Technologies of the Mind

Three technologies for mindfulness and personal growth have served me well over the years:

  • Holosync and the 9 Principles of Conscious Living
  • The Sedona method: Releasing
  • Dream Building and Brave Thinking

What are They?

Holosync is a “brain wave entrainment” technology. By listening to the Holosync soundtrack, people can effortlessly fall into a consciousness-enhancing meditative state in which they experience higher self-awareness. Bill Harris, the inventor of Holosync, also teaches Nine Principles of Conscious Living. Of the nine, “witnessing” (aka being self-aware) and “let whatever happens be ok” are core. By using Holosync and following Harris’s principles, one can gradually feel better and learn to choose the thoughts and beliefs most resourceful for achieving one’s goals in life.

The Sedona Method (and the book) teach us to release attachment or resistance to feelings, the need to change things, or our need for security, approval, separation, and control. This relates to the Buddhist idea that all suffering comes from resistance. To the Eastern philosophers, even becoming attached to something good can cause suffering. One can use Sedona to help in letting whatever happens be ok.

Dream Building and Brave Thinking is a set of intellectual and spiritual practices taught by Mary Morrissey’s Life Mastery Institute. It helps one manifest the life one would love. We are taught to apply the Law of Attraction (or visualization) in blueprinting our dreams, overcome limiting beliefs or paradigms, and build dreams through action.

Mindfulness

The three technologies and associated practices all revolve around mindfulness, or awareness. With awareness comes the possibility of taking greater conscious control of our choices in life, down to the very thoughts we think. And in this way, I find the three technologies complementary.

The kind of awareness you get from Holosync, or other meditation disciplines, can be empowering in itself. Bill Harris believes that once we can actually watch how a belief or behavior is playing out in the mind to manifest unwanted results, it will just fall away.

The Sedona method gives one a way to move to deeper levels of awareness – not by digging up the past as in psychoanalysis, but by peeling the mental onion to expose core feelings of lacking security, approval, separation, or control that may underlie surface feelings, like excessive frustration over some petty incident.

In Dream Building, Mary Morrissey advises us to “notice what we’re noticing” and to “notice our longing and discontent.” Therein we can discover attributes of the life we would love. We also become aware when a thought or feeling is expansive (taking us toward what we want) or contractive (discouraging us from taking action, or dreaming bigger).

Putting Them Together

Could there be a contradiction between active dream building and achieving a state of enlightenment wherein we’ve released any sense of resistance or attachment? Bill Harris calls this the double bind: Life deals unwanted circumstances and changes we try to overcome in order to feel better, but these efforts in themselves could create suffering. Harris suggests: “Play Hamlet, don’t be Hamlet.”

In the Sedona method, it seems everything is to be released. The Sedona syllogism goes: “Can you welcome this feeling? Can you release it? When?” No matter how bad the feeling, we can say we learned from it and release it. No matter how good the feeling, we could release it now and still be able to get it back later.

Morrissey argues much the same as Harris. Dream Building requires a high level of participation. But we should not be “Type A” about it. Don’t be overly attached to specific ways and means. Instead, hold dreams and goals in an open hand: “In a universe of infinite possibility, there are infinite ways to fulfill a dream and it can be easy. Let it be this or something better still.”

Bottom Line

I’ve just scratched the surface in this post. Soon, I hope to go deeper into each technology of the mind and the many interesting topics raised. In the meantime, you can use the links under “What are They?” to learn about the technologies, to try them, or to buy them.

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