Dr. James Hardt (Interview Archive)
Erik: We dropped the connection for a moment, but we're back now. Could you pick up where you left off?
James: Of course. I was returning to the psychophysiological principle we teach. Any experience you have as a living person happens only when the matching pattern of brain waves is present underneath it. Take someone who has never seen angels. If that person develops the right brain wave pattern, by whatever route, a drug, fasting, tantra, or brain wave training, it won't matter what they believe. They will see angels or beings on the astral plane. That is what I mean by spiritual science. The transpersonal researchers and I are after the same thing, evoking transpersonal experience. We simply reach it by different roads.
James: At one stage Stanislav Grof was using LSD as part of his psychotherapy work. Years back, maybe ten years ago, when people's LSD experiences were still fairly recent in the culture, and I don't see the same kind of movement around it today, people would step out of the chamber and say that was better than my best acid trip. They had produced the brain waves of a transcendent experience, so that was the experience they were living. The appeal is that no drug is involved. No side effects. It's completely legal, and you do it yourself.
Erik: And there's the added benefit that the training teaches a person how to summon these states by regulating their own physiology.
James: Right. You learn to regulate your physiology.
Erik: Thinking about the psychology of the future, and especially where technology and human beings meet, it strikes me that you have assembled what is probably the most advanced neurofeedback and biofeedback system I know of anywhere. It's a privilege to have you here at the conference sharing this with the world. Before we close the call, is there anything else you want to touch on?
James: There is one story. This was before I had the chance to run the study with the Green Berets. Two officers from Army Intelligence came to me. They told me they had surveyed brain wave feedback work around the world and concluded mine was the most advanced, and they wanted to train. They asked what I recommended. I told them to start with Alpha One, then move to Alpha One shared. In shared feedback, two or more people enter the same chamber at once. They sit in each other's fields, and each hears not only their own auditory feedback but the other person's as well. Each also watches their own numerical scores, which measure the energy at different sites on the head, and they see those same numbers for the other person.