PNTV: Thresholds of the Mind by Bill Harris (#48)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do Bill Harris's great book, Thresholds of the Mind. I think you can see that maybe not. We've got a great book, my six page PDF Philosopher's note on it. Bill Harris is the founder of Holosync, which is the audio technology I've been using with my meditation. It's a meditation practice I've been doing for the better part of my goddess and I have both been doing for about a year and seven months now. Pretty excited about it. We start every morning with an hour of meditation. Actually woke up late this morning, so I'm going to do my meditation after this. Most of the time I'm doing it first thing on waking up. Spend an hour with this guy's holo sync meditation. It's pretty good stuff. The book is all about meditation, the holosync technology, and just general big ideas on. As he says, the subtitle of the book is your personal roadmap to success, happiness and contentment. Thresholds of the Mind. So the idea behind Thresholds of the Mind is this. You have a threshold in your mind. Now, it might be like this, which is kind of small and contracted and narrow, but. Or it might be broader the more spacious it is. If you think of Genpo Roshi's big mind that we did an episode on not too long ago, that idea of being more spacious and bigger than the stresses that come up in our lives, we want to increase the thresholds of our mind. That's the basic idea. And it reminds me of T. Harv Eker we talked about in the Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. He says, look, you can look at you versus the size of your problems and see how evolved you are and realize that you only have problems when you are smaller than your problem, right? So if you are a size 4 person out of 10, you could be a size 10 person or you could be a size 4 person. If you're a size 4 person, you have a size 4 problem. You're stressed, right? If you're a size 4 person,. You've got a size 5 problem. You're really stressed now. As you grow and evolve as a human being, you become a size 6, size 7, size 8, size 9, size 10 person. This size 4 problem doesn't even really look like a problem anymore. It's just a little speed bump. Not a big deal. Same thing with Thresholds of the Mind. When we have a small threshold, when it's very low and we have a 2 threshold and we face a 4 problem in our lives. We're overwhelmed or totally stressed. As we increase the thresholds of our mind, we become able to handle bigger and bigger stresses more and more gracefully. It's a really good, really cool idea. And the key way that we do it with this book and with Holosync, is through meditation. Then there's a lot of other practices we can use psychologically and emotionally. But meditation is the big one here. And the idea is that our brains, and why meditation is such a cool idea, the short version on that is that our brains are lateralized, meaning we have a right brain and a left brain. As we know, right brain does certain things, left brain does other things. Now, the more lateralized, imbalanced your brain is though, the more stressed you're going to be, the more disconnected you're going to feel, the more anxious you're going to feel. The opposite state of hyper lateralization is synchronization. When you have coherence across the hemispheres of our brains. Right. That's a good thing. Now, anytime we focus our energy and we're in flow, for example, we talked about before, where our skills match our challenges and we're in the state of flow, we're concentrating and our energy is focused on whatever we're doing in the moment. Anytime we do that, our brains tend to synchronize and we feel better. It's one of the reasons why it's such a nice state to be in. Now when we meditate, we focus our energy meditating, the same thing happens. We synchronize our brains. At the same time. We have brain wave states we can be in. We can be in the highest state, which is beta, then we can drop into alpha, which is a more relaxed conscious state. Then we can go into theta, which is where we are when we're in a dreaming state, like REM sleep. Then we can go into delta, which is a dreamless sleep state. So beta, alpha, theta, delta. Now, the more stressed we are, the faster our brain waves. Literally they go really fast and they have a very narrow, I believe it's amplitude, right. So they just go like that, kind of chaotic. When you get into alpha, they slow down and they become a little bit broader and higher. The amplitude becomes bigger. Then we get into theta and they slow down even more and they look like that. Then we go into delta and they're really slow. Now, as we decrease our brainwave frequency, our brains become more synchronized. So when we meditate, what we do is we go from. If we're really stressed a high beta into a lower beta into an alpha state. We're going to talk about this more when we do the note on the Silva method of mind control. But basically we want to drop out of beta into alpha. That's a really, really healthy restorative place to be where we give our brains a break. Literally we give our bodies a break. We get out of the fight or flare response that we're in. Often when we're in upper beta and we get into a more relaxed state where this technology Holosync help us helps us get into that, then it actually helps us drop into a theta and even into a conscious delta state, which is pretty cool. Check out his website holosync.com for more on that. But that's the basic idea with Holosync and with meditation is that it's going to be synchronizing our brains, which is going to allow us to feel more connected to ourselves and to the universe. And, and as we do that, and as we lower our brainwave states regularly through our meditation practice and focus and synchronize our thresholds of our mind increases, we become more synchronized, which allows us literally to handle more stress in our lives. It's a really big idea. I've definitely seen huge results in my own life doing meditation in general and specifically this type of meditation. A lot of people ask me if I recommend this. I say yes, but the most important thing is consistency of practice. I haven't missed a day in 19 months now. And I could be doing anything. I could be doing this, I could be doing a number of different technologies. The key is or practices. The key is consistency. And I found this to help me be consistent because it helps you drop in, etc. Etc. Anyway, that's the idea of holosync meditation. Some ideas on that. What else? He's got some great ideas on meditation and marathons. So too often when we get excited about something, we want to, let's just say we haven't run in a long time. We're not in that great of shape. We get into it and we want to run a marathon this week. We just want to go gonzo on it. He says, look, no matter how gung ho you are, no matter how excited you are, you aren't gonna run a marathon in that first week. It takes training. Well, same thing with our meditation practice. Same thing with anything in our lives. We get excited about something that's awesome and it takes time to see results. We talk about this again and Again and again. I've got a great quote from Epictetus here who says that if you want, no great thing is created suddenly. If you want a fig, first you must plant the seed, then you must let it grow, then you must let it ripen and then you can have it. But we want to change a nine month baby gestation period into a month. We would never do that with a baby. But for some reason we think we can do that with other things in our lives. And he says no. Meditation needs to be done consistently over time. Same thing with anything in our lives. So check in with where you are. Are you looking for results too quickly and then not putting in the consistent effort and kind of inconsistently going for it, then pulling back, going for it, then pulling back and never really getting results. He has an awesome quote here. He says transformation doesn't necessarily reward watchfulness. It does, however, reward daily practice. Isn't that cool? Daily practice does not reward transformation, does not reward watchfulness. It's kind of like planting seeds and then unburying them and looking and seeing how is the seed doing? Well, that's not the best way to see results. Just keep on watering, keep on nurturing, and keep on making sure it gets enough sunlight and you will see some powerful results. Same thing in our lives. So what else we've got? Resistance creates suffering. A lot of great teachers talk about the fact that pain, whether it's the pain of losing a job or even physical pain, that's a relatively neutral event, it's our interpretation of it that creates the suffering. Right? It's the meaning we're giving something that creates the suffering. And it's the resistance of what's happening that ultimately results in the suffering we experience. So all the great teachers talk about it in the note. I echo Dan Millman, Byron, Katie, and some Bill Harris mojo on that. Really good idea. So related to that is the final big idea we're going to get to right now, which is the meaning we assign things. We always have a choice. As I've said dozens of times in these episodes and throughout the notes, we always have a choice to assign better meaning. That doesn't create as much suffering as we might be creating in our lives right now. So if you're stressed out right now, check in on the thing that's stressing you out the most. See what meaning you're giving it currently and see if you can assign new meaning to it. Really big idea. Check that out. That's all we got for today. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you.