The Mind Mirror: Watch Your Mind Awaken During Meditation

Excerpted from an interview of John Dupuy of iAwake Technologies by Judith Pennington of the Institute for the Awakened Mind (IAM), an international consortium of certified awakened mind trainers using EEG-monitored meditation to expand human consciousness. As most of you know, iAwake produces innovative sound-based tools that facilitate immersion in deep meditation, as well as states of creativity, focus, and healing. The interview took place just after John used a Mind Mirror while meditating with iAwake’s Deep Delta brainwave entrainment track.

Judith:  Welcome everyone! Today we have a special guest from iAwake and we are going to talk about how beautifully the iAwake programs affect our state of consciousness and our brain waves. As you know, the Mind Mirror allows you to see what’s going on with your brain waves and with your mind. I, personally, am eager to learn more how we can help ourselves evolve our consciousness, help ourselves go deeper, and possibly develop gamma waves.

I wanted to start out by saying how much we Mind Mirror people have in common with you at iAwake Technologies. Max Cade (inventor of the Mind Mirror, British biophysicist, Zen master, and pioneer of awakened mind training), was very much interested in brainwave entrainment from the start. Then Anna Wise followed up Max’s work in terms of brainwave entrainment with binaural beats, which she embedded in the meditation music that we listen to as part of our audio rewards for the self-training program and also in the Awakened Mind music. At one time, Anna scripted a manuscript of frequencies she said was 20 feet long for Andrew Weil to follow as he instructed the London Symphony Orchestra to take people down into a very deep state, purely with the sound of music and different instruments. That was on his Sound Mind, Sound Body CD, which is still a big seller.

John, we’re both working (and I read this over and over again in your book Integral Recovery) to help people take that big dive to lower states, lower frequencies, in order to be able to balance their brains and physiology. You talk a lot in your book about neurochemistry and how meditation helps with dopamine and other neurochemicals. You talk also about going into the depths, the deep of meditation, to work with the part that is suffering, has an issue or a problem, which we use in Gestalt-based meditations. That is very much a part of your Integral (or 4-quadrant) approach to relieving personal suffering, and that’s what we’re all about, too. We’re convinced—and we see this on a daily basis as every practitioner or self-trainer does—that it’s only by going into that wellspring of wisdom, moving into a witness consciousness that can detach from the issue, going into the deep and facing what needs to be transmuted, that we can deal with it accordingly and be able to clear our consciousness.

John:     Before I got hooked up to the Mind Mirror this morning, I had a very painful meditation. I’m often called to deal with pain and suffering—my own and others—and have learned to lean into it. As Robert Augustus Masters said, you need to lean into the pain, as avoidance leads to nothing but increased suffering and pathology. I came out of a pretty heavy practice session and then got hooked up to the Mind Mirror, and the whole thing shifted. It became a very powerful—well, the other one was powerful too—but it became a very different piece of work.

Judith:   Well, that’s wonderful because our data analysis certainly showed that you had a deep and meaningful meditation. If you’d like, I can share screens right now and give you some feedback on that session.

John:     I’d love to hear it.

Judith:   First of all, as you listened to the iAwake Deep Delta track, you had this deep delta thing going on the whole time. You see that right hemisphere delta and the 1.5 and the .75. Maybe there was also some harmonic resonance with this gamma band that was also showing the whole time. This is the active Mind Mirror window here, and so for the iAwake people who may not be familiar with this, let me just back up and say:

• 49 to 59 is gamma, which is associated with peaceful transcendence and all sorts of super ordinary events and effects;
• 38 to 15 band is beta, which is ordinary thinking, externalized conscious awareness, analyzing and thinking things through.
• Then alpha, 12.5 to 9, is our dream-like, sensory awareness that is diffused and detached, alpha being a bridge down to the subconscious mind.
• And theta, 7.5 to 4, is the subconscious repository of our long-term memories and therefore where we experience personal insights and do our deep work (like John just mentioned). This is also where we find our creativity and spirituality, and where dreaming sleep takes place.
• This bottom series of frequencies, 3 to .75, which actually goes down to .5 hertz, is delta. Delta is active during dreamless, restorative sleep. But when you’re awake, it’s where you extend empathy to other people, and this is where your own intuitive or psychic insights come in.

So, when we see a pattern like this relating to delta, we would say that the delta is reaching out and searching through universal awareness, the collective unconscious, for energy and information—it’s literally reaching out. This is what we call an Awakened Mind pattern, where consciousness is, on the right hemisphere, open and flowing, giving us insight and connection and unity between the conscious, intellectual, thinking mind, the sensory awareness of alpha, theta’s creativity, insight, and spirituality, and delta’s empathetic psychic frequencies.

Then, here on the left, we see an Evolved Mind pattern, which is a whole different animal. It is a progression of the Awakened Mind, where there are fewer differentiations between these four categories. See how these dip in right here, and these are more united? This represents a bliss or an illumination or peak experience. Here on the right is John searching the field, and here is John finding what he is searching for, on the left.

John:     Now, at what point in the meditation was this picture taken? Is there a temporal?

Judith:   Yes, it was at 34 minutes and 23 seconds. The scoring here shows an 80% attainment of the ratios of the patterns. These are very specific ratios, determined by Max Cade, that we use for the self-training programs. So, for pattern attainment on this self-training program, we would say you are in 50% compliance with the ratios of the pattern, and this 80% score says 80% of the time. That is a very high level of the Awakened Mind right there. If you have 80 or maybe 85%, then you would go and train on training level 4. It’s unusual for someone to have a high score in training level 4—somehow, there’s a huge chasm, a quantum leap; people have difficulty getting a high score in training level 4 for the Awakened Mind. In fact, we’re modifying the equipment right now to be able to give them an easier step down from training level 5 to 4. So, it’s a great score, and here you can see the average or summary brainwave pattern.

It’s also important to say that this red bar right here, the 59 hertz bar in the active Mind Mirror pattern, shows that you’re having some gamma as a result of running all of this seeking and searching delta, or that you have built it up. It looks like it is linked to this delta, and one way I can tell is that your gamma amplitude rose a great deal during this session. It started out at 1 microvolt, rose to 3, and stayed at 3 the entire rest of the session.

What we know about gamma is that one microvolt of gamma has really profound effects. People will say, “I felt light stirring at my crown or the third eye,” or “I felt things stirring in my field, peaceful transcendence,” or “I went out of body and experienced a huge flow of creative and intuitive insights.” John, even though you’ve been ill, and you had another interview online earlier today, you’ve really moved fast. You also reported that today was a tough meditation for you.

John:     Actually, it was a very powerful meditation. I did 40 minutes before I started the meditation with the Mind Mirror, just doing my normal practice. Then I started the next 40 minutes, and it was some powerful meditation.

Judith:   Can you say a little about what you were experiencing?

John:     Yes, I was doing one of the practices I do most often, which is centering meditation or centering prayer. It comes from an esoteric Christian tradition, and you can use it with the Christian belief system or not. I discovered it for myself in my meditation, and then I found that there are books all about it and it has a whole history. I guess I tuned into the centering meditation channel down in the deep psyche, where we all connect or something.

The practice is that I relax, then focus on my heart center, and when my mind wanders, I just say, “Thank you.” That brings me back to center. When I begin the meditation, the idea is, yes, I’m willing to be in the presence of spirit, in the presence of the divine, in the presence of God, and not only am I willing, I’m asking for it. Please.

When I was a kid, somewhere I picked up Psalm 28:1, which I love, that says, “Lord, please not be silent unto me, because if you are silent unto me I will be like them who go down into the pit.” If I don’t experience this presence of the divine in my life, this kind of ineffable thing that I try to describe in words, I will tend to fall off the deep end of the despair pit. Suffering is fine, but when it’s transmuted through the presence of spirit or mystery we find in our deepest selves, then everything is redeemed in some sense. All the suffering, all the seeming insanity, becomes somehow deeply transmuted. So, I was experiencing that.

And as I was doing this practice today, at a certain point I started praying for all of the different people in my life, friends and family, past, present, future generations, and just putting it out there to everybody that came in. I got down to that deep place where the only appropriate response is thank you. Under that is just being-ness, if you will, just like where they talk about the first person experience of God. God is not this thing that we are talking about, God is not something we’re talking to, it is just what it is, and there is nothing but that. In these moments, we can just rest in that, and the smallest of our individual identity goes away, and it opens up to the vast infinite source, if you will. So, that’s what was going on.

Judith:   Beautiful. So a profound meditation explains your 26% rewards and training level 5 and your 74% rewards in training level 6, which is an extremely high score.

One curiosity though, is that here it shows that your galvanic skin response actually increased toward arousal as did blood volume impulse, and your heart rate increased… were you aware of anything physiological going on?

John:     Yes, at one point I was feeling a lot of gratitude and I teared up; I wasn’t sobbing, but I did tear up.

Judith:   I would think, considering what you have described (and this is a description that’s common among everyone who’s producing gamma), that that was a gamma experience. It is transcendence and connection with source, the sensation of light, and being held in the grip of—as Max Cade put it—something greater than anything else.

John:     And, the whole idea of being hooked up to a machine, when I don’t even understand what it’s saying, but it’s going to be broadcast all over the world, that didn’t even seem to enter into anything. It was just like normal; I was there and it was a very profound experience.

Judith:   Something we commonly see—since it’s all one system—is that when your brain speeds up to higher frequencies, the heart rate rises, and the movement of electricity under the skin for the GSR increases. And so, the patterns and your experience are a perfect match: the Awakened Mind score because you were doing creative transformation for part of the time, the Evolved Mind score, which is your connection with your Source, and the gamma synchrony, a super conscious pattern that’s also your connection with Source.

John:     What is the difference again between the Awakened Mind and the Evolved Mind?

Judith:   Well, the Awakened Mind is the pattern of—as Max Cade called it—lucid awareness. Anna Wise called it the high performance mind, the mind of the masters, where you have access to all that is, to your essential being or your essence. In today’s terms, some call it the mind of peak performance—experiencing a lot of creative flow, connection with other people, working in service to the world, happy, enthusiastic—typically self-actualized people.

The Evolved Mind pattern is one of bliss and transcendence and union with source. I always get a little thrill when I see it forming on the left, because it tends to be that the person in meditation is feeling, “Oh, I’m in the bliss. I’m in the flow. This feels so good.” And the little analyzing left brain says, “Yeah, but what are the words to describe this?”

John:     You stop thinking; it’s awesome!

Judith:   Right. Here’s the analyzer giving up the ghost and saying, “Okay, I’m going to surrender to this, and everything is fine.”

John:     So, the Evolved Mind is more of the mystical, unitive, nondual experience that we are talking about.

Judith:   It is. And not only that, we also describe the Evolved Mind as a new insight into problems seen from a higher perspective, a sense of light, a sense of illumination, a sense that nothing else matters other than just being. Neuroscientists looking at the neurophysiology of spiritual practices are shooting people up with red dye and taking brains scans of them, and picking up on the work of Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, saying, “Oh, that’s gamma they’re producing.” In fact, something I only just realized, and I’m so thrilled about, is that the Evolved Mind is a gamma pattern. Their descriptions are exactly how I just described our Evolved Mind, because you have to have a high amplitude gamma to have an Evolved Mind pattern up at the top.

John:     So, no matter if you’re meditating deep down in delta, gamma has to be there in order to kick into this nondual awareness or a unitive experience.

For me, this whole thing is mind blowing; it adds a whole new dimensionality to what I’ve been doing for years. It’s very cool.

Judith:   It’s mind blowing for us too, John. We’re looking at the activities of the brain and consciousness in a very holographic way, so that the shape of your pattern gives you clues as to what’s going on according to the categories. So if I say, “Imagine a light right at the top of your head,” you’ll see the gamma come out in people. If I say, “Center your awareness down in your heart,” we’re going to see the alpha increase. I can’t say enough about how astonishing the whole thing really is. And your scores are a definite testimonial to the effectiveness of your programs.

John, thank you for awakening with us.

John:      Yes, and thank you guys for the work that you’re doing. You have a truly integral perception. It’s such a wonderful, multi-dimensional project that opens up the world in a way that was never possible before. Just remarkable.

Judith:   So much is about clearing a way for us to live in our bliss in meditation and in life. From the moment we are born on this planet, something’s missing. What is it? We try so many ways to satisfy the craving we feel, but in the end, it’s only truly satisfied when we satisfy it spiritually.

We bless you and thank you for being here with us and for helping people and helping us understand more about the need to be balanced. I hope that our people will read your book and certainly go to the iawaketechnologies.com website.

John:      Yes, and of course, we’re going to let our community know about the Mind Mirror. What came out of our Spirit Tech 2.0 summit talks was that collaboration is the new competitive edge. We’re not taking each other out; we’re working together. It gets us there much more quickly and much more beautifully, it’s more fun, more loving, and it just works better.

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Judith Pennington, co-founder of the Institute for the Awakened Mind and designer of the Mind Mirror 6, is a world authority on EEG and the Awakened Mind. She is an internationally published journalist, award-winning author, composer of four meditation CDs, and the publisher of a free e-newsletter, The Still Small Voice, and a free e-magazine, OneWorld Spirit, all accessible through her personal website, EagleLife.com.

Visit Institute for the Awakened Mind.com for free meditation tracks and information on brainwave patterns and the Mind Mirror.

John Dupuy is the CEO of iAwake Technologies and the founder of Integral Recovery, a holistic addiction treatment approach inspired by Ken Wilber’s Integral Model. He is also the author of the award-winning book Integral Recovery: A Revolutionary Approach to the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction (SUNY Press, 2013). As a pioneer in the use of brainwave entrainment in therapy and personal development, John has dedicated his life to helping others deepen their spiritual practice and transform their lives.

Blog shaped by iAwake’s editor Heidi Mitchell, www.heidimitchelleditor.com.