Dr. James Hardt (Interview Archive)
My original aim was simple enough: take as many people as I could into that beautiful, exquisite, elevated state of consciousness I had personally experienced. The reality humbled me fast. Only about one person in twenty turned out to be capable of reaching something close to what I had reached. So I settled in for the long haul, fifteen years at the University of California San Francisco, refining the technology, sharpening my training methods, getting better as a coach. By the end of that stretch I had roughly doubled the rate, to about one in ten who would go through a deep spiritual experience.
The pattern underneath those numbers was what kept pulling at me. People kept running into a glass ceiling in their own growth, and the obstruction, again and again, was unhealed emotional trauma. That realization sent me down what amounted to a twenty-year detour. I shifted the whole purpose of the training technology toward surfacing those traumas from the unconscious and then resolving them.
The method we rely on now is a forgiveness protocol, fourteen steps, worked out empirically. It fits closely with the letting-go framework that Dr. David Hawkins, a psychiatrist, laid out in his book "Letting Go." I have actually been going back through passages of his book, and wherever he writes "letting go," I have been penciling in "forgiveness and letting go." My reason is something my research kept confirming. A number of spiritual traditions, yoga among them, teach nonattachment. But if you have not forgiven, you cannot genuinely let go. Meditation can numb the feeling. It does not release it.
Zen is a case in point, since it carries no concept of forgiveness at all. I have spent time working with Zen masters. When an issue surfaces for them, they do not try to heal it through forgiveness. Picture their total awareness, with the issue taking up some portion of it. What they do is widen their awareness outward, so that the slice occupied by the trauma or the distraction shrinks as a proportion of the whole. Removing it entirely never enters the picture. At Biocybernaut we know removal is possible and practical, through this forgiveness work and the letting go that comes after it.
The practical side of that twenty-year detour was building computerized mood scales. People take these several times a day while they are wired up for EEG, interacting with the computer and responding to lists of emotional words. The scales themselves are commercial instruments built by academic psychologists, each with its own scoring algorithm. Our contribution is in how we analyze the way a person takes them, which lets us catch denials. Someone might deny feeling angry and enter a zero on "angry." The computer can push back on that answer, stating its doubt in sigmas: one sigma meaning a 68 percent chance the answer is wrong, two sigmas a 95 percent chance, three sigmas a 99.7 percent chance, and upward from there.