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Bill Harris with Dawson Church

Secret of the World’s Happiest Man

Dawson: Bill Harris is the founder of Centerpointe Research Institute and creator of the world-‐famous Holosync brain entrainment system. Bill started Centerpointe in 1989 with borrowed recording equipment set up on his kitchen table. Today, over two million people in 193 countries have used Holosync to improve their lives and Bill has become one of the best-‐known personal-‐growth teachers in the world.

He is a long-‐time student of contemporary psychology, Eastern philosophy, the physical sciences, the evolution of nonlinear systems, as in chaos theory, and the wide effects of neurotechnologies on evolution, change, and healing. He trained in Ericksonian hypnotherapy and is certified in neuro-‐linguistic programming (NLP). Bill is a frequent speaker at scientific and transformational forums across the U.S. and around the world.

Welcome, Bill, to this next program in the Peak Performance series. I know that our listeners will be as fascinated by your story as I was. I’m curious as to how you came to develop Holosync, what got you into this technology, and how you then developed it from that point on.

Bill: First of all, I really appreciate the invitation to share this information with all of your people. I have to compliment you on what a great job you’re doing on getting all kinds of useful information out to people, so kudos to you about that.

I grew up a pretty unhappy individual. I had kind of a broken home, and various things we won’t go into happened. I was a very angry person, I was depressed a lot, I drove people away from me, and I was alternately charming and extremely difficult. My theory was that this was everybody else’s fault.

At 33, I had a hitting-‐bottom moment in which I suddenly realized that it wasn’t everybody else’s fault. It was my fault. You can’t get your act together as long as you think everything outside of you is causing it.

It’s amazing to me how many people resist that insight. In fact, we have something that we teach people here at Centerpointe that we call the buy-‐in principle. Until you buy in to it, you can’t really change anything in your life.

This is the buy-‐in principle: “Somehow, even if I can’t see how yet, I am creating how I feel, how I behave, which people and situations I’m attracted to or attract to me, and what the things that happen around me mean or the meanings of the events and experiences I have in my life.”


I’m getting ahead of myself in this story. When I was 19, I became interested in meditation because I was so unhappy. Somebody said it would help, so I learned how to meditate. I was a disciplined meditator for the next 16 years. It wasn’t that nothing changed. I certainly improved because of that, but when I got into my mid-‐30s, I was still a pretty unhappy, difficult person.

As I said, when I was 33, I had the revelation that it wasn’t everybody else’s fault and that it was something I was doing. That set me on a personal-‐growth search to figure out what it was. I remember asking a therapist I went to early on, “How long will this take for me to straighten this out?” I was thinking a couple of months or so. He said, “At least seven years.”

Dawson: Not a very encouraging prognosis.

Bill: That was 31 years ago. I’m still working on it, quite frankly, although I would say that over the next 10 years, I probably handled about 90% of it. I don’t think you ever get finished with this process of refinding yourself, getting your act together, or whatever you want to call it.

In the mid-‐1980s when I was in my mid-‐30s, I stumbled upon a couple of pieces of research that changed everything for me. One of them was research that had been done at the world-‐famous Menninger Clinic. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) people had done some similar studies in which they measured the electrical brain-‐wave patterns of people as they meditated. I found the research fascinating because I was meditating, for one thing. Meditators were making alpha brain-‐wave patterns, that is, slower brain-‐wave patterns, and certain benefits such as improved mental abilities and the ability to be calmer were associated with these brain-‐wave patterns.

Then I ran across an obscure article in a scientific journal. I had taken all of these premed sciences when I was in school. I was somewhat of a science geek and very interested in finding out how things work. The article was by a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York who described a characteristic of the brain when it was presented with certain pure sine wave tones delivered through headphones, playing certain tones in one ear and certain other tones in the other ear. Two little organelles in the brain called the olivary nuclei, which have something to do with auditory processing, would communicate with each other. Their communication changed the electrical brain-‐wave patterns. Using this approach, you could create different brain-‐wave patterns in a person’s brain.

I thought, “Wow, I know brain-‐wave patterns of meditation, so could I create those brain-‐wave patterns using this method? What would that be like?”

At the time, I was a graduate student in music at the University of Portland, so I wandered into the engineering lab and borrowed some equipment that I didn’t know how to use. I talked the head of the department into lending me some equipment and then I bought some other equipment.

I don’t even remember how I found it, but I remember that I bought equipment out of a catalog for television repairmen that allowed me to measure sine wave tones accurately. I put all of this stuff together in my basement and I started making cassette tapes because this was before CDs.

When I had the technology together, a couple of other friends and I started listening to the tapes. The first time we did it, I remember we listened to something for about 30 minutes. We were sitting cross-‐legged on the floor facing each other, and we opened our eyes and looked at each other. We were very high because we had been in a very deep meditative state from this.

We looked at each other and I don’t remember who said it, but somebody said, “Are you feeling what I’m feeling?” It blew our minds. We were experienced meditators and we knew what deep meditation


felt like, but instead of having a glimpse of it for a few seconds at a time, we had just entered into this complete other place. We thought, “Wow, this is amazing.”

We began experimenting with it, trying different things and different frequencies. The experience was mind blowing, but what started to happen as months and even a couple of years went by was even more amazing.

I had been almost constantly angry in one way or another for the first 35 years of my life, and the anger just sort of drained out of me. People who hadn’t seen me for a while would say when they ran into me, “Wow, you seem so mellow.” Nobody had ever told me I was mellow. They would say, “You seem so intense.” Now they were starting to say other things about me, and I was starting to get along with people.

I was a musician and a composer at the time, and I started to notice that I was way more creative, that my music got better, that I was more creative in other ways, that my mind seemed clearer, and that all the emotional problems I had like the depression, for instance, cleared up. I just stopped being depressed. All of these things happened to me and I was able to enter quite easily into a flow state and be fully absorbed in what I was doing and stay focused. All of this started to happen.

Over the four years that we were experimenting with this, we gradually through word of mouth had about 150 people using this technology, which I began to call Holosync. That is our registered trademark name for the technology now. I kept refining it and making little tweaks to it.

At a certain point, some of the other people who were using it said, “You really need to create a structured way to use this, make this available to people and start a business.”

At the time, I was living at about $30,000 a year, which was more money in the 1980s than it is now in spending power. My vision was, “If I could make another $30,000 a year, that would double my income.” That was the extent of my vision.

Today we’ve had approximately two million people in 193 countries use this, and now it’s been endorsed by famous doctors and therapists. Because of this, I’ve spoken at the United Nations and shared the stage with the Dalai Lama, Stephen Covey, and Jack Canfield.

Holosync has taken the personal-‐growth world by storm, so to speak, because it does so many things to change your brain to allow you to live a more high-‐performance life or to live with more whole-‐brain functioning. It also modulates your emotions so you reduce the stimulation of your sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight-‐or-‐flight response, and increase the stimulation of your parasympathetic nervous system. Herbert Benson at Harvard published a book in 1975 called The Relaxation Response about methods of stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. Holosync certainly does that, so you’re calmer. The blood goes to your brain instead of to your extremities, which is where it goes during the sympathetic system response to enable you to run or fight. Holosync increases your intelligence, problem-‐solving abilities, pattern recognition, and creativity.

Dawson: Bill, give us a quick recap. What are the brain frequencies you’re aiming at?

Bill: This is the little cook’s tour of brain-‐wave patterns or what I often call Brain-‐wave Patterns 101. Most people are operating in what’s called a beta brain-‐wave pattern. There are different conventions of naming these, so not everybody agrees on the exact frequency range of each one. Beta is about 13 or 14 cycles per second up to around 20 cycles per second. That’s where most people are hanging out most of the time. When you’re just doing your daily thing, going about your business, thinking, strategizing, figuring out what to do, and so on, in most cases, that’s the beta brain-‐wave pattern. At the higher end


of beta, people kind of feel on edge. They feel a little dis-‐ease. They feel anxious, unsettled, or cranky. When you get down to the lower end of beta, you can concentrate better and you’re more functional.

If your brain-‐wave patterns slow more, you get into the alpha range, which is between about eight and 12 or 13 cycles per second, depending on who you ask. Alpha is the brain-‐wave pattern that most people are in when they do meditation, whether Transcendental Meditation, watching your breath go in and out, or just simple meditation. People get so they can make even slower brain-‐wave patterns if they meditate for eight hours a day for many years and that sort of thing. They can go slower than that, but most meditation is happening in alpha.

Alpha is the brain-‐wave pattern of enhanced learning or what some people call super learning, which is based on the work of Georgi Lozanov, a European specialist. He found that when people were in an alpha state, they could learn faster, remember more, and retain it longer. He called this super learning. It’s a brain-‐wave pattern of super learning, and it’s a brain-‐wave pattern of enhanced memory and enhanced focus and concentration. For any kind of detail work, you can do it better in an alpha state.

When you’re watching TV or at the movies and you’re totally absorbed, you sort of forget about your surroundings. That is an alpha state. Alpha is also the brain-‐wave pattern of joy and happiness. When you feel really good, your brain produces certain neurochemicals that cause you to feel great. More serotonin is produced in the brain.

If the brain-‐wave patterns slow even more, you go into a theta brain-‐wave pattern, which most people experience as the brain-‐wave pattern of dreaming sleep or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Also, when people meditate very deeply and begin to have visionary experiences that are similar to dreams, except they are not asleep, that’s a theta brain-‐wave pattern.

Some other patterns of super learning happen in theta. Assigning things to long-‐term memory happens in theta.

Thomas Edison was famous for “power naps.” When he had a problem he was trying to solve in one of his inventions, he would sit in a swivel chair in his office, which had a concrete floor, and hold a large ball bearing in his hand. Then he would drift into a power nap, which is in the theta state. He would finally get to the state where his hand would open and the ball bearing would fall out of his hand, hit the floor, and wake him up, and he would often have the solution to his problem.

Some people would describe the theta state as having more contact with the unconscious mind. Theta also has a remarkable characteristic in that it is the brain-‐wave pattern of what scientists call integrative experiences. The integrative experience is where you suddenly have an “aha,” where you see yourself, a problem, or a situation in a completely new way. Many people have had this experience, where it seems to come out of the blue, like if your marriage is troubled and suddenly you have this aha and you understand what’s going on and what to do.

Dawson: It’s a leap from Point A to Point B without going through a lot of intermediate space in between. Look at the story of how Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity. His son-‐in-‐law describes how Einstein went to bed one night in a state of complete despair and frustration at his inability to complete his equations. He woke up the next day with an enormous “Aha!” and he had figured it out.

Bill: That’s right. A lot of integrative experiences have to do with making a developmental leap in which your perspective widens suddenly. For instance, some people don’t really see how they affect other


people. They are more self-‐focused. Then suddenly something happens and they realize why their life is not going well.

This is what happened to me after I decided it wasn’t everybody else’s fault. You begin to see the other person’s perspective and how your perspective can take into account both perspectives. How to do things, how to get along with people, how to cooperate with them, and how to figure something out suddenly makes sense and it didn’t the moment before. It’s a real leap and reorganization at a higher level. There are many things about theta. I could go on about theta for a long time.

Even slower than theta is the delta brain-‐wave pattern, which is the brain-‐wave pattern of dreamless sleep. Interestingly, quite a few people who have used Holosync have achieved waking delta, which means that their brains are making a little bit of alpha at the same time as lots of delta waves because the people are not completely asleep. Usually, when you’re making delta waves, you are gone.

Something in the background governs autonomic processes, so people are making brain waves all the time. People make mostly beta and delta and not too much alpha and theta. If the delta is your unconscious mind and the beta is your conscious mind, theta and alpha are the bridge between the two. When people learned to make more alpha and theta, suddenly they gained contact with what some people in a mystical sense called the field of all intelligence. They begin to know just what to do in any situation. It’s a kind of super awareness.

Delta is the brain-‐wave pattern of kundalini awakenings. In Eastern philosophy, there’s energy at the base of the spine and it goes up through the chakras. I think there are probably more sophisticated models than this ancient kundalini model. It’s a beautiful metaphor, at the very least, but scientists know more about what’s happening there. It’s a spiritual awakening to be able to make lots of delta. Also, experts in this have told me that the people they studied who were making lots of waking delta—and I found this out because I was one of them—are very persuasive and make really good leaders; they have a certain leadership charisma about them.

There is one other brain-‐wave pattern that is very interesting. It’s interesting for a number of reasons. One is that it’s a faster brain-‐wave pattern than beta. It’s called gamma. In 2005 I read an article about Richard Davidson and some other people doing brain scans on Tibetan monks who were around the Dalai Lama. They found a lot of things that they were doing in their brains, but one of them was that they were making lots of gamma brain waves. Those brain waves were associated with compassion and loving-‐kindness, and these people had been doing up to 50,000 hours of Buddhist meditation designed to create compassion and loving-‐kindness.

At any rate, those are the brain-‐wave patterns that I think are really important to this discussion. When people use Holosync, we’re taking them from the high end of alpha gradually down through alpha, down through theta, and then down into a deeper part of delta.

Every day your brain is learning how to make these brain-‐wave patterns. You’re making all of these brain chemicals, neurochemicals, and hormones that are very healthful. They cause you to have more awareness, more mental clarity, and more creativity.

The other thing that happens is that a person’s threshold for what they can handle coming at them from life goes higher and higher so that people feel good more and more often. Things like anger, anxiety, depression, confusion, bad habits, and addiction just fall away.

I’ll stop now so you can make your comments. Where I’m going is to talk about awareness because after all these years, what I really think is happening is that Holosync makes you more aware, as does


traditional meditation. It just takes 30 or 40 years to do it. There are certain things that happen in the brain that correspond to this awareness. I don’t mean awareness in a fluffy sense the way a lot of people use that word.

Dawson: Let’s talk about that. How do you see awareness? What happens when you are in an aware state and how can you induce those states? You explained what’s happening in the brain in that state. Go ahead and describe the shift from being relatively unaware to becoming aware, how it feels, what you do, and how you act when that transition occurs.

Bill: There are a number of ways to explain this. First, I’ll give a short one from the perspective of cognitive psychology, which would say that there’s a whole group of internal cognitive processes that people are doing all the time. In order to understand what you and I are saying, people have to run these processes constantly. It’s how you make sense of and interact with your world. The processes include things like making internal representations to yourself. That would be internal pictures and internal representations of all kinds of kinesthetic things, such as touch, pressure, temperature, and balance, along with taste and smell, and then internal dialog where you’re talking to yourself.

There are six modalities that are used to create your beliefs and values, which are really what’s important to you. These internal representations are strung together in little sequences called strategies that are triggered by something that you see, hear, touch, and so forth. Then they run through three or four steps. It ends in some kind of feeling, behavior, or decision that you make.

I could go on for hours about all this stuff, how it works and how when you become aware of it and can see yourself doing it, all kinds of good things happen. At any rate, these processes are going on outside your awareness, which is a good thing because they are complex. If you had to think your way through them, you’d have to figure out what a door is each time you came to a door before you could figure out how to open it and get through it. All this stuff is happening on autopilot, which is good as long as it’s operating in a functional way.

I’m just giving an overview of this. What happens is that we’re all traumatized by life. Things happen in life that are not what we want. Some people have a lot of trauma. Some people have just a little bit. The more we’re traumatized in a certain area of life, the more these automatic processes in that area go sideways. They become more about avoiding danger than getting what we want.

Most people who have been around the block know that when you focus on what you don’t want, you tend to get it. In addition to that, you feel bad. When you focus on what you want, you also tend to get it. You figure out how to get it and you feel good.

When people have had a lot of trauma or even a medium amount of trauma or any amount of trauma, to that extent they’re going to focus on avoiding getting more of it. They figure out unconsciously how to attract or create more of it.

Here’s my elevator speech, Dawson. I have this tool called Holosync that creates tremendous amounts of awareness. Then I show people where to direct that awareness to create the greatest amount of choice about how they feel, how they behave, which people and situations they attract or become attracted to, and what the things that are happening in their lives mean.

When there has been trauma and the autopilot stuff is creating what you don’t want, I have found that the only way out of that is to learn how to be aware enough to see how you’re creating it. The big takeaway from this whole conversation is that awareness creates choice.


If you have choice, you’ll always choose what serves you. If something is going on outside your awareness, it isn’t a choice. That’s great when it works, but when there are areas where it doesn’t work and where you’re somehow not able to have great relationships with people, follow through and create the company you wanted to create, achieve the goal you wanted, your emotional health is bad so you’re unhappy a lot, or whatever the area of life is that is not working, you’re doing that outside your awareness.

You have first to gain enough awareness, which isn’t that easy. At least, it wasn’t until Holosync came along. Then you have to learn how to observe how you’re creating these things as you do them.

Dawson: Once you have a choice, you can choose what kind of frame to hold it in, so the event itself may not change, but the meaning you ascribe to it can change completely.

Bill: That’s exactly right. The thing is that you can keep doing something that doesn’t serve you and do it with awareness. Almost everybody has things that they keep doing over and over that don’t end well. They keep getting involved with the same kind of romantic partner and having the same issues and the same fights, but they keep doing it. They keep getting involved in the same bad professional situations or whatever it is.

You mentioned Einstein. He was famous for saying that the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result. The reason we do that is because we’re doing that outside our awareness. I believe that the secret to having a well-‐lived life is increasing your awareness because all of the things we’re struggling with begin to fall into place the more aware you become.

Dawson: These states of flow and awareness of consciousness take experienced meditators a long time to achieve. They can achieve these states, but it might take them five, 10, 15, or 20 years of practice to learn to induce them reliably, on demand. Your focus here has been to train us to induce those states really quickly.

Bill: Yes. Here’s an interesting way to look at this. I told you about the gamma waves and these monks around the Dalai Lama. The most experienced of them was a Frenchman named Matthieu Ricard and he was said to have meditated for 50,000 hours.

He’s also been described in the media as the world’s happiest man. I don’t know if he is the world’s happiest man, but he’s probably right up there if he isn’t.

I said, “I wonder how long that would take to do that?” I took the 50,000 hours and I said, “Let’s say it took 30 years to do that. How many hours a day would he have had to meditate?” Without going through the process of how I figured that out, it turned out to be about 4 hours and 34 minutes a day for 30 years. I thought, “Wow! Who is willing to do that?”

It’s not very many people, unless you’re a monk or something like he is. There were also people with him that had only done 10,000 hours. That wouldn’t be quite as much, but it was still over an hour a day for 30 years. If you did it in fewer years, it would be even more.

The interesting thing about Holosync is that even the first time you use it, it takes you into these brain-‐wave patterns that take these advanced meditators decades to learn to produce reliably. You make them every time. It immediately begins to create new neural connections between the left and right side of your brain. I also suspect that it’s creating new neural connections between your amygdala, which is responsible for a lot of emotional reactivity, and the frontal part of your brain, which is responsible for executive control over things.


Dawson: If you look at the brain signaling patterns of people who have a hair-‐trigger stress response, what you’ll see is that the signals are going straight from the amygdala into the hind brain and the spinal column. With people who have learned to master their stress response, the signal goes from the midbrain, the emotional brain, to the forebrain, the frontal lobes, where it’s interpreted and assessed first. Only if it’s a real threat does it get sent to that hind brain and that autonomic nervous system. That is a crucial aspect of emotional regulation.

Bill: That is exactly what the scientists have found. Long-‐term meditators are better able to regulate things like reward anticipation, decision making, empathy, impulse control, and emotional control. More neurons are turned over to that in the frontal part of the brain. There’s more gray matter created in the frontal part of the brain, and there’s also more what they call white matter, which is the connections between the gray matter and the neurons. All of this research leads to something I’ve been saying for a long time, which is that meditation creates awareness and awareness creates choice.

Choice is what gives you control over how you feel and behave, which people and situations you attract and become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to what’s happening in your life.

Most people don’t stop to think that all meaning is added from the outside. If you look around wherever you’re sitting, nothing out there means anything intrinsically. One of the great things about being a human being is that we add all the meaning.

Unfortunately, some people are adding meaning that makes them unhappy. Somebody may frown at you and one person might say, “I wonder what’s bothering them.” The other person thinks, “Nobody likes me.”

The adding of meaning is something that is also on autopilot. The more trauma we had, the more likely we’re going to add a meaning that says, “I can’t do that. I’m not good enough. Nobody likes me,” or something that is somehow self-‐sabotaging or limiting.

Dawson: The most dramatic example I ever heard of that phenomenon was from one of my friends who used to volunteer at San Quentin State Prison. He volunteered on the unit that handled prisoners who were either in for life without parole or were on death row. One young man was in prison for life without parole. He had killed his wife. She had been having an affair with another man and he said, “I found them in bed together, so I killed them.” In his mind, it was just a straight cause-‐and-‐effect relationship.

It was the same thing in the prison. He was known for violent behavior. The volunteer said, “Why did you hit the other prisoner?” This guy said, “Because he insulted me.” He had all of these straight-‐line connections in his head, up to and including murder. “This means that, therefore I do that.”

After our volunteer had worked with him for a while, it suddenly dawned on the prisoner that he had a choice. He learned to regulate his emotions and he then realized, “When the guy insults me, I don’t have to hit him. I have option B, C, D, and E. I can walk away, I can call the guard, or I can talk to my friend.” He realized he had all kinds of choices.

Before, his life had had this series of meanings. He described the events that had led him to murder and prison. After he learned emotional regulation, suddenly a whole spectrum of responses opened up to him that were based on not assigning the same meaning to events that had led to him being violent before.

Bill: That’s a great illustration of that principle. The whole point is that we assign meanings automatically and we’re doing it all the time. There’s a knock on the door and we assign a meaning to it. Your boss


comes into your office cubicle and you assign a meaning to it before anything happens. It goes on and on.

If you can see how you assign meanings and see the consequences of the meanings, just seeing how you’re doing it implies that you’re realizing, “I’m doing this,” rather than that the meanings are intrinsic in whatever is going on. That is a huge leap for people. When you see how you do it and you see the consequences as they’re happening, if they aren’t resourceful and if they don’t serve you, then you just can’t keep doing them.

The long and short of this is that the more awareness you have, the more likely you are to begin to regulate everything in your life in a way that serves you and, if you’re developmentally advanced enough, also serves everyone else.

If someone is at a development level where they’re thinking mostly of themselves because they need to at that developmental level, then they will be thinking mostly about, “What serves me?” At a higher developmental level, we begin to think more about other people and what serves everyone, not just ourselves. To me, this is a beautiful model because it explains a tremendous amount about human behavior. There’s one other little piece that I could add. There’s a certain way that you become aware of certain basic things about how the universe works at the most fundamental level that you may have been swimming upstream against. I could say a little bit about that, but that’s another whole thing. We could also talk about awareness in a more transcendent sense, but that, too, is a whole other topic, probably for another time.

I’ve been talking mostly about how you feel and behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what things mean, which covers a lot of territory. The reason I talk about those four things is because, quite a number of years ago, I realized that there were a lot of things in this life that human beings do not have a choice about and can’t have a choice about. We don’t have a choice, for instance, about the fact that everything in the universe is impermanent and eventually ends, falls apart, dies, or disappears. A certain amount of human suffering is about the fact that we get attached to things and then they end.

On the other hand, there are whole spiritual movements where adherents try to be non-‐attached, but the whole joy of life is in being attached to things. If you were not attached to your children or to what you do with your time, then it’s just boring and dry.

Humans are in a double bind because if you are attached, suffering happens. I don’t think it’s possible, but if you can figure out how not to be attached, then what’s the point? There’s no juice in life.

The other thing that awareness does is that it regulates this so that you are attached enough to enjoy things, which is what that flow state is part of, but you’re not so attached that you’re demanding that things you have no control over be the way you want them to be.

Of course, we don’t have control over how other people behave. We can influence them. We don’t have control over things like the weather, the sun, or the fact that we need air, water, and certain things or we die fairly quickly. There’s a whole bunch of physical things in the universe that we don’t have a choice about. I just take all of those things and say to the degree that we can influence them, let’s try to influence them. The ones we can’t influence, like the famous Serenity Prayer, let’s just let them be okay and develop our awareness to the point where we have choice about the things we could have a choice about, like how you feel and behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to what happens.


Dawson: There are all these choice points. Awareness then gives us the ability to make choices that serve us, move our lives forward, and liberate us from those kinds of unconscious reactions that until we become aware of them we may think are just part of the way the world is but in reality are part of the way we are. This is really a remarkable conversation, Bill.

Stepping out of an entrenched worldview that way is crucial to personal change. If you’re stuck in that worldview, then all you see is the limited palette of options that you have always seen from within that worldview. When you’re able to detach, have an awareness, and bring consciousness to your existence and circumstances, then suddenly you open up a huge realm of choices and possibilities you never saw when you were stuck in that automatic state. This is really powerful.

Even being aware that you have this awareness and these choices is a very potent way to live your life and to approach your situation.

Bill: I like the way you said “step out of your current perspective,” because that’s exactly what happens. People will often speak of this as developing something that some people call the witness. It’s this other part of you whose only job is to watch. It doesn’t really even comment on anything. It doesn’t have an opinion. It just watches with curiosity to see what’s happening.

To the degree that you watch, because it’s a spectrum, you know just what to do. If you’ve ever known someone who just seemed to know what to do, that is a side effect of being more aware. That person sees things from a broader perspective or from a higher spot on the mountain, you might say.

It’s about developing that ability to have a part of you that’s just watching. Another part of you could be completely caught up and involved and everything, because if you’re not involved then it’s no fun, but another part is just watching. That’s what happens when people listen to Holosync and make that a daily practice. They develop that.

We estimate, based on 28 years of doing this, that Holosync creates the kind of awareness that those Tibetan Buddhist monks were showing in their brains, but about eight times faster than traditional methods.

Dawson: That’s right. Those states can be attained with practice, but that is long and hard and most people who start that kind of meditation practice give up. It’s just too long and too hard.

Bill: Yes, that’s the problem. Most people that have learned a little bit about meditation probably know they ought to be doing it. It has all kinds of physical and mental health benefits. It lowers stress. Stress causes all kinds of diseases and worsens diseases that it didn’t cause. There are all kinds of reasons to meditate, with awareness being the greatest of them. It is so difficult, though, especially for the first several years, that most people can’t do it.

Who has the time to meditate four and a half hours a day? You want to take your daughter to ballet practice, go to the movies, watch Breaking Bad on TV, and earn a living. The great thing about Holosync is that you can live your regular life and also gain this kind of awareness and have all these amazing things happen. I have over 20 interviews with people who were either finished with this program, which you do for about 10 years, or were toward the end. All of them said, in one way or another, “Life still has all kinds of challenges”—that’s all the stuff I said you don’t have any choice about—“but the way that I interact with those challenges has completely changed.”

A very good friend of mine is a well-‐known Zen master named Genpo Roshi. He did it the hard way. He actually uses Holosync now, by the way. He loves Holosync. He’s one of those people who are totally comfortable in their own skin and when challenges come along, he just knows what to do. He doesn’t


freak out about all the stuff that most humans freak out about. He just takes it in stride and deals with it. There are some things that there’s nothing you can do about.

Dawson: If you’re going to be a leader in your family, on your team, at your workplace, at your church, or in your social group, then it’s really important to be able to step out of that reactive mode and have the option of making creative decisions. Some people get so hooked into the stressed brain state that their options narrow down to just the most simple and basic subset of those choices. The people who have developed the ability to stay connected with the larger picture are those who can lead and bring some common sense to the debate. They can perhaps point out other more creative options that are not present when you’re stuck in that reactive mode that only gives you the options you were raised with.

Stepping out of the reactive mode dramatically enhances our ability to find and develop our peak potentials.

Bill: That’s right. Researchers have done SPEC scans and PET scans on the brains of people who are meditating and people who aren’t meditating. When someone is in that more reactive fight-‐or-‐flight state, the parts of the brain that are involved in awareness have very little blood flow to them, so they’re not very active. It’s no wonder those people can’t problem solve, be creative, or figure out the most resourceful thing to do. When you increase parasympathetic nervous system response so the blood is going to your brain rather than to your muscles for fight or flight, that’s when you become more intelligent, more creative, calmer, wiser, and more knowledgeable.

A lot of people put the Dalai Lama and people like him on a pedestal. Certainly there are plenty of reasons to honor the Dalai Lama. However, instead of thinking, “That would be impossible for me to be that kind of a person,” do Holosync or decide to meditate in the way those guys have. This is not something unattainable. It’s been difficult to attain for quite a few thousand years, but now, because of modern brain science and technologies like Holosync, it is not something that is that difficult to achieve.

Dawson: You’ve had this amazing 25-‐year-‐plus odyssey of discovering these technologies, doing it the hard way, and learning how to induce them in ways that are so much easier and mechanical. You put the headset on, listen to the tracks, and you go there. It’s very powerful. You’ve built this huge business and you’ve helped many people learn.

I’m curious about what your own leading or cutting edge is, where you’re working on yourself, where you’re working on your life, what your creative challenges are, and where you see yourself going next.

Bill: On a personal level, the things that we are most traumatized about are the most difficult to uproot, you might say. I used to be so difficult to get along with. Now the only people I have trouble getting along with are people that remind me strongly of my mother, who did a lot of things to traumatize me. I’m at the point where I see myself doing it and I can catch myself. There’s a progression of how you figure one of these things out. At first, you realize well after the fact that you misbehaved, created crappy feelings in yourself, and so on. Then you begin to notice it while you’re in it. You notice it after it’s been created but while you’re still in the middle of it. Then you begin to notice it right when you’re first creating it. You notice it coming on and you are aware enough to not do what you would ordinarily do to make it happen.

I’m getting to the beginning of the noticing it place with that one last thing. Very few other things really get to me anymore. I still have stuff that is challenging to me. I’m still working on it. At least I have the tools.


There is a whole course I teach on going through what I call your internal map of reality. It’s this whole sequence of cognitive things you do. I teach people how to pay attention and observe each one of those things.

People pretty much have to be using Holosync to do this because it takes more awareness than most people have. You look at each one of these things one at a time and practice watching them until very little can happen inside of you that is creating those four things that I kept talking about, how you feel, how you behave, and so on. It’s like a big neon sign flashes at you when you start to create one of those things in a dysfunctional way, which usually stops you from doing it.

Dawson: It reminds me of a great analogy about marriage. You realize maybe a day later, “I really screwed up there.” Then you get to the point where you realize it an hour or two later. You’re bringing your attention closer to the moment of impact. Maybe you realize just after you do it. In my marriage, I call it that bone-‐headed thing. You realize you did a bone-‐headed thing just minutes afterward. The next step, of course, is to be able to project into the future and realize you’re about to do the bone-‐headed thing and stop yourself.

Bill: Exactly. The more we’re traumatized, the more we have this underlying sense that this is really potentially dangerous, which causes us to focus on what we don’t want, which then causes us to figure out unconsciously how to get more of it. Then we get exactly what we don’t want with our wives, husbands, or whomever.

There are very few things in the way we create our lives that aren’t traced back to awareness. In any situation I want to master, I look for the most fundamental thing or things to this. Once you have the most fundamental thing mastered, the other stuff falls into place. When people are trying to become successful, for instance, they’re often caught up in the process. They’re caught up in the to-‐do items. They’re caught up in the tactics such as how to create a web page, how to make the web page convert better, or these sorts of things. There’s a place for that, but if you can’t get yourself to take the action you need to take, what good is knowing that stuff?

If you can’t get yourself to persevere when you do something that doesn’t work, then what’s the good of that? Awareness is so fundamental. It’s usually a big surprise to people. They say, “My god, I can’t believe all these things in my life that I’ve been trying to do something about forever are now clearing up. I really didn’t do anything about them like I thought I would have to do. I just solved them in a different way and they cleared up.”

Dawson: What a potent vision that is, that bringing awareness to a troubling part of our lives or behaviors can start to shift it. That is really powerful.

Bill, I am so grateful to you. I see the man, the human being, the humanitarian, and the passion you have for helping other people and for sharing. I am just so grateful that you have devoted yourself to bringing this magic to people.

You’ve created a successful company. You’ve managed a big team. You’ve now reached millions of people. I feel your heart. I feel the being that has this great purpose, and I so admire and respect that being. I’m so grateful to you for sharing both your heart and your amazing vision with us today.

Bill: I really appreciate the invitation. Don’t put me on a pedestal because I was once a nothing going nowhere fast. What changed that was that I stumbled onto something that, without even knowing what was happening, made me more aware.


Everyone has a purpose inside of them. In some cases it’s really big and in other cases it’s not as big, but everyone has a purpose inside of them.

That’s one of the overarching things that Holosync does. It helps people become aware enough to see what their life can truly be about. That’s probably the most wonderful thing that happens when people become more aware.

Dawson: It’s a tragedy when people live their whole lives and never unlock that potential. I know my passion in doing this series is to give people the tools to unlock their potential. Why live a fraction of what you could be when there is magic inside of you?

Who knows what creativity or what kind of gifts you could bring to yourself, the world, your family, or your community when you learn to unlock them rather than having them all tied up in those reactive states of limited vision?

It is such a huge force for change when people learn to dump those old visions of self and old limitations and live from their core, passion, and purpose and start to carry that to the world outside of them in a powerful way as well. Thanks, Bill!

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