Meditation on Tape: Enlightenment Made Easy : Ancient Search for Peace of Mind Wins Followers With High-Tech Approach

FABER, Va. — For some enthusiasts, high-tech meditation is a fantasy-come-true. It’s the lazy man’s--or woman’s--fast ticket to enlightenment.

After all, with this technology, there’s no chanting of mantras, or Sanskrit prayers. No religion to join. There are no orange robes to wear. And no required pretzel-like lotus positions to twist into.

Instead, practitioners merely strap on headphones, listen to tapes and wait for the ecstasy to appear. Listeners relax and absorb a slow-moving, ethereal combination of sounds: wind rustling through chimes, a gurgling brook, synthesizer, guitar, vocals and more . . . all designed to alter the frequency of their brain waves--with little or no effort needed from the listeners.

Change for the Better

Actress Ally Sheedy (“The Breakfast Club,” “Short Circuit”) has practiced this brand of Walkman meditation for two years and claims it has completely changed her life for the better.

She likes to tell people that with these tapes, created by a monk named Brother Charles, “You don’t meditate. The tapes sort of meditate you.”

About 10 times in the last two years, Sheedy has traveled to Faber, Va., a small town nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to attend intensive audio retreats much like a recent one, which attracted 17 seekers from across the country. At this seven-day gathering, participants spent four hours a day spacing out with this space-age meditation technique.

New York City psychotherapist Steven J. Levin, who has placed 10 clients on a daily regimen of at-home tape meditations during the last two years, calls the tapes “a spiritual Roto-Rooter.”

“What these tapes do,” he said, “is allow people who could never get into meditation to be rewarded rather quickly. People who didn’t have the discipline to meditate in the traditional ways can quickly experience the benefits of long-term meditation.”

Although individual results vary, veteran meditators typically report stress reduction, clearer thinking, improved health and greater peace of mind.

Therapy Shortened

Levin said that a third of his clients using the tapes “drastically improved the quality of their lives and shortened their therapy.” Another third “improved their relationships and well-being.” And the final third stopped listening because the tapes were “too powerful, too cathartic.”

One meditator, a top executive, came to realize how much he disliked his job and the company for which he worked. “He said he’d either have to quit the company or quit doing the tapes,” Levin said. “He chose to drop the tapes.

“The wonder of the tapes is that you can heal yourself with them. No prayers. No incantations. No forced donations. No pictures (of gurus) to look at. No rituals. They (the tapes) quickly empower us, which many healers and therapists don’t.”

Not all listeners agree. Some consider the sounds boring or irritating. One man found the tapes as relaxing as an alarm clock and suspects that listening pushed his blood pressure up instead of down.

But whether the result is delight or frustration, meditation with recordings is hardly new. Music and sound have been used for centuries to alter people’s moods. But those familiar with today’s extensive meditation tape market maintain that Brother Charles has created a unique product by augmenting his music with two relatively old technologies: sound phasing and subliminal programming.

A number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have used the tapes contend that his work could one day put therapists out of business. Levin’s view is slightly more tempered: “Brother Charles’ work is on the cutting edge. These tapes will ultimately cost therapists their vacation homes and many of their BMWs and Porsches.”

The Monk Behind the Tapes

Brother Charles, born Charles Cannon, is a former child music prodigy who performed all over the country at the age of 10, playing drums with jazz percussionist Gene Krupa. (There are no drums on Brother Charles’ tapes, but he provides all vocals, plays all instruments and records all the environmental sounds.)

Brother Charles, 41, spent 12 years as an ordained Vedic monk, working closely with his teacher, Muktananda Parmahansa, the Indian guru whom former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. was known to visit. (Muktananda, as he was called, taught orthodox, lotus-position, mantra-chanting meditation techniques to hundreds of thousands around the world, including John Denver, Marsha Mason and other celebrities.)

After Muktananda’s death in 1982, Brother Charles gave up his shaved head and his orange dress. He concluded his work had been with Muktananda--the man, not his organization--and he set out to make meditation more accessible and more fun for Westerners.

In his view, it’s only logical that modern technology should catch up with cave-age techniques and do so in the United States: “After all, we are Americans. We have created McDonald’s. If we have created fast food, can we not also create fast enlightenment?”

He also suggests some meditation techniques (like chanting, done originally in caves) may disappoint because they were created for a far different life style.

“If we sing those songs in our square rooms, we don’t get the same hit. We say ‘Bunko,’ ” he said. “What’s missing? The echo. In the cave, the reverberation set up phasing in the sound.”

Thus, on Brother Charles’ meditation tapes, at the “audible/inaudible threshold,” there is phasing. The type created in a recording studio, not a cave.

He defines phasing as “a vibrato sound, a tone that contains two tones, the top and bottom of the vibration. Phasing is the interval between the tones. The sound we call the interval is heard only in the brain. Your brain creates that sound from the two tones.”

To alter the brain-wave frequencies of an individual, phasing corresponding to a determined frequency is added to a tape.

(The frequency called beta is the busy, somewhat jangled state in which most people operate much of the day. As Brother Charles considers the beta frequency undesirable, it’s not added. The next slower frequency range is known as alpha , a more relaxed, peaceful yet alert state. Even slower is theta, often associated with meditation. The slowest frequency range is delta, said to occur in extremely deep meditation and also in deep sleep.)

Making the Tapes

“We take the sound; we take $100,000 worth of recording equipment where we can measure the frequencies, the reverberation, the echoes--everything else that’s going on in the sound,” he said. “(Then we) correspond that phasing in sound to the alpha, theta or delta range--whatever we like--play it with a headset on stereophonic sound and bingo: five minutes, transcendental access.”

Brother Charles offers various sets of two tapes with alpha phasing (for $25, generally through the mail) to help induce relaxation and light meditation. These tapes contain no subliminal suggestions.

However, his industrial-strength tapes--those with the theta and delta phasing that transports people into deep, altered states and also with subliminals designed to change attitudes and eventually behavior--are only sold to individuals who meet specific criteria.

These tapes offer only broad, basic subliminal suggestions such as “I am peaceful. I am existence, consciousness, happiness and peace.” As for the rather mixed reviews that other subliminal tapes have received, Brother Charles maintains some of these tapes are ineffective because listeners are not necessarily put or held in the proper state for the subconscious to receive new programming.

To get the heavy-duty tapes, applicants must agree to meditate for one hour daily and to listen to yet another tape during sleep, turning sleep time into an extended meditation. They must also complete a questionnaire on everything from their eating habits to transformational experiences. Retreat attendance is optional.

Because meditation with the restricted tapes is designed to create not only ecstasy but eventual growth and change, which can sometimes be quite rocky, applicants deemed likely to undergo substantial change or catharsis (recreational drug users, for instance) are generally turned down. So are those with little experience managing change in their lives. They are advised to pursue a different method of meditation and re-apply later.

Since the program became available in late 1984, about 2,300 people throughout the country have applied; about 2,000 have been accepted.

sh Progress Reports Requested

In addition, those who are accepted are asked to submit bimonthly progress reports to Brother Charles’ nonprofit organization, MSH Assn., located in Faber, near Charlottesville, Va.

(The association’s initials stand for Multidimensional Synchronicity Through Holodynamics. Synchronicity refers to synchronizing or balancing the right and left hemispheres of the brain through meditation. Holodynamic is the association’s trademark for the process of combining sound phasing and subliminal messages on the same tapes.)

But even with the screening, Brother Charles estimates that about 3% of those who enroll in the $250 program have experienced what they would consider negative results, results that are uncomfortable but perhaps necessary parts of the growth process.

In Ally Sheedy’s case, bliss has been accompanied by periods of distinct discomfort. “In the beginning, I had a really wonderful experience,” she said. “Then it started to get more difficult, because you have all these subliminals on the tapes. Everything you have in your mind that doesn’t agree with the subliminal messages gets processed out.”

According to Brother Charles, this purging of negative thought patterns can occur on the mental, emotional or physical levels. For some, the withdrawal from negative thought patterns can resemble withdrawal from toxic substances.

“I reach a place where I’m right on the edge. I get hyper or anxious,” Sheedy said. “There are a lot of ideas being processed out. I cry. I talk about it. And write about it. Every time I go through one of these periods of feeling crazy, I realize the tapes are working. After that catharsis, I have a long period of exhilaration.”

Sheedy’s also noticed specific benefits: “In acting, for instance, I’ll do a scene and there’s an effortless feeling. Instead of worrying about where the camera is or other things, I can feel my heart open up. I feel at one with everyone in the room. I can also look at a page of dialogue now and memorize it immediately. My mind is working differently on a lot of levels.”

Not all tape tales are so glowing. Last summer, Los Angeles businessman John Kilpatrick enthusiastically began his tape meditations. But after four months of peaceful relaxation, whenever he pushed the play button, he became incredibly angry without knowing why. “I’d be so angry I’d rip the headphones off,” he said.

Kilpatrick reported that by mail to the association and was astonished that no one contacted him--despite a promise of support. “I felt betrayed,” he said, “I dropped out.”

(On learning, however, that a reaction like intense anger is considered a temporary and normal result and that association support is generally limited to those who specifically request feedback or make contact by telephone, Kilpatrick said he would likely resume using the tapes.)

San Anselmo, Calif.-based composer/producer Steven Halpern, who is perhaps the best-known name in mediation music today, quit for simpler reasons. Halpern, who has recorded about 40 albums and received notes from more than 50 hospitals that play his music for patients, used the tapes religiously for about two months. But he found certain patterns in the music “boring, irritating and so predictable that they were getting in the way of my meditation.”

A Few of the Benefits

Even so, Halpern said he benefitted enormously from using somebody else’s tapes.

“When the tapes were over and I sat with the silence afterwards, I was aware something very useful was happening. . . . He’s working with some very potent stimuli.”

So why did Halpern stop regular use of what he calls “by far one of the best (tape sets) on the market”? He cited boredom, a lack of time and moving in with a woman who didn’t want to listen to the tapes.

(Halpern and Brother Charles will appear together on a panel at the Whole Life Expo, at the Pasadena Convention Center, next Friday through Feb. 8. Expo attendees can hear both men’s tapes there, as well as those of other vendors. The Expo will also offer a “Synchronicity Environment,” much like the meditation environment in Faber in which sound, aroma, color, space, light and other visual stimuli are used to balance the hemispheres of the brain.)

What do more traditional music therapists--who use music along with the personality of the therapist to rehabilitate, maintain and improve physical, intellectual and emotional disabilities--think of this high-tech meditation?

Charles Eagle, who heads the music therapy department at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University, said many such meditation tapes “appear to work. The only problem is that I haven’t seen too many controlled experiments. I’ve read hearsay and heard reports of it, but as far as the scientific exploration of it by controlled experimentation, I haven’t seen that.”

Mark Rider, a professor of music therapy at SMU, said he believes some problems are inherent with meditation tapes.

Because “no single kind of sound stimulus is going to produce consistent results with all different types of people,” Rider believes music should be personalized. He also said that some results from Brother Charles’ tapes may be attributed to the placebo effect, especially when a mystique is created around tapes “too profound to be laid on the general public.”

In Rider’s view, another problem of many meditation tapes “is that the minute they get somebody relaxed, out comes all this catharsis. If people don’t have therapists to work through this with, they’re going to throw the tapes away.”

‘Not a Panacea’

Anthony Reading, a UCLA associate professor of psychology, said that meditation tapes are “obviously not a panacea. They’re just one relaxation approach, one element in more comprehensive management of conditions.”

Reading, who said he is skeptical of “a reflex response universally triggered by the tapes,” is not particularly worried that they could be dangerous for users unaccustomed to dealing with catharsis. “People’s emotions can be triggered by all kinds of events,” he said, “and I’m not sure we can regulate all that.”

The greater danger, he said, is that the tapes might be considered a “cure-all for people who might need more active treatment. People could be deflected from that route because they are drawn in by the very inflated promises that are made by this kind of approach.”

More active treatment, specifically in the form of private and group sessions with a licensed psychotherapist on Brother Charles’ Faber staff, was provided to those who attended the recent retreat. Exercise and massage sessions were also available to assist in integrating change.

In general, all those who attended said they felt their money ($500, exclusive of transportation costs) had been well invested.

Ten days after the retreat, some participants were even experiencing the continual joy that Brother Charles claims his work eventually produces. “You can all get it in your closets meditating,” he is fond of saying. “You can get the hit. Peace. Ecstasy. But when you come out and face the big city and you go to your office, where is your elation, your euphoria? How long does it last when you come out of the closet?”

Retired New York police Capt. Fred Fisher, 59, was one of those who found the elation to be rather long-lasting. “It’s almost as though I’m high all the time,” he said. “I feel as though I can be in really disturbing situations and not get ticked off. I’ve already called up and told them I’m coming back for the next one. You know, the place was hard to get to. The facilities were sort of crummy. And yet the whole thing was a hot experience.”