Holosync Dangerous??

[DEEJ]

After ordering Holosync earlier this week and continuing research on the product, I must say I was quite concerned reading the following links... The claim is that the 'Upheaval' that Centerpoint claim is part of the healing process is in fact an adverse affect to the CDs. I'm starting to doubt using it if there is a chance it is dangerous.... I'm confused!! What do people think....

michael hutchinson holosync dangerous - Yahoo! Search Results

An "E-Interview" with Michael Hutchison

[Adrienne]

Interesting sites.. i read some similar stuff before i ordered. And he Bill Harris even says that lots of time some upheaval comes with the territory. I will say that i have only had a little upheaval if any. If i had some, it was so little i did not notice it.. for the most part, i just enjoy the deeper meditation. I am hoping that it will help me become a better meditater and reach that state of bliss.
I was not using the program to SOLVE anything which apparently seems to be source of contention. I was just looking for a really really good meditation and it works for me.

You may have already seen this but i found this link
Holosync vs Michael Hutchison - Transparent Community Forum
and i think alot of the people there really sum up some good points bascially this:
People react to things differently.
The difference between doing it for mediation and doing to solve a problem
The fact that HS is an off the shelf solution as supposed to making your own more tailed to your needs.

As i stated, all i was looking for was a great meditation to help lead me into being a better meditater. for that this has been helpful. Had i been trying to cure add or depression or enhance my ability to learn, i may have had a different view.
Adrienne

[alsy]

Hi Deej
I read the 2nd link you provided. A lengthy read, but quite an interesting story. I also checked some items in the Yahoo search term link you provided, but there was quite a bit of time required to get a decent asseement of it, to which i was not prepared to commit any further.
I dont think Holosync is necesarily any more or less dangerous than other brainwave entrainment products.
In the 2nd link, Michaele was asked about his concerns about the AVS industry. I quote here, a 60 percent portion of the reponse, to which i think might be the key to your concerns. The underlined and bold wording was done by me to point to what i think is the key.
_________________________________________
"The brain can be a very fragile instrument, and is susceptible to damage, if harmful techniques are used.

For example, one neurotechnology product may cause neuronal death, brain damage, and seizures.
Also, it's well known that attention deficit disorders, brain trauma, learning disabilities, and various cognitive dysfunctions are directly linked with too much slow brain wave activity, such as delta and slow theta.
Yet, we have a lot of psychoacoustic tapes and CDs, electrostim devices, and light and sound machines whose manufacturers are encouraging people to use them to entrain theta and slow delta, when in fact this is the last thing many people need, for this is only going to make their cognitive problems worse. "
________________________________________

I also provide the following link i pulled out of a google search, in order to understand a little more about the specific brainwave states mentioned in that quote.
EEG

over 15 years ag ago, i started doing Tai Chi. There was music used by the teacher, which i liked at the time. As it helped bring me into a state, which helped with the energy flows for the Tai Chi. It was a slower brainwave that i was entraining to, as far as i can make of it. I went and bought the music. From then on, I started listening to other electronic music that i entrained to. It was not Holosync type tehnology, but i readily entrained to other states through listening. Interestingly, in the link i gave, i recognise that i was very often accessing, or in the Theta brainwave state, as all the descriptions described i can heavily relate to having been through over number of years. Bordering partially into delta on some occassions..

It is only in the past 3 to 4 years or so that a substantial graduation out of listening and entraining to the various music i have been listening to in the past.
I am definitely different today.
I can not say for sure if it is this "out of balance" brainwave activity which is the result, but it sure seems like a possibility; I use to be able to read whole books sequentially up untill i started the entrainment through listening to the particular sounds/ music in the early nineties. I have wondered for years why it was that i was able to before, but then from about the mid nineties, till about 4 years ago, i struggled to go beyond reading and absorbing more than a few pages at best.

Now, after having read all of the above, and reflecting back, i really think it could be to do with Micheal's quote about cognitive dysfunctions relating to the imbalance of brainwave patterns. It has been about a year since i last listened to any Holosync type of material or the earlier Tai Chi music which i was entraining to but was not of the current entrainment technology. I am about 90/ 95 percent back to normal with absorption now. It seems that way to me.

[schola]

I think the upheaval and depression comes from the realization that their wallets are empty from spending 2,000 bucks on some meditation cds.

[DEEJ]

Well my CDs arrived today and after doing a fair amount of research it looks like the positives definitely outweigh the negatives in terms of people reporting results so I’m going to stick with the program and see how it goes...

My main concern is the fact that if the feeling of upheaval is in fact an adverse effect, it wouldn't cause me to stop using the program because this is considered normal by Centerpointe. It is therefore very difficult to judge if any negative feelings are in fact long term positives or are causing some sort of damage. Im just going to have to use my intuition as to whether to carry on it I reach any stumbling blocks I guess

[veranadine]

I cannot say for certain that holosync is dangerous.

I can only say that my experience was an unpleasant one.

I tried the holosync technology after having been doing regular (ie. daily) meditation for almost ten years.

I had, in the those ten years, successfully opening my gift of empathic healing, met several of my guides, realized my gifts for channeling and mediumship, as well as experienced OBEs and numerous self-induced past-life regressions.

After two days of using the holosync I was experiencing headaches, dizziness and vomiting. The voices of my guides were very distant and the peace that I felt after my own visualization meditations was just not present with those cds.

I stopped doing them and went back to my own successful types of meditation.

To each his own, they are just not for me.

Blessings,

[DEEJ]

I've been using it for 4 days now and I am honestly AMAZED! I was not expecting to get any results for a while so it's not placebo. I feel calm, happy, positive. Better than i've felt in months. Great stuff!

Below is a reply from Bill Harris about Hutchinson's claims...

>I have seen the posting in which Michael Hutchinson's comments about
>Holosync were discussed. Here is my response.
>
>First of all, to my knowledge, Michael Hutchison has never used Holosync
>and has never studied it. To my knowledge, he has no personal or
>scientific knowledge about Holosync other than what is available to the
>rest of the general public. The fact that he would make disparaging
>comments, in which he implies that Holosync is harmful - without having
>any actual evidence - in itself says something about his credibility.
>
>
>He has NO evidence for any of the claims he is making. In actual fact,
>Holosync is not harmful, any more than are any of the dozens of other
>binaural beat products made by dozens of other companies. Binaural beat
>technology has been around for a long time and has been available in
>various forms for decades. To my knowledge, no harmful response to ANY
>binaural beat product has ever been demonstrated, other than intermittent
>emotional upheaval similar to that created by any kind of deep meditation.
>
>We would not have tens of thousands of people using Holosync, a huge
>percentage of whom continue through level after level over many years of
>daily use, if the program was not benefiting them or was harming them in
>some way. And, Ken Wilber, a noted expert in meditation, would not be
>recommending Holosync (which he has used extensively) to all the students
>in his Integral Institute seminars, if it was harmful. The same could be
>said for a huge list of other prominent endorsers.
>
>I don't believe the National College of Naturopathic Medicine would be in
>the process of creating a clinical trial to study Holosync if they thought
>it was harmful. I am also in communication with Andrew Newberg, M.D.
>(author of Why God Won't Go Away, about brain scans of Buddhist monks and
>Franciscan nuns, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania)
>regarding creating a brain-scan study of Holosync users. I don't believe
>that such respected people would be involved with Holosync if it was harmful.
>
>Hutchison suggests three searches on Google to bolster his suggestion that
>Holosync is harmful. One was for beta brain waves head injury damage. I
>did such a search, and could find nothing in dozens of web pages listed
>that had any connection with Holosync or binaural beat technology. I
>invite you to do a similar search. If you do, you'll see that there is
>nothing to be found linking Holosync or any other brain wave entrainment
>protocol to anything harmful.
>
>It may be that certain brain injured patients create more low frequency
>brain waves, but that does not mean that low frequency brain waves are
>harmful. You make them all the time, and you make lots of them during sleep.
>
>And, the pictures I found on these web pages of brain scans of such
>patients are nothing like those of meditators. After all, these are people
>with brain injuries.
>
>No connection whatsoever is made in any of these web pages that would show
>anything about Holosync, or that it creates any harm. Certainly if I
>thought Holosync was in any way harmful, we would stop marketing it.
>
>A second suggested search is for hypersynchrony. Here is something from a
>page in which the term is defined
>(<core.ecu.edu/psyc/grahamr...4.1.html):
>
>About 2 million people in the United States suffer from epilepsy, and none
>can be cured of it. Epilepsy is not a disease; it is a collection of
>different brain dysfunction symptoms all involving seizure activity. A
>seizure is a brain state involving the organization of massive numbers of
>neurons into patterns of abnormal activity. The abnormality of these
>patterns can be readily seen in an EEG record. The most outstanding
>feature of seizure activity is hypersynchrony, which shows up on the EEG
>as very large, slow waves.
>
>Hypersynchrony (hyper-, too much; -syn-, together; -chron, time) refers to
>a condition in which there is too much simultaneous facilitation. There
>are too many EPSPs occurring together at the same time. LP #31 shows the
>EEG evidence of the drastic reorganization occurring in the brain as an
>epileptic seizure begins. The high-amplitude waves in the seizure imply
>that literally millions of neurons are firing together in gigantic
>volleys. This activity resembles the sort one finds in some forms of coma.
>Thus, it is not surprising that such waves are usually accompanied by
>total loss of consciousness. The small, high-frequency activity of the
>normal waking brain probably indicates the firing of relatively small
>assemblies of neurons (engrams), each of which represents a particular
>thought or perception. The huge waves of a seizure suggest that neurons
>that would normally participate in patterns of activity underlying
>thoughts or percepts are being forced to fire in giant groups that
>represent nothing at all, that convey no meaning because they are
>assembled by some defective internal process rather than by meaningful
>external or internal events. In other words, seizure waves contain no
>information; they are nonsense events and are therefore unable to produce
>a conscious state.
>
>
>
>First of all, I see no reference to Holosync or binaural beats, and did
>not see any such references in the other web pages that came up in the
>search. More specifically, I have never heard of a single case in which
>any kind of binaural beat technology has induced an epileptic event in any
>person, ever. The flickering lights of light and sound machines can and
>have created seizures in a few people, but no one has ever demonstrated
>that sound can induce seizures, and certainly no such effect has ever been
>linked to binaural beats or to Holosync. To link Holosync to epilepsy
>because Holosync creates synchronization and hypersynchrony occurs in
>epilepsy in the brain is faulty logic, as is the assumption that brain
>synchronization--which has been shown to be very beneficial--is the same
>as hypersynchrony. For Hutchison to make such accusations is at the very
>least mentally lazy. There is no evidence of any kind, anywhere,
>connecting Holosync to the phenomena Hutchison cites.
>
>A third search Hutchison suggests is for kindling effect. Here is a
>description of kindling effect from one of the web pages that came up in
>such a search.
>
> KINDLING EFFECT
>
> G.V. Goddard and his associates in 1969 reported a peculiar kindling
> effect generated by repeated, periodic, low-intensity stimulation of the
> limbic region of mammalian brains. A sustained periodic signal input to
> the brain and central nervous system eventually sets up a cumulative
> resonance which increases in magnitude until the entire organism is in
> sympathetic resonance.
>
> A laboratory rat at first continues to explore its environment in a
> normal manner when it is subjected to kindling. But after repeated
> stimulation at the same intensity, the rat will begin to rear up and its
> forelimbs will convulse. Eventually these bursts of electrical activity
> induce similar patterns in nearby brain regions, and the threshold
> becomes progressively lowered. Stimulation progresses to the amygdala,
> to the amygdala on the other side of the brain, to the hippocampus, to
> the occipital cortex, and finally to the frontal cortex. Kindling can
> start only in the limbic structures.
>

[DEEJ]

> While kindling was originally thought to be a model of epilepsy, John
> Gaito of York University has reported that a different mechanism is
> apparently involved since the amino acid, taurine, which suppresses
> epileptic seizures in laboratory animals, does not prevent phenomena
> caused by kindling. Also, kindling apparently causes permanent changes
> in the neural circuitry. Pulsed repetitions of telepathic senders have
> also been shown to increase the reception of telepathic messages. Thus
> the kindling effect apparently applies to the paranormal channel as well
> as to more orthodox transmission channels. (For further details, see
> "Kindling, once epilepsy model, may relate to kundalini," Brain/ Mind
> Bulletin, Vol. 2, No.7, February 21, 1977; pp. 1-2.)
>
> The kindling mechanism is a far more general mechanism than epilepsy
> researchers have realized. Coherent time collection of bioenergy in one
> bioframe "kindles" toward the threshold of the next bioframe, which has a
> fixed threshold. When sufficient kindling occurs to reach the threshold,
> automatic orthogonal rotation of the kindled bioenergy occurs into the
> next frame. There it simply constitutes the kindling or superposition of
> the imperceivable subquantum state into the perceivable quantum
> state. This is the mechanism whereby one kind of field can be turned
> into another. E.g., thought energy (third biofield) can be kindled into
> second biofield (flux), which can be kindled into first biofield
> (electromagnetic energy), which can be kindled into zeroth biofield (matter).
>
>Does this seem to be describing something harmful? And, does it mention
>Holosync, or brain wave synchrony created by binaural beats?
>
>Here is another article from the internet regarding kindling. Again you
>will see that it has nothing to do with Holosync or binaural beats.
>The "Kindling" Model in Bipolar Disorder
>from <bipolar.about.com/cs/brai...age.htm>by Marcia
>Purse
>
>If a bipolar person goes untreated for a period of years, could he or she
>begin to experience rapid cycling, or become treatment-resistant? If
>stressors initially set off episodes, in time could episodes appear
>without any such triggers? Research says the answer to all these questions
>is yes, and the reason may be a process that has been termed "kindling."
>
>The phenomenon of kindling in epilepsy was first discovered by accident by
>researcher Graham Goddard in 1967. Goddard was studying the learning
>process in rats, and part of his studies included electrical stimulation
>of the rats' brains at a very low intensity, too low to cause any type of
>convulsing. What he found was that after a couple of weeks of this
>treatment, the rats did experience convulsions when the stimulation was
>applied. Their brains had become sensitized to electricity, and even
>months later, one of these rats would convulse when stimulated (History,
>199 . Goddard and others later demonstrated that it was possible to
>induce kindling chemically as well (Hargreaves, 1996.)
>
>The name "kindling" was chosen because the process was likened to a log
>fire. The log itself, while it might be suitable fuel for a fire, is very
>hard to set afire in the first place. But surround it by smaller, easy to
>light pieces of wood - kindling - and set these blazing, and soon the log
>itself will catch fire. Dr. Robert M. Post of the National Institute of
>Mental Health (USA) is credited with first applying the kindling model to
>bipolar disorder (NARSAD). Demitri and Janice Papolos, in their excellent
>book The Bipolar Child, describe this model as follows:
>
>..... initial periods of cycling may begin with an environmental stressor,
>but if the cycles continue or occur unchecked, the brain becomes kindled
>or sensitized - pathways inside the central nervous system are reinforced
>so to speak - and future episodes of depression, hypomania, or mania will
>occur by themselves (independently of an outside stimulus), with greater
>and greater frequency.
>
>Thus, to put it simply, brain cells that have been involved in an episode
>once are more likely to do so again, and more cells will become sensitized
>over time. This theory has been borne out by some research observations.
>For example, "there is evidence that the more mood episodes a person has,
>the harder it is to treat each subsequent episode..." thus taking the
>kindling analogy one step further: that a fire which has spread is harder
>to put out (Expert Consensus, 1997).
>
>Thus, many researchers now believe that kindling contributes to both rapid
>cycling and treatment-resistant bipolar disorder, and this model also is
>consistent with cases where cycling began with definite mood triggers,
>stressful or exciting events, and later became spontaneous.
>
>In addition, it has been shown that substances such as cocaine and alcohol
>have their own kindling effects which can contribute to bipolar kindling.
>In fact, it was the knowledge that cocaine causes seizures that led Dr.
>Post to connect kindling in epilepsy with mood disorders, after he had
>studied the unexpected effects of cocaine on severely depressed patients
>(NARSAD). A study led by Dr. Joseph Goldberg found that patients diagnosed
>with both bipolar disorder and substance abuse were much more likely to
>respond to treatment that included an anticonvulsant/mood stabilizer,
>divalproex (Depakote) or carbamazepine (Tegretol), with or without
>Lithium, than treatment with Lithium alone. At the same time, patients who
>had bipolar disorder but no history of substance abuse had similar
>remission rates with both types of treatment. Dr. Goldberg did note that
>more controlled studies are needed on the role of anticonvulsants in
>treating dual diagnosis patients. (Substance Abuse, 2000)
>
>As a result of many studies involving the kindling model, many researchers
>now stress the need for early and aggressive treatment of bipolar
>disorder, to prevent the brain from becoming more and more sensitized and
>going into rapid cycling or treatment resistant manic depression. A 1999
>study also indicated that a significantly higher percentage of dual
>diagnosis patients had a history of medication noncompliance - which could
>suggest that kindling had more time to take place when no medication was
>being taken. (Substance Abuse, 2000) What does all this mean for the
>bipolar patient?
>
>Take your medications as prescribed. Stopping treatment now could make
>your condition actually worsen and become more difficult to treat in the
>future.
>
>If you have not been diagnosed but feel you may be manic depressive, seek
>treatment, the sooner the better.
>
>Be honest with your prescribing doctor if you have an alcohol or drug
>problem, so he or she can evaluate your medication therapy accordingly.
>
>
>
>Again, there is no evidence that Holosync, or any type of binaural beat,
>creates this kindling effect. Even if it did, there is no evidence that
>any of the negative effects of kindling mentioned have ever happened to
>Holosync users or to users of any other binaural beat product. Again, this
>is faulty, lazy, irresponsible logic. It is in the same realm as saying
>that people are killed by sharks in the waters off Miami, proving that
>water is a cause of shark attacks.
>
>Michael Hutchison wrote a book twenty years ago about technologies that
>affect consciousness. In doing so he met and spoke with several scientists
>who had done some work with binaural beat technologies, and he read the
>available literature on this subject (of which there isn't a lot). Michael
>Hutchison, however, is not a scientist, and is not the expert on this
>subject most people give him credit for being. I would hazard a guess that
>he is familiar with little if any literature that I am not also familiar
>with. In addition, I have twenty years of experience with this technology,
>with over 160,000 users givng me feedback--something Hutchison cannot say.
>
>In its possibility of (supposedly) creating these negative reactions in
>users, Holosync is technologically no different than any of the other
>binaural beat products on the market, including those Hutchison has
>created himself. Yet Hutchison isn't making defamatory statements about
>any other binaural beat products. Hutchison has zero information about
>Holosync, and zero evidence that ANY binaural product creates any of these
>problems. Perhaps he should confine his comments to subjects about which
>he knows something.
>
>
>In short, Holosync has withstood the test of time. We've been around since
>1989, and the company continues to grow at a huge pace because Holosync
>works and does what we say it will do. A minuscule number of people return
>the product for a refund, and we receive many letters every day from
>people telling us about the positive changes they experience as they use
>it. None of the effects Hutchison cites has ever been linked to Holosync,
>and no one, to my knowledge, has ever complained about anything that
>resembles those effects.
>
>Hopefully, this will put this ridiculous matter to rest.
>
>Be well.
>
>Bill Harris