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There are lots of tools out there designed to help you clear out the mental clutter. Tools designed to enhance your meditation, tools designed (in some cases) to basically meditate for you - All you have to do is listen. While they are all helpful so far as they go, there are reasons why they are side dishes for me instead of the main course.
The Advantages of External Tools.
Two such tools that I can think of right off the bat would be binaural beats/brainwave entrainment based tools and meditation recordings. There are many, many more, but these two can be used to represent the rest.
The first represents a big boost as far as getting to alpha state for meditation. By playing slightly different tones in each ear, it causes your brain to react by bridging the gap in frequency. This, in turn, puts you into alpha, or sometimes theta state, often with no real effort or practice involved. You just ride along. You can engage in a meditative practice on your own while listening, and get to states that you were unable to achieve, up until now.
The second is similar (and in many cases, includes the first in some way) but this one actually uses guided imagery and hypnotic cadence to guide you through what they wish you to experience. This can be ideal if you know what you’re doing, and have a quality recording that you can trust and use properly. I myself am rather partial to the Paraliminals put out by Learning Strategies, but as I said, they serve a secondary role, not a primary one.
The Problems With External Tools.
The problem I have with the first is that while it’s great for getting to Alpha and Theta and so on, it’s got a severe limitation in that in order for it to work, you have to use it. Except in certain circumstances (and there are a few), you aren’t trained to operate without it, meaning that you can’t operate independently. Furthermore, if you use it too much, it starts dropping in effectiveness very quickly. I’ve seen this happen time after time when I was first learning to use binaural beats.
As for the recordings, there are actually a couple of problems with this. First, there’s the trust issue. I remember I was listening to such a tape one time, and was pretty relaxed. Then, just at the edge of hearing, I caught a word fragment. Subliminal messages. That could have anything in it. I was immediately alarmed and was now inherently distrustful of that disc and the publishers.
The second problem that I have with the recordings is that like a train on a track, you’re pretty much limited to where they take you. They may give you some freedom of movement, but I’d rather learn to play an instrument, than have a collection of tuning forks.
The third problem I have with the recordings is the same one that I had with the “aid” tools: Dependence. If you want to get the benefit of the recordings, you have to listen to them. That’s not a huge problem for me, as I have them on my mp3 player. But the idea of relying on an outside source for doing internal work is one that I find rather frustrating.
Why I Prefer Internal Tools.
If I have mental/emotional techniques that I can access at will that will do the same job, I’ll use them even if it takes a while to learn. It may not be as quick or easy, and I may not be as dead-on as the external tools at first, but the payoff in the end is that I have all the tools I need inside and won’t need to depend on binaural tones, or meditation recordings to get the results that I can produce on command.
What do you think of using external tools for internal work? Do you have any experiences to share? If so, please leave them in the comments.
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