Paul Scheele: It’s a pleasure for me to introduce Bill Harris. He is a person I’ve known for a number of years. Bill has been involved in personal development for over 35 years, as a seeker, teacher, public speaker, author, musician, composer, therapist, workshop leader and business owner.
A student of ancient and modern research into the nature of the mind, Bill has studied and practiced a variety of traditional and modern transformational techniques and approaches, with a variety of teachers. Bill is President and Director of Centerpointe Research Institute. He started Centerpointe in 1989 with borrowed recording equipment set up on his kitchen table.
When he published his book, Thresholds of the Mind, in 2002, it referred to 80,000 people in 62 countries having benefited from his work. Now, over 200,000 people in 172 countries on six continents have used Centerpointe programs to improve their lives.
In his role as Director of Centerpointe Research Institute, Bill is the creator of the Holosync Solution program and Life Principles Integration process. In addition to his groundbreaking work in the field of personal development, Bill has become widely known for his ability to take his knowledge and passion for personal growth and development, and transform it into an incredibly successful business.
You’ve done something extraordinary, to say the least. You’ve created Holosync, a completely new human development technology, and you developed a multi-million dollar business around it. Would you tell us how your passions led you to this, and something about the story of how Holosync came to be?
Bill Harris: I guess my passions, the two passions that I had that really led to this were, first of all, a passion for meditation. I was very interested in meditation and had been meditating, in a traditional way, for about 16 years when I first started playing around with what became Holosync.
My other passion was to figure out why I was so screwed up, and get myself from being unhappy and angry and depressed, to being happy and functional. It was really trying to figure out how I could be happy and why there was something wrong with me (or at least I thought there was something wrong with me) that really gave me the motivation to continue doing this.
As I said, I’ve been using traditional meditation for quite a long time, and I’d been a very disciplined meditator. I heard that there was a way to induce the brainwave patterns of regular, traditional meditation, using sound.
In fact, the place that I found this out was an article in Scientific American that was published in 1973, called Auditory Beats in the Brain, by a man named Dr. Gerald Oster, who was a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.
This article described a way, using certain, very precise combinations of sound waves, sign wave tones, you could induce different brainwave patterns, including those of meditation, enhanced learning, enhanced creativity, and many other states. A number of my friends and I began to play around with this to find out what would happen.
We were curious to know whether, if we did this, we would have the same experience we had had meditating in a traditional way. Would we get the same benefits of meditation that we had read about in all the books we’d read? Most people have the experience of reading all this great stuff about meditation, and then they do it, and very little, if any of it, actually happens.
It takes decades, literally, to perfect the technique. We found, when we used this more high-tech way of meditating, that the deep, meditative states happened easily and instantly, and that the benefits that we’d read about and had sought for so many years, began to come really quickly.
Pretty soon, the anger and depression and other dysfunctional emotional problems I had began to fall away. Four years later, I was a totally different person. I used to be the guy in the Li’l Abner cartoon who always had the black cloud over his head. I was really negative, really angry, difficult to get along with, and all of that just lifted from me and my entire life changed. People really noticed this huge, huge difference in me.
Paul Scheele: I’m curious, Bill, when you went into meditation, did you go into it for the purpose of getting more happy, or for the purpose of getting out of your depression, or did you meditate for one reason and then hope that somehow, you’d also figure out why you were screwed up?
Bill Harris:
Well, I don’t know that in those days, I really saw the connection as clearly as I see it now. We have probably about 180,000 people in 172 countries now doing this program and we interact with them to a very high degree, so we get lots of feedback from what’s happening when people do this.
I can see now that many people who come to us who are interested in meditation – really what’s going on is that they’re very unhappy in some way. They read these books about meditation. They read books by famous yogis or Zen masters and what they describe sounds so wonderful in comparison to the way these people feel that they think, Wow, yes, that’s what I want. I want to be a yogi. I want to be a Zen master.
They’re not really thinking so much in terms of, There’s something dysfunctional that I’m doing inside as a result of trauma I’ve suffered in the past and I need to heal that. It’s really an escape, almost.
The fortunate thing about it is that this is the type of escape that, if you try to escape doing this, it turns out to help you anyway. It’s the one way of running away from yourself that turns you back on yourself and causes you to actually become clear about what’s going on if you’re persistent enough about doing it.
Paul Scheele: When you got into the Holosync technology and discovered this high tech way of meditating could, in a matter of a couple years, save you decades in order to get to a similar outcome, were you simultaneously noticing that the other people around you were changing in the same way? They were saying, You’ve really changed, Bill.
Bill Harris:
Well, the people that were doing this with me, and there were a growing number of people, 15 or 20 people eventually, who were experimenting with this with me – they were all having similar changes, yes.
Everyone was having some really remarkable experiences and really remarkable changes in their mental, emotional and spiritual health. I may have been more screwed up than most of them, so it might have seemed a little more dramatic for me, but everyone was experiencing the same sort of thing.
What I tell people today is that everyone is creating their reality by certain things they do inside, but most of those things are totally outside of their awareness. They’re doing them unconsciously, automatically, unintentionally.
Once you become aware enough that you begin to see these internal processes, those that do not serve you, which in my case was most of them, begin to fall away. You just cannot do these things that sabotage yourself emotionally and otherwise and do them consciously. You can do them unconsciously for your whole life, and many people have proved that, but you can’t do them consciously.
There are many things that Holosync does, many benefits that I could go through, but in a fundamental way, the main benefit is that it increases your conscious awareness to the point that you begin to see how you are creating the states and emotions you feel, moment by moment, and how you’re creating your behaviors and the situations and people that you either attract or are attracted to, which ultimately creates the results in your life, internally and externally.
That awareness is the same thing that all the yogis and Zen masters are talking about, and it really turns out to not be the same as what you think it is when you read all these books. It’s not that the books are inaccurate, it’s just that until you experience it for yourself – it’s like you read all the books in the world about what strawberries taste like, but until you taste one, your mental conception of what it’s going to be like is really not accurate. The same goes for this awareness.
Paul Scheele: This is different than therapy per se, where you sit in a chair in psychotherapy. You try to gain insight into the nature of your problem. What you’re saying is that what pops into conscious awareness is the fact that you are in charge of making these choices and you could choose to make other choices. Is that what I’m understanding?
Bill Harris:
That would certainly be one way to say it. You bring up a really good point, Paul. There is a distinction that most people don’t understand between knowing something and being aware of something. Most people that are in personal growth could write a Master’s thesis about their stuff. Most people are experts about their stuff. They know all about it, but they still do it.
I’m not talking about cognitively understanding something, or as you said, having insight into it. That certainly can be helpful, but there’s something, when your awareness actually expands to the point that what was unconscious, the unconscious, internal processes that you are doing, but you don’t really know you’re doing – once you become aware of those things, something remarkable happens.
Ken Wilbur is fond of saying, Awareness, in and of itself, is transformative, and he’s exactly right. As you become aware of how you’re creating your life, you cannot continue to do the things that you’ve been doing that are not resourceful for you.
Paul Scheele: Okay, so the awareness itself is transformative. To me, this is a profound distinction in this whole area of what we’re calling human or self development, because getting more knowledge isn’t really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about accessing the very decision-maker that’s running our unconscious behavior or automatic behavior.
Bill Harris:
Exactly. That’s the same field you’re in too. You’re teaching people the same thing. You may describe it in a little bit different way than I do, but we’re both teaching the same thing.
Paul Scheele: This is stuff that a lot of people are worried about when they think that something that’s unconscious, and driving the bus for them, is suddenly going to become conscious. Don’t they fear that there’s some kind of demon running the bus back there or something a little more heinous than this benevolent self that wants their life to work out?
Bill Harris:
I think that they probably do think that. That brings in another interesting point, because when people become aware of some of this stuff, a lot of times they do become depressed about it. They become unhappy when they find out, Oh my god, what kind of a loser am I that I have been creating all this stuff? and they get down on themselves.
Essentially they’re focusing their mind on what they don’t want. They’re focusing their mind on what they want to avoid, what they’re afraid of, what they’re worried about. That’s the other thing that happens when you actually become more aware in the sense that I’ve been describing it.
That is that it becomes more and more difficult for you to focus on what you do not want. One of the things that I frequently say, which is usually a revelation to people, but is very simple, is that all bad feelings are caused by focusing on what you do not want. There’s no way to have a bad feeling without focusing on what you don’t want.
Most people do their focusing, unfortunately, completely unconsciously, so as you gain awareness and begin to see how you’re focusing your mind, and you begin to notice that, My god, I’ve been focusing on what I’m afraid of most of the time, when you do that, two things happen.
You get it, most of the time, and you feel bad. Once somebody sees this with awareness, it becomes really hard to keep doing it. That means that all bad feelings really are unnecessary and they fall away once people gain the conscious awareness that allows them to see how they’re creating them.
There’s another little point I’d like to throw in. There’s another reason why people do personal growth things, that we didn’t touch on, and that is that they want to get this feel good to hit. People will read a book, and at the end of the book, they feel really good or they go to a seminar and at the end, they have seminar high.
If they have not really gained any additional conscious awareness, any real awareness of how they’re unconsciously running their life, they have really not evolved in any way. They have not improved their situation. They just temporarily feel good.
Many people run from one personal growth experience to another in order to feel good, instead of gaining the awareness that would allow them to create feeling good themselves instead of getting it from the outside – to feel good all the time.
When you go to a seminar and get seminar high, what’s really happened is that as a result of the seminar leaders working with you, they have gotten you, one way or another, to spend a lot of time focusing on what you want in your life, so you feel good. Then you go back home and you go back to your old habit of focusing on what you’re afraid of, what you don’t want, you go back to feeling bad and the seminar high goes away.
If you gained the awareness where you could see how you were creating feeling good at the end of the seminar, and how you were creating feeling bad later by changing your focus to what you don’t want, then you’d be able to be in charge of it yourself. You wouldn’t need to go to one seminar after another in order to get a contact high because somebody is manipulating your focus for you.
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Paul Scheele: What advice might you have for me or anyone else, when we face our challenges, when it feels like we’re getting shot down, when it feels like we’re not getting the result that we would have hoped for?
Bill Harris:
When you have a challenge, setback or failure, there really is a huge opportunity in it. Most people focus their minds in the wrong direction and then they miss it.
We’re in the process right now of installing a half-million dollar Oracle database, which gives us many more abilities to do things that we couldn’t do before with our current computer system. About a week ago, we pulled the switch to change from what we were doing before to what we’re doing now.
All kinds of stuff hit the fan, and we ended up not being able to take any orders for about a week. During that week, we probably had a half-million dollars’ worth of business come in that’s sitting there, swirling around in cyberspace, in electrons – that we couldn’t get.
We couldn’t send the product to people either, which to me, is a huge disaster, because I really care about these customers and what happens to them. I try to think like the Four Seasons Hotel thinks: if something goes wrong and inconveniences the customer, how can I make this so good to them that they’re almost glad it happened?
I won’t go into all the details on it, but I’m now figuring out all kinds of great things that I’m going to do for all the people that unfortunately got caught in that and inconvenienced and are getting whatever they asked for from us late. I’m going to make a huge, huge lemonade out of this so that all these people are thinking, ‘What an amazing company! These people really care about us.’
Yes, it’s inconvenient and this has been somewhat of a minor disaster. I could go on and tell you details about it that would get you to realize what a disaster it was. Eventually, this is going to make us more business and make us more happy customers. That’s just an example of this.
What I find that people do when an outcome happens that they didn’t want – they do a promotion and it doesn’t work – their mind tends to get pulled to what they’re afraid of, what they don’t want, and what they’re worried about. That is really poison when you do that.
It’s easy, like sliding downhill, to let your mind go there. What you need to do is develop the habit of saying, What about this is an opportunity? What about this is good? What did I learn from this? What can I do to turn this into an opportunity instead of a failure? What did I learn form this that will allow the next step to work better?
It might sound like, Big deal. You’re asking those questions. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to find the answers. The thing is, if you’re focusing your mind on those questions, I mean really thinking about them, getting really curious about, What is the answer to that question? What about this is an opportunity for me that’s going to make me glad this happened this way? your unconscious mind picks up that you’re focusing on that with a lot of passion and a lot of intensity, and it figures out the answer.
I have never had something like this happen where I thought that way and it did not turn out to be some huge benefit for me. If you focus on: What is the benefit? How can I turn this into something positive? your unconscious mind will deliver the answer to you in one way or another.
Paul Scheele: This is really that transformative awareness that you were talking about, that Holosync generates in you. Instead of getting down on yourself, instead of focusing on what you don’t want and ending up getting it or feeling bad, you just make that shift. Let me take this for a moment.
Holosync is a technology that lets an individual achieve more balance, not just in the brain waves, but really in, as you’re saying, their thinking. When something knocks them off, instead of them spiraling out of control, it seems like you right yourself so quickly in that mindset that says, How can I make the best of this? What is the opportunity here that’s going to transform my life?
That internal balance creates not only a more balanced and effective life, but certainly it’s going to have a huge difference in anybody’s business. Talk to me about the role of this sense of internal balance that allows you to live more passionately and really manifest your dreams.
Bill Harris:
As long as a person is, what I would call, an unconscious, automatic response mechanism, as long as something that you didn’t want to happen happens, and you immediately, unconsciously and really, unintentionally go to what you’re worried about, Oh no, this is going to happen. What’s wrong with me? all this negative stuff – as long as you’re doing that, that shields you from getting to the part of your mind that can solve any problem and answer any question.
Once you start directing your mind toward: What is the potential benefit? What’s the answer to this question? How can I do this (whatever this happens to be)? a whole different realm of possibilities open up.
You can do this by gritting your teeth, and every time your mind gets pulled to the negative side, pulling it back – but if you use Holosync, it quiets all that negative stuff, so that it makes it easier and easier and easier, until it’s effortless – to automatically go to the place where you do tap into that part of your mind that automatically knows the answer.
It used to be that it would take me two or three months sometimes, to answer a tough question, such as, What’s the benefit of being sued for $1 million? Now, when I have something happen and I ask that question, usually within five seconds, the answer comes to me, and then other answers continue to come to me.
You bring up something very interesting when you tie this into passion. I guess I could frame this by saying, I’ve been very fortunate, blah, blah, blah, but it really wasn’t just fortune or luck that did it. I made a conscious decision to run my brain in a way that really successful people run their brains.
Then I happened to have this tool, Holosync, that cleaned out a lot of crap in my head that makes it more difficult to do that. The result was that I ended up in a career where I get to be creative, I get to help people, I get to make a lot of money, I get to use my thinking capacity to the fullest, I get to meet all kinds of wonderful people and speak in front of wonderful groups.
If people want to be fulfilled, I guess here’s the way to say it. This is something that I very often say to groups: For any outcome you want, including being happy, fulfilled or rich, there is a certain way of thinking and acting that will get it for you. Your job is to find it and be flexible enough to try it on.
Finding it is the easier part because there are two ways to find it. One way is to find other people who are already doing it and copy them. That’s a fast way to get 90 percent of the way there, at least. The other way is to learn how to ask these kinds of questions, like, What’s the benefit in this? How can I do ‘X’?
Learn to tap into your unconscious mind, because it will deliver the answers to you also. The how-to, finding the way of thinking and acting that will get you a certain outcome, is actually the easier part. The part that people have trouble with is being flexible enough to try it on.
People are really married to the way that they’re already thinking and acting, which is the way people sabotage themselves, by not being willing to give up what they currently believe, not being willing to change the internal processes they use, not being willing to change their values – or whatever part of their internal process that they find out is in their way – people still hang on to it.
They think that beliefs are cast in stone. The actual truth about beliefs is that beliefs create your reality, along with a few other things, and that means that if you know that, the smart thing to do is to figure out, What do the people believe who are getting what I want to get? Adopt those beliefs, even if you don’t have the experiences that would normally lead you to believe those things.
Believe them anyway, pretend to believe them. Read about them, hang out with other people who believe them, and pretty soon, you really will believe them. Once you believe them, the results that flow from those beliefs will happen to you too.
Paul Scheele: I want to ask you, Bill, what is your biggest, current project, and what intention would you like us at Healthy Wealthy nWise, along with our readers, to hold for you?
Bill Harris:
My intention at this point is to get as many people on Earth using Holosync and learning the information that I teach in the online courses that I have, and actually even in the marketing stuff that I’m teaching a lot too.
A couple years ago, I decided that the big way to do that, to really have Centerpointe come into its own, was to get people who were centers of influence interested in Holosync, and interested in telling the people that they had influence over, to use it. I held that intention in my mind.
Since then, I have met and started working with Ken Wilbur. I have met and started working with Jack Canfield. Jack started this transformational leadership council that you and I, Paul, both belong to, and have met all the people in that. I was asked to speak at the United Nations. They’ve written about us in the New York Times and we’ve had feelers from Newsweek and Time magazine. That really came about because I began to intend to do it.
I’ll tell you another little benefit of Holosync that I’m beginning to realize. When people do Holosync for several years and really apply themselves to it, they begin to develop the ability to manifest whatever they want.
I did not do any hard work to have all the things I just mentioned happen. I really just intended that they happen. Now, I would have had to do hard work on it five years ago, but at this point, I just had to intend it and then take action on the possibilities that popped up.
If people want to hold an intention for Centerpointe, it would be that it would come more and more from under the radar to above the radar, so that the next time they do an issue in Time or Newsweek about meditation, we’re prominently mentioned.
I know that both magazines were deluged with calls, when they had articles about that, from our customers saying, Why didn’t you mention Holosync? It’s better than any of the things you mentioned. If people want to help out, they can intend that along with me.
Paul Scheele: We’ll definitely hold that intention. I want to hold that up for everyone as well, that when you suggested to me that I might put Holosync tracks on my paraliminal technology, which I developed back in 1988, we put those on in our recent reissuing of all our paraliminal recordings, and the results have been fabulous.
The difference in brain states, the difference in mental clarity and awareness – people are reporting how different the paraliminal technology has been as a result of bringing your technology into it. I want to thank you and say I’m a big, two-thumbs-up believer in the Holosync technology. It’s been tremendous.
Bill Harris:
Certainly the paraliminal technology and Holosync work together really wonderfully. You and I are definitely on the same page on what we teach about how the mind works and how people create their reality, so it’s definitely a marriage made in heaven.
Ultimately, what I’m really trying to do at this point – I’ve made so much money now, I don’t need money. I give away tons of money now to charity, mostly having to do with helping inner city kids. I really still feel the same way and with the same passion that I did when I first started and hoped I could make $30,000 a year with this.
I feel like a little kid who’s found something really cool and wants to share it with all the other kids. Holosync really changes lives in a very profound way. I just want to spread this all over the world.
Bill Harris conducted in front of a live Tele-Audience.
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