The golden thread of Hemi-Sync #draft

I'm trying to remember how I came across Hemi-Sync.

I rememeber now - My Stroke of Insight. A wonderful TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor that explores whole brain living. the consciousness of the left hemisphere, where one becomes solid, an individual. Me. Reuben. Or stepping into the right hemisphere and becoming something much bigger than yourself, experience a oneness with all the energy that ever exists. That's pretty crazy stuff and all going on in that noggin of ours.

And Jill concludes saying which side would you choose? And through a remarkable personal journey of having her left hemisphere going offline during a stroke and experiencing the full oneness of the right hemisphere, she concludes that by choosing the deep inner-piece circuitry of our right hemisphere we can all live more compassionate, peaceful and connected lives.

Whole brain living. Check Jill Taylor out - she's incredible.

So I made this little diagram of the left, right and front, back sections of our brains. Monkey bit at the back, funky thinking at the front. And then me side on the left and the oneness side on the right. This is cool, I'm thinking - lets try and find out more.

A google search of "whole brain living" and going down a meeting some rabbits over there and here I stumbled into Hemi-Sync. It must have bleeped the google algorithm through the word SEO in the website's section of "How Hemi-Sync Works" and then following with … the result is a focused, whole brain state known as hemispheric synchronisation...

I'm thinking, “What the quack?!” because I'm transported back to my year 2 class sat with a bunch of strange shapes on the table. This pointy thing called a triangle, a still pointy thing but has a bit more pattern called a square. Wowsars, no points to be found on the circle. And then the motherlord of all shapes - you knew you were cool when you could recognise it - the half-circle called hemi.

With this line of pointy logic, surely hemi sync is only half the brain activated?

Let's do some more digging and it turns out it starts with a declassified file from the CIA. It all started with Robert Monroe becoming obsessed with sleep learning in 1950s, having out-of-body experiences, and producing evidence for specific sound patterns having noticeable effects on the human consciousness. First forward to 1971, a classified report claims the Soviet Union is pouring money into psychokinesis for spy purposes and Monroe in 1975 is working on hemispherical synchronisation (silly me thinking too much, hemi sync the shortened version!). A CIA report comes out in 1983, "Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process" all about funky states of mind expanding the frontiers of human consciousness and the fundamental basis for it uses Hemi Sync.

Page 6 of the 30 document is a nice metaphor by Mellisa Jager for what is happening in hemi-syncness. She uses the metaphor of lamp vs light, how the natural state of mind can be likened to a lamp. Incoherent, scattered, diffused and spreads out over a large area. Whereas, through Hemi-Sync the mind now becomes like a laser beam in its coherence and with amplitude and frequency similar to the surface area of the sun! Phew, I give thanks to the metaphorical god for not bringing metaphors into reality.

So, I thought let's try this out. Flip to the next page - chapter 7 on Frequency Following Response. Ok, let's read on, and found that by playing one beat in the left ear and a different in the right ear the brain when relaxes, in this virtual sleep state, can combine the beats of both hemisphere and hear a binaural beat.

What the flip! There's a big elephant in the room here and that is hurdling towards reality at a frightening speed and trumpeting that this solution is not going to work. Hearing sounds and deafness doesn't quite go hand in hand.

But.. reddit came to the rescue. A deep thank you to breinbanaan on writing about Hemi-sync techniques without binaural beats. They shared a technique of focusing on both the ears at the same time. And imagining a golden thread connecting the ears and here is where the magic happens. When you focus on two objects at the same time your focus is usually gravitating towards the mid point.

Before trying this technique, and when I don't have my cochlear implants on, I hear tinnitus pretty much all the time. But it changes pitch, tempo, volume and I think it might be the awareness of what's going on in the brain in relation to the body. For instance, the sound changes depending on my breathing and if I'm breathing rapidly the volume also gets super loud. Breathing in, sympathetic nervous system, and breathing out, parasympathetic. One calms whilst the other stresses and I've noticed that there's a slight lag between the breathing and what you hear. But the sound increases on the in breath and decreases when breathing out. Another thing that effects the ringing, and causes a loud and quick ringing sensation in a located part of the brain is touch and pain.

I'm not entirely sure what's this is all about but it seems like deafness gives one a greater inner eye of what's happening with the brain and the body by listening to this sound. I'll probably write some more about this another time.

And so, I laid in bed with my eyes closed and imagining this golden thread between the ears. Doing some meditative breathing too and brining the focus of the two hemispheres into its centre point. At first, I'd notice one hemisphere getting quitter and then the other louder or vice versa. And I think this was where my focus wasn't in the midpoint of this golden thread but slowly the two hemispheres did the hemi-sync thing and it blew my mind away.

Total silence. Feeling of being beyond. No perception of time, just being.

That moment of total silence and timeless being felt like unlocking something extraordinary within myself. It's made me wonder—how might we all tune into that golden thread in our own ways?