew
better than to do) that person would be revealed as me. This was an
aspect of the multi-layering of thought I had seen earlier. Thoughts
could exist at different levels of egoicity and at different degrees
of attentional focusing. I am now aware that a whole science of
thought could develop around research into such experiential
explorations, but at the time, I knew only that an ego aspect was
lacking in the type of awareness which could exist in harmony with the
Alpha activity.

As this process of quieting the egoic rational processes began to
merge into a condition of ego dissolution, my ego, unprepared to
dissolve, countered with FEAR. Fear of falling is the only fear I can
clearly remember, but there were other vague and nonspecific fears
too,- - all of which reduced my Alpha activity or stopped its increase.

Slowly I learned to deal with these fears the way I dealt with other
thoughts: I fled my thoughts and filled my awareness with the feedback
tone, now an almost constantly increasing presence. The scores, also
constantly increasing, were like mileposts of my ascent. The chair and
the room were left below as I rose ever higher in what appeared to be
the front seat of a roller coaster car. I became aware of an
approaching summit, and inwardly delighted at the expected rush from
swooping down the tracks of the descent. The rate of increase of my
scores slowed and the summit was attained. The scores stood above 550,
- over ten times the minimum I'd seen at about 50 earlier in the day.

I felt poised for a plunge of prolonged ecstasy. My gaze followed the
tracks downward eager to see the succession of dips and hills I
imagined would follow the initial plunge. But I was startled to see
that the tracks, instead of veering upward again near the ground, bore
relentlessly downward, entered, and were swallowed by the blackest
hole I had ever seen. The blackness lapped like a liquid at the tracks
and at the edges of its pool.

As I started downward toward this engulfing, enveloping blackness, I,
my ego, understood through a flash of intuition that if it entered
this place that ego dissolution would occur and it would no long Be In
Control. So my ego told me the Big Lie and filled my mind with the
warning thought that if I entered this place, that I would never
emerge, and I would cease to be. Since I was a Physics major with a
Protestant fundamentalist religious background, I was totally ignorant
of mystical experiences, ego dissolution, transcendence, etc.,...and I
foolishly believed my ego's self-serving warning, ...and I panicked. A
soundless scream of fear and unwillingness filled my mind, ...and of
course my Alpha instantly disappeared, so the feedback tone
disappeared; then the whole scene disappeared, and I tumbled back into
he-who-was-sitting-in-a-chair in Joe Kamiya's feedback laboratory.

At once I felt sheepish embarrassment for over-reacting; then a vague
sense of loss and regret at having missed some kind of opportunity
began to grow. I tried to resume the attitude of Alpha enhancement,
but the doorway I was now seeking remained closed and unapproachable.
[The good news about Alpha training is that you can only get as much
experience as you can handle and integrate. The bad news is that you
can only get as much experience as you can handle and integrate.]

There were other experiences after that, also of considerable
interest, but the physical fatigue and the fear of the abyss conspired
to keep my Alpha levels well below those at which the most profound
experiences had occurred. The fatigue, which I had also felt in the
three earlier sessions about 5 minutes before the technician ended
those sessions caused me to estimate I had been there for about 45
minutes.

I was therefore not at all surprised when the door began to open; but
I was surprised when the technician burst into the room in a sudden
flood of light and a state of some alarm. In the background were about
a dozen people, most of the lab crew, who had all been at lunch
together when my technician remembered, [ "Oh my God! "] that she had
forgotten me in the feedback chamber, and they all rushed back
together in the VW camper bus to "rescue " me.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in telling and retelling the story
of my adventure. For two days afterwards, I walked around feeling
light and buoyant and not at all sure I was touching the ground, which
remained about 2 feet below the soles of my shoes. Four months later,
still moved by the realness of what had happened, and having heard
that similar things can happen in meditation, I started Raja Yoga
lessons to prepare for another encounter with the unmanifest, which my
ignorance and unreadiness had led me to fear and to avoid.

The following is from The Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous 14th
century English mystic

"... persevere in the work ... For, when you begin it, you will
find that there is at the start but a darkness; there is ... a cloud
of unknowing. No matter what you do, this darkness and this cloud is
between you and your God and because of it you can neither see Him
clearly with your reason ... nor can you feel him with you ... love.
Be prepared, therefore, to remain in this darkness as long as must be.
... For if you are ever to feel Him or see Him, it will necessarily be
within this cloud and within this darkness. ... you are to try to
pierce that darkness. ... You are to strike that thick cloud of
unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love: and you are not to
retreat no matter what comes to pass."

For the rest...
http://www.biocybernaut.com/about/discovery/part1.htm#nav1top

jalef

this is an amazing article. big thanks to you for posting it!
The truely wise man knows that he knows nothing!
  - Confuzius