Dr. James Hardt: Halos, Brainwaves, and Protecting the Research

When I came up onto the stage, the man took one look at me and said I had to be both a psychologist and a physicist. I asked how he could possibly know that. His answer was that no other mix of training could have assembled the kind of data I was presenting. We ended up talking for the next three hours.

A halo, in the end, is the thing I had been looking at all along. What I observed was a torus sitting over the head, and I recognized it as a halo. Across very different cultures, that shape has stood for spiritual progress and ethical purity. Think of how Jesus, the apostles, and angels get painted with them. Krishna and his wife appear the same way. The Buddha is shown with one again and again. So this is not something that belongs to Christianity alone. It travels with spiritual growth and moral clarity wherever it shows up, and I can tell you exactly what the accompanying brainwave patterns are. More than that, I know how to train them. Right now I'm building the hardware and the software to make that training possible.

Erik asked whether there was any kind of insurance on me, some person set up to carry this work forward if something were to happen, God forbid. He wanted to be sure that research this far out ahead of the curve wouldn't simply vanish.

I asked him, half joking, whether he was really suggesting that dark forces might want to stop people from having halos.

Not at all, Erik said. Still, he pressed the point: he hoped the work was safeguarded somewhere, held by people I trusted, so that it could keep going no matter what. He brought up something close to common knowledge, the way an oil company will buy up a patent and then sit on it, burying a new technology so it doesn't disrupt what's already in the ground. Could Dr. Hardt give any assurance, he asked, that this was something the rest of us could actually look forward to?

My faith is in the patent process. I recently had a patent allowed by the European Patent Union. Filing costs run all over the place depending on the country. In some places it's only 300 or 400 euros. In others it climbs to 2,000 or more. For purely financial reasons I've had to cap how many countries I file in, even though the patent has been allowed in places ranging from Lithuania and Latvia to Monaco. If people want to send something to our patent fund, they're welcome to, because those limits are real. I believe in patenting this work to protect it, and to keep from being shut out by someone else who might lock up the patent first. So that's where I stand.