Ken Wilber and John Dupuy Discuss Brainwave Entrainment-Binaural Beat and Trauma (Transcript)

Transcript of a brief exchange between Ken Wilber and John Dupuy on Holosync-enhanced meditation. The actual audio originally aired on Integral Naked.

John:
The next subject is a little more practical and clinical. I’ve been working on this thing I call Integral Recovery working with addicts and alcoholics. One of the causal things that we deal with in addiction is unresolved trauma. About two years ago I started incorporating binaural brain entrainment technology to really just juice it up because Step 11 of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous says, “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God”, but left no instructions on how to do that. So I started using binaural technology. I mean you’re down in these deep states and then Ken Wilber kicks in and then I have maps when all the critters show up. But you’ve mentioned how meditation misses the shadow stuff. While I’m doing my personal practice or dealing with the people I’m working with, this pain from these different issues begins to emerge in the body. On the top side of it while it’s still there I can’t listen to the messages because it’s too deep, it’s too painful, it will kill you, it’s your fault, it’s hopeless, whatever. So I focus the witness and then it comes and it builds and it builds and then it releases and when it’s released – whatever the issue was – whether it was sexual abuse, the war or whatever – it’s gone, it doesn’t come back. And underneath that there’s this spaciousness and emptiness and then you can listen to what comes up. There’s a wisdom, an intuitive knowing then but not on the top side. It’s just a bunch of fictions, stories you’ve spun in your ego. But then it’s experienced bodily and when it’s gone, it’s gone. And you’re free. It doesn’t come back. I find that extraordinary and often think, “I wish Ken was here, I could ask him what’s going on here.” So that’s my question.

Ken:
Could you all hear that OK? It has to do with using tapes like binaural beat technology in this case where the tapes are taking you down into some of these deeper areas.

John:
But it works without it after a while too, you can do it just naturally without the help.

Ken:
And that while you’re down there these tapes through using upper right technology can move you from alpha or beta which tend to dominate waking state into theta which tends to be dream state or also creativity states while you’re awake and then into delta which is deep, formless sleep and also some types of formless meditation. And there’s several other things going on but that’s sort of the basic thing. Somewhere – do you know where you were when felt theta to delta – just someplace down there?

John:
It’s pretty much Holosync, Bill Harris, so it’s pretty delta. It takes you down through theta but then into delta.

Ken:
O.K. It says delta and for a lot of people that’s hard for them to actually get there. Binaural beats aren’t that strong down at delta so it’s often theta, low theta and a little bit of delta and then some people go into it. But it’s somewhere between theta and delta which is certainly where a lot of theorists, including myself, think that at this wave length a lot of shadow material tends to get kind of clogged up. You can gain access to it. Now the question is that sometimes in meditation you miss shadow elements so what’s going on here? Is this really working? And I think yes, it is. But I would give one caveat about it. One point is that you’re not doing this just yourself. So to some extent there is another intentionality that’s driving this process. And that outside intentionality has in a sense the same kind of effect as a therapist’s intentionality driving you into areas that you couldn’t do on your own. So that’s why some shadow stuff comes up using the tapes that doesn’t come up using meditation on its own.

But there’s a second part. You can get at a lot of the monsters of your unconscious like that but not always the actual relationship of you to those monsters. And that’s the trick. For example in a meditation state and a dream state you can get plunged down into and encounter a big ogre monster that’s chasing you and wants to eat you, devour you or rip you open – whatever these things do. Or play Mahjong or whatever your particular type of monster does. That to me is the most hideous thing that could happen so I get this Mahjong thing for hours and hours. It has nothing to do with the fact that my mother played Mahjong so I don’t want to get into that. You can get into some of those monsters. You have a fear reaction to them.

However, if you do therapeutic work to get to authentic emotions, you’re the monster in first person and your authentic emotions under these circumstances are rage, destruction and hate, not fear. So you just have to keep that in mind. Just the fact that you can go down in there into some of these monsters doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re getting through the primary resistance area which is owning it in the correct way. But still going through and experiencing them on even that level can have important transformative changes.

John:
We’ve been using the 3-2-1 thing also. And then there’s this incorporated thing where the feelings just come and go into release. We’re kind of using the cognitive and the corporal.

Ken:
The 3-2-1 thing is such a simple introductory aspect  ‑ but you can go with it to really deepen your shadow work. 3-2-1 is an extraordinary process because it does exactly what is so very hard to do if you’re suffering from some of these shadow issues – and that is it actually reverses the direction of the shadow and it reverses the ownership. That’s what repression does. That’s how people lie to themselves fundamentally. They won’t lie about there being anger down, they’ll lie about who owns it. And every kid does this. You come in and find a mess on the floor. Your mom says, “Who did that?” You say, “Yeah, it’s a mess, but I didn’t do it.” Mom knows better and so does the therapist. That’s what 3-2-1 does. It gets you to not just acknowledge the mess but to acknowledge ownership, authorship and directionality. So that’s why it’s so extraordinary. 3-2-1 is to whole depth psychology what Big Mind is to Zen meditation. In other words it speeds up the process and still gets the essence of it in a remarkably brief amount of time. And of course if you want to go into it into more detail, you can.

Using tapes is recommended. I particularly recommend using things like Holosync tapes if you also do some meditation on your own. Because when you get into a meditative state yourself there’s an extraordinary amount of intentionality that you put into it. This can actually be seen if you look at this on a 16 channel EEG machine for example. There is a very complex rich sea of brainwaves and brain patterns.

Holosync and things like that are by nature somewhat limited. They’re driving you down to just a particular wave length using a particular technology. It’s must harder to reproduce this extremely rich kind of complex patterning that meditation is. So if you’re doing some meditation on your own and want to do some tapes, that’s great. If you’re the type of person that just isn’t just going to do meditation or that kind of practice come hell or high water, then is it better to do Holosync or similar tapes than not do anything – yeah, definitely.

John:
You know with addicts they don’t have a lot of time. Either they get well soon or they die.

Ken:
And Bill Harris is also playing around with it. Gamma waves and gamma states now apparently mark states of compassion. So Bill with Holosync also offers his four levels of gamma meditation. Just be careful. So it sounds like you’ve had some luck with them though.

John:
So far so good. Very good.

Ken:
When you say that the problems resolve themselves more or less indefinitely, how long has the longest indefinitely been?

John:
In my case three years.

Ken:
I take that as good enough. That looks like it’s really getting at the issues.

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