[00:00:00]Luke Storey:  I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. Here we are, Dr. Hardt, good to see you again.

[00:00:26]James Hardt:  Wonderful to be with you.

[00:00:28]Luke Storey:  Oh, man, for those listening, I feel so bad. You guys just missed a really fascinating off-the-record conversation. 

[00:00:35]James Hardt:  Two or three, actually.

[00:00:36]Luke Storey:  Yeah, that we did. We did. Sometimes, like when I'm first meeting someone or haven't seen one in a while, is the case with you, we kind of warm up and have a chat, and it's so common that during those chats, I'm like, I wish we were recording. But this was a confidential conversation. But we're here again. I'm back at Biocybernaut after-

[00:00:56]James Hardt:  Welcome back.

[00:00:57]Luke Storey:  Yeah, many years away. Those that are watching the YouTube video here will know that this is not my normal set. I remember some pretty profound healing experiences in this very room when I went through the training. I guess it was 2015 or '16 here in Sedona, so it's great to be back, great to see you, and see that you're still charging forward with not only the center here, but the center in Germany and improving people's lives one by one, one brain at a time, or two, or three. But yeah, few brains at a time actually. So, there are so many different directions I want to go, but when I went through the program here- 

[00:01:36]James Hardt:  Well, let's do all of them. We don't have to be linear.

[00:01:39]Luke Storey:  Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, I'm thinking back to when I went through the program, and sitting in this room, what I remember was doing the brain training in my little booth. 

[00:01:54]James Hardt:  Soundproof chamber.

[00:01:54]Luke Storey:  Yeah. And then, I had no cell phone. There were no windows. I would come in at whatever time I came in. I had no idea what time it was. And it was absolutely exhausting to go through the training because of the energy required from my brain. And I just remember being so discombobulated in terms of what time it was and just kind of disconnecting from the world, which is great. But I remember being in here and doing the exercises on forgiveness, and then going back on the qEEG and trying to determine whether or not I had not true-

[00:02:34]James Hardt:  Well, it's not qEEG.

[00:02:35]Luke Storey:  Oh, okay. 

[00:02:35]James Hardt:  That's a different thing.

[00:02:36]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[00:02:37]James Hardt:  On the EEG feedback. 

[00:02:38]Luke Storey:  On the EEG, okay.

[00:02:39]James Hardt:  And did you do the premium double or the single? Were you in the chamber once each day?

[00:02:44]Luke Storey:  Twice.

[00:02:44]James Hardt:  Twice. So, you were one of the early ones because that's about how long I've had that available for people.

[00:02:51]Luke Storey:  Okay. And so, I remember, there was an indication from my brainwaves telling me whether or not I had really done the deep excavation of those resentments and things like that. So, anyway, there's Kleenex in this room. I remember crying and I think the sort of psychological part of it or the therapeutic part of it, I wasn't expecting, right? I just was like, I'm going to optimize my brain and creativity, and boost my IQ points. And then, I came, and I was like, oh, man, this is some deep emotional work.

[00:03:20]James Hardt:  Well, let's direct some attention to that, because this is not therapy and we do not build it as therapy. There's a wonderful man, now passed, Dr. David Hawkins, who actually lived-

[00:03:33]Luke Storey:  Oh, my God, my all-time favorite teacher.

[00:03:35]James Hardt:  Yeah. He lived in Sedona. I've met his widow. I was at a birthday party where his ashes were, so been that close, but I've read a number of his books. And as you perhaps know, he had the biggest psychiatry practice in America. It was in New York City. And then, he began to become enlightened and I think actually lived in the cabin alone in the woods for some months. And speaking as a professional and hugely successful psychiatrist, he said, letting go and psychiatry are not the same.

[00:04:09] Now, I'm referring to a recent book of his called Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. And I've actually done a paper in a British journal, EC Psychology and Psychiatry, comparing Dr. Hawkins' work, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender with lesson 134 in the Course of Miracles, which is, let me understand forgiveness as it is and integrating that with the Biocybernaut Forgiveness Method. So, it's an online journal. Anyone can go look at it.

[00:04:36]Luke Storey:  I want to read it.

[00:04:37]James Hardt:  Yeah. And so, he said, the goals of psychotherapy and letting go are different. In psychiatry, they're not interested in helping you get rid of your ego, they just want to adjust it a little bit, so you fit in better with other egos. He said, in letting go, the goal is total liberation of the soul. And in doing that, you must confront the ego. In zen, they have the five hindrances: doubt, drowsiness, distractibility, and worry, aversion, any form of ill will, and boredom, to which I've added forgetfulness as a hindrance.

[00:05:16] And these are the tools that ego uses to keep you crushed, and vulnerable, and not growing to your maximum potential, and certainly, minimizing any spiritual awakenings that you might have, because then, you slipped the surly bonds of ego when you have those transcendent moments. And so, when I was still in California, the training was not as powerful as it is now. I had a psychiatrist come to me, and he said, Dr. Hardt, I want to do your training.

[00:05:47] You've trained a number of my patients and you've done more for them in seven days than I've been able to do in 20 years, I want to know what you're doing. But I'm very clear, we are not doing therapy, it's not the practice of therapy. We are teaching people forgiveness and letting go. And so, it's a very important distinction because the goals of letting go and psychotherapy are different, and we believe we have, shall we say, higher goals.

[00:06:14]Luke Storey:  Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I like that contextualization. And God, speaking of David Hawkins, I think the first time I came to Sedona was to see him speak. I was fortunate enough to see him speak twice.

[00:06:26]James Hardt:  Live? Oh, fabulous.

[00:06:27]Luke Storey:  Yeah, really, being in the presence of a being at that level of consciousness just changes everything. And I've been fortunate a few times in my life to be in the presence of great teachers like that. But I've listened to, I don't want to exaggerate, but probably thousands of hours of Hawkins' talks over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again for years, and years, and years. And I was always looking for, he would use kinesiology to calibrate the validity, or level of consciousness, or truth, or falsehood of a concept, idea, teaching, place, thing, person, whatever, which is fascinating. 

[00:07:07] He's seemingly the first one that was able to use kinesiology or identify that it could be used for nonlocal phenomenon, which, it's so meaningful. I think it goes over people's heads because we have the ability to tell truth from falsehood. I mean, that's such a gift. But anyway, not many people have caught on yet. But anyway, my point is, on one of those tapes, at some point, someone in the audience says, ask a question about biofeedback and mentions of place in Sedona. I don't think they use the name Biocybernaut.

[00:07:40] And they said, I forget the question, it was like, does it elevate consciousness or is it real, basically? And he went, I don't know, let me see. And he test it on the arm, he said, yes. So, you got the stamp of approval from Dr. David R. Hawkins, because I think there's no other place like this in Sedona, and I remember thinking that. And that was after I had come here, and I thought, yes, I didn't waste my money. I already knew that I had benefited, but I thought that was really cool.

[00:08:07]James Hardt:  We had a group in Mexico that worked extensively with muscle testing and David Hawkins' system, and they said that the Biocybernaut technology, in and of itself, without any of the guidance from the trainers calibrated at 600, which is where Hawkins says, enlightenment begins.

[00:08:24]Luke Storey:  Yeah, that's very high. Wow, cool. That's so good. Yeah. And this will be relevant to people listening, because I recently did a show with a great guy named Clayton, who I've become friends with, and he's a student of Hawkins and a master kinesiologist. Just for, I don't know, 12 years, he's just done tens of thousands of calibrations, and he's gotten really good at it. And so, we did a show and I'm hopefully going to do more with him where we calibrate different things for people that are curious about the validity or the power.

[00:08:53] And he tested a number of different EMF devices and stuff that I have because I promote them on my show and my website, and I don't want to promote anything that's fake. And when you get into the sort of ambiguous world of EMF harmonizing, not blocking, it gets a little wonky, it gets a little woo-woo. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't selling snake oil. And yeah, he tested some of these things and they were 560, 600. So, it's really amazing to get that stamp of approval, I think, based on that.

[00:09:23]James Hardt:  Well, since we've already gotten a little wonky, I could mention that this trainer who worked with me for a number of years here, actually, after he did his first drum flow workshop, I think Earth Guy or Awakening the Illuminated Heart, he had a flower of life tattooed on his back. And when I introduced him to Hopkins, he immediately began doing a lot of muscle testing. And I use pendulum rather than muscle testing.

[00:09:57] And so, he and I would calibrate on the Hawkins scale the consciousness level of people on day one when they walked in and near the end of day seven. And when we were doing the premium training, and we would do this independently, we were usually within a point or two, and sometimes, exactly spot-on with these two different methods. We were getting 15 to 20-point increases on the Hawkins scale from the Alpha single training.

[00:10:27]Luke Storey:  And that's a logarithmic scale.

[00:10:27]James Hardt:  It is.

[00:10:28]Luke Storey:  So, that's profound. And when we went to the premium double, you were one of the first people to do that, we started getting increases that ranged as high as 50 points. And when people came back and did multiple trainings, then we found that there were some people who had more than 100-point increase over several trainings.

[00:10:50] Wow. That's profound. 

[00:10:52]James Hardt:  Very cool.

[00:10:53]Luke Storey:  So cool. Yeah, that's so neat. I wasn't even expecting to go there. But now, I'm kind of remembering, actually, when I was here, that you did have a knowledge of a lot of different sort of esoteric teachings and things. I would hear you drop A Course in Miracles, or this and that, I thought, hmm, this guy is pretty tapped in. For folks that are already lost, and are going, what the hell are the guys talking about, could you bring us back to the beginning when you discovered neurofeedback as a modality, and perhaps, even who discovered it or invented it, where it came from, and then when in the journey did you really latch on to this as something you wanted to pursue?

[00:11:30]James Hardt:  Well, sure. There's deep science here. And I've spent most of my career developing the science of doing university-sponsored research studies with both private grants and federal grants to document the results in measurable ways that are recognizable by peer-reviewed science. And so, yeah, it goes far out, but usually, only when people start manifesting or they have brainwaves for unusual states. For example, this is a little bit of a delay in getting to the science, but there is a brainwave pattern that I recognize as, when this pattern occurs in someone, they see angels.

[00:12:20] And so, at the end of the first day, when we're gathering after the debriefing here in the canopy room, we go to the conference room and we bring up their brainwaves on the polygraph and we look at them. And when I see this pattern, I'll ask the people if they see angels, and sometimes, they freak out. Like, well, how do you know? I've never told anybody. The biggest freakout was a US Army Green Beret. I had the privilege of installing my technology on a secret army base for the purpose of training, giving the Alpha-1 training to two 12-man teams of US Army Green Berets.

[00:12:56] And before we did their training, I measured with the three baselines that you're familiar with, the eyes opened, eyes closed, and the eyes closed, white noise counting the beeps. And they're 24 guys, there are a lot of head. So, I taught them how to put electrodes on each other, and then I ran them through these baselines, and then I had a private interview with each one. And in one of the 24, I saw this pattern which I recognize as angel pattern. So, big, skinhead, killer dude sitting across the table from me, totally buff, I'm going like, let's see, how do I pop the question to him?

[00:13:34] And so, I look at the numbers, and look at him, and look at the numbers, and I go, do you talk to beings that other people don't see? Well, it was like I hit him with a two-by-four because he went back in his chair. He almost tipped over. He's hyperventilating. He's having a panic attack. He's looking around like, did anybody else hear that? And he goes, how do you know? And I said, well, I see it in the numbers in your brainwaves. He goes, how do you know?

[00:13:57] And I repeat it, I see it in the numbers of your brainwaves. He said, I've only told my best buddy on pain of death if he would ever tell anybody, how do you know? And I go, well, you've got what I call angel pattern. So then, he calmed down, and he said, well, when I'm doing my martial arts training, this old Asian martial arts master shows up, and he coaches me, and nobody else can see him. And so, it's a bit esoteric, it's a bit woo-woo, it's a bit wonky, but it's real science. 

[00:14:30] And every single person who's ever shown this pattern, when I ask them, they might freak out, like, how do you know, but they always confirm that that's the case. Now, at Biocybernaut, we say, brainwaves rule. It's a simple way to say the psychophysiological principle, which, in scientific language, would be, any experience you have as a living human being, you can have that experience only when you have the appropriate underlying pattern of brainwaves. And when you change your brainwaves by any means, drugs, sex, rock and roll, meditation, Sufi dancing, shamanic drumming, when you change your brainwaves, you will change your experiences.

[00:15:11] And when you change your brainwaves enough, you can change, profoundly, who you are at an identity level. Now, when I shared this with Robert Diltz in 1992, one of the second-tier luminaries of the NLP movement, he had just written a book called Changing Beliefs. And he said, well, with NLP, when you change beliefs, you can change all the behavioral patterns that flow from that. I said, Robert, that's really cool. Well, I'm here to tell you that with the Biocybernaut training, people can change themselves at a level of identity.

[00:15:43] And his jaw dropped, and eyes get big, and he goes, he said, the only thing I know that can change someone to level of identity is a spiritual awakening. And I sat back and smiled. I said, you said it, not me. And so, we don't wear this on our sleeve, we don't typically put this on our website, but when you change your brainwaves enough, and the right ones, and the right places on your head, you will have profound spiritual awakening and you will live in an entirely different reality, where there's more love, and more understanding, more consciousness, more capabilities. 

[00:16:22] Simple measures that I've made over the years on the Alpha-1 training are, there's an increase in IQ that averages 11.7 points. And in my research where we've followed people up, there's no fading of this IQ boost even as far out as we've measured, which is out to a year. There's no hint that the IQ boost fades even out to a year. We've also seen an increase in creativity of 50%. That is whopping. At one point, I trained a group of Stanford Research Institute scientists and they shut off their work in their laboratories, gave up their lab time, they came as a group, several groups for about a seven-hour training.

[00:17:08] Well, some of them solved, in the Alpha chamber, problems that they had been unable to solve after two years of very hard and dedicated work. When Colin Martindale studied creativity in Alpha in the mid-80s, he said—well, what he did was he took groups of creative people known by the indicia patents, publications, paintings, sculptures, and he compared them with a demographically matched group of normals who did not have any of those indicia of creativity. No difference in the brainwaves at rest. 

[00:17:45] No difference. But give the people problems to work on, the normals sat there in their normal brainwave state and do only as well as normals usually do, and the creative people, immediately and nobody knew how, turn on high Alpha all over the head, and quickly and effectively solve the problems in a manner that distinguish them as creative people. So, Colin Martindale's said, creativity is simply a matter of having the right brainwaves. And Tony Robbins, after he did the training, in fact, Tony was in that canopy bed when he was here.

[00:18:15] His wife, Bonnie Pearl, was here. After his Alpha training, I've seen Tony live, speaking to his audiences, saying, there's no problem that can't be solved in Alpha. I would actually beg to differ because let's talk about the second type of creativity which happens in Theta. In Alpha creativity, what your brain does is it goes out into the vast storehouse of information that you've been exposed to. Maybe it's forgotten, you don't have access to it, but in Alpha, you have access to it. And you pull together information from Column W, and column R, and Column C, and you assemble it in a novel way and there is a solution to your problem. 

[00:18:57] But what if the problem requires information that you have never been exposed to? Maybe solving this problem requires information that no human in your historical time period has ever encountered. Alpha is not going to be much help there. So, what you need are Theta brainwaves, which you can use to pull information out of the universal database known as the Akashic Records. Akasha is a Sanskrit word, meaning primordial substance. And then, Theta, with the appropriate motivation, you can pull information not known to any human being in your time period to solve this problem.

[00:19:38]Luke Storey:  Wow. This is so cool. I love this. So, in Alpha then, those brainwaves don't facilitate access to the quantum field of potentiality, but Theta brainwaves do. So, this is why in a deep meditation, a float tank, different experiences that induce that Theta, you pop out of that experience knowing something that you didn't know you knew because you didn't, but it is known in the field. So, you can enter into the field, and capture that, and bring it back as an intellectual truth that you can then apply. 

[00:20:16]James Hardt:  At the Global Consciousness Summit 1.0 that we just conducted, November 21 and 22, I showed brainwaves of a man who grew his company from zero to $200 million in just two years. And of course, he had unusual brainwave. He had really big occipital Alpha in the back of the head so he could be very creative and he had simultaneously big frontal Theta so he could pull information out of the universal field, out of the Akash, and then creatively apply it in ways he could grow this company from zero to 200 million.

[00:20:54] Now, if he had gone to what you mentioned, like qEEG, they would have looked at those brainwaves, compared them to a normative database, and said, oh, my God, you have deviant brainwaves, we have to train those out of you. And they would have trained out the very giftedness that was responsible for his ability to grow company from zero to $200 million in two years. And so, I'm not a fan of training people toward normative databases. I mean, the zen master would walk into a place like that, and they go, oh, my God, you've got deviant brainwaves. We've got to make you more like the C student, the average. And I'm not a fan of that.

[00:21:38]Luke Storey:  Right. I'm curious, with the brainwaves of those that are able to see angels and that indication that you would get, what do their brainwaves look like? Are they going to Gamma, or high Gamma, or is there something that-

[00:21:54]James Hardt:  Oh, well, some patterns are complex. I've developed brain energy maps, which show, if you take head sites on this axis, frequency on this axis, and then you have cells like 200 different cells, which relate to specific frequencies and specific sights in the head, and then I've studied how brain activity at that head site, at that frequency is or is not related as a positively related, negatively related to any of whatever mind state you want to measure. And I call them the cartography of consciousness or the brain energy maps.

[00:22:32] And so, any state is going to be produced by a bewildering variety of brainwave frequencies in hundreds of different places on the head. And so, when you can produce that pattern, then you manifest that skill or that ability. And so, there are ways that you can train things. Some of the patterns, as I said, are very complex. The initial part is actually quite simple. In 80% of all people that I've seen, I've seen probably 7,000+, 80% have their biggest Alpha at the back of the head, occipital. And in these rare people, they have their biggest Alpha at the centrals.

[00:23:18] Both centrals are bigger, left and right central, C3 and C4, are bigger than both occipitals, O1 and O2. But that's not the only criterion. There's also an amplitude criterion. In other words, the centrals need to be bigger than the occipital, but the centrals need to exceed this threshold and the occipitals need to exceed this threshold. Otherwise, if you don't have those two things, centrals higher than occipitals and both exceeding a specific energetic threshold, the experience doesn't show up. So, I have two pretty cool stories about that. One was I was doing with Foster Gamble, and I really, really urge you to see his movies, Thrive.

[00:24:04]Luke Storey:  Oh, I just saw the second one a couple of months ago when it came out, amazing. 

[00:24:08]James Hardt:  Mind-blowing.

[00:24:09]Luke Storey:  Amazing. Yeah. And it's like, I wish I could force every human being on the planet to watch that movie. I was sitting there going, oh, God, I hope this is huge.

[00:24:17]James Hardt:  Yeah. Well, over 90 million people have seen the first one, Thrive I, what does it take? And so, we can hope that Thrive II: This Is What It Takes, is going to be similarly successful. 

[00:24:29]Luke Storey:  For those listening, we'll put it in the show notes, a link.

[00:24:31]James Hardt:  Oh, please, yeah.

[00:24:32]Luke Storey:  Amazing. Amazing.

[00:24:33]James Hardt:  Well, for some years, Foster and I were business partners and we did a company called Mind Center, which leased the Biocybernaut technology in order to offer these trainings. Well, at one point, we had two ladies come from France. One was a reporter working for the big French picture magazine, Le Monde, which is like Look or Life in the US. And they were doing an article on American Mind Technologies, and our company name was Mind Center, so they found us. 

[00:25:05] So, Foster said, well, we should give them a sample of the training. So, we wired them up and ran them through for a short while. And then, I'm interviewing them and the reporter lady who was traveling with her girlfriend had centrals higher than occipitals, but they didn't exceed the numerical thresholds. And so, I really kind of put my foot in, because I said, oh, that's a very unusual pattern. And the reporter and her, like, she's on me like that. Okay, well, what does that mean to you?

[00:25:36] And I go, oh, my God, I shouldn't have said anything, because she doesn't have the power levels. And so, if I go off talking about seeing angels, she's going to go back to France and write about Dr. Looney Tunes. I mean, talk about wonky. So, I resisted for about half-an-hour, but she was so good and she was so persuasive. Well, I won't hold it against you, but what I really want to know, when finally, I broke down, I said, look, there are two criteria. Centrals have to be higher than occipitals, but they both have to exceed this threshold, and you're not even close, so you probably aren't going to have this experience.

[00:26:12] She said, I promise I won't hold it against you, please tell me. So, I said, well, it means that you can see astral plane beings. And she breaks into this big smile. And she said, well, ever since I was a little girl in France, my beloved grandfather would take me out into the vineyards at night and teach me how to see wood sprites and elves. And so then, I knew what the power requirement was for. The power requirement was so that these perceptions could be strong enough that they would break through the disbelief filter that almost anybody in our culture would have.

[00:26:50] If you have just a glimmer of something, ah, nonsense, another glimmer, nonsense. If it comes on full and it just stays there, as it does when you have high power, like for example, a woman came in and she had centrals higher than occipitals and all her scores were well over 2,000. And so, I asked her, do you see angels? She goes, oh, there are hundreds of them around me all the time. So, the more power you have in this, the more of the angelic realm you can tune into.

[00:27:17] Okay. So then, another story. I'm in Canada, my Canadian center, and I have a man who's mid-30s. And he had centrals higher than occipitals, and he was close to the threshold. Never went over, but he was close. And so, I waited a couple of days before saying anything, like we're day two in the training, and I say, you have an unusual pattern, which is like angel pattern. He started to cry. I go, what's wrong? And then, the story tumbles out. Canadians have a lot of ice, and so they play a lot of hockey. 

[00:27:57] They're nuts about hockey. And so, he was seven. His father fashioned himself as a hockey coach and he gets the little boy out on the ice. Well, immediately, this angel shows up and he's coaching the little boy in hockey. And he'll be in the situation, and the angel will say, shoot, and he shoots, he always scores a goal. Well, this infuriated his father because his father had given him a list, of don't ever shoot if you're in this situation or this situation.

[00:28:23] Next game, he's out on the ice, he'll be in one of those situations, and the angel says, shoot, and he always scores a goal. His father got furious, and this got worse and worse until, at 14, the little boy realized that he was either going to have to tell his angel to bug off or he was going to lose his relationship with his father. His father was so ego-involved, and that was just luck, and you got to do what I say, and I'm your father, and all of that.

[00:28:51] And so, he told the angel to bug off and it disappeared. Now, he's 35 and I'm seeing echoes of that in his brainwaves. And he's crying because he was torn up about having to say goodbye to his angel. So, he said, can I get him back? I said, do you want to? He says, yeah, for sure. I said, well, ask him to come back. Next day, the brainwave power was a little higher, it was over the threshold, and his angel was back.

[00:29:24] Well, at Biocybernaut, we do what we call spiritual science. And for many people, atheists or rationalist, this is nonsense. No, it's brain science. And you talk about the quantum field, there's a lot more to reality than people know or even than they can know. I think it was Sarah Sherrington who said, reality is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

[00:29:50]Luke Storey:  Right. I love that. That's so good. 

[00:29:55]James Hardt:  And then, going back to the Akashic thing, I want to tell a story there because one of the most famous examples of Theta creativity in the scientific record has to do with a Flemish, I believe, organic chemist named Kekule. The new field of organic chemistry had taken on kind of the moonshot, the synthesis of benzene. Benzene, which is a hydrocarbon, I believe a formula is C6H12, something like, it's just carbon and hydrogen. And it has become an important industrial solvent?

[00:30:38] And there was limited natural supply. So, the new science of organic chemistry undertook a moonshot, we're going to synthesize benzene, and Kekule became obsessed with this. And he would work late at the lab, take the last tram home, have a big meal, and then drowsing from the fire. This is like early 1800s, I think. And so, there's no television. There's no radio. And the fireplace is the most entertaining thing in the house after dark. And so, he drowses in from the fire and he begins to see furry balls moving around in the fire.

[00:31:13] Well, he grew up with fireplaces. He's never seen this before. And so, now, a tennis ball is a furry ball, but each piece of fur is the exact same length. But Kekule's furry balls, they were kind of like fuzzy indistinct edges, but they were more or less round, and they would move around. And he began to look forward to this. And so, over days, weeks, sometimes, the furry balls would bump into each other as they're moving around in the fire, and sometimes, they would stick.

[00:31:42] And so, over time, they'd built up chains. And over weeks, maybe months, the chains then would be undulating through the fire. And one night, they were particularly frisky. And the one chain started to play crack the whip. And it cracked the whip hard enough that the two ends spun around and stuck. And he knew in a flash that was the structure of benzene. And he counted one, two, three, four, five, six. So, he knew the structure of benzene was six carbon atoms in a ring with the hydrogen atoms stuck on the outside. And he rushed back to the lab, he confirmed it was the case, and synthesized benzene.

[00:32:24] Well, we now have a technology called the electron microscope. And if you take a picture of an atom with an electron microscope, you'll see something pretty close to what Kekule was seeing, round things with fuzzy and distinct edges, and it's not a point at which the electron cloud stops. Five feet away from the nucleus, there could be electron that's like on its way back. Okay. So, Kekule, with his desire, late at night, after a big meal, drowsing from Theta, what do you think he was running? Theta. And so, with strong desire, he pulled out of the Akashic records what would become known to science a hundred and some years in the future, which is what atoms look like.

[00:33:08]Luke Storey:  Wow. 

[00:33:09]James Hardt:  Brainwaves rule.

[00:33:10]Luke Storey:  That's so awesome. Makes me want to go do a Theta meditation, bring some stuff into existence. 

[00:33:18]James Hardt:  Or Theta training, we have Theta training.

[00:33:19]Luke Storey:  I know. I was actually going to get to that. I was going to get to that. Wow. This is so fun. Oh, man. I love conversations like this. With the propensity for certain people to have brainwaves that just sort of naturally show up so that they can access these kind of interdimensional astral plane beings, it brings to mind something that's fairly commonplace in the Joe Dispenza workshops. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Joe's work.

[00:33:51]James Hardt:  I know of them. I don't know the details.

[00:33:53]Luke Storey:  Okay. So, Joe Dispenza, he's been on the show before. Great guy, brilliant, started as a chiropractor and essentially just got into consciousness work. And so, I went to one of his workshops and it's largely based around these really long kind of hypnotic meditations. And so, he's teaching you how to rewire your brain, essentially, to make new neural pathways by doing different meditations and even breathing techniques that, I'm assuming, he kind of borrowed from yogic traditions. 

[00:34:25] In his workshops, he's got vast numbers of scientists who are doing testing and quantification on brainwaves and a number of other metrics to keep refining and improving the meditative techniques that he's teaching people. There are certain people that hit anomalies in their brainwaves during these events, and he's probably referring to them and kind of a non-scientific, non-specific way, but he says he has people going into high Gamma, things that are just extremely uncommon for your average person to be experiencing.

[00:34:59] And when the room hits this critical mass where enough sort of satellite brains are going into those brainwave states, these entities enter into the room and the people that are in those brainwave states see them. And it's a universal experience that's repeated over and over again from people that don't know each other, don't know that that's even possible or going to possibly happen. And it's become these phenomenon and these events. And so, they do these coherence healings where you have one person who has some sort of physical, mental, emotional ailment, and they're laying down with a circle of people around them, and everyone around them is sending very specific intentions and prayers, et cetera.

[00:35:41] And it's most common that the people receiving the coherence healings will see these beings, these healing sort of giant beings enter into the room and do healing on them. And oftentimes, what transpires is, in fact, spontaneous healings that there is no medical account for. It just makes no sense. The person had a broken back, and now, they're walking. Like really crazy miracles. And it is common that it has something to do with these beans.

[00:36:10] And that sounds super far-out to people, but again, like with your work, this is such a fascinating place where science and spirituality meet. Because here, you have, in the back of the room, a bunch of scientists with all the fancy gadgets, and gear, and screens, and electrodes like you guys have here, and they can now pretty much predict, based on what they're seeing in the brainwaves, who is going to have that type of experience and when. 

[00:36:36]James Hardt:  Brainwaves rule. 

[00:36:36]Luke Storey:  It's just incredible. It's so exciting. And of course, I'm going back to an event in a couple of weeks in Florida, another intensive. Of course, everyone in the room is like, when am I going to hit those brainwaves? And so, there doesn't seem to be a reliable way for people in the audience to hit those brainwave states. You just kind of have to keep trying and hope for the best.

[00:37:01]James Hardt:  Or there is a direct way you can do specific neurofeedback training on those brainwaves.

[00:37:06]Luke Storey:  Okay. This is what I'm getting at.

[00:37:07]James Hardt:  Yeah.

[00:37:08]Luke Storey:  So, could you take someone in the audience said Joe Dispenza, look at their brain waves, have a model of that, and then induce that specific set of brain waves using your training?

[00:37:22]James Hardt:  Well, now, you use a word, which is a forbidden word.

[00:37:26]Luke Storey:  What, induce?

[00:37:26]James Hardt:  Yeah.

[00:37:28]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[00:37:29]James Hardt:  It's like entrainment. 

[00:37:29]Luke Storey:  Is it encourage?

[00:37:31]James Hardt:  Well, how about train? 

[00:37:33]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[00:37:34]James Hardt:  Train. I see a continental divide in technologies. One is learning and another is do it to you, like drugs are a do-it-to-you technology. Entrainment is a do-it-to-you technology. Binaural beats are a do-it-to-you technology. Now, ecologists are very worried about invasive species. If you get a two-pound African toad on a Hawaiian island, pretty soon, all the ground-nesting birds are going extinct. Okay? As a brain scientist, I'm concerned about invasive frequencies. 

[00:38:15] We have invasive species in ecology. Well, in the ecology of consciousness, I'm concerned about invasive frequencies. The brain is a multiple coevolved system of frequency generators, which all have learned how to work harmoniously together. And when you come in with whether it's binaural beats, or pulsed electrical lights, or even worse, electrical frequencies that you're injecting into the brain. If you're producing cows, it's like taking a garden of flowers and driving a CAT9 through there, just devastating the natural ecology.

[00:38:56] And so, I'm sure we say quite opposed to inducing any frequencies that are not indigenous to that brain at that moment. Well, for example, if somebody is in a swing and they want to swing high. If you stand at the back of the swing and push at the exact right time, if you push at the wrong time, the person is going to fall out of the swing. But if you push at the right part of the cycle, pretty soon, they're swinging high, and they're laughing, and having fun.

[00:39:31] And so, I would consider it unethical and maybe even immoral to entrain a frequency that is not known to be indigenous to that brain at that moment. I've actually written the patent on how to do ethical entrainment. It was granted on Christmas Day several years ago. I didn't know the patent office worked on December 25th. And so, if we measure the current dominant frequency in the brain in the last half-second, and then that frequency is the only frequency that we would allow ourselves to entrain during the next half second. 

[00:40:09] But during that next half second, we're measuring what's the dominant frequency, and if it's different, then we would change it. And so, entrainment is not something I'm fond of. If you give the brain information about, is it doing something that would produce an interesting experience, let the brain figure out in its wisdom how to produce more or less of that frequency rather than forcing it to do more or less of that. It's more ecological, more ethical.

[00:40:37]Luke Storey:  Got it. So, going back to your Theta training. So, I guess for context, when I did the, I guess it was the Alpha-1 training here. 

[00:40:48]James Hardt:  Premium double. 

[00:40:49]Luke Storey:  When I did that training, what I recall was we were teaching my brain how to recognize when it was producing a lot of Alpha waves and encouraging it to continue to do so.

[00:41:02]James Hardt:  And as you went through the week, we gave more and more head sites for you to have feedback. So, by the end of the week, you were getting feedback on your whole head, front, back, top, sides.

[00:41:13]Luke Storey:  Right. So, if the purpose there is to achieve some of the benefits you've described here, higher IQ points, 50% potential creativity, all of these things, and we can go more into that, what would be the purpose of the Theta training? Would you want to be producing Theta as you're living your life, or would you just get better at going into Theta when you want to meditate or have little trips into the quantum and manifest things, et cetera?

[00:41:44]James Hardt:  Well, I'm an Aquarius. And when faced with an either or, I'll say both and. Okay? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. For example, I gave the guy who had big frontal Theta simultaneously with big occipital Alpha, and he was able to grow a company from zero to $200 million in just two years because he had both of those abilities, or like Kekule, wanting to know the structure of benzene without an atomic microscope, electron microscope, or at one point, I have worked since 2003 with people who do readings in the Akashic Records. At one point, my favorite reader sent her best student. 

[00:42:37]Luke Storey:  Is your favorite reader based here in Sedona by chance?

[00:42:40]James Hardt:  Currently, she is, but she's my new favorite reader.

[00:42:42]Luke Storey:  I wonder if she wants to be interviewed. I've been wanting to do someone who's an Akashic record reader and I'm just kind of feeling out for when I meet the one.

[00:42:52]James Hardt:  Well, I like her. Her name is Kelly Jones. And with my first reader, I told everybody about her. And so, pretty soon, I had a two or three-week wait to get an appointment with her.

[00:43:06]Luke Storey:  You shot yourself in the foot. Got it. Yeah. I know how that goes. Sometimes, people covet their healers, because they're like, they're so good, they won't have room for me anymore.

[00:43:17]James Hardt:  Like for example, a couple of nights ago, I had an urgent question, I called her up at like 6:30 at night and we did a 20-minute reading. She was able to do that. But I've said her name, Kelly Jones, and I will give you her contact information.

[00:43:31]Luke Storey:  Lovely. Okay. Carry on with your story.

[00:43:33]James Hardt:  Okay. So, this woman, I can speak in detail because she's now passed, her name was Ann Jensen. And in her tradition, there was a secret prayer that they would do. Part of it was public, and then part of it was secret that they would use to open the Hall of Records for a person. And she came and she did Alpha-1. She loved it. And her Theta increased. She came and did Alpha-2 and her Theta increased more. And then, she came back and she did the Theta training. And after the Theta training, she didn't need the secret prayer anymore. She could simply turn on Theta and be in the Hall of records.

[00:44:15]Luke Storey:  Wow.

[00:44:16]James Hardt:  Yeah.

[00:44:17]Luke Storey:  Wow, that's so cool. So, explain to people, perhaps, how the training works. I always find this fascinating. My sort of rudimentary version of it is this, that your brain is producing brainwaves, which are signals that can be measured. And you're in a chamber, wherever you are, doing your neurofeedback, those signals are being interpreted by a computer interface that is then sending feedback in the form of sights or sounds back to your perception that then tells your brain, do more of this or less of this. So, it's like a way for your brain almost to communicate and observe, communicate with and observe itself. Would that be accurate?

[00:45:07]James Hardt:  It's well said, yes. 

[00:45:08]Luke Storey:  Okay. I just find this so fascinating. Subjectively, this experience is like, when I was here and I've done a lot of neurofeedback at home in LA to just one-off things, that I want to sleep better, I'm too anxious, or I want to focus more, whatever, it's really interesting because your consciousness, or higher self, or however you want to put it, is observing you in your physical body doing the training. So, there's this higher-self intention to it, but then there's the purely physical aspect of it, of your brain watching itself. So, it's like your brain's watching itself, and then there's a you watching your brain watch itself.

[00:45:49]James Hardt:  And there's other perspective where you can be watching yourself, watching yourself.

[00:45:53]Luke Storey:  Right. I don't know if I've had that one yet. Yeah. I had a recent ceremony at home with magic mushrooms, and I remember posing the question, I think I was asking, if the witness is watching the self, then who's watching the witness? Is there a witness to the witness? And no answer came. I just kind of got stuck on it.

[00:46:19]James Hardt:  Try Atman. 

[00:46:21]Luke Storey:  Atman? Elaborate.

[00:46:23]James Hardt:  Well, you have the Manus, the lower attached mind, the buddhi, the higher intellect, and then you have the Atman or the oversoul. In Tibetan Buddhism, there's over 150 attainment levels and each one gives you additional higher perspective on all the levels below.

[00:46:43]Luke Storey:  Oh, wow. God. It's such a complex game, this Awakening, because just when I think I've got it licked, it's like, wow, I'm actually able to kind of be in awakened state and observe the phenomenon of mind, emotions, personality, ego, spend some of the time being aware. Like right now, there's a me talking, there's also me that's watching me talking, and observing the authenticity, and spontaneity of the interaction, and how I'm performing for you, with you, et cetera, but I don't know that I've ever gotten to the place where I'm watching that being watched. That's where it gets interesting.

[00:47:17]James Hardt:  Well, one time, long ago, I was working with a man who became a dear friend. He's passed recently. His name is Gunnar Hurtig. Brilliant. He was a Stanford MBA and a master's degree, electrical engineer. And he knew silicon at the atomic level. He also knew management. It was a hot property in Silicon Valley. He had a formula. He would take a two-year contract as a CEO of some high-tech company, 175,000-dollar salary, 1% of the company, at the end of two years, there was no money in the universe that would cause him to stay with the company.

[00:47:53] He would go on. He had a quarter-circle pin. He could take a company from here to here. He knew that was his sweet spot, and that's what he did. And he was so good that when he was coming off his contract, there'd be like 50 or 60 headhunters on him pushing choice job offerings on him. And Gunnar, I mean, he made Mr. Spock look like an emotional wreck. I mean, he was so cold. Not unfriendly, but he was cold. He was non-emotional. Okay. On day five of his training, I go into the chamber, he's clearly in an altered state.

[00:48:35] He used to have an expression that if you weren't 100% rational 100% of the time, you were off your nut or he's off his nut. There was a 10-second period in 10 years I've known him where he wasn't completely rational. He's off his nut. Okay. So, Gunnar is in this altered state. I go into the chamber. I can see it. And we didn't have video cameras then, stereo, audio. And so, he's got his microphone, I've got mine, and he starts telling me that he's having his first out-of-body experience. 

[00:49:09] He's out of body and he's watching his body make love with a beautiful woman. He's in a third perspective watching himself watch his body make love with a beautiful woman, and thinking, man, this is such a guess. And I said to him, Gunnar, if I would have told you five days ago such a thing was possible, you would have said, I'm off my nut. And when I said nut, he exploded in convulsive belly laughter, he couldn't stop laughing for 10 minutes, his stomach muscles ached for days after because they hadn't had that much exercise, and he was profoundly different. Those happened in the Alpha-1.

[00:49:51]Luke Storey:  Wow. What a fun gig you have, huh, to see people go through these transformative experiences. I don't know if there's any better life than to be a participant in people's evolution. So fun.

[00:50:06]James Hardt:  Well, for a gardener, one of the greatest joys is to see the flowers or the vegetables, if things bear fruit and be productive. Well, I get to watch people flourish, to become what's been latent in them all their life. And suddenly, they know it, and they can live it, and they are celebrating it, and they're filled with joy, and people say sometimes, well, don't you ever want to retire? And they go, well, what's retirement? Let's see, retirement is supposed to be where you do what you want to do. I do that every day. Why would I want to stop?

[00:50:42]Luke Storey:  Right. Do you do neurofeedback training yourself?

[00:50:47]James Hardt:  Absolutely.

[00:50:47]Luke Storey:  You do, still?

[00:50:48]James Hardt:  Oh, still? I mean, it's ongoing. All of the technology has come through me in the chamber. Wow. There's a medieval painting of a shepherd on his hands and knees with his head kind of like poking through a rainbow, and then there's the medieval idea of like outer space. And it's like, in the chamber, I put my head through into the other side and I see how the electronic circuits work, I see how the computer codes work. I used to solder the circuit boards together myself and write the code myself. Now, I have other people to do that, but it all comes from the other side.

[00:51:22]Luke Storey:  Wow. Do you find, after having done so much training yourself, that when you're not connected to the electrodes, et cetera, that you're able to drop into a Theta state simultaneously, or at will, or is it possible for you or anyone that's had a lot of training to be able to, you don't like the word induce, to encourage Alpha or different brainwaves? Like do we have the ability or do you have the ability to bring up more or less of brainwaves according to what you're trying to achieve in a moment?

[00:51:56]James Hardt:  Well, yes, and we are embodied beings, we're bioelectromagneto chemical organisms. And so, if you put a harmful chemical in like garlic, or caffeine, or alcohol, it's going to sabotage your brainwaves and you're not going to be able to get to the state you wanted. A couple of years ago, I was feeling, and uncommon for me, amount of anxiety, a little worry about this, little worry about that. And so, I tracked it down. I have to confess to having been a ketchup-holic most of my life. People would ask me, do you want a little hamburger with your ketchup? And I'll say, well, a little, but not too much. I've walked out of restaurants that didn't have Heinz ketchup.

[00:52:46]Luke Storey:  That's funny. My fiancee is the same way. I hope she hears this. She doesn't listen to my podcast, but she's obsessed with ketchup. Anyway, go on. 

[00:52:53]James Hardt:  But you see, I had become sensitive to the point that Heinz ketchup and most other ketchup contained onion powder. And this onion, well, the Arabs have a proverb, after the devil had done his dirty work in the Garden of Eden, when he walked out, where his first foot fell, that's where garlic grew, and where his second foot fell, that's where onions grew. So, Brahmins in India are forbidden from eating onion or garlic. Buckingham Palace does not allow garlic in the palace. They understand that it sabotages the brainwaves you need for creativity.

[00:53:31]Luke Storey:  I wonder if there's a correlation there with the vampire mythology.

[00:53:37]James Hardt:  Don't know. 

[00:53:37]Luke Storey:  Maybe vampires are super high Alpha. Yeah, I remember that going through the training. There was no caffeine, which, at the time, was pretty challenging. I stuck with it, but I was a coffee drinker. I still am. I mostly drink decaf now. Funny you mention that. But yeah. No garlic, no onions, no caffeine. I don't drink alcohol forever anyway. On that note, do you happen to know what's happening to someone's brainwaves when they're under the influence of ayahuasca, or LSD, or psilocybin, or any of those potentially consciousness-expanding molecules?

[00:54:12]James Hardt:  Well, remember, brainwaves rule. Any experience that you have as a living human being, you can have that only when you have the appropriate underlying pattern of brainwaves. And so, psychedelic, which means mind-manifesting, psychedelic chemicals do profoundly alter brainwaves. Now, I remember working with a Danish colleague who had a portable EEG measuring, not feedback, measuring equipment that he took to Peru and measured brainwaves on ayahuasca ceremonies. And he reported that ayahuasca increased alpha at O1, O2, C3, C4, which are the four sites at which we train Alpha from the very beginning, even in the Alpha-1 training. But of course, there's no need to throw up when you do the brainwave training. 

[00:55:04]Luke Storey:  Yeah, I did throw up once. Yeah.

[00:55:06]James Hardt:  Mescaline, for example, has 13 alkaloids. One of them gets you high, the other 13 caused you to vomit.

[00:55:14]Luke Storey:  I noticed that.

[00:55:15]James Hardt:  And so, you take peyote and you remove those 12, make-you-throw-up alkaloids, you're left with one which is mescaline, and then you take that. Now, I know of studies, it was interesting, synchronicity, Dr. Joe Kamia introduced the human ability to voluntarily control your own brainwaves with brainwave feedback in 1962. It was in California. Also, in 1962, LSD became illegal. One technology for mind-manifesting psychedelic experience was taken away and another one was given. 

[00:55:58] So, shortly before LSD became illegal in California, Barbara Brown, an early researcher in brainwave feedback, legally gave LSD to college students and measured their brainwaves with some fairly primitive, maybe only one channel equipment. And what's very interesting, she found that LSD made big Alpha for some people and took the Alpha a way for others. And it divided it along whether they were visualizers or not.

[00:56:25]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting.

[00:56:26]James Hardt:  Okay. So, you know that from being in the chamber, and we'll go back and do a little more detailed description of the process, you'd ask for that, the chambers are completely dark. The only time you get visual feedback are for eight seconds when your auditory feedback, which is pretty continuous in two-minute epics, or in Theta and Delta training, they're three-minute epics, the audio feedback stops, and for eight seconds in Alpha, or 15 seconds in Theta or Delta trainings, dimly illuminated scores come up on a screen that tell you how much power you put out on different head sites on the left side of your brain, the right side, and other scores that tell you how well your left and your right brain are coordinating, how coherent they're becoming, called, hemicoherent. And so, when you have visual input, the Alpha is suppressed. So, if you do eyes opened, eyes closed baseline, almost always, the eyes open baseline, the Alfa's tiny, in the eyes closed, it's big.

[00:57:33]Luke Storey:  I remember that now. Yeah.

[00:57:35]James Hardt:  Okay. So, if the visuals are caused by photons coming in your eye and being absorbed by the retina, it's as disruptive to your Alpha as if the visuals are caused by the psychedelics.

[00:57:48]Luke Storey:  Wow. That's crazy.

[00:57:49]James Hardt:  Okay. So, if you are a visualizer because you took mescaline, or LSD, or whatever, then you have the visuals, and it's like you have your eyes open, and the Alpha is suppressed.

[00:58:01]Luke Storey:  That's so strange. Fascinating. In in some of those experiences I've had, whether it be ayahuasca or Bufo alvarius toad, DMT-

[00:58:15]James Hardt:  Bufotenin. 

[00:58:15]Luke Storey:  Yeah. I mean, I've had so many positive experiences, and I don't recommend that this is for everyone, but for me, I've had some profoundly transformative experiences that have been nothing but positive. A few heroin ones, too, in there, but specifically, with the ayahuasca and with psilocybin, I think because I've been meditating for 20 years before I did any of that stuff, I'm familiar with that, I guess, what is that Theta sort of quantum access point, where you're still aware that there's a body and you're in a room, but you're also somewhere else and you're having access to experiential information. I wonder if in those experiences, you're in Theta because it seems like what you're describing as Theta being that access point to go into the quantum field and access the Akashic records or that vast information, it seems that some of those compounds have the ability to do that.

[00:59:21]James Hardt:  Well, let's talk about 21 to 40 years of zen. In 1966, two pillars of the Japanese scientific community, Dr. Kasamatsu and Dr. Hirai wanted to study the brainwaves of zen meditation. So, they went to zen masters in Japan, in two of the main zen traditions, like Christianity has Protestant and Catholic. In zen, there's Soto and Rinzai. And so, they went to zen masters in both traditions and requested permission to measure brain waves on the monks while meditating. Permission granted.

[00:59:56] Further, they asked zen master to rate the monks for level of spiritual development. They did. Beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Nobody was rated advanced who had less than 21 years of practice, and some of them had up to 40 years. So, in the zen tradition, it's a minimum of 21 one years to get to the point where you have the brainwaves of advanced zen. No guarantee because some of them had to go longer, but that's the minimum, 21 years minimum. And zen meditation, Ram Dass called it the steepest path and without any railing.

[01:00:33]Luke Storey:  I love that. That's funny.

[01:00:34]James Hardt:  And when I trained the zen master, Ruho Yamada Roshi, he said several very interesting things. One, at the end of his Alpha training, he said in his broken English, Biocybernaut better than having on zen master. And I go, Ruho, you're a zen master, how can you say that? He goes, listen, you have zen master, Master Bisi, many students, you sit, you meditate, you have attainment, Master Bisi not notice. Next day, Master see you, see you different, Master give you feedback, one eyebrow go up little. 

[01:01:06] At Biocybernaut, feedback all the time. He repeated, Biocybernaut better than having on zen master. Okay. So, the Zen master in these two tradition's attunements, I rated the monks beginner, intermediate, and advanced, nobody was rated advanced with less than 21 years. I've studied beginning, intermediate, and advanced zen, as well as the zen masters. In fact, in a zen master, I discovered a pattern that I later realized was a halo. There's a brainwave pattern for having a halo.

[01:01:43] We can talk about that in a moment. And so, the pattern for advanced zen—okay. Beginning zen, usually, one to six years is beginner. Alpha increases only at the back of the head. In intermediate, which is six to 21 years, typically, that Alpha spreads forward on the head. In advanced zen, which doesn't begin before 21 years, those two things happen plus two more. The frequency of the Alpha slows a little bit. Not into Theta, it slows as Alpha, and at the frontal locations, pure Theta waves emerge.

[01:02:22] So, that pattern of high Alpha that spreads forward on the head slows a little, and then Theta emerges at the frontal side. That's the signature of advanced zen. That happens in seven days in the Biocybernaut training. Now, people differ in how much their Theta increases, but it always increases. And when people come to me after they're Alpha-1, and they say, am I ready for Theta? And I say, well, technically, the only prerequisite for Theta-1 is you have to have done Alpha-1, but let me look at your Theta.

[01:02:56] And if they have produced a lot of Theta along with their increase in Alpha in their Alpha-1 training, I say, fine. If not, I say you maybe want to do Alpha-2 or maybe even Alpha-3 before you go on to Theta. Now, when we were in Canada, we had a scholarship sponsor who put up $6 million for scholarships, personal money. He sent people from his company, second largest oil and gas company in Canada. He said the ROI on a Biocybernaut training was 100. If you $20,000 to send somebody to a training, the training that the employee got back, he felt, was worth $2 million.

[01:03:37] So, he said, the ROI on a Biocybernaut training is a hundred. And this was a guy, who, with one partner, had grown his company from zero to $2 billion in two years, very astute businessmen, ROI in the Biocybernaut training is 100. Okay. So, he also sent over 200 Canadian Aboriginals, who, because of the racism in the residential school system, which in some places, continued up until 1989, caused many Canadian Aboriginals to be as traumatized as returning war veterans, 80% of all male Canadian Aboriginals have been sexually abused. 

[01:04:17] And in some of the tribes, it's 100%. And so, the abuse, the traumatization, the post-traumatic stress disorder is vast. So, we trained over 200. At one point, I was invited to speak in Geneva at the United Nations about this work, and I actually published a paper entitled Reductions in Psychopathology in a Cohort of Male and Female Canadian Aboriginals, or we took these immensely traumatized people, gave them the scholarship, sponsored, paid for up to three Alpha trainings, Alpha-1, Alpha-2, Alpha-3. One of the first to come was a very famous chief, Chief Victor Buffalo.

[01:04:55] He had been chief of the four Cree Indian tribes at the big Hobbema Reservation outside Edmonton, Alberta. And after he had done his Alpha-4, because the scholarship sponsor gave him extra, he said, Jim, I have a confession to make. And I go, Chief, what was that? He said, well, as you suggested, I eliminated tobacco, alcohol, nicotine, onion, garlic from my diet before my Alpha-1. But after, I went back to eating onions and garlic. Now, when I came for my Alpha-2, I eliminated those again. But after my Alpha-2, I did not go back to onions or garlic because my consciousness had grown to the point where I could feel what it was costing me to eat onion and garlic.

[01:05:45] He said, I was so into the lost states of mental confusion, and what do they call it, the rajasic temperament. In the three gunas, sattva, rajas, and tamas. Sattva is enlightment. Rajas is egoic activity and will promoted by onions and garlic. And Tamas is the principle of inertia or ignorance. This is why Brahmins in India are forbidden to eat onions and garlic. And so, Chief Victor Buffalo actually came here to Sedona as we were under construction and walked through the building doing prayers and Cree for the blessings of all the people who would come here.

[01:06:24]Luke Storey:  Wow. Wild. You mentioned the PTSD, and I know that's not something, at least, that I've noticed that you market about here, it's more about performance and enhancing your life. But I have interviewed Dr. Andrew Hill in LA, a neuroscientist, and I hope I'm quoting him right from our interview, but I think he said that neurofeedback can not just assist or help with PTSD, but cure it, like gone, done you don't have PTSD anymore.

[01:06:59]James Hardt:  Also, TBI, traumatic brain injury.

[01:07:00]Luke Storey:  Right. Tell us a little bit about that.

[01:07:03]James Hardt:  Before PTSD was an official category, I trained a young man who had just come back from Vietnam, from the Vietnam War. He was very muscular, buffed, he looked like he had just sat down the weights, but he was so tense inside, because his best buddy was walking point, he was right behind him, the best buddy stepped on a claymore mine, and he had to peel the pieces of his body off of him. He was so profoundly traumatized, and yet even the early form of the Alpha training that I was doing back then, this might have been like '72, completely healed him of that incredible trauma. I remember he joined a Christian commune after that. And I've also worked with Gulf War veterans. And so, yes, it's a profound healing.

[01:07:55]Luke Storey:  So, if you were working on an issue like TBI or PTSD, would that solution just be kind of embedded with the training that you already do or would that be a specialized training to help someone with that issue?

[01:08:10]James Hardt:  You perhaps remember from your own training that each person's training is highly personalized to them based on their brainwaves, and also, what comes up on their mood skills, their computerized mood skills, which have the ability to detect emotions that are beneath the level of their conscious awareness. Of course, they can't work on them, they can't heal them, or if it's a good emotion, they can't feature it because it's unconscious. And so, these computerized mood skills bring up those unconscious emotions, so we can talk about it, you can get strategies, go in the chamber, and work on it.

[01:08:42]Luke Storey:  Got it. Okay. Cool. Wow. Fun stuff. Let me see, what else do I want to ask you? I feel like there's so much we could cover and I don't want either of us to be here all night, but I just get obsessed with this stuff. It's so fascinating to me.

[01:08:58]James Hardt:  You ask very good questions.

[01:08:59]Luke Storey:  Oh, great. Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it. Okay. So, when doing the training or if someone who just wants to be able to produce Alpha: caffeine, not good; nicotine, not good; garlic; onions. Now, I know when I was here, I did follow the rules as far as those things go, but I was, I got to be honest, sneaking some supplements on the side. So, I don't think I did modafinil because that would have been too much of a cheat, but I was probably taking Piracetam, or one of the racetams, or something like that, some nootropic or smart drug. Have you experimented with any exogenous type of compounds to enhance the training at all, or do you find that there's no point, or that it's deleterious to the effect that you're trying to go for?

[01:09:48]James Hardt:  Well, if people come and they are on any medically prescribed substance, I encourage them to continue that. One of the amazing examples, when I was still in the university, I had the opportunity to train the wife of the second most powerful professor in my department, and she was on 17 different psychiatric medications. At the end of her training, she was only on one. And this was with the advice and consent of her physician. And she wanted her insurance company to pay for her training. This was long before brainwave feedback was an accepted category.

[01:10:35] And they said no. So, I said, okay, well, come on down. And I got out an actuarial table and we put in the information like, what was her age? What was her gender? She's female. What was her education? What was her weight? All that. And we came up then with an expected number, large number of months that she was expected to live. And we multiplied the cost of those 16 medications that she was no longer on per month, times the number of months the actuarial tables said she had left to live, and it was the number that was so hugely beyond the cost of the training that her insurance company gladly paid.

[01:11:20]Luke Storey:  Oh, really? That's funny. Wow, that's really funny. So, with someone who's having psychiatric issues that would require medication, obviously, that has a lot to do with how your brainwaves are performing or not, but is there anything that would be able to enhance the brain's ability to become malleable or adaptive to the training? trying to think of like PQQ or something that is known to improve mitochondrial function or something like that, which obviously, your brain's using a lot of that energy in the training. Are there anything that you've added in or is it just like, eat a healthy diet, don't do any of the forbidden Alpha-killing foods, and that's it?

[01:12:12]James Hardt:  Well, let me give you two stories here. We have had some vegans come to do the training. Now, as you know, your brain works harder in this training than it has probably doing anything else you've ever done before in your life. 

[01:12:27]Luke Storey:  Absolutely.

[01:12:29]James Hardt:  Okay. So, by day five, these vegans are typically looking for a piece of salmon. Okay. Because they're not getting enough brain fuel out of their vegan diet. So, there's one thing, proper nutrition. I remember one point, Time magazine said, salmon is the healthiest non-vegetarian thing you can eat so I started eating a lot of salmon. Sometimes, I would get sick to my stomach, sometimes not. And I found the difference was farmed salmon versus fresh salmon.

[01:12:56] Because with farmed salmon, they buy fish meal from junk fish caught in the most polluted waters in the world and take it to these pristine waters where they have the salmon penned up because it's the cheapest fishmeal. Okay. But now, right about the time you did your training, before I introduced the premium double, in the single, we would sometimes allow people on day five if the whole group, when they finished their Alpha enhancement, the one session that we would do in that training per day, we would invite them, if the group wanted to do more, they could do extra, but the whole group had to stay together.

[01:13:40] And if everybody wanted to do more training, we'd say, okay, do you want to do 50% of what you just did? Do you want to do 20%, want to do 80%? And whatever the smallest number was, that's what we would do because we didn't want to push anyone beyond their comfort zone. Well, then we started to have people come who are taking MCT oil. We've got three people in the group, they're all taking MCT oil, and every one of them wants to do extra, and everyone wants to do 100% extra. So, we now make every morning before people go into the chamber frozen blueberry shake with a vegan protein powder, and guess what, MCT oil.

[01:14:21]Luke Storey:  Yeah, definitely. I was, for sure, taking MCT oil when I was in the training. Yeah, thank God. Why is it so exhausting to be—you alluded to before what happens in the chamber? I want to give people a picture of that. So, kind of explain the process of what happens when you're in the chamber, and then why is that so? Why do you get so fatigued during this type of training?

[01:14:47]James Hardt:  I'm going to answer that immediately, but then I'm going to jump to the bigger picture of, the chamber is just one of the things that people do in the day. You asked earlier and hadn't gotten there yet, people will throw out figures, oh, we never use more than 10% of our brain power. Oh, we never use more than 7%. Where do they get these numbers? They make them up, I'm pretty sure. In the chamber, you are using a much bigger percentage of your brain power than you ever have before. 

[01:15:15] And so, the brain like a muscle that's being asked to—well, in physical fitness, people go for three things: strength, flexibility, and endurance. In mind fitness, we go for three things: strength, bigger Alpha's better; flexibility, turn it on, turn it off; and endurance, go longer, and longer, and longer, and longer because some of the things like gamma waves only come out to play on the cortex after there has been a long period of stable high Alpha. Okay.

[01:15:45] Like duck hunters going into a blind, they make their noise and the forest shuts down. They have to sit there quietly for a long time before the forest comes back to life. So, when the ducks fly in, they're not warned off by, hey, where's all the birds singing and the squirrels running? And so, you have to be at peace in your brain for a long time before the gamma waves emerge. But okay, the context, there's a conference room, when people first come in, they sit at a conference table and they're given some coaching, it's like being in a college class about the brain. The brain is complex and any meaningful brain machine interface is going to be complex, and you're not going to be able to learn it just like that.

[01:16:33] All learning is divided into two parts. There's learning how to learn, and then there's the actual learning. Much of the first three days is learning how to learn. And then, you can take all that information, you know what to do with it, how to do the procedure, the protocol, and you get in, and you do it. Okay. So, at one point, I was visiting the San Francisco Zen Center by invitation. They had learned I had studied the brainwaves of Suzuki Roshi, who founded that zen center, and he's the one in whom I first found the pattern that I recognized later, years later, as a halo, a pattern of brainwaves that produces halo.

[01:17:13]Luke Storey:  Oh, yeah. We got to go back to the halo thing when you're through with this. Thank you for bringing that word up.

[01:17:17]James Hardt:  Yeah. And so, they had seen one of my papers showing, which I published in 1993, that seven days of the Alpha training produced the same brainwave changes as 21 to 40 years of zen. I published that paper in 1993. And so, I was teaching people, the Biocybernaut training is like 21 to 40 years of zen and did that for a long time. And so, they wanted to know more about this. So, they had me up. We had a ceremonial tea. And then, we had a tour of the training center, they have a big statue of Suzuki Roshi.

[01:17:56] Everyone was very reverent. And then, we gather back in the office of, I guess, Master Roshi. And he says, Dr. Hardt, we would like to understand because we don't understand, how you can produce the same results in seven days that we take 21 to 40 years to produce. There was no dispute, no argument. It was like, we want to understand, we don't understand how you can do this. And he said, and the reason we don't understand, he said, is because we know that you have to accumulate experience. 

[01:18:33] And I go, experience, you're absolutely right on that. Experience is the key. And so then, I told him a story. My house in San Francisco was on Potrero Hill, a very steep hill, and I had put in terraces. Now, I'm a blueberry fanatic, and I had bought early-season, midseason, late-season blueberries. I'd had them shipped in, I dug holes, I built these terraces, planned the blueberries, watered them, put vitamin B6 to stimulate growth, then I went in my house.

[01:19:05] Next morning, I went to see how they had survived the night, my new blueberry pots, months in the planning, and all the blueberry plants were gone. They were ripped out of the ground and chewed into little matchstick-type pieces, and there were muddy dog prints, and they went up the back stairs of my neighbor's house. So, I gathered a few of the twigs, the chewed-up twigs, and I went up the back stairs, and knocked on the door, and say, look at what your dog did to my blueberries.

[01:19:36] And they were abusive. They yelled at me. They swore at me. They said, it's your fault, you should have had a fence. And, oh, my. So, that night, I'm in my meditation room in my house and this dog starts barking. I can hear it through the walls. I meditate. I'm trying to meditate, and my mind goes off on this rant like, oh, my God, there's that dog, and why didn't they, and they should have been [making sounds] you know what those rants are like. Fifteen minutes later, I'm telling these to the zen guys, 15 minutes later, I wake up, and go, oh, my God, I'm supposed to be meditating. 

[01:20:13] And I bring my mind back. I say, that was one experience. You're right, you do have to accumulate experience. But it took me 15 minutes and I was probably quick because I was pretty experienced in my meditation. Now, how quickly do you accumulate experience with Biocybernaut? Well, at that time, we were doing only the Alpha-1 training, each of the four tones [making sounds] the volume is adjusted 50 times a second to track your ever-changing brainwaves. So, you're sitting there, and if you're paying attention to the tones, you're having 200 opportunities per second to learn compared to one experience in 15 minutes. 

[01:20:56] And so, your brain, if you pay attention to the tones, and I ask people, listen to the tones as if your life depended on it. If you pay attention to tones, your brain has more information than it's ever had before, certainly, about itself. And what I found is that even children have an almost unlimited capacity to absorb, pay attention to, and remember accurate information about themselves. And so, this is you listening to you.

[01:21:25] It's like you stand in front of a mirror, the mirror doesn't make you smile, but if you want to learn a better smile, you can try pulling facial muscles in different ways, you get instant feedback. And so, you're in there, you're listening to these sounds which vary as the amplitude of your Alpha, varies at different sites in your head, and you have more information than you've ever had before. And you love it. The brain loves it. And it sucks it up. And it works harder than it's ever worked before in your life. 

[01:21:50] And this explains why you tend to get pretty fatigued when you're doing this type of work. Alright. That's cool. What goes on in the chamber? I remember being surrounded by all of these different speakers so that I could hear the tones. And at times, there would be what sounded like a symphony, not necessarily a coherent symphony, but a symphony of sounds, totally dark, and then we'd go through the mood scales. Again, this is a few years ago, so my memory is a little vague, but perhaps you could walk those that are trying to visualize this through that process. What are you actually doing in the training?

[01:22:28] Well, when you first go into the chamber, you will have spent some time in the conference room, having your head measured every day, carefully measured electrodes put on, and getting guidance, instruction. It's like a college class. And how the brain works, and strategies, things you can try. So then, you go in the chamber and you get plugged in. Now, the brainwaves are very tiny. They're just a few millions of a volt, an eyeblink, tiny muscle that that is, is sometimes, like 10 or 20 times bigger than your biggest brainwaves.

[01:23:03] And so, these tiny signals coming out of your head have to be amplified by our technology about 100,000 times for them to be big enough for our computers to process. Now, part of the processing is simple, conceptually. Most of you have seen a triangular prism with sunlight coming through it, and then the rainbow, the spectrum of colors, a white light is spectrally decomposed into the color spectrum, which goes red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, indigo, violet.

[01:23:36] And so, your brainwaves similarly constitute a spectrum. And we want to pull out in the Alpha training just the Alpha. We don't want any Theta in there. We don't want any Delta in there. And we definitely don't want any Beta in there. Increasing Beta makes people irritable, and impatient, and even angry. And so, we don't want any of those other frequencies. You just want the Alpha, and you want pure Alpha with no attenuation. So, slow Alpha, middle-speed Alpha, and fast Alpha all will be treated equally and they all run the tone equally. 

[01:24:12] Bigger Alpha, louder tone. And so, as you are doing this, you're paying attention to what you're thinking about, what's going on in your head, and you're also listening to the tones. And as the thoughts or the awareness is changing, the tone are changing, and your job is to pay attention. Brain is super good at correlating. It's a master correlator. And all you have to do is pay attention to the changing tones and the changing content of your awareness, and you will learn really rapidly. 

[01:24:47] And you pretty quickly learn, I mean, well, like Goldilocks. Now, this one's too cold, this one's too hot, this one's just right. They even refer to, around stars, there are Goldilocks zones, where it's not too hot, not too cold, you can have liquid water on the surface of a planet. And so, you pretty quickly find out that your Alpha is your Goldilocks zone, where you feel good, your body feels good, you're not under stress. And then, as you build that, it goes from feeling good to cosmic bliss, and then beyond. And you just work your way up. 

[01:25:25]Luke Storey:  Amazing. So exciting. I love that things like this exist and that I get to share them with people. What's up with the halo pattern?

[01:25:34]James Hardt:  Okay. I had, on FM tapes, brainwave recordings from Suzuki Roshi and 30 of the monks that he brought to be measured during their zen meditation. And my first job following getting my PhD was to read the assembly code of a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-15 minicomputer that was in the EEG Systems Lab at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco as a part of UC San Francisco. And so, this brilliant programmer, Alan Gevins, had written this program in assembly code that would do power and coherence spectral analysis on brainwaves.

[01:26:25] And my first job was to read the code and document it. And so, once I read the code and documented it, I knew the program better than the programmer. And so, on Christmas Day, when the whole hospital was shut down, I let myself in, mounted the tapes, and began playing the tapes through this analysis program, and making graphs. Now, some of the things like the coherence, you can get 100% coherence on just noise just by random. So, what I found is that you had to do an amplitude threshold on the coherence. 

[01:27:00] So, you wouldn't report the coherence unless there was at least a minimum amount of amplitude. And when I did that, amazing patterns—first of all, I confirmed everything that Kasamatsu and Hirai had found, beginners and little bit of Alpha at the back of the head, intermediate, spread forward, and they had advanced slowing, and frontal Theta emerging. But I saw in the coherence a pattern that I had never seen before in the zen master, which was simultaneous coherence in Alpha and Theta. 

[01:27:32] Simultaneous, not one, and then the other, but simultaneous. Now, that was mind-boggling because I had never known that that was possible to run Alpha and Theta at the same time, and certainly, not to have them coherent. This pattern of bimodal coherence was seen in only one of the 30 monks that Suzuki Roshi brought with him, happened to be in advanced then. And because this man has now passed, Suzuki Roshi has passed, and this man, I can say who it was, it was Richard Baker, who was an advanced zen. 

[01:28:05] And I know, I'm a scientist, so one out of 20 is all you need for statistical significance. So, this is one of the 30. I knew it meant something. I didn't have a clue what, but I made a presentation at a scientific conference. Oh, my God, power and coherence of zen meditation, and the zen master, and one of the advanced, and they show this unusual bimodal coherence pattern. That was it.

[01:28:29] I went back to working on the technology. Seven years later, Suzuki Roshi died. It was a conscious passing. Like next Thursday, I'm leaving my body. Come on by. There were 45 people in the room. And when he died, some of the people felt something leave the dying zen master and going to somebody else in the room. It's called giving transmission. The man to whom he gave transmission was Richard Baker.

[01:28:57]Luke Storey:  Wow.

[01:28:57]James Hardt:  Wow. Yeah.

[01:28:58]Luke Storey:  Oh, my God.

[01:29:00]James Hardt:  It's very exciting. Now, this caused a bit of a scandal in the zen community. Oh, why did Roshi do that? Well, I knew why Roshi had done it, because of all the monks around him, he was the only one who had a vessel capable of receiving energy that the master was about to drop when he left his body. So, now, I do another scientific presentation. Oh, this is a marker for Zen Roshi. Let's celebrate. What did it mean? I didn't have a clue. So, now, we fast forward maybe 10 years more.

[01:29:31] And I'm at a conference on the East Coast on Chaos Theory as applied to analysis of brain waves. It was a lot of military intelligence people in the room. It was like 2,000, 2,500 people, big auditorium. I was in the next to last row, and a lot of the papers were highly mathematical, delves, and curls, and things like that. I understood it all. I was a math wiz in high school and college, but wasn't that interesting. Then, just before lunch, they introduced a guy named Dr. Arnold Mandell.

[01:30:05] And I knew from the introduction, this was going to be different. He had been the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at UC Davis. Power, procedure. I mean, psychiatrists get to say what normal is. Immense power in our culture. But he gave all that up because he loved math so much. And he went from being chairman of the psychiatry department to a low-ranking mathematician in the math department because he loved math so much. So, he gets up and he starts talking about brainwaves follow Fibonacci scaling.

[01:30:36] Now, you know what Fibonacci numbers invented by the Italian mathematician, Fibonacci are. You start with one and zero, and you add them together, and you get one, and then you add one and one together, and you get two. And you add two and one together, and you get three. And you add three and two together, and you get five. You add the two previous ones to get the next one. Well, except for the first few, the ratios of all Fibonacci numbers and they go out to an infinite series are never resolved to a rational number.

[01:31:02] It's always irrational. Now, Fibonacci numbers are deeply embedded in nature. When a little plant comes out of the ground and puts out its first leaf, the plant is smart enough not to put the second leaf directly above the first because it would shade it and waste resources, so the second leaf is set off by some angular degree. And as you go up the stem, it's a Fibonacci number before you get one leads that's directly over one below. So, plants know Fibonacci numbers.

[01:31:29] And so, if he said, brainwaves follow Fibonacci scaling, that would mean the center frequency of Delta, if added to the center frequency of Theta would equal to the center frequency of Alpha, which it doesn't. And I'm [making sounds] on the back, growling. But then, he quickly resolves my discomfiture, by saying, well, you see, Delta is not a monolith. Delta is actually two different brainwaves. There is slow Delta and there's fast Delta, and they have different generators in the brain that go okay.

[01:31:58] So, if you have the center frequency of slow Delta center frequency, high Delta, you add the center frequency of Theta, then you have center frequency of high Delta and Theta, you add center frequency of Alpha, and it all works. Okay. But I'm interacting with him in a most enjoyable, and entertaining, and informative way. And then, he's working with a transparency, and a grease pencil, and a projector. So, everything he draws here is projected for this audience of 2,500 people. 

[01:32:27] And he draws the occipital lobe of the monkey brain. And you might want to go to, in the Global Consciousness Summit, I did an actual paper on the brainwaves of halos. So, I actually have graphs and stuff in there. So, now, we have two frequencies, Theta, remember, we had coherent Alpha and we had coherent Theta, so we have five Hertz and 10 Hertz. So, he says, okay, we take a line that's five, and then a line twice as long as 10. So, you take the five line and you revolve it around, it makes a circle, then you take the 10 line and you revolve that around, and what the circle does is it sweeps out of volume, which is called a torus.

[01:33:08] Well, when he did that, I did something I've never done in my career before or since, I leaped out of my second-to-the-last-row chair, cupped my hand, shouted at the top of my lungs because the stage was long ways away. I've got two people in my database who showed that pattern. One was a zen master and the other got transmission when that zen master died. Now, Dr. Mandell was most gracious, and said, please, after my talk, come up. Now, as a side story, as I said, there were a lot of military intelligence people in the room.

[01:33:42] My outburst there won me, a few months later, an invitation to a CIA or NSA safehouse in Savannah, Georgia, where I was invited to come to present. And I mean, of all the speakers who were there to present, I was the only one allowed to stay all week, so I got to see all the things that everyone presented. And they were freaked out that a civilian knew the things that I knew about brainwaves, and consciousness, and stuff. And so, that story had legs. But okay. Now, the lunch bell rings and everybody empties out, I walk down. 

[01:34:21] The first foot I put on the stage, Dr. Mandell says, you must be a physicist and a psychologist. And I go, how do you do that? He says, well, only somebody with those backgrounds could possibly have this data. And so then, we talked for a long time. Now, because what I had seen was this pattern of coherent Theta and coherent Alpha simultaneously produces over the head a torus in phase space. Wow. And if you ask any PhD level electrical engineer what happens if you convolve a coherent signal, well, you'll get a torus in phase space.

[01:34:58] I mean, it's not esoteric. It's like if you take an oscilloscope and you feed in a 10 Gertz signal in the X axis, and the 10 hertz in the Y, you get a circle. And then, if you make it a 10 hertz and a 20, you get a figure eight. And so, these are called [indiscernible] patterns. Well, this is a three-dimensional [indiscernible] pattern and we know people have seen this because you can go back to the 500 and 600 A.D., and when painters were painting saints, they put halos over their head.

[01:35:28]Luke Storey:  So, that's wild. This is an amazing story. So, is that then, when you have the coherent Alpha and Theta making this halo, is that a magnetic field, this torus field?

[01:35:42]James Hardt:  Well, that's a good question. I mean, the fact that the torus exists in phase space, is it a mathematical abstraction? It's certainly visible to many people. And it's not just Christian because the Buddha is often depicted with a halo, and so is Krishna. In Hinduism, Krishna and his wife are often depicted with halos, as well as Jesus, and the angels, and the apostles. And there was one painting, Dr. Jerry Pitman, who done the training when I shared this with him, he went off to art libraries and gave me scores of color xeroxes of religious paintings of halos.

[01:36:16] And there was one painting of Jesus and the apostle, and the one apostle had his halo at about a 45 degree angle over on one side of the head. And I go, oh, my God, a brain asymmetry. And rarely, maybe one in a hundred or one in 200 people will have like 10 times more power in one hemisphere than the other, and that would pull the halo over to that side. So, right now, if you give me a painting or a photograph of a saint with a halo, I can make measurements of the major and the minor axis, and calculate back, and then tell you what brainwaves have to be running in that saint's head in order to produce a halo that size and orientation.

[01:36:56]Luke Storey:  So cool. So then, is that pattern indicative of enlightenment? I mean, is that an indicator of what we would, just for lack of a better term, I mean, just a blanket term, enlightenment, when one has transcended?

[01:37:14]James Hardt:  Well, Hawkins said, enlightenment begins at 600 on his scale. Jesus, when he was in the body, was a thousand. At one time, a passing archangel who sent him a thought that brought him out of his slew of despond, he calibrated the archangel at 50,000. And so, that's one scale. I'm fond of saying that it's possible for you to formulate the first axiom of biofeedback in 1970.

[01:37:45] Any process in your brain, mind, or body about which you can be given accurate and immediate information, you can learn to control, whether that's your heartbeat, or the acidity of your stomach, or your muscle tension, or your brainwaves, or the pattern. Now, halos are a pattern that emerges in phase space when you're running a certain pattern of bimodal coherence. Now, you could run coherent gamma, and coherent alpha, and that would be a different shape of halo than coherent Alpha and coherent Theta. But halos are a cross-cultural symbol of spiritual advancement and ethical purity, Buddha, Krishna, Christianity. 

[01:38:28] Maybe decades ago, there was an election and a whole bunch of freshmen congressman went in under the direction of, I believe, Newt Gingrich, and I remember there was a cartoon in the newspapers of Newt Gingrich in a little kiosk outside the Capitol building, and the freshman congressman were lining up, and he was handing each one a halo. The idea, we were going to have now ethics in government. And so, halos are a cross-cultural, recognized symbol of spiritual advancement and ethical purity. Do you call it enlightenment? Well, in what scale? I think it's probably better to have one than not.

[01:39:03]Luke Storey:  Yeah. So, relative, I guess. Wow, dude. Fascinating stuff here. I think a lot of people are going to hear this, and want to get in on neurofeedback and what you're doing here at Biocybernaut. And I hadn't been on the website in a while, but I was going through just kind of reacquaint myself with your work, and formulate my questions, and I thought, oh, let me just see what the packages are, and how much they cost, and there were a number of different programs now available that I don't know when I came in, but it's quite expensive. I mean, we're talking $15,000 to $20,000 to come for five or seven days. 

[01:39:41]James Hardt:  Or 50 to 80,000 if you want to train with me.

[01:39:44]Luke Storey:  Okay. I didn't see. I guess there were some shocking numbers on there. So, sometimes, I cover things on the show that are so profoundly useful and transformative. And at the same time, I often feel bad because they're not available to all people for whatever their socioeconomic situation might be.

[01:40:03]James Hardt:  Let's address it directly. One, there are payment plans and there are some places where people can apply and get loans to do the training.

[01:40:17]Luke Storey:  That's what I did. I borrowed it from Visa.

[01:40:19]James Hardt:  Yeah.

[01:40:20]Luke Storey:  When I came. 

[01:40:21]James Hardt:  Well, let's talk about the payoff because there's a book that we give out. We probably got a free copy. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Dr. Travis Bradberry and Jeanine Greaves. And everyone who comes for training now will take their online test. It's paid for when we buy the book and we give the book to you. You take it at the start of day one and at the end of day seven. It measures emotional intelligence. Well, as you look through the book in the first few chapters, it points out that emotional intelligence is the master skill for success. 

[01:40:55] IQ maybe accounts for 10%, or best case, 20% of your success in life, where emotional intelligence or EQ, they say, accounts for 58%, almost 60%. So, three to six times more important for your life success than IQ. I mean, you can be the smartest guy around, but if you can't relate to people, you can't have employees, you can't be an employee, you can't have investors. You just can't relate to people because you don't have the emotional intelligence. So, they've actually studied EQ all around the world in different cultures in different economies.

[01:41:37] And so, they found, using, as an average, a salary boost from a boost in EQ that includes India, and Pakistan, and Seychelles, and Burma, and as well as Germany, and France, and England, and Canada, and the US, and Japan, the average boost in your annual income from a one point rise in EQ is $1,300, and that's global average. If you're in a first-world country with more opportunities, it's likely to be much more than $1,300. But even if you take that global average, $1,300, and you multiply it by the average EQ increase of our Alpha-1 premium double training, which is 15.8 points, you get a number north of 20,000, which is more than people pay for the premium double training.

[01:42:30]Luke Storey:  That's interesting. It's funny. I didn't know the the metrics of that when I signed up those many years ago, but I got to say, I think it was $15,000 when I did it, and I mean, I probably had like a few hundred dollars in the bank, you know what I mean? I used to have problems with credit cards. I've since remedied that. I don't borrow money that I don't have something to back it up with. Hard lesson. But I remember putting it on my credit card and I just had to hope and pray that something like what you just described was going to happen.

[01:43:02] And now, here I am, all those years later, and it still would be a chunk of change for me, but not something I would probably have to put on a credit card for that long. So, I felt like it was a worthy investment. And my success, I'm sure, has had something to do with, at least in some part, the health of my brain and my ability to access these different brainwave states. But I did want to bring that up because I know, sometimes, people are right into the show, and be like, oh, man, all these improvements, and biohacks are so expensive, and it's a rich person's game. And I always tell people that the best biohacks are just nature. 

[01:43:36] So, that's the number one answer to that. You don't have to do all this fancy stuff, but I also just want to like prepare people for that and give them an understanding. And also, I think when someone hasn't gone through a training like that, it's difficult to understand why it would cost that much money. But having been here, when you look at all the equipment, and the number of staff, and like the attention going on, I'm sure that the overhead is not cheap to run kind of an operation like this. And the other thing about it is, is that getting to know you even more today and having spent a week with you those years ago, you don't seem like a guy who's in this for the money.

[01:44:15]James Hardt:  I don't get a salary.

[01:44:17]Luke Storey:  Oh, really?

[01:44:18]James Hardt:  And money that comes in goes into the technology, or into the staff, or whatever.

[01:44:23]Luke Storey:  Right. Yeah. So, I appreciate your heart. And it's no accident that you're named Dr. Hardt, but yeah, man, I appreciate the work that you're doing and I hope that people can find a way to make this accessible. Do you foresee at any point in the future as this type of technology emerges as commonplace that the demand will, in a universal way, lower the cost to make it less prohibitive to people?

[01:44:53]James Hardt:  The answer is yes. But there is always two ways to do that, is to provide more money. At one point, I wanted to know what the US defense budget was. And it was 2008, the numbers were classified all the way back to 2004. And so, the US defense budget, which included the Coast Guard, and Homeland Security, and things like that, just half of that would have provided the training to all adult North Americans. Okay. At which point, everybody would be so much more creative, and so much higher emotional intelligence, and wouldn't need the same kind of defenses, because we would creatively discover, and invent, and put in place new forms of defense.

[01:45:49] And so, just half then. Now, when we had a 6-million-dollar scholarship fund in Canada, this paid for the airfare, and the hotels, and the taxi, and the training fees of over 200 Canadian Aboriginals, as well as people from the philanthropists company. And so, instead of trying to make the training cheaper, and cut this out, and cut that out, and cut corners here, let's just come up with more money. What I learned when I had my first federal grant, you don't have to have money to spend money. 

[01:46:28] There was the money, wasn't mine, I couldn't buy an ice cream cone with it, but it could hire this person, I could buy a computer system. So, you don't have to have money in order to spend money. And so, the Goethe quote that we read on day one of every training includes, once you commit, then providence moves too, raising in your favor all manner of unforeseen meetings and material assistance that no man or woman could have dreamed would have come their way.

[01:46:58]Luke Storey:  Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah, that's so true. I'm a huge proponent of vision work. Yeah, I used to make vision boards and it was just awkward when I was dating, because then, you'd forget your vision board was out. 

[01:47:14]James Hardt:  Who's that woman? 

[01:47:15]Luke Storey:  Yeah. A bunch of bikini clad ladies on my vision board and one will just walk in my room. So, that got awkward, but there were just other private affirmation, I'm kind of joking, but not really. And then, I started making vision books, where I get these kind of big, whatever the 11-by-14 books, and I'd cut out pictures, and affirmations, and all the things. And they worked so well that I'd have to make a new one every year because so many of those things, and one of them was coming to this training. 

[01:47:44] And I had to eventually take it out of the book because, mission accomplished, I had done it. And there were all sorts of 15,000-dollar biohacking do thats, and I thought, oh, man, I'll never be able to afford that, says the conscious mind, but after many years of vision work, now, I actually do videos and I put really meaningful music behind it, or someone made it for me. And my friend, Bri, just made me a new one.

[01:48:09] And now, she uses Photoshop, and she'll take a picture of me, and superimpose it somewhere that I want to be. So, it's like a beautiful home, or a vacation, or whatever it is, or she'll put me and my fiancee in front of our dream home, and we're in the hallway just standing there. And they look pretty real too. And I'll invoke that feeling of gratitude as if that event has already transpired, because as we were talking about in the quantum field of infinite potentiality, it does exist, right?

[01:48:40]James Hardt:  Yeah.

[01:48:40]Luke Storey:  So, buying into that and really working with that, I think, is so powerful. So, I might leave people with that, and to the point that you just made, is that these things seem to be out of reach for many of us, but if you know the right tools, they can become part of your reality. And I'm living proof of that. I mean, I don't come from money. Man, I used to be a pot dealer and a waiter. 

[01:49:02] Like I have no credentials, training, education, nothing, and here I am, and I'm experiencing some of these things that I share about on the show and I'm manifesting them for myself in the same way that people listening to this show can for themselves. So, there's my encouragement for people that feel like they're excluded from the party. Like you're only excluded because you haven't yet mastered the techniques of manifestation and bringing into reality what you really want.

[01:49:32]James Hardt:  And to underscore for everyone, the key elements there, you talked about, you'd have the feeling. Just reciting words, I'm rich, I'm rich, I'm rich, it's not going to get you very far. But when you can manifest the feeling of how you will feel when you are whatever it is that you want to be, cultivate that feeling, and while cultivating it, allow yourself to drift down first into a deep Alpha state, and then into a Theta state. And the reality will take the impression of that feeling and shows up pretty quickly. 

[01:50:13]Luke Storey:  Awesome. I love it. Alright. I got one closing question for you, man. This is really fun. We're almost at two hours here. I know when time disappears that it's going to be a great episode. At this point, I've done over 300-some of them, and I have a pretty good sense of when it's really going to be useful to people. So, thank you so much. I think people are really going to benefit and just be entertained by this whole thing we've gone into today. But my closing question-

[01:50:39]James Hardt:  Let's do the time thing. Ram Dass said, if you want to live high, you have to live outside of time. Suzuki Roshi said, time is the basis of fear. I was 26 when I heard Ram Dass say that, if you want to live high, you have to live outside of time. So, sitting in my gym clothes on the carpeted floor of my apartment on Noe Street in San Francisco with a big imaginary samurai sword, I spent three full days thinking of what ways I might be connected to time, and when I found one, I would cut it. For three days, I did that. Later, psychics were to say to me, Him, your nature is that of timelessness. You want to live high, you have to live outside of time.

[01:51:24]Luke Storey:  Wow. That brings to mind something, speaking of manifestation, and just having goals and dreams come true, prior to coming over here today, I got an email from someone that sounds true, the publishing house that represents so many amazing spiritual teachers, and they want me to do a show about Ram Dass. He's one of my all-time favorite teachers. Unfortunately, I was unable to get him on the show, but one of his cohorts is going to come on and we're going to talk about his teachings in life and work. I just got that email before I came over here. I was like, yes. It really does work. This stuff works. Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah. And I noticed you mentioned him a couple of times. I thought, oh, he's around. He's around. 

[01:52:06]James Hardt:  Everywhere.

[01:52:07]Luke Storey:  Yeah. My last question for you is, you've taught me so much today and in my prior experiences with you, who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and your work that you might share with the audience?

[01:52:19]James Hardt:  Well, of course, Ram Dass. When he would come to the Bay Area, I lived in San Francisco, he would be on KPFA from midnight to dawn, and I would tape-record these talks on reel-to-reel tapes. Okay. And then, I would play them. One time, there was a guy who called in and I would call in from time to time, talk to him. At one point, I did a retreat with him, meditation retreat in person. And this guy said, I've heard you talk about your teacher, your guru in India, so many times, but you've never said his name, would you be able to say his name?

[01:52:57] He goes, yes, of course. And he starts talking. And he talked, and he talked, and he talked, and I never heard the name, aha, but I have a tape recorder, so I played the tape, listening for the name. I didn't hear it. It wasn't until the 10th time, I counted, the 10th time when I played the tape, I heard him say yes, and my guru's name is Neem Karoli Baba. And so, that was obviously embedded, and you had to attend, you had to rise to a certain point in consciousness before you could see. 

[01:53:29] I think at one point, Ram Dass was taken on a hike in the Himalayas, very high up, way above the tree line. And they came over this little lip and there was this huge bowl-shaped valley, very steep walls. It's all rock. And he looks at this guy like, why do you bring me here? The guy goes, tune a little deeper. So, he tunes a little deeper, opens his eyes, and the entire bowl-shaped valley, like an amphitheater, is filled with these old, old yogis like shoulder to shoulder, and the guide said, these beings are here holding our reality back from chaos. 

[01:54:10] Except for these beings being here, all this entire reality would dissolve into chaos. And so, okay, so you have to tune. I had to tune 10 times in order to do that. Certainly, Yogananda was a powerful teacher. I was initiated into Kriya Yoga by one of his direct disciples from a Kriya Ananda, the Ananda Cooperative Village. And I have to credit Rick O'Dell, who was a grad student in phenomenological psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. When he and I met the first summer I didn't go work on my family's farm for harvest, I stayed behind to work at the computer center, and that summer, I met Rick O'Dell, who taught me like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, started to teach me about consciousness, and I loved it, but something was missing. 

[01:55:06] Like it all sounds great. It's all philosophy. It sounds wonderful, but how do you measure it? And then, in the senior semester of my senior year, when I came out of the student union after lunch to confront a big hand-painted sign where every letter was a slightly different color, it said Dr. Joe Kamia will talk on brainwaves and consciousness, and the time was, oh, 10 minutes from now. The building was right over here, Margaret Morrison College, and I did not have a class, and so I went, and suddenly, I knew, this is the technology to measure consciousness.

[01:55:39] Now, I had to transform the field. They were using measures like present time that suffered from gauge invariance like a rubber ruler, and I built my technology. I built the filters, the world's best analog filters. I built the world's first microcomputerized brainwave feedback and analyzing system in 1978. So, I've had to create the tools to do this, but it all came from the other side, in the chamber.

[01:56:06]Luke Storey:  Well, Jim, man, what a mind-blowing conversation. Just when I think I've done the be-all-end-all podcast, I have one like this. Man, thank you so much for spending time with me.

[01:56:07]James Hardt:  It's a delight to hang out with you.

[01:56:07]Luke Storey:  Wonderful to be back here on the premises where all this magic takes place. In closing, where can people find your websites or social media? Any links you want to share, and we'll, of course, put those in the show notes for people.

[01:56:28]James Hardt:  Sure. Well, I'm on LinkedIn, and Brian Alcorn, my operations director, is also on LinkedIn. And our website is www.biocybernaut.com. And it's easy because a biocybernaut is to interspace, when an astronaut is to outer space. Naut is a Greek suffix meaning, somebody who goes on an adventure.

[01:56:51]Luke Storey:  So, it's the inner adventure. 

[01:56:52]James Hardt:  Through the cybernetic technology.

[01:56:54]Luke Storey:  Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Alright, man. Well, thanks so much. 

[01:56:58]James Hardt:  Thank you so much for being here.

[01:56:59]Luke Storey:  And you know what, I'm going to set a new goal. I'm going to get myself back in and do that Theta training at some point.

[01:57:05]James Hardt:  That's awesome.

[01:57:05]Luke Storey:  Yeah. I mean, I love coming to Sedona for any reason, but to come here and be able to have such a transformative experience would be really cool. 

[01:57:13]James Hardt:  Well, I'd be thrilled if you moved here, you and your fiancee. 

[01:57:15]Luke Storey:  Well, I gave it a shot this time. We'll see how it goes. We're still on the hunt. But I have a feeling we're going to end up back here a lot more, if not all the time. So, thanks again, and we'll see you soon.

[01:57:28]James Hardt:  You're welcome. Thanks for being here.

[01:57:30]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Yeah.

[01:57:44]

‍