It's good to know there are some effects, even if they're not the insane shit the Hemi-Sync site claims (listen to this MP3 and you'll learn about your past life! Yeah, right.) But these effects seem to be able to be produced with regular meditation anyway.
I'm actually rather interested in conspiracy theories, UFOs and the paranormal, and I have a good library of books on the subject, but it seems that unlike most people that are into this stuff, I've kept a little something called critical thinking.
I've read a really good book on Roswell lately and I think it's impossible to claim that nothing special happened there. Too many people saw it, handled the crash remains (composed of badass things like aluminum foil-looking stuff that can't be bent at all, and thin sheets of metal that instantly retake their form like water with no visible creases when crumpled and released, both were handled by multiple witnesses), the cover-up was much too intensive with military hanging around for months picking up every single tiniest remain and the Air Force scaring witnesses into submission by threatening them and their families, too many ex-military people testified to weird shit, both while they were alive, on their death beds (death bed confessions are considered particularly legit in law) and in their wills. The military's standard "weather balloon" answer, experimental, top-secret or otherwise, has always been substandard and insulting to people's intelligence.
Ex-military also say that they recovered alien bodies, including a live one that later died, saw them and even performed autopsies, but I'm unconvinced as to that part. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It would take much more than testimony to get me to believe that. Following the Drake Equation, I have no trouble believing that ET is out there on their planets, and that some of these ET species are intelligent (after all, it's a huge Universe we live in) but I'm not convinced that they're coming here and saying hello. I reserve my judgment about what happened at Roswell until there's further proof, but something happened there.
The subject quickly tends to deteriorate into really kooky shit, like project SERPO that claims we've actually sent soldiers to an alien planet aboard an alien craft as part of an exchange program (proven a hoax) or the zillion of abductees/contactees that seem to me the product of sleep paralysis, attention seeking or simply insanity for the vast majority, with a few unknowns. I don't think aliens need to abduct people and stick probes in their asses to study them. It appears to me that were aliens studying us, looking at our genome and simply observing us would be sufficient to learn all that they need to. Worse yet are the David Ickes of this world claiming that all our leaders are evil shape-shifting reptilians hell-bent on making humankind a slave race, or the Däniken/Sitchin-style "alien astronauts teaching us how to be civilized" proponents. Come on.
Louis Theroux did a really good feature on the UFO movement. He went hunting extra-dimensional aliens with some guy, shooting his gun with his mind. Obviously, there was not a one.
It's the same thing with paranormal stuff. I don't believe in life after death, but I don't disbelieve it either. A lot of people in my family went brain-dead then came back saying they had seen stuff (the OBE phenomenon), most prominently my own mother and grandmother, and I've read a few books about it. The scientific explanations don't convince me as for most of these to be true, the neocortex needs to be functional, which isn't the case in a lot of people reporting OBEs. All that proves though is that the cause is unknown. Maybe consciousness is able to be separated from our brains, maybe not, so again, I reserve my judgment. One thing is clear to me, it's that if life after death exists, religion's got it wrong as everyone, sinner or not, from any or no religion, seems to get to view a slice of heaven.
As for the other stuff like PK, telepathy, astral projection, remote viewing, medium stuff, you'll see zillions of people claim that they can do freaky shit with their minds. The TV mediums are the absolute worst. They are disgusting, evil, subhuman scum preying on vulnerable people who have lost people dear to them by using crude psychology to cold read their audiences and make believe that they can talk to dead people. If I had my way, Lisa Williams and her ilk would be rotting in jail. No disclaimer can fix that wrong.
It speaks to me that despite this kind of paranormal stuff being much more easily testable in a controlled setting and falsifiable than UFOs, for example, that there's little to no scientific proof or literature on the subject that isn't flawed. Personally, if I could move stuff with my mind, I'd take the James Randi challenge immediately and not only get rich, but prove this stuff exists for real for humanity's sake.
The Internet is making this stuff way more dangerous than it used to be because like minds conglomerate on message boards and just say stupid shit that passes as gospel among these people. An individual human can be smart, but in a group, the vast majority of us turn into rabid, thoughtless animals. Just look at Black Friday. Conspiracy/paranormal message boards are the Black Friday crowds of the Internet. Maybe there's some truth on there, but the effort required to separate all the dense piles of shit to get to the unlikely gold nugget make the effort a bit worthless. Books are much better sources of information as long as you've got that critical thinking skill.
That's why I was so leery of binaural beats. Even if something is legit at its base, there's always some douchebag who will take that base and raise it to ridiculous, unlikely levels, which casts a shit stain over the whole thing. Meditation is a victim of that too even though no one can deny meditation is effective at what it does. New Age shit makes a fortune out of doing that. I detest New Age shit.
