I spent the bulk of the weekend attending a Mindlink Foundation seminar. One of my friends took this course about two years ago and has spent the intervening time urging me to go along myself every time the show's in town. I finally succumbed more on the grounds that it would stop her from trying to persuade me to go than anything else.
The show began with a free introduction on Wednesday night, which turned out to be the entire Friday night session. Had I know that, I'd have skipped Wednesday. The proponent, heck, the heart and soul of Mindlink, Rod Briggs, is an impressive character, a good showman, a sprightly and energetic man for his size and what I'm guessing is his age. He talked to us of brain rhythms, perceptions, whole-brain experiences, and so forth. The weekend was basically Friday: sweeping technical description of brain operation, introduction to alpha-wave meditation; Saturday: using alpha-wave meditation to control aspects of your life; Sunday: using alpha-wave meditation to control aspects outside of yourself. That's not a precise chronology, but it more-or-less covers the essential points.
Obviously Sunday was a little bit wiggy.
Unfortunately for my friend who was expecting me to be mindblown by the whole thing, it's essentially a retread of stuff I read in college five to ten years ago, coupled with a little wiggy philosphy that I didn't wholly agree with but didn't argue with because heck, if other people in the room are getting something out of it I'm not going to spoil their party. Also a little science to show how it's all scentifically based, and some quotes from people you may or may not have heard of.
It's a curious thing to talk about. I don't want to debunk it, or give the impression that I'm debunking it, because there's at least some truth to the whole thing. Talking to a neurologist friend about psychoneural immunology, which Rod describes as the scientific term for his stuff, I discovered that it's actually got a reasonable basis in epilipsy research, specifically in the so-called placebo effect. It's not a 100% success rate, but it's not a complete failure, either. And as demonstrated by participating in the course itself, if you wanted it all to work for you, then certainly it was doing something for you, where as hoary old skeptics like me ended the weekend where we started, pretty much unmoved by the entire thing - but deeply relaxed, due to the repeated alpha-wave meditation sessions. But as I say, there's a kernel of truth in there, and Rod certainly seems to both believe it and have lived a good life based on it, hence my unwillingness to simply dump it all in the bin labelled "bunkum".
If you do a little googling, or search newspaper archives, you'll turn up a bunch of journalists who warble about how you can't describe it, you have to experience it ("no one can tell you what the matrix is...") which is understandable if you don't have the background for it, I guess. I blame my college reading habits for that.
Anyway, my friend was, I think, a little disappointed that I didn't have a HOLY SHIT moment about the whole thing, but that can't be helped. I had my HOLY SHIT moments about this stuff in college, and the funny thing about HOLY SHIT moments is that they generally only happen once for a given chunk of material - after that, the stuff that blew your head open becomes humdrum and mundane. Go read some Robert Anton Wilson non-fiction or Timothy Leary, if you've not already covered this ground, and see if it opens your head up.
If it doesn't, don't complain to me. I'm not evangelising this stuff.
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