Get High Without Drugs: Harold Shore

Get High
without Drugs
Harold Shore
Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

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Table of Contents
About this book.....................................................................................7
Why Get High?.....................................................................................8
Getting high is a valid life purpose...................................................8
An age old desire..............................................................................8
Getting high to change state.........................................................9
Euphoria getting high to feel good.............................................9
Getting high to be at one with the universe...................................9
Getting high for self-healing........................................................10
Getting high for self-reintegration...............................................10
Variation is healthy.........................................................................10
Altered states are normal............................................................11
Transcending drug conflicts...........................................................11
We'll show you how.........................................................................12
A better way of being high..................................................................13
Get high voluntarily........................................................................13
Enjoy the intensity you crave......................................................13
When and for as long as you want...............................................14
Your altered state should sustain itself.......................................14
Be the way that's right for you........................................................15
Select the way you want your mind to work................................15
Feeling better.............................................................................15
Enhance the way you are................................................................16
Pleasure......................................................................................16
Self-reinforcing...........................................................................16
Presence.............................................................................................17
What presence is.............................................................................17
What presence does........................................................................18
An emotional holiday...................................................................18
Ah! Here we are..........................................................................18
It's the only time we actually have..............................................19
How to do it....................................................................................19
The Smiling Breath (Sukhabhati)........................................................22
It's easy..........................................................................................22
You can't fail...................................................................................22
You're free to improve it.................................................................22
Sensualizations...........................................................................23
Simplicity........................................................................................23
Technique.......................................................................................23
Mood..............................................................................................24
Effects of doing the smiling breath.................................................24
It's self-reinforcing......................................................................25
It becomes more powerful with practice.....................................25
It helps you get along with others...............................................25

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It can make you more attractive..................................................25
Don't impose this on depressed people........................................25
Be subtle.....................................................................................26
Breathing...........................................................................................27
Yoga................................................................................................27
Breathing and time.....................................................................27
Timing patterns...........................................................................28
Styles of breathing..........................................................................31
The complete breath...................................................................32
Alternate nostril breathing..........................................................33
The force of the breath................................................................33
Bandhas..........................................................................................34
The root lock...............................................................................34
The neck lock..............................................................................34
Diaphragmatic lock.....................................................................35
The psychic direction of the breath.............................................35
Breathwalking................................................................................36
Holotropic breathing.......................................................................37
Psychedelic intensity...................................................................37
Mild euphoria..............................................................................38
The renewal breath.........................................................................38
Complete relaxation....................................................................39
Continuous breathing..................................................................39
Awareness of every feeling..........................................................40
Acceptance..................................................................................40
Intention.....................................................................................41
Using your mind.................................................................................42
Set and setting................................................................................42
Controlling your environment.........................................................43
Focus on inspiring and positive things........................................44
Having a high quality mental diet...............................................45
Stay away from negativity...........................................................45
Spend your time on things you can affect....................................46
Altered kinesthetic states................................................................47
Controlling intensity and duration...............................................50
Designer highs: not designer drugs.............................................51
Scanning for the good.....................................................................53
Review and identify what's good every day...............................54
Hypnosis.............................................................................................55
The placebo effect.......................................................................55
The Schachter effect...................................................................57
The Milton model........................................................................58
Changing your experience of things............................................61
Meditation......................................................................................62
The habit of return......................................................................62

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Celebration.................................................................................64
Telling yourself a story the power of inner ritual..........................65
Emotional Alchemy.............................................................................68
Escape!...........................................................................................68
Ways of coping................................................................................69
Using whatever life brings..........................................................69
Seeing things differently.............................................................70
The transmutation of energy.......................................................71
Time distortion...................................................................................74
How we tell the time.......................................................................74
Remaking time................................................................................75
Mind machines...................................................................................80
Brain waves....................................................................................81
Beta ...........................................................................................81
Alpha...........................................................................................82
Theta...........................................................................................82
Delta...........................................................................................82
Entrainment....................................................................................83
Kinds of machines...........................................................................85
Stimuli........................................................................................85
Phase and kind of stimulation.....................................................87
Programming..................................................................................88
Ramps.........................................................................................89
Ramp and return.........................................................................89
Sweeps........................................................................................89
Alternation..................................................................................90
Tonal ranges...............................................................................90
Physical techniques............................................................................91
Face................................................................................................91
Lips.............................................................................................91
The tongue..................................................................................92
The eyes......................................................................................92
The hand.....................................................................................93
Brain Gym.......................................................................................93
Lazy 8's.......................................................................................94
Brain buttons..............................................................................94
Cross crawling............................................................................94
Hook-ups.....................................................................................94
The elephant...............................................................................95
Thinking cap...............................................................................95
Energy Yawn...............................................................................95
Calf pumps..................................................................................95
The energizer..............................................................................96
Autogenic training..........................................................................96
Begin with a body scan...............................................................96

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Always end by 'canceling'............................................................97
The heaviness exercise................................................................97
The warmth exercise...................................................................99
Calm and regular heartbeat .....................................................101
It breathes me...........................................................................101
Abdominal warmth....................................................................102
Cool forehead............................................................................103
Confidence................................................................................104
Advanced autogenic training.....................................................105
Stillness........................................................................................105
Frequently Asked Questions.............................................................107
General Questions........................................................................107
This is too much work! I want something that is as easy as taking
a drug.......................................................................................107
These techniques seem to work best in solitude, I need
something that works in a social situation.................................107
How do I make these experiences last longer?........................108
Presence......................................................................................110
How do I know I'm doing Presence correctly?.........................110
What is the definition of Presence?.........................................110
Is Presence like being involved in same very fast action or
intense activity?........................................................................111
Why did you put Presence first in the book?............................111
Smiling Breath.............................................................................112
Who named this 'Sukhabhati'? And what does that mean?......112
I don't feel happy now. Why should I make myself happy?......112
How do I smile with my eyes?..................................................112
How do I make it stronger and last longer?.............................113
Breathing.....................................................................................113
When is the best time to practice?...........................................113
How soon should I advance to a longer breathing pattern?.....113
How long should I practice?....................................................114
Which pattern should I start with?..........................................114
What should I look for in my practice of the patterns?............114
Hypnosis......................................................................................114
How do I create good suggestions about getting high?............114
Meditation...................................................................................116
Do I have to have be initiated by a teacher?............................116
What are good subjects to meditate on?..................................117
Can I actually meditate on a coin, as in your example?............117
How long should I meditate?...................................................117
When should I meditate?.........................................................118
How soon will meditation make me high?................................118
Altered Kinesthetic States............................................................118
Will I see paisley patterns and the walls moving?....................118

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Is this stuff safe? If you get into an altered drug-like state, say
while driving, aren't you impaired?..........................................120
What should I start with?........................................................120
Mind machines..............................................................................120
Where can I get a mind machine?............................................121
How do I take the experience of a mind machine beyond the
context of the mind machine session, so that I can enjoy the
benefit without the electronics?................................................121
With so many possibilities, where and how do I start? ...........121
Do mind machines have medical applications?........................123
What about combining mind machines with other techniques
given here, such as the smiling breath?....................................124
Stillness.......................................................................................124
Why does this qualify as a way of being high?.........................124

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About this book
Recreational drugs are obsolete!
It has been said that a person buying an electric drill doesnt really
want a drill, they really want the hole it can make. In the same way,
a person obtaining and using drugs doesnt really want the drug
itself, they want to experience the results of taking the drug. They
really want to enter a specific state of consciousness.
This book is about how to enter desired states of consciousness - to

get high - without using drugs.
This book is a manual on how to achieve the kinds of states sought

by recreational drug users, but without any use of drugs. People
seek specific states of consciousness and drugs are just one means
of getting into such states. Drugs do work and for many people
drugs were the first way they became aware that such states of
awareness exist. As a result, people assumed that drugs were the
only way to access those ways of perceiving and feeling. And
people thought those states were so valuable and felt so good that
they wouldn't hesitate to put up with the expense, health risks and
social and legal hassles associated with drugs to regain those states
of consciousness.
But the good news is that there are ways of entering these states of
mind that do not have the drugs' expense and risks. And in fact,
since these ways are dependent upon your own skills and are fun to
use, continued use will improve your mastery to the point where
you have better experiences from your own mastery than drugs
could possibly give you.

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Why Get High?
Getting high is a valid life purpose
Altered states of consciousness have been sought by mankind since

time immemorial.
The achievement of altered states of awareness has been involved in

the foundation of most human religions and the occasion of many
insights and inventions
Not everything is possible to our normal waking consciousness,

which is optimized for rapid pattern recognition, communication
and self-preservation. Design and insight are actually inhibited by
this kind of awareness.
An age old desire
Anthropological records show that all cultures have discovered and

incorporated ways of changing consciousness. The early discovery
of alcohol in most cultures is ample evidence of this. The use of
chemicals to stimulate or alter awareness remains a world wide
phenomenon. While the use of chemical agents, such as alcohol,
caffeine, hemp, kava kava, betel nut, khat, etc, is common, there
have also been other techniques in common usage: ritual dancing
such as spinning, immobility, self-deprivation, chanting, ritual,
hypnotic practices, and unusual breathing techniques are just some
of the ways human have learned that they can alter awareness. This
book looks at some of these as well as some novel techniques for
altering awareness that have only emerged with the rise of modern
technology.
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Getting high to change state
The desire to enter into different states of of mind, for pragmatic or

comfort reasons. is one that all humans have. Everyone knows that
when you change your state you change the way the world looks
and alter the range of things you can do.
Euphoria getting high to feel good
One of the states sought after most commonly is one of euphoria a

general sense of well being. After struggling with the challenges of
the day, it seems to be a common need to enter into a more pleasant
state before sleep. To many it seems that you can't do well unless
you feel good.
There is a class of religions that hates euphoria as a distraction from

the idea that only God can legitimately grant such feelings of
pleasure. Of course, if you're selling bliss, it makes sense to hate
anyone or anything who offers it more readily. It's bad for business!
Getting high to be at one with the universe
Our normal state of consciousness is characterized by a sense of

anxiety and separateness. Yet experiences of blissful unity are
normal and well-known. Seeking to regain that sense of unity is a
fundamental desire of humans. Since the availability of the original
way such unification was experienced is often blocked, humans
seek alternative means to achieve the unified and blissful state.
Drugs have been a classic means to that end.

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Getting high for self-healing
Getting high often offers a perspective from which psychological

healing can occur. Normal consciousness may constrain a person to
a view that supports the problem; altering that allows the person the
choice of seeing a better way.
It is well known that drug addicts often see the futility and self-
destructive nature of their habits only when they get high.
Unfortunately, as the old song says, Tomorrow never knows - the
insight is specific to the state of mind in which it occurs. When
they return to normal awareness, they come back to focusing on the
compulsion to get high again.
Getting high for self-reintegration
Insights are state-specific and to recover them it is often necessary

to regain the state in which they occur.
Normal consciousness, with its symbolic logic-tight contexts, can

fracture a person's psyche. Getting into an altered state can allow
people to access material that would otherwise be relegated to the
unconscious.
Variation is healthy
The body that is capable of many things is healthier than the body
that can only do a few things.
We are not advocating any extreme behaviors here, just the

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personally controlled access to states by non-drug means that have
the same benefits of drug-induced states but without the expense,
medical and legal consequences.
By making altered states of conscious available based on learn able

skills, a lot of the social pressure to over-use them evaporates.
When something is always available, the compulsiveness of it is
diminished.
Altered states are normal
Altered states occur naturally dreams, sexual orgasm, spiritual

release, depression and flow just happen in the course of life.
Why not learn to reliably re-induce them without drugs?
Transcending drug conflicts
A distressing phenomenon of modern life is the persistence of

drug wars carried out by governments for various purposes.
While the phrase 'war on drugs entered common usage during the
presidency of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, there actually seems to
be a number of drug wars that are related.
These drug wars seem interminable and costly in human terms.

And it is a war zone that anyone with an interest the expansion of
consciousness can avoid. When you know the techniques given in
this book, you can modify your awareness without drugs. Not
having to use drugs allows you to achieve some distance from this
problem. You will have placed yourself in a different context.

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We'll show you how
The purpose of this book is to show you how to use non-drug

techniques to get high. We will show a variety of techniques for
altering states of consciousness in ways that achieve what drug
users typically seek.
We will show how to achieve these states without drugs. The

emphasis will be on detailed instructions sufficient to enter into the
desired state reliably and repeatably.

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A better way of being high
Get high voluntarily
We are talking about altered states of consciousness that are under

the person's own control. With drugs, once you have chosen the
amount of the drug you take over a particular period of time, the
duration, and intensity of the resulting experience is totally
dependent on the interaction between the drug and your body, with
body-weight and characteristic individual tolerance and reaction to
the drug dominating the intensity of the experience. Once you take
the drug, you lose choice. With non-drug means of altering
consciousness, duration and intensity of effect remain up to you,
even after the experience is under way.
Enjoy the intensity you crave
The intensity of an altered state of consciousness (ASC) should be

controllable by the person undergoing it. They should be able to
control the degree of change that is comfortable or useful to them.
Instead of having to risk unpleasant or dangerous side effects of
over-dosing chemical, you should be able to get as high as you want
cleanly, and accurately. This is fairly difficult to achieve with
drugs, as drug potency is a function not merely of the amount of
drug consumed, but also of the person's level of rest or fatigue,
amount of food eaten recently, mind set and environmental context
and personal sensitivity. Yet efforts to control drug potency focus
on dosage and dosage intervals! This is because once you have
ingested a drug, it is fairly difficult to stop its action.
With non-drug means, controlling the level of effect is much more

direct, and much more reversible. Thus intensity can be more
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appropriately modified during the experience.
When and for as long as you want
A desirable state of consciousness is one that can be started, endures

as long as desired and be terminated at will. You shouldn't have to
wait for its onset (unlike the latency period associated with most
drugs) and the duration of the state of consciousness should be up to
you. Being able to ending that state of consciousness at will is an
important requirement.
Wouldn't it be nice to go to a party, enter into a very relaxed and

euphoric state appropriate to the gathering, and then, when its time
to return home, be able to snap back into a normal alert state of
awareness appropriate for the journey? You drive home normally.
Then when you are comfortable at your home, you may choose to
re-enter the state of consciousness you had at the party. You can
similarly change your state when you have to deal with an
interruption requiring your attention. Its easy to do this when your
altered state of consciousness was achieved without drugs, hard or
impossible when drugs were the way you altered your awareness.
Your altered state should sustain itself
A desirable state of consciousness should remain even when Im

not trying to maintain or even notice it. For example, when I want
to enjoy some music in a state than allows me experience it
intensely and with delightful time-dilation, I want to be focused on
the music, not on maintaining my level of consciousness.

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Of course, this is one area in which drugs excel. The predictable
duration of the drug ensures the persistence of its associated states
of consciousness. But such persistence can be achieved by non-
drug means as well. Post-hypnotic suggestion can cause states to
persist for very precise amounts of time, or only to occur in
specifically appropriate and favorable context
Be the way that's right for you
Select the way you want your mind to work
Any true altered state will involve some kind of changes in mental
function. This could be something as simple as becoming more
relaxed, or preferring to use another sensory mode, or having more
vivid imaginative flights. It might involve being able to think out
of the box about things to generate a new perspective. Or it
might be an enhanced ability to scrutinize a logical or legal
document with a fuller sense of the implications involved.
Feeling better
Typical bodily changes would include enhanced or decreased

alertness, alterations in rate and depth of breathing, postural choice,
even alteration in pupil size, blood pressure and pulse rate. For
example, performing some of the Yogic breathing exercises detailed
below will alter your blood pressure and skin galvanic response. As
your mind changes, your body will respond. As your body changes,
your feelings will too.

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Enhance the way you are
Pleasure
A desirable state will be typically be more pleasurable than your

normal baseline state.
There are many ways that this can happen due to the wide variety of
altered states. There are many kinds of positive feeling and each
one can be enhanced and associated with a specific state of mind.
Self-reinforcing
If a state is pleasant, there will naturally be a desire to experience it

again and again. Since that action that brings about the state will be
under our conscious awareness and control, you'll be able repeat
that action to be able to enjoy that specific state over and over.
Some mind-alterations were designed specifically to be self-
reinforcing. Start doing Sukhabhati (described below) and you'll be
on your way to endless enjoyment.

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Presence
What presence is
Presence is attention to the present moment. It is the practice of

attending to whatever arises without reference to past valuations and
future hopes, fears and plans. Just being aware of the present as it
unfolds, letting yourself sense whatever comes and letting yourself
be driven by the moment.
Presence is the simplest and yet the most profound of all practices.
One aspect of presence is that it is a form of sensory uptime,

when all your sense are devoted to what is available now. We can
see what is before us, or we can visualize the past, from what is in
our distant past to what is we anticipate as our future. Such
visualization is internal, it is when we are down inside our minds.
In uptime we see what is outside of us. All the senses have both
internal and external modes, down and up phases of their operation.
Uptime is when all our senses are externally focused.
Presence is related to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness a

practice called by the Buddha the only way to achieve
enlightenment. One who practices mindfulness knows what he is
doing as he does it. Breathing a short breath, he knows he is
breathing a short breath; breathing a long breath, he knows he is
breathing a long breath; lying down he knows he is lying down;
walking he knows that he is walking.
Yet presence is not thinking thought is always about an

intentional object that may or may not be actually given and thought
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tends to lead the mind by associative pathways to other thoughts
away from what is given right now. Presence is awareness itself.
What presence does
An emotional holiday
Because presence is oriented to the present, its first effect is to calm

the emotions. Our feelings are derived from past experiences and
involve the perception of things in terms of those experiences. That
is to say, I am constantly judging that this thing is one of those, this
is in this group or class and I know what those mean for me! I'm
always besieged by significance. Such an effort of judgment
involves memory, categorization and association with a known
feeling. Of course all this happens in a split second and occurs so
fast that we cannot stop it once it starts. But to the extent that we
inhibit this reference to the past, to the extent that we allow
ourselves just to be in the present, our emotional reactions are given
a rest.
As our emotions are put on hold, we give ourselves a moment of

peace and provide ourselves a space for regeneration. This is a true
holiday, and we can take it just be being present to our
surroundings. Even one minute of presence can have a delightful
restorative effect.
Ah! Here we are.
Presence has the effect of revealing our environment to us in

unexpected ways. Attending to what our senses bring, we notice
things that would normally escape us, and allow the richness of our

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environment to reveal itself. Even in a room that is familiar, it is
quite likely that you will notice things that had you had missed
before. When this occurs as you are out and about, it will often
seem as if you rediscovering your environment, as if you are seeing
it for the first time.
It's the only time we actually have
Our body lives in the present; only our mind has the ability to lose
itself in the possible and the past, in the unreal. To practice
presence is to return to the only reality we have. To live the present
is to live fully, not merely potentially.
Not only is it the only time we really have, but when we are aware
of the present, our sense of the passage of time changes. The future
does not press towards us, because it is always now. While things
change, the presence of the present doesn't. There is a paradoxical
timelessness during the state of presence.
How to do it
Actually, presence can't be done; it just happens. The good news is

that we can encourage it to happen by playing at it. The rest of this
section describes practicing presence in this playful sense.
To practice presence, the first thing to do is to realize that that you

are not aiming to be in this state all the time. Our thoughts and
time-lines and emotions and distractions are part of life as well.
So we should start with the limited goal of practicing presence for

limited periods of time, just as one would go on holiday only for a

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limited period of the year
Start by choosing a small period of time like 5 minutes. Just be in

the present for that little time. Or perhaps you can do this on a
walk, and choose to be immersed in your present sensations for the
time it might take to walk to some nearby place.
Then set up a habit of rotating your senses, so that you will typically
move between feeling and smelling and heading and sight. Practice
moving between these until it becomes a skill. (A few minutes
might be sufficient to get into this pattern.)
Perform this sensory rotation for your chosen time. Do this

whenever you please, but at least once a day for a couple of weeks
Of course, thoughts will occur to you and when they do, just notice
that you have drifted away from presence and gently return to your
senses.
The net effect of this will be to add a skill of breaking away from
your normal awareness into one that is just as valid and yet a
refreshing change.
You can do this to give yourself little mental vacations, or you can
extend this practice for longer and longer periods of clock time. If
you do choose to practice this for extended periods of time, you will
have begun the practice of insight meditation, which leads to a
centered calmness, and clarity of mind.
As you practice presence, you will begin to spontaneously

experience moments of presence in which time and self seem to
disappear. These will last from a few seconds to possibly an hour or
more. Usually they will last for a few minutes. This is really
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nothing you can control. You will naturally emerge form this state
when you need to. Typically, you will only be aware of
spontaneous moments of presence as you emerge from them.
As your practice evolves, not only will you be graced by these

moments of presence, but it as if your normal time-bound, ego-
driven experience will also take on some of the openness and
spontaneity of actual presence as well. It is as if your normal
consciousness is secretly learning from these moments of presence.
You'll notice you feel happier, more accepting and the same time
that you are more resourceful. There is really no way to force it; it
just gradually happens. There is nothing you can grasp and there
is nothing to be known, yet this will leave you spiritually richer and
at the same time more willing to listen to and be available to others.

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The Smiling Breath (Sukhabhati)
Sukhabhati is the happy breath. It is probably the easiest way to

induce a feeling of euphoria.
Sukhabhati was specifically developed as a good addiction. The

aim is to give people a way of feeling good that lies entirely within
their power, one that they can enjoy anywhere and at anytime. By
being free to enjoy Sukhabhati, the hope is that people will have the
opportunity to be happy more often and would eventually learn to
prefer being in this state. This will liberate them from the patterns
that held them in less aware, less open states of mind.
It's easy
The breath of happiness is available to all, because it is very easy.
You can't fail
There is no wrong way to do the breath of happiness. So you can

forget about worrying whether youre doing it correctly.
You're free to improve it
Youre free to improve upon the basic technique if you want. The
breath of happiness was specifically designed to be enhanced by
those who want to adapt it to their special circumstances or skills.

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Sensualizations
Visualizing in complete, rich and sensual detail the things you like
is a obvious way of enhancing the breath of happiness.
Simplicity
Sukabhahti is designed to be simple and easy to do, anytime,

anywhere. You dont have to reveal it to others if thats not
harmonious in a certain situation. Theres not much to say or read
about it. It is just this incredible simplicity that allows it to be
universally available.
Technique
The smile is the context of the breath. Sukhabhati begins with a

slight smile. It should be slight because a slight smile is easiest and
least obtrusive. In Sukhabhati, you smile first with your eyes and
then ever so slightly with your lips.
Just let yourself breathe! Impose no pattern on your breathing,

theres no way to do this incorrectly. As you breathe, just be aware
of your breathing and how it feels. As it changes just follow the
feeling.
Begin by letting your current facial expression fall away.
The start to smile. Let a slight smile light up your eyes. Then let
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that slight smile spread to your lips. Just by smiling, you will begin
to relax into a mood of contentment. Follow your breathing and
how it feels. Changes will occur theyre OK, just follow them
too. Its YOUR happiness, youll have it in your own way!
At the beginning, to get a sense of this breath, do it for 5, 10 or 15

minutes continuously. This will enable you to get a sense of the
feeling that the breath of happiness induces.
You can do this anytime you want. No one needs to know. You
might find it handy to do this in situations where you're stuck like
waiting for something or someone. Its amazing how you can fill
spare moments with happiness without taking anything away from
your other activities.
Eventually you will naturally want to enjoy the breath of happiness

while focusing on your normal activities. Youll find they go better
when you do.
Mood
Because of the sufficiency of happiness, there is no further goal

to be achieved. You are enough, you have enough, you do enough
this is sufficient.
Youre already there theres no further thing to be sought.
Effects of doing the smiling breath

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It's self-reinforcing
Sukhabhati was designed to be a good addiction. It feels so good,

youll naturally start doing it more and more often. This trivial
little exercise will start sprinkling happiness all over your day.
It becomes more powerful with practice
Because it only depends upon you, you naturally get better at doing
it as time goes on.
It helps you get along with others
If youre feeling good, other are easier to get along with. Things
that would have annoyed you in the past, dont matter as much
when you are in a happier and more resourceful mood. New
possibilities seem to open up on their own.
It can make you more attractive
Happy people are more attractive, all things considered. Since

Sukhabhati will make you happier the more you do it, the more
others will naturally enjoy being around you.
Don't impose this on depressed people
We live a world of frustrated people, and the last thing they want is
to have some idiot grinning in their face. They do want to be happy
themselves, of course, but happiness may seem like a big step away
25
from where they are.
People are attached to their problems for all sort of reasons, not all
of which they would be able to explain.
Be subtle
The slight smile with the eyes and lips that is the context of the
breath can be very slight if need be. You should not confront others
with happiness if it would create more of a problem than they
already have.
Just being inwardly content will help them, and they might be able
to approach that level of confidence and resourcefulness that helps
them beyond their clutch on negativity.

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Breathing
The use of breathing techniques to induce altered states of

consciousness is as old as human recorded history.
I will not attempt to cover such an enormous subject fully here.

Even if that were possible, it would not be useful. What is useful is
just to illustrate some of the most common practices primarily
involving the breath and to show how they can alter consciousness.
Yoga
Control of the breath has been a major aspect of yoga. Called

pranayama, (energy control) it uses control of breathing to break
the minds addiction to its current picture of the egos world and to
induce another state of awareness more more pleasant, effective and
conducive to spiritual evolution.
Pranayama involves controlling the breath though the use of

different patterns of breathing, styles of inhalation and exhalation,
bodily locks, and direction of the breath energy with the mind.
Breathing and time
Begin by doing just a few repetitions a day of one of the patterns

discussed below. Once you have done that pattern for a week or so,
you can begin to increase the repetitions you do daily.
Start with 5, just to get the hang of doing that pattern. Then add a
few more repetitions every week. Eventually you will want to build
27
up to 100 cycles or more.
It doesn't take 100 breaths to get high! By the time you have built
up to doing 50 or breaths in a rhythmic sequence, you'll be able to
alter your awareness within the first few breaths. The skill you've
developed in conscious breathing will have led you into very altered
states and also spontaneously created a self-reinforcing cue for your
mind to get high.
The goal here is to become comfortable doing the breath pattern, so

that you fall into a easy rhythm doing it. There is a kind of
AHA! point where instead of laboriously doing that pattern, you
find yourself inside it. At this point just continuing is the most
natural path.
Timing patterns
There are four phases of the breath inhalation, retention,

exhalation and exclusion.
In inhalation the breath is drawn inward by extending the

diaphragm down and by expanding the chest.
In retention, the breath is held within the lungs by preventing it

from flowing out of the mouth or nose.
During exhalation, the breath is allowed to flow out of the lungs by

relaxing the chest and retracting the diaphragm. Exhalation is
relatively passive.
The exclusion phase involves stopping the breath after exhalation,

thereby excluding air from the lungs.

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The relative length of each phase is shown for every pattern as
follows: <inhalation>: <retention>: <exhalation>: <exclusion>
The numbers given below for these timing patterns are meant to be
multiplied uniformly by some small factor, such as 2,3,4 8, 10 or
16. For example, in the first pattern given 2:1:2:1, the factor might
be 4, so that there would be an inhalation of 8 counts, a retention
phase of 4 counts, an exhalation phase of 8 counts and an exclusion
phase of 4 counts.
Using a higher factor will produce a slower breath and, when

mastered, will give more profound results. But it is far more
important to establish a steady rhythm or groove with a low
count than attempt to do the breaths with a high factor. When you
have established a steady rhythm, you will be able to sustain the
desired state and enjoy its benefits more than when you are making
the serious effort that a high factor requires.
You can expect that the state developed with these patterns will
persist for a while after you stop consciously practicing the pattern.
You can continue to sustain its intensity by briefly repeating the
pattern to refresh the state.
2:1:2:1 the holding breath
This breath is very relaxing after even a few (10 or so) rounds. It is
called the holding breath because of the exclusion and retention
phases. At first you should practice this with a low multiplier to get
a feeling of where it leads you and then build up to more. This
breath can be used when you want too quickly move from an
agitated to a relaxed state of mind, or to prepare yourself for a
stressful challenge.

29
1:1:1:1 the stable breath
This is an even breath which includes retention and exhalation

phases. It tends to produce a very tranquil and spacey state of
mind. Because retention and exclusion are not part of normal
breathing cycles, performing the stable breath will break whatever
state you were previously in.
Sometimes this pattern is called 'square breathing'.
1:0:2:0 the calming breath
This is a calming breath with the exhalation being twice the length
of the inhalation. The zeros in the retention and exclusion phases of
the breath means that those phases are not part of this cycle. There
is only an inhalation and exhalation phase. It's easy to do this
particular pattern in a public setting.
The calming breath will relax the body and mind and can be used to
induce sleep when you find yourself agitated at night. Otherwise it
is generally conducive to a passive, meditative attitude.
Generally, those patterns in which the exhalation is longer than
inhalation are more relaxing; those in which the inhalation is longer
than exhalation excite and stimulate the mind. The variety of
patterns will provide you with subtle choices of the kind of
tranquility you want to enjoy.
1:4:2:0 the transcending breath
This breath is used in conjunction with alternate nostril breathing

(discussed below). This will produce an altered state almost
instantly. One of its effects when used with alternate nostril
30
breathing is brain hemispheric synchronization.
2:0:1:0 the arousing breath
This is a stimulating breath. This is best used with a fairly low

multiplier. You can use this to turn yourself on before a stressful
challenge.
There are many more patterns of breathing that can be learned from
any competent yoga practitioner. (You may have to seek beyond
your local Yoga Studio for the level of skill I am referring to here.
The people to know this are the sort of yogis who are doing it for
spiritual growth rather than health, beauty and physical relaxation.
You want to find the kind of yoga practitioner whose focus is
altering their awareness to attain samadhi (ecstatic meditation) for
detailed instruction in pranayama.)
That said, you do not have to relocate to the Himalayas to use

breathing to become proficient in altering your consciousness.
Select one pattern and just practice it every day until you can
reliably enter into the consciousness you desire. Build up to thirty
minutes a day with the breath pattern you have chosen and you will
have built for yourself a resource for the rest of your life.
Styles of breathing
It is now time to discuss the depth of the breath which parts of

the lung are used. There are different levels of breathing which
involve different physical mechanisms and which have different
effects when they predominate. These are the three physiological
levels of breathing: apical (shoulder), inter-costal (chest) and
diaphragmatic (belly). These terms correspond with the various

31
groups of muscles that initiate the breath.
In apical breathing, breathing is done from the top of the lungs.

Your shoulders move up and down, the rest of your body need not
move. In inter-costal breathing, breathing is done from the middle
lung. The chest expands and contracts, both the shoulders and belly
can remain motionless. Diaphragmatic breathing is the deepest
form of breathing and is performed with the large lower part of the
lung. The belly moves in and out, the upper part of the body need
not move. This is the most relaxing way to breathe. Babies
naturally breathe like this when they sleep.
The complete breath
The complete breath or yoga breath is a combination of all the three

types of breath into one slow circular breath. "Circular" just means
that the in-breath leads directly to the out-breath and the out-breath
immediately to the in-breath. There is no retention or exclusion
phase in between them. (The 1:0:2:0 breath given above is an
example of a circular breath.) First you inhale with your diaphragm,
letting the belly move out and down. As you inhale, let your spine
arch inward ever so slightly. After your lower lung fills up, expand
your chest muscles until the middle lung is full. Finally, raise your
shoulders slightly to allow the top portion of the lung to fill. For the
exhalation, simply relax in reverse order. Let your shoulders drop,
allow your chest to contract and finally let your belly gently
contract.

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Alternate nostril breathing
Alternate nostril breathing involves using just one nostril and then
the other on successive breaths. First you inhale through one
nostril, then when it is time to exhale, you close the original nostril
and exhale through the other one. The next inhalation is through the
open nostril. Then that open nostril is closed, so that the eventual
exhalation is through the original nostril.
The effect of this is to completely change your mental pattern.
To achieve this kind of breathing, typically the nostril that is not

being used is closed by gently pressing it closed with either the
thumb or a finger. The nostrils are alternatively closed, and the
open nostril will carry the breath.
A more sophisticated form is to direct the breath through the nostril

simply by the use of your attention. To practice this, get a small
mirror so you can see which nostril is fogging the glass. With a
little bit of practice you will discover you can control which nostril
the breath is flowing through with attention alone. Some yogis
think this is the most effective form of alternate nostril breathing for
attaining an altered state of consciousness.
The force of the breath
Varying the degree of force used in performing these patterns will

give widely varying results. It is best to attempt the calming
patterns with a gentle breath, ideally so gentle that it produces no
noise when you do it. (This takes a little work!) The stimulating
breaths may be done more forcefully. In some cases, it can be
33
useful to a small number of repetitions with great force.
Bandhas
The Bandhas or locks can be used to enhance the effect of these

breathing patterns. In general they should not be used until the
groove or immersion state can be reliably achieved with a given
pattern.
There are 3 locks, the root lock, the neck lock and the diaphragm
lock.
The root lock
This is performed by clenching the Kegel muscles that surround the

anus and perineum. It is said to hold energy in the body that would
otherwise move down and out. The root lock is used during
retention and exclusion phases of the breath.
The neck lock
The neck lock is performed by bending the chin into the sterno-
clavicle notch at the top of the breastbone and closing the throat.
Sometimes the closure of the throat is accomplished by pressing the
tongue up against the upper palette of the mouth. It may also be
accompanied by focusing the eyes toward the third eye position
located just behind the center of forehead about one inch above the
eyes.

34
The neck lock, like the root lock, is used during the retention and
exclusion phases of the breath.
While doing the neck lock during the retention phase, it is

especially useful to visualize energy moving up and down the spinal
column.
Diaphragmatic lock
The diaphragm lock is quite different from the other two. It

performed at the end of exhalation by lifting the diaphragm into the
thorax quickly and firmly. The effect is to stimulate the body.
Sometimes after doing this, one feels that one is walking on air.
Literally, concrete pavement can feel like a cushion! The body
seems full of energy, not in the sense of nervous or muscular
energy, but rather in the sense of a more centered, softer aliveness.
The psychic direction of the breath
The psychic direction of the breath refers to how you use your mind
when you have achieved a steady rhythm or groove with the breath.
It depends upon having reached this inside the breath state.
Although physically the breath is moving through the lungs.

pulmonary tract and nostrils, you can visualize the breath as
entering or leaving through any part of the body. This has the effect
of energizing that part of the body. Some people notice healing or
reduction in pain as a result.

35
Later, when you have experienced energizing various body parts ,by
altering the psychic direction of the breath, you can mentally project
the breath to other things and people. To do so, once you have
achieved a steady rhythm with your breath, visualize the breath
being exhaled to enliven or energize whatever you will. You'll want
to be in a loving and peaceful mood before you do this.
Breathwalking
It is extremely effective to combine the practice of breathing

patterns with walking. Here the step functions as the count. Using
the example given above, one might breathe in while taking 4 steps,
and then breathe out while taking 4 steps. You will find that this
induces the feeling characteristic of the pattern very quickly and
deeply. Prolonged breathwalking is a most effective means of
inducing altered states of awareness, gently and with no health
challenges. I recommend using only the Relaxing, Stability and
Stimulating patterns at first those involving retention are too
tricky to be useful. Keep it simple.
Breathwalking is a meditative experience, integrating bodily

movement, breathing, and mental activity. According to Dr.
Herbert Benson, of Harvard Medical School, breathwalking evokes
the relaxation response.
In my experience, using a relaxing pattern helps me achieve that

same deep clear calm that sometime emerges during psychedelic
experiences. In fact, that state of deep meditative calm is more
reliably reached through breathwalking than it is through the use of
drugs.
Many people could use more exercise anyway. And as far as

exercise goes, this must be one of the easiest. Because of the

36
rhythm of the breathing and walking, when you hit a comfortable
pace, it's more like you are floating along your path than stressing
yourself. But the physiological benefits are there just the same. Its
an exercise you'll gladly repeat.
Holotropic breathing
Holotropic breathing is a technique developed by Drs. Stanislav and

Christine Grof in an effort to naturally replicate their use of
psychedelic drugs in accomplishing deep psychotherapy.
The basic technique is to breathe rapidly in a circular fashion in a

set and setting that will provide direction to the mind.
Mind set is provided by the previous discussions with the therapist

and the desires of the voyager. The setting includes music selected
to guide the voyager where they want to go.
For the rest of this section we will call this rapid continuous
breathing the holotropic breath or holotropic breathing.
Psychedelic intensity
Psychedelic just means mind revealing. Full psychedelic

experiences can be created with holotropic breathing for over one
half hour in length and extending for up to several hours. By
comparing the experiences record by Dr. Grof with the catalog of
effects listed by Masters and Houston in their book The Varieties of
Psychedelic Experience it is clear that such voyagers can replicate
each and every effect encountered by using drugs such as LSD
37
Mild euphoria
Sometime you don't want to embark on a mind exploration intended

to resolve and release birth trauma and childhood problems.
Sometimes you just want to feel good for a while. Sometimes a
gentle breeze is more welcome than a storm.
This can be accomplished with between 5 to 10 minutes of

holotropic breathing. It can be maintained with periodic
refresher periods holotropic breathing lasting a few minutes or so
each.
The renewal breath
The key to the practice of renewal is the insight that we suppress

various thoughts and feelings because we deny them, we make them
wrong in an effort to achieve greater mental harmony. Perhaps
we were criticized for having these feelings by someone we cared
for or whom we depended upon. In order to resolve the inner
conflict such criticism would cause, we made those feelings
wrong and suppressed them from consciousness.
But suppressing the feelings doesn't make them go away, it just

makes them unconscious. They continue to affect how we act and
what we want, only beyond our awareness. They become painful
and compulsive.
A central aspect of renewal practice is the re-acceptance of these

feelings into awareness. Then you release the energy involved in
their suppression, get to deal with them in the present and remove
the pain and compulsiveness from your life. In doing so, you will

38
have expanded your consciousness; you will have gone from
darkness to light and from compulsion to freedom.
There are five parts to this process: complete relaxation, continuous

breathing, acceptance of every feeling, integration of your feelings
and intention the intention to renew yourself. These aren't
sequential steps so much as parallel aspects of a gradual process.
However they are presented as a sequence to enable the practitioner
to build the practice of renewal breathing in a step by step manner
Complete relaxation
The first step in practicing renewal breathing is to completely relax

your body. Get into a position in which you can just let your arms
and legs relax. When you can let yourself safely sink down
comfortably, you can let go of the all the tensions and readiness that
characterize normal awareness. Many people like to lie down, and
this can even be done while floating in water.
Continuous breathing
Once you have begun the process of complete relaxation, you can
start the process of continuous breathing. Continuous breathing
entails that there is no breath or pause between the inhalation and
exhalation phases of the breath. It also means that when you inhale,
you inhale completely, not cutting off the process at some point.
And when you exhale, you let the air out, without holding some
back. The connectedness of the breath, especially allowing each
phase of the breath to complete before beginning the next phase will
release energy that more restricted patterns of breathing have denied
you.

39
Awareness of every feeling
With the new energy now circulating within your body as you
breathe, be aware of every detail of feeling that you experience.
Your consciousness will naturally move around your body and both
positive and negative feelings will occur to you. These will be
brought to the surface by the extra energy made available by the
breathing and by complete the relaxation of your body. Just accept
them and stay with them, no matter how painful or annoying they
are. Accept all their details. Focus into the feeling, explore its
parts. Just staying with feelings that are initially painful or
annoying will cause them to change into other feelings. Feelings
aren't things, they are just patterns of energy. Once they are
brought into awareness, you will notice that the energy naturally
changes. It always changes!
Feelings are also directed feelings are associated with those ideas,
feelings are about ideas and experiences.
Acceptance
The acceptance step is where you accept your feelings fully into
your awareness. It is where you cancel the 'make wrong' or
suppression that normally accompanies such feelings.
There are many ways of doing this. You can compare the feeling
with something much worse. You can see it as a necessary part of
your healing and success. You can see it as the best thing for your
future, in the form of a learning opportunity. You can enjoy it for
40
itself. You can see the thought associated with the feeling as
equally true, false or possible as anything else. You can see the
humor in it. You can see it as just a necessary phase.
As you find ways to accept this feeling and allow it as part of your
consciousness, you discover that your judgment of things is separate
from the thing itself. I have a feeling, about something and I have a
judgment of it. But I could have a different judgment of it. Just
because I used to think this way, don't mean that's the only possible
way to think. Why shouldn't I allow myself to be happy? And if I
can be happy with this feeling if I think of it differently, what would
be harm in trying that now
Intention
The key to success with this technique, as with any technique, is the
intention to actually do it, to actually integrate your awareness. If
you truly intend to integrate your consciousness, almost any
technique will work. The degree to which you can perform the
previous four aspects of renewal doesn't matter. So long as you
really intend to achieve integration, you will be able to achieve it.
So maybe your relaxation wasn't as complete today as yesterday,

perhaps you didn't breathe fully continuously for the whole session.
But if you want to stop suppressing a feeling, to accept it and deal
with it on a conscious level, you can anyway. All it takes is the
intention to do it.

41
Using your mind
Using mental techniques to get high seems obvious enough - being

high is a special class of mental states and since the mind can learn
to transform itself, why not simply learn how to get high? In point
of fact, the obsessive normality many seek to escape was produced
by mental events. And now you can use the power of these same
mental events to redirect the energies of the mind toward states that
are more enjoyable and more insightful.
Set and setting
"Set and setting" was the terms the late Timothy Leary used refer to
both the mental and physical environment of a person, especially in
relation to embarking upon a mind-altering experience.
"Set" or "mind set" is a combination of attitude, expectations, and

determination or focus. This is essential for success in any
endeavor, especially one that so intimately involves consciousness.
Attitude is defined as "a mental position with regard to a fact or

state or a feeling or emotion toward a fact or state". It is in essence
your bias or point of view about something. Are you predisposed in
favor of it or against it?
An attitude is always an attitude about something. It could be an

event, a task, a person, or as general ideas as just how you are
treated by other people. In the context of getting high, attitude
means your position with regard to changing to a more open and
pleasant state of consciousness, your readiness to change your
mental state to one more pleasant for you. You have to be willing.
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Expectations are created both by your past experiences and by what
you can vividly imagine. Past experiences can give a strong sense of
what will occur, but need not be your only guide. Being able to
vividly imagine an outcome will cause it to occur, even though you
haven't experienced it yet.
Decision is critical - you may like something and be able to

envision it, but you must actually choose to make it happen. You
must decide to have that or experience that.
"Setting" refers to your physical and social environment. Obviously,

for changing your state of consciousness, the external things you
have to deal with are going to dominate your awareness. If you are
preparing a meal with your family around you, some of these
techniques are inappropriate, while others, such as the breath of
happiness or "Sukahbhati", may work better.
In general, you want to select situations and people who are

supportive and conducive to whatever you are doing.
Controlling your environment
Beyond set and setting issues, which refer to your present, there are
internal and external factors that you want to align with your goals.
Otherwise, its like trying to drive with one foot on the gas and one
foot on the brake. The more aligned the factors are with your goals,
the sooner and more brilliantly you will succeed.
The human mind has a tendency to repeat itself, to form recurring

patterns. This is the basis of learning, skills and culture. It is also the
basis of personality.
43
We naturally have modes in which we learn and modes in which we
enact what we have learned. When we are in learning mode,
whatever we are exposed to in terms of experiences and ideas, tends
to stick with us and get played out in our enacting mode. The
alternation of these modes occurs daily and in larger cycles that
span periods of our lives.
Just as it is important to eat foods that agree with your body and
build health, so it is important to expose yourself to experiences and
suggestions that agree with your mind and support what you want to
accomplish.
But just as you can consume junk food or even some poisons and
not feel the effect right away, so you can expose yourself to bad
mental inputs and not feel the effects right away. Nevertheless both
bad physical and bad mental food have their consequences. Bad
physical food will eventually make you sick, and bad mental food
will eventually frustrate your ability to accomplish your desires.
The good news is that you can control your mental inputs and this
will support, enhance and encourage those factors that lead to
success.
Heres a criterion: Is this input helpful? Is there some way I can

use this or react to this positively? How does it make me feel about
what I am trying to accomplish? If this helps me or usefully
informs me, then its good mental input. If it excites me about things
I cannot affect, or depresses or discourages me, then I dont need it.
Focus on inspiring and positive things

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What things work for you, what things get you inspired or get you
unstuck? These are things that you need to focus on regularly. This
will be how you succeed.
Having a high quality mental diet
Seek out things that teach you how to succeed, inform you about
what you are trying to accomplish or give you new skills..
Read books or listen to tapes that teach and support you. Celebrate
the good things in life. Do what works for you.
Stay away from negativity
It is critical to avoid the influences of other peoples negative

opinions. We are powerfully shaped by the opinions of others. Our
desire to please others, to be one with the group and conform are all
at work here. This is especially true when those people are close to
us in some way.
But if we want to achieve mental goals we have to select those

influences that are in alignment with our purpose.
Some people will scorn any attempt to succeed because they

themselves are not successful. They would like to be; they want
success for themselves and dont see why others should have it
when they dont. So their reaction is to attempt to make you fail.
Others wont even try to succeed and look to have support for their
lack of success from others. If you look determined to attain a state
they cannot, they will try to discourage you and convince you that

45
what you are attempting cannot be done. And theyll find lots of
supporting evidence in the mediocrity they see all around them.
If you seek to be able to achieve altered states of consciousness

without drugs, you are attempting what others do not our drug
based culture promotes the materialistic idea that you need to
chemically alter your physiology to alter your state of mind. If you
are satisfied with that belief, you will not even try anything to
achieve different. The failure of others to get high by other means
is usually only because they have never tried other means.
You do not need to limit yourself to the level of others failures and
indolence. Trying out the techniques in this book will empower you
with many ways to get high without drugs.
Another source of negativity comes from people who are simply

uncommitted. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they
are committed to being uncommitted. Theyve been wrong before
and by God, they're not going to let themselves be fooled again!
And they think that the best way not to be fooled is not to be
convinced of anything different than the opinions they currently
hold. (This mindset actually guarantees that they are perpetually
fooled.)
Those things dont work for me! they proclaim or more

generally Those things dont work. But since the reason that
things dont work is that they dont seriously try them, this is
hardly an opinion to be taken seriously.
Spend your time on things you can affect
One source of negativity in life is the news and local gossip. The
news and local gossip can be a royal waste of time and a source of
46
much anxiety, anger, and depression. Most of it will never affect
you, and you wont be able to do anything about it anyway.
Gandhi once said, I wont let anyone walk in my mind with their
dirty feet! Its good advice to follow if you want to enjoy higher
states of consciousness. In a sense, most news is to your mind what
indigestible food is to your body.
Altered kinesthetic states
This is the technique that allows you to experience states which are
exactly the same as those induced with specific drugs. It depends
upon some previous experience of alterations of consciousness with
those drugs.
By vividly remembering the exact set of feelings involved in the

onset of an altered state of consciousness, you can induce the state
of consciousness exactly.
When you do this right, you might be surprised at just how intense
the effects are, even the very first time. (When drug users learn this
trick, it will drive drug dealers out of business.)
What you can identify, you can re-create.
In fact, if you are having any difficulty with this, you're probably
trying too hard. In the case of drug experiences, just think of those
feelings which you would notice when you are identifying a sample
of the drug that was quite excellent. Concentrate on those feelings
for a little while. Soon you'll start to notice other things that remind
you of that drug state.

47
The specific technique is the following. Find a moment when you
can reflect uninterruptedly. Get something to take notes with: you
start by interviewing yourself.
First remember a time when you got high using a specific drug. Go
back to that time and remember how you noticed that you were
indeed responding to the drug's influence.
What did you notice first? Specifically, what feeling or change in

you body's action did you notice? Perhaps it was a certain feeling in
your head, a specific kind of spacey feeling or relaxation. Or maybe
it was a feeling in your body of comfortable warmth. Whatever that
first feeling was, write it down.
Now what was the second thing you noticed that convinced you
were getting high, that you were responding to the drug's influence?
Perhaps it was a dryness in your mouth, or maybe it was that colors
seemed brighter. Write that down too.
So now your list might be like this:
1: that light headed feeling

2: dryness of mouth
What was the third thing in order that you notice when you got high
with that drug? Perhaps it was a kind of warmth and looseness of
you hands. Write that down. So you list might look that this now.

2: dryness of mouth
3: warm loose hands

48
After a bit, you might end up with the following list:

2: dryness of mouth
3: warm loose hands
4: body feels heavy and doesn't want to move
5: colors are bright
Now go through the list in the order you have written it down,
imagining each feeling as best you can. If you correctly noticed the
feeling and their sequence, by the time you have completed this
sequence, you will find yourself having other feelings associated
with the previous experience of the drug.
This works because that sequence of feelings is both an anchor for

and a mirror of the state of consciousness. In practical terms, this is
the means of getting high which is the most precise in re-creating
the kind high associated with a specific drug.
As I pointed out, you must have some actual previous experience

for this to work. But once you have had enough experience to be
able to distinguish a particular drug's typical effects, you can then
fully re-experience the drug high without the drug. This is based on
the same mechanism as the so-called placebo effect. In the placebo
effect, the subject gets the same physiological benefits of a drug
merely because they believe that they are getting the drug, when in
fact they are not. This can occur both for drugs that have
pronounced psychological effects as well as for drugs whose action
is primarily below awareness, such as, for example, an antibiotic. It
is the mental image of the drug action and expectations which work,
not the drug itself. That is because drugs are just the trigger for the
body's response, the actual cause of your feelings.
49
Of course, in the placebo effect, we are utilizing the belief that one
has actually taken the drug, and the mind's ability to fulfill its
expectations of that drug's effect. In mimicking the precise sequence
of feelings that are involved in the use of a drug, we are doing
something different. We are using the same feelings that an expert
drug user would use to determine that he or she had taken the drug
in question.
Controlling intensity and duration
Re-inducing drug states by vividly remembering the sequence of

feelings that accompany their onset is both powerful and easy. All
this takes is memory and the will to do it.
Once you have accomplished this. one thing that you can do is to
gain some control over the intensity and duration of the experience.
When I want to intensify a state, I just ask myself, what would this
be like if it were twice as strong? You do know how to multiply
by two, don't you? So you would know when something had
gotten twice as strong, wouldn't you? What's it like when that
happens? Would you be able to feel if it were three times as
powerful?
Once you can induce the feeling of the drug by remembering how
you would know that the drug is working, you can make it stronger
by this technique. And you don't have to stop with one doubling.
Induce the feeling, double it, and double it again. See how much
fun you can stand. You won't be using up your stash!
I find that re-induced highs tend to be quite persistent just because

they are desirable states. (Since you bothered to re-induce them at
all, you probably enjoy them.) As soon as the mind knows it can
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enter these states of mind at will, it will automatically enter and
preserve those states it prefers.
But no one would want to be stuck in just one type of consciousness

all the time.
I find that it helps to set a limit of how long I want to enjoy a

particular high. For example, I might want to stay high until the
party is over. Once I step outside to drive I'm automatically regain
the alert focused state that driving requires. (And there's nothing
unusual in your blood or on your breath.)
It's good to train yourself to induce a variety of states of mind, so

that you can shift both in and out of those sweet spots you prefer.
Designer highs: not designer drugs
Is there something about the drug high you were re-inducing that
you dont like? For example, maybe you don't like the hunger that
accompanies a cannabis high. Or perhaps you would like a re-
induced caffeine high to be more mellow.
Once you have established your ability to achieve a high which re-
creates what you typically would get with a certain drug, you can
change it to whatever you desire.
Enter the original state. Ask yourself what you would experience
when you have succeeded in fully modifying that aspect of the state
in the direction you desire. How would you know that its really
happening? And as you get a sense of that, what would make you
enjoy it for a while?

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That's about all there is to it. You don't need a degree in organic
chemistry, you don't need to risk the unexplored side-effects of a
new chemical. You just have to know what you would prefer. Enter
the unmodified state and then vividly imagine how your new
modification would feel while you are in that state.
It helps to remember that because what you are imagining is just

your own mental state, there is no barrier to your entering that state
directly. It's not the same as imagining you have some physical
object. Of course, you have learned the difference between
imagining and actually possessing external things. However, with
mental states the rules are quite different; you are free to enter into
any state you imagine fully.
For some people, the following procedure works: visualize yourself

as if you were looking at yourself when you are in the state you
want to be. Pretend you're standing outside of yourself looking at
yourself in that state. Imagine what you'd see. Add details; enrich
the image until it's vivid. When you have a really good image of
how you would look like in the state you desire, step into that image
it's yourself, you can do this and be in that state.
I first learned this as technique in anger management. There were

times I would be upset and know I wanted to calm down. After
reminding my of something that made my blood boil, my guru
suggested I imagine myself peacefully sitting across the room.
When I actually did this and then projected myself into that
imagined person, I was amazed at how dramatically different I felt. I
went from red hot to cool in a moment!
A further illustration of how this works occurred when I was doing

a little hypnosis with my pranayama (Yoga breathing) teacher.
When she had entered a light trance, I asked her to remember how
she felt when she had been the most calm. After a moment I could
see by the softening of her face that she was really getting into it.
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Then I suggested she was going to be twice as calm as she was now.
I said her unconscious knew what that was like and she could let
herself be open to that, but no sooner than she wanted to feel that
way. I could see the change happening as I spoke with her. Then I
said that I knew she could multiply by five, and her unconscious
mind even knew what it was like to be five times as calm. Again
she would feel that now only as soon as she wanted to ....
When I finally brought her out of the trance she confessed to me

that she had never in her life experienced such peaceful bliss. She
had originally started to re-live the feeling she had reached years
before after five days of fasting and breathing exercises with her
teacher in Nepal. She said she felt quite happy to be in that state
again. That's when I first suggested she double it and then quintuple
the ecstasy. And she did.
I wondered just how far I could have taken her? How much
peacefulness could she stand? That's when I realized that I could do
this for myself too that there were no real limits to how high I
could I let myself be. I found some time to fully remember a
powerful experience and then managed to remember to double it's
power. By that time I was beyond thinking in words.
Just how far do you want to go?
Scanning for the good
"The mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell, or a hell
of heaven". John Milton Paradise Lost
Whether you look for the good or look for the bad is merely a habit
of mind. And you can shape this habit the way you want.

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Thousands of things occur to you every day. What you select to pay
attention to is what will shape your life.
What you mind, you will find. If you look for the good, your life
will be good; if you look for the bad, your life will be bad. Many
people have trained themselves to look for problems and hope to
improve themselves by negating those problems. But because they
have trained themselves to look for problems, all they find are
problems.
And you become what you behold. It seems like the mind does not
have the ability to form an image of "not". It can only imagine
actual sensible qualities. So when you think of things you don't
want and say to yourself 'not this', your imaging brain can only
image 'this'.
Any thought that you have once becomes likely to be repeated, due
to the fact that every time you have a thought, your brain physically
reshapes itself to make having that thought a little easier, a little
more probable. Not only that, anything you imagine yourself to be,
your unconscious will try to fulfill. Together these two principles
can form a powerful engine for self-realization or self-destruction.
Look for the good, imagine how things will work for you, see the
positive outcomes that you can enjoy and your mind will work to
produce these in your life.
Review and identify what's good every day
A little work here will help to build the "good" muscle in your
mind. Regular practice helps here a lot. Think of 25 great things
about your life every day. These can be things you enjoy, things you
are grateful for, things you like.
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25 is just an arbitrary number just keep doing this until youve
put yourself in a great mood.
By finding what is good and new right this moment, we practice

looking at our present reality and identifying the positive things in
it. Doing this on a regular basis will transform your sense of your
life and reduce the stress you experience. In fact, it is especially
good to practice finding something good and something novel at
rigorously predefined times of the day. Having to come up with the
good and new forces you to scan for the good when youre not
already in a positive state of consciousness. And that's when you
need to the most. Learning how to find the good and new at those
times is the best time to exercise your skill.
Many people practice saying grace at the beginning of a meal. One

adaptation of this would be to have everyone around the table
verbalize something that is good and something that is new in their
experience, in effect identifying the good things that the prayer of
grace generally refers to. By actually specifying good things out
loud at such a time, the same purpose is fulfilled, but the effect is
stronger because the mind has to search for specific things that God
has brought us.
Hypnosis
The placebo effect
It is standard practice when testing the efficacy of a drug to do a

double blind experiment in which both the subjects and the
experimenters are unaware of which subjects are getting the drug
being tested and which subjects are getting a inert pill, sometimes
55
called a placebo. What is interesting is that many of the subjects
receiving the placebo actually experience all the same
pharmacological effects as those subjects receiving the real drug,
supposedly due to their expectations. Drugs are considered
efficacious if the percentage of subjects receiving the real drug who
have reactions is significantly higher than the percentage of reactive
subjects who are receiving the placebo.
This testing methodology is built on the fact that many drug effects
can be caused by the belief that one has been exposed to the
chemical rather than from any effect of the chemical itself.
An interesting example of using the placebo effect to induce a drug-

like altered state of consciousness occurred to one of my friends
when the author enjoyed the friendship of Dr. Humphrey Osmond in
the late 60s in Princeton, New Jersey.
Dr. Osmond had tremendous authority in our eyes: we knew that he

was the person who had originally coined the the psychedelic,
that he had been doing medical work with psychedelics for the
previous 15 years, that he had brought the psychotropic qualities of
morning glory seeds to the attention of the scientific community,
and that he was senior co-author of the medical treatise
Psychedelics.
Osmond knew of my friend's deep interest in psychedelics and that

he had already experienced the drug LSD-25 hundreds of times.
One day, my friend's wife was visiting him and Osmond offered her
some unusual mushrooms, suggesting that they would have the
same effect as LSD. Curiously, he suggested that the way to
prepare them would be to saute them in butter.

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When his wife brought them home, my friend thought that the
suggested method of preparation was odd, because it seemed the
heat and butter would destroy the chemicals that would be involved
in the desired drug action. But who was he to challenge the
directions of our learned friend?
His wife cooked them as directed and he consumed a plate of them.

He said they tasted pretty good, actually, a real change from the
bitter tastes many plant sources had. Just as Osmond had predicted,
a powerful LSD-like trip began.
Four hours later his wife ended my experience by telling him that
the mushrooms were just Chanterelles and it had been Osmonds
desire to play with him through suggestion.
Osmond's authority in my friend's eyes was all that was necessary to

invoke powerful belief and the placebo effect of the powerful
LSD trip.
The Schachter effect
This effect concerns how the mind combines a label and a physical
stimulus to produce an effect quite different from the effect that the
physical stimulus would have produced all by itself.
One way of stating this principle is that it is not the body state itself
which produces a certain feeling but rather the interpretation placed
on that bodily state. In the original experiment during the 1950's.
Schachter and Singer gave epinephrine to their subjects.
Epinephrine will induce excitation or anxiety. Then they
approached different groups of subjects in various ways and the
nervous excitement generated by the drug was interpreted as being
the emotion involved in the response. The subjects then continued
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to have other physical experiences associated with that emotional
response. For example, when the subjects were approached by a
smiling member of the opposite sex, they developed the bodily
reactions associated with sexual arousal. (Ah, so it was a sex
drug!) When they were approached with contempt they
experienced anger and felt the other bodily reactions which are
appropriate to anger. (That pill made my blood boil!)
To use this, you have to be able to have a feeling that you can
describe accurately and then label as whatever you want. For
example, pain can be described to yourself as your bodys process
of self-healing. Another instance can be to describe a certain kind
of breathing as itself a form of getting high.
The Milton model
Milton Erickson was a leading practitioner of medical hypnosis who

often used subtle language techniques to swiftly provide patients
with more satisfying and useful patterns of living. He did so by re-
contextualizing their understanding of experience in a permissive
way so that they were free to choose outcomes that were more
gratifying than those behaviors they had been stuck in.
One aspect of the language whereby he accomplished these

transformations was to use non-specific language to formulate
statements that the person would be free to interpret as truly
descriptive of their experience and then to gradually lead the person
so that new options would become apparent to them.
Trance is not some unusual, bizarre state; it's just a form of mental
focusing, and we naturally allow that to happen unless there is
something that challenged us or seems wrong. So it is important in
using words to go into a trance to say things that must be true. If I
told you that the light is very bright as you read this, it might not be
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for you and you'd become more critical. But if I just told you that
there is light that helps you see this, that has to be true and would
help you listen in a more focused manner to what I had to say. If I
told you you were standing up as you read this, that might not be
true and force you into a critical mode. But if I merely said, your
eyes are open as you read these words, that is true and helps you
focus further on what I have to say.
So to get into trance and begin to use the powers of your mind, it is
best just to note, in a general sort of way, what happens to be true
right now. And as you do this, you can use the non-specific
expression of that to amplify and unify your experience to the point
where you can accomplish what you desire.
In much of our experience, we care constantly correcting and

rejecting what is said to us, because it does not describe what we
know and experience to be true. This keeps us in a reality-testing
mode. However, where we are presented with language which
reflects our reality, we will start to accept it as valid, understand it
in terms of our specific experience of it.
So when I could talk about your ability to see, to distinguish shapes

and make sense of things, even though I don't know how bright it is
where you are or what source of illumination you are using, you
will naturally and easily understand my remarks about seeing and
light in terms of what is true for you. And you could be, or not be,
just a little more receptive to the words which follow. And either
way is OK so long as you can distinguish my words and understand
what they mean, because just the ability to do is one of the
requirements for using language to change consciousness.
I know you are wondering how these trivial facts about language
have been used to get people high. Especially since language is
more often used to focus consciousness in ways that are the
opposite of being high.
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The activities of consciousness which are used to focus on meanings
and sensation are the same activities that get you high when they are
focused in a different fashion. It's not a case of needing something
new; by being conscious enough to read and understand these words
you have all you need to alter your awareness now.
How would you know whether you understood that? You

automatically look inside for the sense of significance. And in fact
looking inside is the key that unlocks the doors to altered states.
You can tell whether this makes sense because you have an inner
criterion for something making sense. Just as you can tell when you
are in another state of mind because you have a way of telling when
that has happened. You know what to look for in the way you feel
and the way your mind works. That's how you would know as you
look inside, just how what your state of mind is now. You could
even imagine what it's like when you're as high as you want. Now,
sometimes there's the temptation for me to go off into a pleasant
mental zone even as I'm trying to write these words.
People who use trance sometimes tell you to relax, but that's not
really necessary. You can do this anyway you want. Just amplify
your experience by identifying it consistently, going along with
whatever is true for you, whatever is happening until you are ready
to transition smoothly into being able to follow a suggestion that
takes you where you want to go.
So you can use anything in experience as a starting point for being

able to go into the mental state you desire. It is your own mind that
allows you to create your state of awareness and look for those
signs you use to decide that you're high.

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You can just think about it whenever you want it. Its not about
language putting anything into your mind, so much as it is your
ability to understand how language can help you find those ways
you already have to change your state to one you truly desire. And
to let that happen would be a good thing, isnt it? Now, let's talk
about ....
Changing your experience of things
It is a little known fact that you have a lot of control over how you
experience the things in your life. Your mind makes a huge
contribution to how you experience anything. Here we are not
talking about set and setting. We are discussing the specific way in
which your mind represents the experience. This representation is
how you choose to remember it and how you choose to talk to
yourself about it. How you remember it and think about it
determines your reactions to it. The specific form in which you
categorize each experience will predispose how you handle it.
Most of your sensory experiences are through seeing, hearing or

feeling. And so you represent these experiences to yourself through
a process of internal seeing, hearing or feeling. Each of these ways
of internal experience has certain characteristics. For example,
when I remember something I have seen, it has a certain apparent
size in my mind. So what if I changed that size? Suppose I took
something I liked and made it bigger? (Its my mind, I can do that).
When I make it bigger, I might notice that changes how I feel about
it. What if I made it brighter? Or more colorful? Does that change
my feeling?
Altering something I like in this way is a great way on enhancing

my pleasure in it.

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The same things can be done with anything I dont enjoy. Perhaps
theres a voice in my head that is just the memory of someone
nagging me. So what happens if I make that voice fainter? How
about if I imagine it coming from very far away?
Perhaps I can make that voice faster and high-pitched like a

chipmunk. Would its nagging bother me as much? How about if I
made it very quick?
All of these alterations will affect how we react to our inner

experiences of events. Being able to alter these aspects of
experience is a major skill that will allow you to alter the way you
handle your experience.
Meditation
Meditation is a classic means of altering consciousness. In fact,

meditation is so classic and so well known that it covers a very wide
range of meanings and has myriad forms. That being the case, any
claims to there being a right way to perform meditation must be
understood as right within a specific context of a spiritual
practice and its goals.
For our purposes here, we will consider meditation to be any mental

practice that principally involves focusing the mind on a particular
subject or in a particular fashion.
The habit of return
The mind naturally moves from subject to subject, either by

62
association or by logical progression. The trick is to utilize this
tendency to move to achieve focus on a particular subject. This is
done by developing the habit of returning to the original subject of
the meditation. As soon as you notice that you are not thinking
about the original subject, you gently return to the original subject.
The technique is to constantly return to the original subject. The

mind is actually allowed to wander with the intention of returning
immediately after it has touched upon one relationship, or context or
property of the subject. It is programmed to wander and return.
For example, I wish to concentrate upon a coin. I see that it is round

and immediately return my mind to the coin. I think of its hardness
and I return to the coin. I think of its weight and I return to the coin.
I think of how it came to be there on the table before me and I return
to the coin. I think of its significance as a monetary unit and I
return to the coin. I think of the its composition of metals and I
return to the coin. I notice its color and I return to the coin. I think
of the side that is showing and I return to the coin. I think of the
inscriptions on it just as physical shapes and I return to the coin. I
think of how its edge is formed and I return to the coin, I think of
how worn it is and I return to the coin. I think of the date on it and I
return to the coin. I think of the monetary system it is part of and I
return to the coin. I think of my possession of it and I return to the
coin. I think of the coins size and I return to the coin. I think of its
angle of presentation to me and I return to the coin.
Get the idea? As I meditate on the coin, admittedly a simple object,

I have build a up a rich idea of the coin and can continue to do so.
Basically my mind has noticed just one property or relationship of
the subject and then returned to the subject. My mind has
concentrated on the object even while its normal processes of
thought and interpretation continued.
When I wander away, for this process of return, I just return to the

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subject, in this case, the coin.
As I do so, my mind becomes focused on the coin and my emotions

become tranquil. And this is just from a few moments of thoughtful
concentration!
As I continue to do this, a rich mental intuition of the object is

progressively achieved while the mind remains focused on its
chosen topic. At some point, the intuitive idea shines forth in the
mind and the coin is experienced with a depth beyond what would
have been imagined. Now you seem to really know the coin in a
way you could not have previously imagined. This moment of
intuitive experience is rapturous and beautiful.
As you continue with your meditation on the coin, your mental

processes will need less and less explicit formulation in words. You
just continue to explore the subject intuitively. Eventually the
rapture falls away because it too seems to be a distraction and you
just experience the coin joyfully. As your concentration deepens,
even the enjoyment of the experience is discarded as a crude
annoyance. Only the coin remains. Now you are fully concentrating
on the coin.
See the Buddhist classic meditation treatise Visuddhimagga (the

Path of Purification) by Buddhaghosa for a very detailed outline of
this process. Buddhaghosa treats the process in the same detail as a
good engineering manual, with explicit descriptions of each step on
the way and how to deal with various kinds of distractions and
challenges.
Celebration
A particularly fun form of meditation is to celebrate something.

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And how are things celebrated? When you celebrate something you
remember it, talk about it and even daydream about it. You
decorate and embellish your ideas of it and refer to it frequently.
You promote it to others. You cherish records of it and
commemorate it. If you can, you collect instances of it and other
memorabilia. You may find yourself, imitating it and enacting
those parts that please you the most. At the very least you will
review it and concentrate your mind on it whenever you can.
What you celebrate, you nurture; and what you nurture, grows. So if
you want to nurture a higher state of consciousness, you should
celebrate it.
Dont make the mistake of celebrating what you think causes what
you desire. If you celebrate A (which you dont really want)
because you think it causes B (which is what you really like), you
just end up with a lot of A, but not necessarily a lot of B. To
celebrate the cause of what we really desire is one of the biggest
fallacies the human mind can commit and one of the most common.
Rehearse success, not the means to success.
Telling yourself a story the power of inner

ritual
A particularly interesting form of meditation which utilizes the

tendency of the mind to move from thought to thought is the
practice of inner ritual. In general, this is the repetition of some
sequence of ideas, often in the form of a story that expresses some
special theme. In many forms of inner ritual, this is a religious
story. Powerful legends, such as the Parsifal legend, have also been
used in the same way. By going through the ritual, the mind can
easily stay on topic, and the transformations of awareness that the
legend induces occur.

65
Classic uses of ritual to alter consciousness include the Tantric
traditions of both Hinduism and Buddhism as well as the alchemical
and magical traditions of medieval Christian practice. The Eleusian
mysteries of ancient Greece are probably an example of this process
as well. Carl Jungs works give some modern insight into these
traditions as do the works of writers like Aleister Crowley.
One powerful aspect of these inner rituals is that the participant

goes through or is led through multiple levels of nested contexts
that effectively detach his awareness from day-to-day living. Only
then is the participant allowed to follow the story line which now
occurs within a structure of meaning that alters awareness.
But you dont have to travel to ancient Greece, the Himalayas or

arcane cloisters in Europe to use this technique. You can create
your own stories of transformation and use them to reshape your
awareness. Chances are your own ritual will fit your own needs
and powers more perfectly.
Create a story line that leads you from where you feel yourself to be
to where you want to be. As you do so, embellish that story line
with symbols that have powerful meaning for you. Go over the
story, enriching it with detail and giving its plot powerful twists that
lead to the emergence of the consciousness you desire.
Once you have your story worked out, now imagine that you are
living through this story in the first person. Do so repeatedly so that
you feel the changes described are happening to you. If you
practice this every day, you will soon have built a way of leading
yourself from one level of consciousness to another, a way that is
reliable and predictable; a way you can control.

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You probably already tell yourself stories anyway! But are they
your stories? Do these stories serve you? So take control of the
pathways of your imagination and go where you want to go, not just
where others have programmed you.

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Emotional Alchemy
Escape!
All these techniques are well and good for empowered resourceful states,
but sometimes people use drugs, not to get high, but to avoid being 'down'.
That is to say, drugs are used as a means to cope with bad days and
negative situations.
A major use of recreational drugs is to change emotional states on bad

days. People look for a way to to repair or avoid unpleasant or poor
reactions to things. This is the "I really need a ... now" coping syndrome,
where drugs function as a fix for an emotional state, or for a state in which
we are 'stuck'.
Drugs serve as a powerful escape mechanisms for people who cannot cope
with their perceived situation. They use drugs as a means of becoming
emotionally unstuck. Taking a drug is something they realize they can do,
and the bodily change that results changes their emotional state because
emotions are always felt in the body.
What we're talking about here is learning how to deal with negative
feelings such as anger, inappropriate sexual arousal or lack thereof, fear,
the sense of being dominated by those agenda it is to control you, political
partisans who won't leave you alone and whom you cannot avoid,
deprecation & slander, frustration, and your own internal obsessive ranting
about all or some of the above.
These are common enough needs, whether or not you use drugs, and you

68
will do everything you can to deal with these situations. Here we will
review some powerful alternatives.
Ways of coping
What is needed are ways of coping with situations that get you emotionally
stuck and unhappy. There are 4 main ways to do this. First, reduce your
exposure to psychic material you can't handle. Second, develop the habit
of using whatever life brings for your own purposes. Third, learn to see it
differently. Fourth, change your response to something useful transmute
the energy within yourself.
We live in an information age and we are constantly bombarded with

information designed to excite a response. But just because you were
exposed to some information does not mean that you can effectively
respond to it. We do react emotionally to it, but then what can we do?
To reduce your exposure to material you cannot handle, your criterion

should be: can I or would I do anything about this? If the answer is no,
turn away from that source of 'information' and lighten your emotional
burden.
Using whatever life brings
As you develop a habit of using whatever life brings for your own
purposes, you will become very powerful and successful. You will take
advantage of what becomes available for your own purposes. You'll move
from being 'at effect' to being 'at cause'; from being a victim to being active
and the author or your fate. Just this change of attitude will alter the
significance of what may have been a trying situation. By getting into an
attitude of control, you'll feel better.

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Whenever something displeases or annoys you, IMMEDIATELY ask
yourself, how can I use this? The answer you come up with could be really
off the wall, so long as it helps you in some way. In fact, the more
'unusual' your answer is the better then it might contain the seed of an
idea that is a creative way of dealing with your situation.
The key here is to learn to respond immediately to any difficulty with the
question, how can this help me, or what can I learn from this?
As a rule, collect three different answers as to how this situation could help
you or be turned to your advantage. By the time you have thought of three
answers as how this could help you, your emotions will have transformed
themselves into something more pleasant.
Other questions to ask, What is the best thing about this for me now?
How can I have fun with this? What's the smallest change that would
make this great?
Seeing things differently
The art of seeing things in a different light is called 'reframing'.

Reframing something means to put it in a different frame or context of
meaning. Whenever you reframe something, you understand it differently
and it loses its psychological power over you. It loses its sting.
For example, if something someone has done is bothering you, it might

change if you can see their actions coming from their weakness rather than
their strength. Usually we are bothered because we attribute power to the
source of our annoyance. Seeing them as powerful makes us feel helpless.
So when we see the weakness in that source or that it is motivated by its
own problems, the situation might go from being a real bother to being
something silly. At least you will have more options for dealing with it.

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Your feelings of annoyance or frustration might also change if you put the
entire situation in a different context. Just doing so, means that, in your
mind, you have stepped outside of the situation and are looking at it in a
different way.
Ask yourself what this would mean in a grander scheme of things, or how
you would see this next year? Would even care about how you feel now,
knowing what you did then?
Why are you certain you have to respond to this situation the way you
have? Is it because of some component or it? Could it turn out to have
different consequences than you anticipated? Are you sure there couldn't
be other important factors affecting ti that you haven't considered yet?
The liberation occurs just in the asking of these sorts of questions. No

matter what the answers turn out to be, you have taken charge of the
situations and can move on to more empowered feelings.
The transmutation of energy
It happens to everyone. No matter how proper you've been, no matter how

careful of their feelings, someone comes along and dumps their problems
on you either by a burst of anger you didn't deserve, or by hurting or
offending you, or by ignoring you unfairly, keeping you waiting when you
really were in a hurry, etc. You did nothing to provoke them. It all seems
so wrong.
Their negativity probably wasn't even aimed at you. You just happened to
have been there at the wrong time. You were not their target. You are the
accidental victim of their own bad feelings.
But no matter, it makes you feel bad. You may not be able even to respond
to the person who got you into this state. But your body goes into a 'fight

71
or flight' response mode anyway Physically, you're ready to lash out or run
away. But you can't. So you're left with an activation of your body's
defense mechanisms which, if not dealt with, will be just useless stress for
your body
It is at this point that people reach for their favorite drug in an attempt to
change the way they feel. But there is much better way to deal with this all
too common situation. You can take the emotion you are feeling, and use it
in a way that will change the way you feel, without striking out at someone
or holding it within you.
What is suggested here is an unobtrusive exercise, such as repeatedly

tightening and releasing a muscle group you want to strengthen, using up
whatever negative energy you feel until you no can no longer feel it.
Such tightening and releasing of muscles is effective in toning and

strengthening them and will use up that energy. Muscle groups such as the
stomach muscles, thighs, calves, chest, supper and lower arms can be
exercised unobtrusively in this way. It is important that the exercise be
unobtrusive so that you can immediately apply this technique even in social
situations when the occasion arises.
So, for example, someone snaps at me. Instead of snapping back at them,
or holding in my resentment, I realize that if I did not provoke their action,
I am not really their target their words were thrown at me but just
because I was there. I remember that I can use this energy for whatever I
want. Since I'm working on strengthening my stomach muscles. I do a few
contract/release cycles until the feeling of being abused goes away.
Afterward I feel clean and empty, open to whatever I have to deal with
next.
I've stopped the pattern of negativity in my environment; I've done some

useful exercises for my body which were paid for by the person who
irritated me; I've put myself in a position of control instead of adopting a
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passive attitude. Now I can forget about it. All I'm left with is some
exercised muscles (which is a good thing).
This is one of the most valuable techniques in this book, even tho' it
does not deal directly with the creation of positive states of mind.
Not getting into negatively altered states is very liberating.
Reducing the load of negativity carried within, or at least not adding
to it, changes the way life feels. It's such a relief not to anticipate
that every day will throw up something that will put me down or
make me feel bad. It's a form of mental security.

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Time distortion
Changes of consciousness will often bring with them changes to the way
we experience time, and such changes are frequently used as a criterion of
whether your awareness has changed. Conversely, changing the way we
experience time can be sufficient to change our consciousness.
Of course, here we are not talking about physical time, a dimension of the
physical world. We are focusing on subjective time, which is a complex
and multi-faceted way we represent physical time to ourselves. Such a
representation is as much the product of consciousness as it is of the
external world.
How we tell the time
Our sense of time is a product of both subjective factors and of our use of
external instruments that represent time spatially or numerically.
We observe clocks and the passage of regular events, such as the

alternation of day and night or the even the flow of our own breath. We
also observe sequences of events and map these onto these devices and
regular sequences. This constitutes our 'observation' of time. Implicit in
these observations is our theories about time, such as that it flows in a
universal uniform linear fashion from past to future or that it always
progresses in the same direction. We believe this is how it really is but in
fact, in physics, both Relativity and Quantum theories take a different view
of time. Our assumptions about time may only be useful approximations to
what is physically real.
But there's more than sequence involved here. Our experience of time
includes our position in it, our orientation to it, our sense of its flow, the
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degree to which we are aware of time at all, the granularity of our sense of
time as well as how it related to external measuring devices.
In addition, our experience of time involves our dominant mental
operation. Are we mostly intuitive, sensory emotional or rational in the
way we live? Each of these dominant mental operations has its own
characteristic temporal orientation. Intuitive persons will focus on the
future, as that is where they see the possibilities that are important to them.
Emotional people will be concerned with the past, the source of those
feelings through which they interpret life. People whose dominant mental
activity is what they can experience with the senses will be oriented to the
present. Rational persons, whose favored way of seeing experience is
thought, tend to experience things within a time line that extends from the
past, through the present and into the future.
Each way of approaching experience is valid and useful, and each gives a
different emphasis to the way we can experience time.
Obviously, there's a lot of things that we can change here.
Remaking time
We can readily alter our perception of the granularity of time. This is the
measure of how large a piece of time we consider a unit. Do we focus on a
minute or on an hour?
A powerful way to become aware of how the granularity of time affects our
day-to-day perception can come from the all too common experience of
waiting in line. Imagine yourself in a traffic jam. If your 'unit' of time is
the movement of each car through the intersection, the process can seem
interminable. But if your 'chunk' is the time it takes for you to get through
the whole line of traffic between you and the intersection, it will seem that
you're through it right away.

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This little trick has saved me hours of frustration, even it it didn't save me
hours of time. But the purpose was to change my perception of time, when
I couldn't change the actual route I had to take.
Another way to change your perception of time is by altering your

dominant mental process to another one you use less readily. If you
experience the world mostly through the emotional values that are served
or frustrated in experience, you can focus on what is possible. Then you
will be forced to focus on the future and this will change how time feels to
you.
Going into a different brain state (see the next chapter on mind machines)
can powerfully alter the perception of the passage of time. In particular, in
alpha and theta states the passage of time will have a more relaxed feeling.
In theta states, it is as if time is a property of the objects of experience,

rather than those experiences being within a time that is like a container of
things. In theta, each experience provides its own time to you. Time
doesn't seem to a quantity that can be used up by this or that; it is this or
that experience that provides the time to you so that it can emerge in your
consciousness. It isn't necessary to rush; each thing supports its own
justification and time for being.
Another way to distort time involves the use of hypnosis. It depends the
fact that our brain is many times faster than anything that causes our
experiences - that is, even a fast moving object still gives us an experience
in real time, while our brain can imagine long sequences of such
experiences in a very short time. For example, it is possible to relive a
movie in full detail, which seem as if it takes several hours to view, in a
few seconds.
Note that such expansion of time only deals with material that has already

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been encountered. It is not a matter of going through normal life at such
accelerated speed. While our visual imagination can go a very very fast
rates, our imagination of bodily senses dealing with feeling and motion
simply would not keep up. Such feelings by their very nature persist in a
way that images do not.
The technique is to go into a trance and to see yourself performing some

activity that can be quantified something that can be counted. Make a
note of what number you reach. Repeat the act of going into trance for the
same length of external time and performing that same activity. As you
perform this, you will notice that the number you reach will steadily climb,
even though the duration of your trances will remain the same. This will
convince you that you can speed time up subjectively.
Now program yourself to have a very long time to perform the countable
activity and and that you will be able to comfortably complete many many
instances of that in the time you are going to give yourself. This time you
will find that that you are able to vastly increase the count of things you
can get done.
At this point, you are ready to enter trances and practice what you have
learned, or review moments that are particularly rewarding and supportive.
You will be able to experience hundreds or even thousands of repetitions in
the space of a few minutes while in trance. If review can help with the
subject you've chosen, you will find that it is as if you had practiced that
subject for weeks at the speed of normal consciousness, except that you
only needed to devote a few minutes while in trance to achieve this effect.
Another distortion of time which relies on sensory experience uses the

sense of hearing and combines the sense of pleasure with it to produce a
relaxed concentrated awareness. For example, if you have worked very
hard physically and then were able to rest and listen to music, especially
music whose internal beauty and richness reward you, the pleasure in your
relaxed body combined with intently focusing on beautiful music will slow
time down in a way that is quite magical.
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Once more, the formula here is deep muscular relaxation combined with
focused attention on hearing music.
It doesn't seem to work as well for arts other than music because they do
not take time the way music does. It also doesn't seem to work for
temporal arts such as watching a movie of a play because such arts seem to
embed their own construction of time that produces a different experience.
Another powerful distortion of time is to change how you represent it

internally. This is the phenomenon known as the time-line. We have a
tendency to organize events in the past, present and future spatially,
imagining event in the past in one place, and events in the future in a
different place.
Some people represent time as a line that crosses in front of them from left
to right. Others represent time as a line going from behind them (the past)
to the pace in front of them (the future). They feel immersed in time and
always about to confront what the future brings.
Just shifting from one pattern to the other will change your sense of time.
But you can do more with this pattern.
For example, if you imagine the time-line as it stretches out into the future
as sloping gently downward, you will see your future as being easy and
relaxed, as opposed to representing your time-line as sloping upwards into
the future (a harder uphill climb). Or you can imagine your future time-
line as having many paths, thus opening yourself to many possibilities
rather than just one. You can see it as short, meaning that future events
will be crowded on it, or stretched out, giving you the sense of having
adequate time to deal with what comes.
While these visualizations are purely subjective exercises, they will change
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your actual sense of time and your style of consciousness as a result.

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Mind machines
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you or anyone else who would use these devices
is subject to any form of seizures, epilepsy, or visual photo-sensitivity,
using a pacemaker, suffering cardiac arrhythmia or other heart
disorders, or is currently taking stimulants, tranquillizers, or
psychotropic medications, DO NOT USE THESE MACHINES. While
using such machines, if you feel uncomfortable or bothered by the
flashing lights, stop your session.
Mind Machines are devices that provide controlled stimulation to the body
in the form of regular pulses of light, sound and possibly microvolts of
electrical energy. These stimuli are in various forms of extended rhythmic
patterns. When the body experiences these controlled stimuli, it reacts by
entraining itself to those rhythms. This affects the mode in which the brain
works and therefore the quality of consciousness that you enjoy. Mind
machines are very precise and powerful means of altering consciousness.
The experience is rather odd at first. You put on a pair of specially wired
opaque goggles and earphones. The program starts and you close your
eyes. But even though your eyes are closed you begin to see a kind of light
show. At the same time there is a regular beeping sound from the
earphones.
Soon you notice that the light show is changing and you follow these
changes. After a few minutes you may notice that you feel different. Its a
pleasant change, but hard to describe. Depending on the program, you may
be more tranquil, or more alert. All of this continues until the session
ends. Typically sessions go on for periods ranging from ten minutes (rather
short) to two hours (somewhat long). I prefer sessions that last about half
an hour but have used a wide range of times in my own work with mind
machines.

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Depending on the kind of session, different ideas may come into your
mind. Some of these might be long forgotten thoughts; others are wild
fantasies. Not quite like dreams, they arent like daydreams either. You
can think clearly, but the style of your thought will seem to be changed.
After trying alpha and beta sessions, you might want to try a theta and delta
session. Theta sessions are more imaginative whereas delta sessions can
lead either to sleep or to a profound thoughtless, calm clarity. This clarity
might not be enlightenment, but certainly is quite delightful.
These kinds of sessions can be accurately programmed sequenced and

combined for very specific effects.
Brain waves
The brain is an organ that exhibits rhythmic electrical patterns. These

patterns can be detected by electrodes that are attached to your scalp which
send these patterns to a machine called an electroencephalograph. This
machine can then transcribe these rhythms into mechanical impulses
allowing them to be recorded. The graphic record looks like waves of
different frequencies and amplitude.
Due the complexity of the brain, you are typically enjoying many different
frequencies of brain wave at once. Moreover, your brain will shift from
one pattern to another rapidly. As a result, the patterns your brain are
somewhat complex and may even appear to be chaotic.
Beta
Beta waves are the waves most common in normal waking consciousness.
They exhibit frequencies between 12 and 20 cycles per second. (Hertz is

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the unity of frequency here. One cycle per second is called a wave with a
frequency of 1 Hertz. 4 cycles a second would be a frequency of 4 Hertz.)
Beta waves are between 12 and 20 Hertz.
Alpha
Whenever you relax, your brain shifts into the alpha class of brain waves.
These are between 8 and 12 Hertz. You feel calm, and receptive. Your
senses may seem sharper.
Alpha brain waves are often exhibited by experienced meditators as they

enter into meditative states.
Theta
When you're drifting off to sleep, or just waking up, or having a vivid
daydream or actually dreaming during sleep, your brain will show a theta
wave pattern. At times like these logic and proportion seem to fall away
and ideas blend together in novel and amazing ways. Salvador Dali and
Pablo Picasso were wonderful at illustrating some of the possibilities of
this kind of consciousness. So were the composers Richard Wagner and
Igor Stravinsky. Theta waves are between 4 and 8 Hertz. You can
visualize well, and you will be more suggestible and more creative in this
state.
Delta
As you go into a deep dreamless sleep, your brain produces delta brain
waves. These waves are between .5 and 4 Hertz. These low brainwaves
tend to be the largest of all brainwaves in amplitude.

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As I mentioned earlier, you neednt be sleeping during delta stimulation.
However, if you are awake your mind will definitely be calmer and clearer.
There can be a sense of unity or belonging.
Entrainment
Entrainment is the phenomenon whereby one object that is exposed to the

periodic motions of another object begins to exhibit these motions itself.
For example, when two bells are placed in proximity to each other, and one
bell is struck so that it begins to ring, the other bell will also begin to ring.
The rhythms of the brain we have been discussing are similar. When the
brain is exposed to stimulation at a frequency in the range to which the
brain can respond, the brain will tend to entrain itself to that frequency.
For example, if the eyes are exposed to a light that flashes 10 times a
second, the brain will have a tendency to develop alpha brain waves
(starting in the visual cortex) at about the same frequency. This is called
the Frequency Following Response (FFR) of the brain.
Simultaneous exposure to sounds that cycle on and off at the same 10 times
per second frequency will cause the entrainment to occur even more
rapidly.
Since it is well known that experienced meditators show alpha rhythms

while they were meditating, this means that using controlled stimulation it
is possible to replicate the same brain waves observed in experienced
meditators. Subjectively, this is felt as a process of becoming more calm
and relaxed.
This also works for levels of stimulation beyond alpha. If you experience

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both light and sound pulses in the delta range (between one to four Hertz)
you will have a strong tendency to go to sleep or to enter an extremely
tranquil conscious state. Theta stimulation will enhance your ability to go
on imaginative journeys and to absorb any verbal material that is presented.
This is a powerful discovery. Since we can alter our mental states and
inner mood via simple external stimulation, we have a powerful, non-
invasive, reliable means of changing our state.
Even better, because the frequency of light and sound can be easily
controlled through instrumentation, the stimuli inducing change of state
can be replicated and precisely controlled. This means that we gain close
control of the state that is induced. We can repeat rather exactly the
stimulus that caused a kind of reverie or the degree of relaxation we
enjoyed. It is then possible to rapidly enter (or re-enter) that desired state.
While the Frequency Following Response is not the only thing operative
here, nevertheless, the experience it induces in one session will be anchored
to that specific pattern of stimulation and have a tendency to be re-evoked
when that specific kind of stimulation is experienced again.
We can use instrumentation to produce complex stimuli to achieve specific

mental states, or program how the stimuli are to be sequenced over time so
that it is possible to design not merely states but also develop the
experience in specific directions. Combined with the huge variety of
controllable aspects of stimulation, mind machines become a highly
precise, reliable and powerful way of altering consciousness.
In short, mind machines can bring the experience of getting high to a new
level unmatched by any other technology.

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Kinds of machines
There is a wide range of mind machines now available on the market,

ranging through a wide spectrum of features and programmability. Some
are simple appliances with only a dozen or so options from which to select.
Others come with 30 to 100 programs pre-installed, the ability to
automatically write new programs and programming languages for those
who want to completely control the experience.
Naturally, as there are more features available, the price of the unit goes up.
The price range is typically between $100 US for simple models and $700
US for top of the line models with an amazing collection of features.
You can have powerful experiences with even the simplest models.
Stimuli
Mind machines currently deliver three main kinds of stimulation: sound,

light and, on the more advanced models, micro-volt electric pulses. These
can be used alone or in various combinations as fits the requirements of the
user.
Sound is perhaps the most fundamental of these inputs and can be used to
induce very subtle types of stimulation. Individual tones can be given,
turning on and off at the desired frequency. Or it is possible to deliver
continuous tones to both ears which differ so that the beats between their
frequencies produces the desired frequency in the mind of the user. This is
called binaural stimulation. A powerful variant of this is to use two sets
of tones to produce two generated frequencies. This allows for complex
states to be evoked the most famous of which is the body asleep-mind
awake condition that is supposed to allow out-of-body-experiences to
occur.

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It has been found that using different pitches of sound can induce different
kinds of experiences. Lower pitches tend to have a physiological effect and
produce changes in bodily feeling, whereas higher pitches tend to act on
mental and intuitive abilities and produce changes in how you think and
perform higher mental functions. So the user can choose to excite his mind
while tranquilizing the body by listening to a beta frequency at a high pitch
while also listening to a delta frequency at a low pitch. Or the user can
vary the pitch while maintaining a given frequency so that he can tune his
whole body to the same level of stimulation. Sleep induction programs use
this technique.
While sound is usually experienced through some device like headphones,

it is possible to use speakers to allow the stimulation to be experienced by
everyone in a room. Alpha rhythm sounds have been broadcast in police
stations and medical waiting rooms to produce a calmer atmosphere for all
involved.
Some of the original work with this kind of stimulation was done with light
sources. In the early 40s it was found that having subjects look at a strobe
light delivered at 10 hertz had a tranquilizing and relaxing effect. Of
course, the subjects were being entrained into an alpha wave state.
Just as sound has pitch, so light has color. Varying the color of the light
used by the subject can vary the way in a person will respond. A
combination of red and green electrodes in the goggles seem to deliver a
very colorful inner experience.
An interesting kind of stimulation is based on receiving microvolt pulses of

electricity, usually through electrodes placed on the earlobes. This is one
of the more powerful techniques of entrainment. The electrical pulses
should be of such low amplitude that you cannot feel them.

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ECS (electro-cortical stimulation) tends to produce stronger feelings and
also to create feeling of contentment or pleasure. Many drug users find this
is a good substitute for the feelings they seek when they are enjoying their
drug of choice. Interestingly, ECS also seems to suppress feeling of
withdrawal when the subject has just stopped taking one of the addicting
drugs, such as an opiate, barbiturate, amphetamine or cocaine-derivative.
This has been observed in both laboratory animals and with human users.
Because ECS does not involve the ears or eyes, it is possible to receive this
kind of stimulation while doing other things, such as reading, or while
performing sedentary tasks.
ECS stimulation tends to have more persistent after-effects than just light
and sound stimulation.
Phase and kind of stimulation

All of the stimulation sources mentioned above have two points of entry
into the body. Both eyes may be stimulated together or each stimulated
separately. Similarly for sounds and micro electric pulses which are
delivered through the ear.
When pulses are delivered together, they are said to be in phase. When
they are delivered alternately, they are said to be out of phase. These
produced different experiences for the user. In general, in-phase
stimulation entrains more rapidly.
Stimuli may be direct or derivative for example, short beeps heard at a

given frequency constitute direct stimulation at that frequency. But if the
stimulation is delivered at one frequency to one ear and at a slightly
varying frequency to the other ear, the brain will entrain to the difference of
the frequencies. This is derivative or binaural stimulation.
Dual binaural beats allow for some amazing mental states to be created that
far surpass any drug phenomena in sophistication. For example, a
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frequency of 5 Hz with a tone of 128 Hz combined with a 15 Hz frequency
with a tone of 512 Hz creates what can only feebly described as an alert
calm ecstasy. And there are hundreds of different combinations more that
may be explored here.
Programming
Thus far we have only described single, static states which can be produced
by mind machines. But the instruments can also be programmed to deliver
sequences of states, which greatly extends their power.
Usually, when a user begins to use a mind machine they will be in an alpha
or beta state, and if the target state is very different, it takes a while for
entrainment to happen, or for the mind to transition from its original brain
state to the desired one. One way to help the mind move smoothly from a
starting state to the desired state is to entrain at the state the user is
probably in when he begins to use the machine and them to ramp through
intermediate states to the desired state. Because the entrainment that
occurs at the beginning of the ramp is very close to the users current state,
it will happen swiftly and easily. Then by altering the delivered
frequencies to the desired state the user is gently lead to have the desired
experience.
Once it became obvious that this was possible, designers then began
building specific transitions into mind machine programs to achieve
various purposes. Programs for morning awakening, or having an
afternoon rest or for optimal learning were soon developed.
Typically any mind machine on the market will have at least a dozen of
these programs and some have up to 100 programs installed. In addition,
middle to high-end machines give the user the ability to develop programs
of their own. Needless to say, this opens up a huge domain for
explorations and self-configuration that expands the use of these machines

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virtually without limit.
Ramps
Ramps are simplest programming sequence. Suppose your target

frequency is a theta frequency of 5.5 Hz. Since users are likely to be in a
state between 12 and 15Hz when they put on their equipment, you might
first entrain them to a frequency of 13 Hz. That's easy, because they are
probably already there. Then you lower it to 12 Hz, 11 Hz, etc., pausing at
each stop to allow the user to entrain to the lower frequency. Since a small
change is easier to adjust to than a large change, the user will easily follow
the stimulation down to the target level.
Ramp and return
After the period you wish to stay at the target level, it is usually good to
gradually ramp up to a good exit frequency close to normal consciousness.
The pattern of ramp, entrained state and return ramp is a classic form of
Mind Machine programming.
Sweeps
Another pattern is to slowly sweep across a range of frequencies that span

and even exceed the range you wish to focus on. This is powerful because
in entraining to the sweeping frequencies, the mind loses its ties to normal
awareness. Sometimes several sweeps at the beginning of a program will
totally detach the user from the expectations of normal consciousness.

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Alternation
The classic wake up program involves alternating frequencies between

10 and 18 Hz, or alternating alpha and beta stimulation. The best programs
of this type will start with longer periods of alpha stimulation at the
beginning gradually altering to longer periods of beta stimulation at the
end. The effect is to gradually entrain the brain from a relaxed state to an
alert state.
Alternation is a way to combine two kinds of stimulation on even the

simplest machines.
Tonal ranges
The pitch of the sound being used will cause the experience to be physical
or emotional or mental depending on the octave being used. A low octave
will cause the effects associated with its frequency to appear in a physical
form. Delta at a low pitch will cause physical rest while beta at a low pitch
will cause physical agitation. On the other hand delta stimulation at a high
pitch will cause a kind of mental pause or still clarity (delightful), while
high beta stimulation will cause mental agitation and nervousness similar to
drinking a lot of coffee.

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Physical techniques
The origins of physical efforts to alter consciousness is, like the use of
breathing techniques, shrouded in the mists of prehistory. Dance, Martial
Arts, Yoga and self-deprivation have all be used to change the way we
feel.
For the present purpose, I only wish to comment on some simple and as
yet, relatively unknown techniques that work well to alter consciousness.
Face
Curiously, the face has been ignored by fields such as NeuroLinguisitic

programming while they concentrated on eye movements, tonality and
posture to elicit their cues about inner processes. Yet the face not only
expresses our awareness, it can help create and anchor it as well.
Lips
The lips are a powerful tool both for expressing and creating
consciousness. (We all learned this as children.) In particular, the degree of
tension or relaxation of the lips seem to both reflect and control the extent
to which we are allowing ourselves to either enjoy or resist experience.
It's worth noting that profoundly relaxing the lips is one of the best ways to
induce a state of awareness similar to that induced by the euphoriant drug
GHB (gamma hydroxybutyric acid).
In addition the sensitivity of the lips is a factor in experience. Allowing the

lips to feel increases your general receptivity the world around you. That
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makes sense considering the very large number of afferent nerves that end
in the mouth and lips.
The tongue
An easy way to enter into a relaxed meditative state is to relax the tongue.
Much of our thinking is involves internal verbalization which uses sub-
vocal micro-motions of the tongue muscles. Relaxing the tongue helps shut
down the process of inner verbalization which supports symbolic, beta-
wave consciousness.
The eyes
The eyes, and especially the muscles around the eyes are a powerful
creator/determiner of consciousness.
Anyone who has lived in those countries where women veil their faces will
know just how expressive the eyes can be. The young women there,
allowed no other means of showing their feelings in public, are mistresses
of this art. But we all have it. In the chapter on Sukhabhati the first step in
inducing that change of awareness is to smile only with the eyes. If you
start with the lips, it is less likely to induce the happy feeling being sought.
How to smile with the eyes alone? Think that you are looking at something
you love and your eyes will begin to smile. It feels as if they are shining.
Now just for contrast, think of some experience of harsh denial you have
undergone. And as you do this, sense how your eyes change. That will
show you how the eyes express awareness.
Now reverse the process. Begin to smile with your eyes without any
particular thought in mind. You will notice that your mind selects pleasant

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experiences as if seeking out reasons why the smile would be
appropriate. As you maintain this smiling with the eyes your mood will
progressively improve.
The hand
The hand is also expressive of and determinative of awareness. People are

more aware of how the hand expresses awareness than they are how how it
can shape our consciousness. We relax or tighten our grip; touch things
softly or strike them, caress or control.
Because we use our hands with such a variety of movements and with
relative speed, we may not identify the relationships of our hands to our
awareness usually we're focusing on our hand's relationship with the
objects with which they interact. But clearly these interactions are related
to our awareness and mood.
What would it mean if someone clenched their fist as they expressed

affection? There's obviously some internal incongruence here.
Brain Gym
'Brain gym' is a set of simple movements to help the body enter states
where the ability to learn is enhanced. Basically they are designed to
energize the communication between the various lobes and hemispheres of
the brain. They should be done before any session where you will be
absorbing new information, or when you are experiencing a block in
performance or awareness.
While these exercises were developed to allow challenged people unlock

their learning potential, they'll work for you as well and should be regularly

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used to enhance your capability to learn and visualize.
Typically you only do each exercise for 2 to 5 minutes. Certain exercises

have an immediately noticeable physical effect and you can use this effect
as a guide for how long the exercise should be performed.
Lazy 8's
Hold your hand out in front of you and extend the thumb, Now draw a large
8 on its side (the infinity symbol) slowly in the air. As you do this continue
to focus on your thumb without moving your head. Of course this means
you have to follow it by moving your eyes, not by moving your head!
Brain buttons
Place your left hand on your navel and rub under your collarbone with your
right hand. Brain buttons stimulate the flow of blood to the brain and
gently wakes up the brain for effective sensory attention.
Cross crawling
Slowly walk in place, touching the knee of each leg with the opposite hand
as you raise the knee. This activates the whole brain, increasing
communication between the hemispheres. It is useful to do this when you
get stuck.
Hook-ups
Cross your feet and cross your rotated arms and clasp your hands, then
bring them up to your chest while holding them together. At the same
time, gently touch your tongue to the upper palette right behind your teeth.
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Maintain this for between 2 and 5 minutes.
Hook-ups have a calming effect, bringing the body out of emotional states
and allowing more rational, "cool" behavior to emerge. It is a powerful
stress buster. It can be used to change your state when you are excited or
disturbed and you want to change that.
The elephant
Starting with your left side, place your left ear on your left shoulder close
enough to hold a piece of paper. Then bend over to the left from your waist
without moving your hips of feet. Trace a lazy eight in the middle of your
visual field. This should be done for two or three minutes on each side.
This exercise integrates the whole body while improving vision, hearing
and the ability to sustain attention.
Thinking cap
Place your fingers on each ear and slowly uncurl the edge of the ear from
front to back. The Thinking Cap wakes up the whole hearing mechanism
and improves memory.
Energy Yawn
Massage both sides of the face around the temporal-mandibular joint while
slowly yawning. The energy yawn improves verbalization and
communication skills.
Calf pumps

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Place one foot about 12 inches behind the other. The heel of the back foot
should be raised. take a deep breath and as you exhale bed the front knee
and lower the heel of the back leg to the floor. As you inhale straighten up.
Calf pumps release stress and improves the ability to communicate. This
exercise is also great when you have been driving a long distance and need
to have a brief "unwinding" before you continue.
The energizer
This is done sitting at a desk. Place both hands on the desk face down.
Inhale and as you exhale, bend your neck forward and drop your head until
your chin touches your chest. As you inhale, bring the head up until the
back is slightly arched. Repeat several times. This should be done every
fifteen minutes or so if you are working at a computer. The Energizer re-
energizes the mind and helps focus attention.
Autogenic training
Autogenic training is a technique for training yourself to enter and leave

into a deeply relaxed state at will. It is very systematic in its approach to
this, relying on the practice of a specific set of exercises that will result in
developing a profoundly relaxed state.
It reduces stress to a point that is competitive with the major euphoriant

drugs. The following are the techniques involved in autogenic training.
The first two are used at the beginning and end of every training session.
Begin with a body scan

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Before you begin an autogenic training session, it is recommended that you
scan your whole body. Begin by focusing your awareness on your feet,
then move your consciousness up your legs until to reach the pelvis. Now
move your awareness over your body up to the neck. Next, scan your
arms. And finally become aware of your head.
The purpose of this is to focus your mind on feeling your body, and also to
become aware of what's happening in it.
Always end by 'canceling'
After performing a set of the exercises, it is important to cancel the shift

into the relaxed parasympathetic state the training induces. The whole
point of the training system is to master the shift into relaxation and back.
Canceling is the movement back to normal alertness.
To cancel, clench your fist and then straighten your arms. The bend your
elbows, bringing your hands up and down two or three times. Finally take
a deep breath and as you let it out open your eyes.
This simple procedure will become a tool for re-entering normal alert,
competent consciousness.
The heaviness exercise
Now that you know how to begin and end a training session, the first
relaxation exercise is the limb heaviness exercise.
On the first day, just repeat to yourself 3 times,

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My right (left) arm is heavy.
Selecting that arm which is the dominant arm. Then cancel. Repeat this
sequence three times.
So the complete procedure in this introductory session involves these steps:
body scan
heaviness exercise
canceling
heaviness exercise
canceling
heaviness exercise
canceling
It is important to understand that that you are not making this heaviness
happen, you are just repeating the suggestions verbatim and passively
observing what may happen. It is also important to know that there is no
hurry to achieve success the urge to attain success will be counter-
productive and actually reintroduce muscular tensions.
On days 2-4, repeat the following sequence to yourself.
My right arm is heavy.

My left arm is heavy.
And then cancel. Repeat this whole sequence 3 times per session.
On days 5-7, this is the sequence to use:

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My left arm is heavy.
My right leg is heavy.
My left leg is heavy.
And then cancel. Repeat this whole sequence 3 times per session.
Do three or more sessions per day, usually at morning, midday and night.
After each session, it is useful to note any experiences in a diary.
Now add the neck and shoulders to the practice.
On days 8-14 use this sequence of suggestions:

My arms and legs are heavy. (repeat 3 times)
My neck and shoulders are heavy. (repeat 3 times)
I am at peace. (repeat 3 times)
And then cancel. Repeat the sequence 3 times per session.
The warmth exercise
Here we begin to integrate the suggestion of warmth into the exercise. This
will happen in the third week of your training.

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On days 1-3 of this week (the 3rd week) use these suggestions following a
scan of your body.

My right arm is warm. (repeat 3 times)
My left arm is warm. (repeat 3 times)
My arms are warm. (repeat 3 times)

As always you should do three or more sessions per day.
On days 4-7, you add the suggestion that your legs are warm.

My right leg is warm. (repeat 3 times)
My left leg is warm. (repeat 3 times)
My legs are warm. (repeat 3 times)
My arms and legs are warm. (repeat 3 times)

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Calm and regular heartbeat
During the fourth week, add the suggestion that your heart beat is calm and
regular.

My heartbeat is calm and regular. [repeat 3 times)

It breathes me
During the fifth week, you add a suggestion about breathing, in a passive
sense. The new suggestion is It breathes me.
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It breathes me. (repeat 3 times)

Abdominal warmth
In week six, you add the suggestion of abdominal warmth. The script
becomes

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My solar plexus is warm. (repeat 3 times)

Cool forehead
During the seventh week, you add the suggestion that your forehead is cool
and clear.

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My forehead is cool and clear. (repeat 3 times)

Confidence
In the eighth week, you being to add suggestions about your all over state,
such as I am calm and confident. So now the script is

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My forehead is cool and clear. (repeat 3 times)
I am calm and confident. (repeat 3 times)

Advanced autogenic training
At this point you are skilled in self-inducing a trance and both entering and
leaving a very relaxed state of being at will. Now you are ready to add
other useful suggestions to your script depending upon your own needs and
desires.
You have built a capacity to direct your mind and body powerfully. It is
important to make your suggestions positive and beneficial.
You should be careful about doing this, as you are speaking directly to the
subconscious mind and it will take things very literally. One autogenic
trainer reported that some male students decided to do the warmth exercise
on their sexual organs, and their sperm production decreased dramatically.
After they abandoned this suggestion, however, their sperm count returned
to normal.
Stillness
Don't move!
This is probably the easiest way to alter your consciousness.

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The desire to move periodically is part of the body's homeostatic
maintenance system. In the short run, this is just to keep your awareness
within certain limits. (There is a long terms purposes which is to allow
circulation to proceed to parts of the body which my be poorly served by
your present position. - but we are not talking about remaining immobile
for more than two hours.)
Here the trick is assume any comfortable posture and just keep it until the
urge to adjust your position arises. Simply ignore that urge and maintain
your position. As you let yourself remain immobile for a period beyond
what your body is used to, you will begin to alter your state of awareness.
Usually the effect is to induce a kind of waking reverie, a vivid kind of
daydream. Sit or lie still, and let your mind fly.

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Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
This is too much work! I want something that is as easy as

taking a drug.
When you get high from a drug, you must first obtain it, find a place
where you can take it safely, learn how to take it efficiently, spend
time taking it, deal with any physical side effects that you don't
want, and then wait for the drug to take effect, hoping that you got
the dosage just right.
Actually, in the long run, this is much easier and quicker than taking
a drug. You can learn some of these techniques in the time it would
take to smoke a half dozen joints. And then you have them at your
disposal freely, instantly and forever. You'll never have to wait for
privacy to get high. You'll never have to invest time in acquiring
your drug.
The economic/cost advantages are all of the side of getting high

without drugs.
These techniques seem to work best in solitude, I need

something that works in a social situation.
These techniques are certainly learned in solitude, but, with the

exception of mind-machines, Autogenic sessions and physical immobility,
I have used them all in social situations, even in crowd situations.
What you need to do is practice them when you can focus on them and
rehearse them to the desired degree of intensity. Once you get to
that point, you need to establish an anchor or trigger. This is a
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physical gesture that you only use for the purpose of entering into
the states you have developed.
It could be doing a certain kind of smile, or touching your ear lobe

in a certain way or place. You could also use your voice to accomplish
this, saying a word in a certain tonality that is only used for
getting into a special kind of space.
The trick is to get into your desired state and then at the point
where it is close to its most intense and then do the special
behavior. Do this frequently to create a habitual association for
yourself. I find it often take a couple of dozen practices to really
hard-wire such a trigger in, but then it works like clockwork.
The more unique the gesture, even the more silly, the better you will
learn the association. But choose things you can do without being
noticed by others.
I've done these techniques at concerts, at social gatherings, in

corporate office settings, on the street, in stores (sometimes to pass
the time while my partner shops!), and pretty much anywhere I please.
once I've got them working - up to the right intensity - its great fun
doing them. I used to rent a house from a Mountie - one of Canada's
federal cops, and I loved to get into a virtual cannabis high whenever
he came around to pick up the rent. I'd wait till he was there before
I started. And he would inevitably get a contact high while we
chatted. We became pretty good friends!
How do I make these experiences last longer?
This was perhaps my greatest challenge with these techniques. Now

I have a layered method that works for me.
You'll need to have developed at least one of the techniques in the

book to the point where you can enter an altered state readily.
Hopefully it will be an altered state that you like. For the purpose
of answering this question I'm going to work with the smiling meditation.
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(Sukhabhati).
You also need to identify some things which are always true for you.
For this purpose I have selected (1) my body always has a sensation
of weight (2) I am always breathing and (3) I am always - to some
degree - awake when I want to do these techniques.
So the first thing I do is I associate one of these three feelings

with my ability to do the smiling meditation - to put myself into a
happy state. So now when I feel the weight of my feet on the floor,
or of my body in the chair, I think of the happiness I enjoy with the
smiling mediation.
So the first layer is the happiness of the mediation. The second layer
are these constant feelings and my associating them with the first
feeling.
The third layer is that when I try to remember what they high felt
like, I can always do that.
Think of something you like, but don't have. Concentrate on it so

that you build up a vivid picture of it. See its size, its shape, its
color, everything you like about it. Now think of something else.
After a while see if you can still think of that thing. And of course
you can.
In the same way you can always recover your high, whenever you look to
see if you are high - because you're being high is the very thing to
which you're turning your mind. So whenever you need to check on
whether you are still high, you are!
The fourth layer is a trigger to start the whole thing off. I wrote
about that is answer to the previous question.
Now this sounds a lot more complicated than it really is. In practice
it flows rather well. I get into a state I like and I'm constantly
being sustained in it, by things that are always true of my waking

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life. Even when I get absorbed in something else for a moment, I
still want to be in my happy or calm or excited state. And when I
turn my mind to that, there I am.
But I am free to leave the state if I want to, or whenever I need to.
I have sustained highs this way for many hours!
Just like any practice it takes repetition to build up the associations

where they work for you habitually.
Presence
How do I know I'm doing Presence correctly?
When you're doing Presence correctly, you won't be concerned with that
issue! You'll just be aware of what's happening around you. There is
sometimes a "snapping out of it" feeling as you go back into your
normal everyday trance. When you look back at the moments when you
were aware in Presence mode, you will notice that you were unemotional
or simply happy.
I've experienced Presence and it's really cool, but I don't feel
high like I do on pot.
What are you looking for to prove to yourself that you do feel high?
IF you are looking for a replication of a particular drug experience,
then perhaps you should look at the technique "Altered Kinesthetic
States". That is closer to the states of consciousness induced by
drugs you may have experienced in the past.
What is the definition of Presence?
Presence may be formally defined as a context free, assumption free

awareness of what is going on the present. It is an awareness that
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may described without words related to necessity or possibility
or valuation.
When you find yourself saying, "This must be that" or "This ought to
be like this" then part of your awareness is not based in the present
but in some context or hope or memory. That is OK in itself, so long
as you don't let that context, hope or memory swallow you up because
you are holding on to them so vigorously you lose your connection to
the present.
Is Presence like being involved in same very fast action or

intense activity?
There is a similarity. Such activities require you to focus on what

is happening to you right now. In fact, this is part of their
attraction, they provide a relief from the concerns and anxieties of
normal consciousness. But you can't always indulge in extreme sports
or high-speed activities whenever you want to retreat into the
simplicity of the present.
Why did you put Presence first in the book?
Presence requires no special breathing or bodily expression or

equipment or situation. No one can tell you're doing Presence unless
they measure your brain waves or measure the electrical potential of
your skin. (You will show more alpha brain wave activity and a higher
galvanic skin response when doing Presence.) When you do Presence
properly, many of the other techniques may start up anyway, especially
the smiling breath.
Presence is the purest high of all, because it is your most natural

state of mind. It brings openness, relaxation, humor and delight.
It's always available to you. Open your Present.

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Smiling Breath
Who named this 'Sukhabhati'? And what does that mean?
Pandit Parakriyananda named it. I was told it means "good cleansing".
I don't feel happy now. Why should I make myself happy?
Do you want to feel happy, or do you want to continue feeling the way
you do? It's your choice.
You may feel that you don't have the right to feel happy or that
things have to be different for happiness to be correct or
justified. You may be looking for a raise, or to fall in love or to
have better health as something that will give you the right to feel
happy. And right now those things haven't happened. But even though
that may be true, why does that mean you can't be happy?
You yourself support the rules and criteria for happiness that work
for you. And you can change those rules whenever you want. (Or do
you also have rules about when you can change your own rules?)
Think about it as a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you do the smiling

breath and induce happiness in yourself, you will actually be
improving your chances for getting that raise, attracting that special
someone and even feeling better. When you're happy people think
you're a winner, and everybody loves a winner.
Happiness is powerful stuff!
How do I smile with my eyes?
Think of something you really like. That should start it.

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How do I make it stronger and last longer?
When you practice this when you are alone, make a really big smile.
And just when you're doing that imagine hearing a huge crowd cheering
you for every good thing you've ever done. (Trust me, Eyore, they'll
come to you.) As you imagine that sound, raise your head as if thing
were looking up.
The method for making this last longer was given in the general
section of this FAQ. To briefly repeat it, develop a positive state
and build an association with experiences that you always are having -
such as feeling your own weight, breathing or being awake. Realize
that when your attention shifts, you can always go back into this
state. And build a trigger for it when you want to start it.
Breathing
When is the best time to practice?
I prefer the early morning when I have just arisen. Another good time
is late morning, when you have digested breakfast and are still clear
headed. A third time is mid-evening, after supper has settled.
The most important thing is that it be a regular time, so that

breathing practice is just part of you daily schedule.
How soon should I advance to a longer breathing pattern?
Take your time. It's better to lengthen the session with a simple
breathing pattern you can easily do than to extend the length of each
breath by using a higher multiple of the basic pattern.

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How long should I practice?
Start with short sessions (5 to 10 minutes) and move to longer periods

as you need to spend more time. Choose a length of time that is
consistent with your practicing every day.
Which pattern should I start with?
This depends on what you want to accomplish. If you are normally

tense, and want to relax, start with a calming pattern (1:0:2:0). If
you are normally too laid back and want some energy in your life, start
with an arousing breath (2:0:1:0 or even 4:0:1:0). Do the arousing
pattern somewhat forcefully for the quickest results.
What should I look for in my practice of the patterns?
With breath patterns that are meant to stimulate you, you should be
able to feel the stimulation immediately. Similarly with calming
breaths, look for a the emergence of a more peaceful feeling. With
some of the other breathing patterns you should observe that you are
falling into a 'groove' in which keeping the pattern going seems like
the path of least resistance. You will get the sense of the breathing
process becoming one of 'effortlessly being breathed' rather than of
actively breathing. At this point you will start to feel the pleasure
of the pattern.
Hypnosis
How do I create good suggestions about getting high?
The first thing you need to do is to write out a detailed description

of the state you seek. It has to be one that works for you -
that really expresses the state you really want. You should make

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it as richly detailed as you can, the more numerous and explicit the
details, the better.
Now rewrite that description, making it all positive and present

tense. By positive I mean, instead of saying, for example, I don't
feel bothered by things, you would say, I feel peaceful and able to
focus. Instead of saying, I am beyond pain, you would say I feel
pleasure. You should be specific - I feel a pleasurable space in
my head and my stomach is relaxed an warm. Concentrate on what you
want to actually enjoy.
You should put it into all three 'persons' of speech - I feel warm;
you feel warm; Harold feels warm.
You should then put your present tense sensory descriptions into
dependent clause - I don't know yet how fully I will feel a pleasant
warmth in my belly or how soon I'll feel a delightful laziness.
Notice that the described state 'a pleasant warmth in my belly' is

also actively suggested 'feel a pleasant warmth in my belly'.
When your suggestions are in dependent clauses, you mind has to form
an image of what those clauses mean to understand the sentence. And
it's not something that I can reject - I don't know when I'm going to
feel stoned, do I? Anything that is well described is a command to
the unconscious.
Use language that suggests possibility - "I realize that if I feel

very lazy and comfortable, I'll come closer to all the other feelings I
seek."
Here the world "if" introduced what I want my mind to do

"feel very lazy and comfortable". It acts as a 'softener' making it
easier for me to contemplate the suggested description - "I'm not
saying "You feel relaxed". If someone said that to me it might
not be true and my rejection of it would tend to disrupt my focus.
But it's hard to object to someone saying that "if I feel relaxed",

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because while relaxation was suggested, it wasn't asserted. And what
isn't asserted, won't be denied.
Just one suggestion may not work very well. But when you put 50 or 100
suggestions in this form together, they will have an effect.
When you have compiled your suggestions this way, record them on a
tape which you can them listen to when you want to induce a high
state. As you record the tape, speak slowly and pleasantly in a tone
that you will enjoy listening to. (I found, being a man, that having
a woman read suggestions to me worked rather well. What was cool was
that she went into a trance while she was reading them!)
Advertising and politicians use this kind of language all the time to
lead us into the reality of motivation and desire that they want. I'm
just adapting it to our own purposes.
If you want to know more about the method I am using to construct

these suggestions, study Neurolinguistic Programming or Ericksonian
hypnosis.
Meditation
Do I have to have be initiated by a teacher?
A good meditation guide or teacher is a real blessing, but actually is

not required. The real initiation occurs when you begin to do it. A
teacher can structure your practice and provide support for the
practice. But only you yourself can do the practice of focusing your
mind, and that's where all the real learning occurs.
Remember that the people who started many of the traditions did not
themselves have teachers. They may have had some ideas about how to
begin their search from their culture or from other teachers but they
went ahead and discovered for themselves what worked for them. They

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were often alone, with no one to turn to as they sought the release or
insight that they later taught to others. (Nobody taught the Buddha
how to do Buddhist meditation.)
What are good subjects to meditate on?
The best subjects will be simple, stable and emotionally neutral for
you.
Can I actually meditate on a coin, as in your example?
You can meditate on almost anything that you can return your attention
to in a concentrated way. Simple objects, like a coin, can work.
Even better, simple bodily processes like breathing, or one's sight,
or the "inner light" will work.
Breathing is particularly good because you always breathe, so it is

always with you. (You are still breathing, aren't you?) Breath is
major body-mind process and reflects your changing states. Breath is
complex enough to keep your attention. You don't need any thing other
than yourself to do this.
But its the practice of concentrating your mind, not what it is

concentrated on, that defines meditation and provides all the
benefits.
How long should I meditate?
As with any practice, you should start will a period of time that you
can manage. You want to create success early in your practice. 10 -
15 minutes in a good period at first, short enough that you can do it,
but long enough to give you practice in returning to your meditation
subject.

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When should I meditate?
The answer is similar to breathing practice. Choose a time that you

can use every day to meditate. Do not do it (at first) right after a
meal or when you are dealing with stress. Make sure you do it every
day.
How soon will meditation make me high?
If you are worried about getting high with meditation while you
meditate, it will interfere with your concentration. You will be
constantly distracting yourself to check 'Am I getting high?' But if
you just continue to concentrate on your meditation subject, not
caring how you are being affected ( how high you are getting), you'll
get very high with practice.
So the answer would be, meditation will get me high as soon as I

forget about getting high. Sometimes this is called "letting go".
Altered Kinesthetic States
Will I see paisley patterns and the walls moving?
You can expect to experience the things that are the most important
elements of that kind of high. For example, if seeing paisley patterns
on surfaces is how you tell that you are high on a strong psychedelic,
you will see them. If having the walls move is what you expect, you
will see that.
The degree to which you re-experience drug phenomena is determined by

how well you have modeled the onset phenomena you already know and of
course, your most common experience of that drug.
The "paisley patterns" question originally came to me as a surprise,

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because in my many LSD trips many decades ago, these things only
appeared in the first dozen or so trips. After that, my psychedelic
experiences were typically more "deep calm innocence" experiences,
whose sensory phenomena were mostly visual hyper-acuity (which causes
anything that moves to look like it has multiple pretty ghost images
trailing it), kaleidoscopic internal imagery with my eyes closed, and
intensely sharpened sense of touch smell and taste. There was also a
sense that time was more relaxed and I could experience music in a new
and more intimate way.
I re-experienced all of the phenomena of my typical trip when I did

the Altered Kinesthetic States pattern, but I didn't have the paisley
patterns or shimmering walls. So this question surprised and
challenged me at first. I had to go back in time and then induce the
state to even begin to see things like that. What finally kicked it
off was re-entering the belief state that "Everything Is Alive". (I
tried to cook on one early trip. I picked up a piece of celery and
realized it was still alive in my hand! I ended up communing with the
celery and didn't eat much that day. Remembering that helped me to
get back into that state of consciousness where the walls started
'breathing'.)
I realize that to anyone who is an LSD virgin, the above paragraphs

must seem completely daft. To those of us who know, it is a Way and a
Truth hidden from our "normal" awareness. Only the stubbornly
ignorant would presume to dictate that only one is valid.
Stuff like breathing walls and paisley patterns are phenomena within
consciousness, and perhaps evidence of its quality, but they are not
the state of consciousness itself. Since they are visible (and fun),
trippers dote on them. But they're the content of a certain
awareness, not that awareness itself.
Just hallucinations you say? No more than the common view of the
solidity and flatness of the wall is. Actually, physics trells us the
wall is a sparse shimmering lattice of energetic processes. Both the
"flat solid" perception and the "breathing, alive" perception are both

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distortions which reveal how the observer is a condition of the
observed.
So the answer to the original question is this: you'll see what you
typically saw, and you can recover phenomena by getting back into the
belief context that was active at the time.
Is this stuff safe? If you get into an altered drug-like state,

say while driving, aren't you impaired?
These techniques should only be practiced in a safe non-distracting

environment that are conducive to their un-distracted enjoyment.
That said, I created a state of consciousness that is perfect for

driving which involves focusing on the present conditions around me
and driving perfectly. I don't let my mind wander to other things; I
am absorbed in the driving now. I find that this helps me get through
any journey much more pleasantly. Even rush hour traffic jams don't
bother me, they're just part of the 'meditation'. Very peaceful.
What should I start with?
Start with experiences which have a definite startup sequence that you
can recall. These are the easiest to recover with this technique,
which depends upon using that initial sequence of phenomena to access
your memory of how you previously got high. It is also important to
do this where you can allow yourself to let the high occur and
persist. Don't do this where you will be interrupted, because you will
be training yourself to fail. Choose a time and a place where you can
enjoy the results.
Mind machines

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Where can I get a mind machine?
There is a list of currently active vendors maintained at

http://1st-spot.net/topic_mindmachines.html
How do I take the experience of a mind machine beyond the

context of the mind machine session, so that I can enjoy the
benefit without the electronics?
When you feel you are beginning to enter into a state you like, create
an anchor by touching yourself in a specific place or saying a certain
word in a certain way. The anchor should be quite specific to the
state you want to recall. Then when you wish to re-invoke that state,
use that anchor to help you remember it.
With so many possibilities, where and how do I start?
The ideal way to start would be to set aside a time every days for a
couple of weeks when you are going to work with your machine. Do not
do this at a time and place where you are likely to be interrupted. (But
if you find you are interrupted, that's OK. Just end your session and
continue the next day.)
Begin with alpha wave programs just to get practice in working with
the machine. Such programs are also an enjoyable place to start.
You may find that you fall asleep during some of the programs, or that
there is a period where you have "no-mind". This quite OK and
natural. (Typically, you will feel quite refreshed after this
happens.) At other times, you will just experience various sorts of
kaleidescopic hallucinations followed by a change in awareness, both
in the way you think and the subject matter of your thoughts.
After experiencing the relaxation of alpha brainwave states, you may

want to experience the deeper theta brainwave states. These will put
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you in a more dreamlike state in which your body will feel different
and you will think in a very different way. Here the limitations of
space, time and causality will be nothing to you and you will be more
in the realm of possibility thinking. (Or even impossibility
thinking!)
Sample theta states gently; some people have strong emotional issues
that will re-occur to them in such states and you will have to deal
with them by yourself. If it is unpleasant - just take off the
equipment and stop the session.
This is less likely to occur though, because of the way theta sessions
are induced. The programs that lead to such states will first entrain
you into a very relaxing alpha meditation-like state before
entraining you into the more hypnotic theta states. So you will be
entering such states in a relatively unstressed manner. Since the
approach has a different signature than what triggered stressful
episodes in the past, your utilization of this level of consciousness
is likely to be very different.
I like to have a voice recorder near me when I do theta states as I

come up with all sort of creative ideas about all kinds of things.
Just a word or two will help you remember your ideas later, when you
can expand upon them. High theta (8 - 6 Hz) is a wonderful
brainstorming tool.
If you find theta states to your liking, you can begin exploring the
levels between 6 - 4 Hz. This is much more dreamy, imaginative and
open to some of the different time distortion phenomena discussed
elsewhere. But there is a strong possibility of inducing the "no-mind"
or sleep states at these relaxed brainwave levels. This is why I like
to do low theta states in the morning when I don't need sleep.
Having acquired some experience along these lines, you might want to
experience delta sessions and high beta sessions. Delta brain waves
are associated with dreamless sleep, so you may very likely fall
asleep at some point. If you do remain awake, you will experience a

122
extremely calm and blissful mode of awareness. There is a kind of
concentration that occurs in such a quiet state, so surround yourself
with beautiful things for such sessions.
Do mind machines have medical applications?
Yes, they do. Consult your doctor and follow their advice. The value
of your doctor is that he or she provides not only medical knowledge
and experience, but also an objective perspective and diagnostic
capabilities you do not have.
One legitimate problem doctors may have with instrumentation like mind
machines is a lack of specific control. Since most machines come with
controls that allow the user to adjust them in myriad ways, the
physician has no way of knowing that you are following their
recommendations. It is as if they were to prescribe a specific drug
for your problem and then send you home with an entire pharmacy in
your pocket. How would they know that you were following their
recommendations? So it is understandable they don't feel comfortable
with the current state of the art.
Possibly in the future, manufacturers will build machines that have

some lock or password so that they can restrict the functionality of
the machine to what they see as beneficial to the patient. Then we
will see more application of such machines in day to day treatment of
various conditions. The medical literature is already full of peer
reviewed papers detailing what these are.
Many of the applications are symptomatic; pain control, sleep

induction, etc. Other applications are in the easy induction of
hypnotic states to facilitate patient training. Still others
applications deal with altering underlying disease phenomena and
etiology.

123
What about combining mind machines with other
techniques given here, such as the smiling breath?
This can work well, and you can use the smiling breath technique to
"anchor" specific brainwave states you like. In addition, the smiling
breath technique can add a specific direction to a given brainwave
state.
There have been numerous suggestions about combining pranayama

(breath-control) techniques with mind machine states. There have even
been machines created specifically for this purpose! However, I find
that the kind of attention used in breath control is different that
the free-floating consciousness induced by mind machines. That said,
I've had best results combining breath control with stimulation
frequencies between 11 and 14 Hz (the alpha - beta borderline).
Mind machines work well with verbal material to be learned or enjoyed.

Self-hypnosis tapes for habit control work well with mind machine
settings between 10 and 6 Hz (low alpha, high theta). I have also
used such states for learning first foreign language vocabulary
material. (This is like Lazunov "super learning" techniques.) If you
have a specific story (see "Tell Yourself a Story") to rehearse and
celebrate, you may find that theta brainwaves between 6 and 4 Hz
provide a powerfully receptive state for these patterns of
transformation.
Some of my friends claim that combining long (2 hour) theta sessions

work well with transcendental meditation sessions.
Stillness
Why does this qualify as a way of being high?
It would be improper not to cover this since way of altering

124
consciousness, especially since it has been in use by seekers for
thousands of years.
Every state of awareness has its physiological counterpart and to

change the way you use your body is to change your mind.
Actually, to answer the question you merely have to try it. When you
are motionless, your attention can withdraw from its concerns with
your environment and your inner life is correspondingly enriched in a
away that reflects your current mind set and physical setting.
If you begin this practice in a positive way, perhaps by reviewing

things your happy about and are grateful for, you will find that your
subsequent thoughts will spin out along positive directions, And if
you have taken care to make yourself comfortable, your body will
augment this comfort. I find myself becoming quite stoned in a
non-heady way when i do this. It also works for me as an effective
pain killer. (I suffer from an intermittently painful eye disease,
and often deal with the pain that arises by lying very still. I find
that just as effective as the pain medications prescribed by my
doctors.)
Apart from working as an analgesic, Hindu and Christian mystics found

stillness to be a powerful means of inducing the kind of meditation
or spiritual communion that they seek. As you progress in this, you
can expect insights and even visions to arise.

125

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Get High

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Recreational drugs are obsolete!

This book is about how to enter desired states of consciousness - to

This book is a manual on how to achieve the kinds of states sought

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting high is a valid life purpose

Altered states of consciousness have been sought by mankind since

The achievement of altered states of awareness has been involved in

Not everything is possible to our normal waking consciousness,

An age old desire

Anthropological records show that all cultures have discovered and

The desire to enter into different states of of mind, for pragmatic or

Euphoria getting high to feel good

One of the states sought after most commonly is one of euphoria a

There is a class of religions that hates euphoria as a distraction from

Getting high to be at one with the universe

Our normal state of consciousness is characterized by a sense of

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Getting high often offers a perspective from which psychological

Getting high for self-reintegration

Insights are state-specific and to recover them it is often necessary

Normal consciousness, with its symbolic logic-tight contexts, can

We are not advocating any extreme behaviors here, just the

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

By making altered states of conscious available based on learn able

Altered states are normal

Altered states occur naturally dreams, sexual orgasm, spiritual

Transcending drug conflicts

A distressing phenomenon of modern life is the persistence of

These drug wars seem interminable and costly in human terms.

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

The purpose of this book is to show you how to use non-drug

We will show how to achieve these states without drugs. The

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Get high voluntarily

We are talking about altered states of consciousness that are under

Enjoy the intensity you crave

The intensity of an altered state of consciousness (ASC) should be

With non-drug means, controlling the level of effect is much more

When and for as long as you want

A desirable state of consciousness is one that can be started, endures

Wouldn't it be nice to go to a party, enter into a very relaxed and

Your altered state should sustain itself

A desirable state of consciousness should remain even when Im

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Be the way that's right for you

Select the way you want your mind to work

Typical bodily changes would include enhanced or decreased

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

A desirable state will be typically be more pleasurable than your

If a state is pleasant, there will naturally be a desire to experience it

Getting High without Drugs Harold Shore 2004

Presence is attention to the present moment. It is the practice of

One aspect of presence is that it is a form of sensory uptime,

Presence is related to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness a

Yet presence is not thinking thought is always about an

What presence does