Introduction

My Story

It was a Monday, seemingly like any other Monday, however on this particular Monday my life was about to be radically and irreversibly altered. On this particular Monday, unbeknownst to me, the beginning of my ‘new life’ was about to be set in motion. Not because of some dramatic external event, just the opposite, my life was about to transform because of something happening inside of my brain.

Welding smoke and burning aluminum filled my senses as another ordinary workday was playing out in the same mundane way that most of the other days of my life had played out before. However, before this day would end my life would change forever. Disengaged and daydreaming at work, I had been thinking about partying away the upcoming weekend. I was standing in an industrial shop in the mid-1980s completely checked out from my job and my life, as usual. Another day, just going through the motions, watching the clock, praying the day would end so I could find a way to distract myself from the meaningless life that I had created.

My life was full of stress, fear and apathy. I had been kicked out of college – academically ineligible to return after my freshman year – and now I was 26 years old and heading exactly nowhere. Suddenly, everything changed. As I stood, slouched – next to a piece of high-pitched buzzing industrial equipment – in grease-covered old jeans and a T-shirt, a sense of empowerment came over me and I, in that very moment, saw my stunning potential. I stood riveted in the middle of that shop, transfixed by a surge of energy in my body and a deep knowing in my soul.

The sights and sounds and smells of my surroundings ground to a halt and everything except my empowered inner feeling and the clear sense of my potential new life disappeared. The harsh welding smoke and grating noise of that steel and aluminum factory, in the middle of the midwestern United States, vanished within the new atmosphere of my mind, the stunning vision of what was to come; a new life vision crystalized and was all that remained in my consciousness.

Time stopped, realization flooded my awareness and I was suddenly bursting with confidence. In this moment I knew that I was about to transform my life and there was nothing that could stop me. From this newly empowered place of clarity and knowing I immediately left my job and went back to college. I went from being a college failure with a 0.57 GPA, to an honor roll student taking (and acing) 32-credit hours – twice the normal full time college class load – per semester in undergraduate college. I took on this extreme college class load so that I would be granted acceptance into a professional school as quickly as possible. Once the mandatory undergraduate work was done, I was admitted and completed a four-year postgraduate doctoral degree in Chiropractic in only three years. I graduated with honors and was on the national deans’ list for academic excellence.

This was just the beginning of my new life which is now marked by many professional accomplishments, including owning and operating successful businesses in the wellness and personal development industry, speaking in front of thousands of people, and ultimately – in the early part of the 21st century – I founded and developed Higher Brain Living® and now Source Code Meditation and the 9 Summits of Transformation. I have owned and operated numerous HBL centers, trained and certified hundreds of HBL facilitators and currently direct the Higher Brain Living Institute and the Source Code Meditation world headquarters in Chicago IL. I have traveled the world hosting retreats, speaking, teaching and training, while writing the book you now hold in your hands.

What is of particular interest regarding my personal story of transformation is that there wasn’t anything in my past that could have predicted this dramatic upward shift in my life. I went from being a stressed-out anxious medicated kid with chronic migraine headaches to a college dropout (actually I was thrown out, as my grades were too low to continue) to becoming a high achiever almost overnight. There was absolutely nothing about my past that could have predicted such profound change in the direction of my life. So what exactly was going on? Why me? Where did this new direction, this empowered state, this sense of confidence and clarity and knowing come from?

I grew up in the lower midwestern United States and had a good home with caring parents. However, my solid upbringing did not stop me from going through the world dazed, confused and fearful. I had been stumbling through life without any real sense of direction, and then suddenly, I had the clarity and the energy for transformation. What was it that woke me up – and even more importantly – drove me to action and radically transformed my life? The answer to this question, and the desire to help others experience transformative life change, became my life’s passion.

I want to be clear here; I am not suggesting that I had some sort of full-blown conversion experience or attained an ultimate enlightened state during my epiphany at 26 years of age. What I did experience however was a very radical shift in my brain and consciousness that led to a new life that was almost unrecognizable from my life up to that point. I am still a work in progress, as we all are if we embrace an evolutionary model, but I am very different than I once was, and you can be too. I apply the principles and techniques of Source Code Meditation every day and I continue to grow and evolve. My hope is that my personal evolution, and yours, never ends.

The Great Search and Discovery

Thus began my journey into the confusing world of self-development and the human potential movement. Following my transformation at the age of 26, I embarked on a two decades, and more, search to find out what caused transformation to occur in some seemingly lucky individuals but not in most. Most of us, as Henry David Thoreau so painfully reminded us, “live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them”. Once the majority of us reach adulthood, any kind of dramatic transformation of our consciousness seems to elude us, even though the desire for liberation exists across cultures and continents in billions of people.

Historians, integral theorists and developmental psychologists have researched and articulated the outlines of evolving stages of mind that result in radically new ways to create meaning and interpret the world. Likewise, great sages both east and west have pointed to an ultimate unitary experience of consciousness that plunges one into deep divine rapture. We know the possibility exists for transformation, but until now we were left without a means or mechanism for the masses to attain it, or for that matter to create vertical (evolutionary) and sustainable life change of any kind. We have stumbled in the dark for far too long without an adequate way to catalyze and accomplish this beautiful awakening for humanity. For most of us, being free of the bondage to this world of suffering and separation seems like a dream without any real hope of happening.

For the small percentage of individuals that do experience dramatic life improvements and transformations, they usually don’t understand how or why it happened. What hope is there for most of us ever even improving our day-to-day lives, let alone attaining the potential exalted state of oneness, knowing and connection? How could we possibly hope to attain this advanced form of enlightened consciousness reported by the saints and sages both east and west? According to yoga and mysticism historian Gopi Krishna, “it is the rarest of rare human beings” that has ever attained this ultimate state of being at any time in history. It seemed as though luck had looked down on some individuals and granted them exaltation. What about the rest of us? The burgeoning new path elucidated in this book points to a new way forward that can create the fertile ground for our awakening.

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What I discovered after devoting my life to this search is shocking; there is a ‘missing link’ to personal transformation approaches, and a hidden key that must be turned if positive change of almost any kind is going to gain the necessary momentum to take hold in your life. This ‘missing link’ holds most of us back from even ordinary life improvements such as losing weight, improving relationships or furthering our careers. This ‘missing link’ squelches our joy, flattens our passions and hides us from our life’s purpose. It even diminishes our capacity for deep authentic spirituality and enlightened states of being.

What I know now is that the profound change that burst into my life over 25 years ago is just the beginning of what awaits humanity if we are willing to open to a new story and commit to a new movement that promises to disclose a stunning new landscape of possibility. A possibility that is just now starting to emerge and that is pointing to a new vista of human potential. What I came to understand is that the very key to our growth and evolution as individuals and as a world community lies in the energizing of the latent highest potential of our brains. From the most ordinary day-to-day life improvements we seek, such as less stress, and better relationships to the potential for enlightened states of consciousness and transformation; the ‘missing link’ is the same. The ‘missing link’ to personal transformation is the untapped, slumbering highly evolved part of our brain. Source Code Mediation is a key that turns it on.

What this book will reveal is not just theory but also a practical new way to turn the key that unlocks your higher brain potential, so that we may ‘wake up’ and use our new brain state to transform our lives.

Tragically, the lower primitive stress-producing part of our brain – running its survival programs below our awareness – is hijacking our potential and reinforcing problematic areas of our lives. As we will learn, the lower brain has a primitive biological imperative to keep things the same, because sameness = safety.

The concept is simple; when certain areas of your life are not improving, your lower brain is controlling those areas! If stuck areas of your life are going to change, the lower brain has to loosen its grip and the higher brain has to power up. SCM is a key, a new way to energize the untapped higher brain, liberating its latent potential so that you can bring an empowered emotional state and elevated consciousness to the areas of our life that you wish to improve. You will soon learn to make this brain shift possible in yourself! There’s even more good news; when enough of us make this shift into the higher brain I am convinced that a point of critical mass will be achieved and positive widespread social change will occur. This collective brain change will disrupt the gridlock in our world and open us to new possibilities for what it means to be fully human.

On the website www.sourcecodemeditation.com/demos you can witness demonstrations of the technique taught in this book. You will see the dramatic response in the human body as energy uploads into the higher brain. By the end of this book, and with practice, you will be able to do what you see on these video demonstrations! These will put in perspective the profundity of what you are about to discover.

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As this book progresses I am going to take you on the same search that I committed the last two and a half decades of my life to. We will journey deep into the world of human potential and I will show you what I found. We’re going to trace a path that started nearly 5,000 years ago in caves in India. It was here that spiritual adepts were amongst the first to discover a mysterious energy in the human body, devoting their lives to techniques and practices that would awaken this energy.

These adepts committed all of their waking hours to the rare possibility of directing this sacred energy into their brains to transform their minds. They had stumbled upon the ‘missing link’ and were experimenting and searching for the key that they believed could end human suffering and deliver us from the despair of our own impending mortality. They isolated themselves from the distractions of society and dedicated themselves to decades of practice in the hopes of mobilizing this mysterious energy and attaining transformations of their consciousness.

The ultimate in these sought-after transformations of consciousness were the ‘enlightenment experiences’, a departure from ordinary reality so radical that it left the bewildered seeker with direct and immediate answers to the time immemorial questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What does it all mean? Attaining enlightenment experience felt as if one had been asleep one’s whole life and had just woken from a dream. This enlightened consciousness conferred a sense of oneness, connection and belonging that did not have to be (and could not be) intellectualized or ‘figured out’. This new state simply provided understanding on a deep and profound level beyond the rational mind’s capacity. In this state what was directly experienced was a deep sense of being and bliss and a knowing how everything in the universe fitted together with wholeness and meaning. These rare ancient realizers had in effect experienced a new mind with which to know themselves and the cosmos. The legendary orations and sacred writings describing these advanced states of consciousness were so powerful that seekers gave up everything to pursue them.

Unfortunately, what I did not find in my intensive search (past and present) and deep inquiry into human potential, were the vehicles, techniques or practices capable of ushering in this higher consciousness for the masses living in modern society. For that matter, I did not find evidence of any practices or techniques that have ever created rapid sustainable transformative change of any kind in large populations of people at any time or place in history.

Within all cultures, past and present, there have always been a few rare individuals who plummeted into this new leading edge of enlightenment consciousness. An awakening that was so far beyond the cultural understandings that they often faced severe repercussions for even talking about it. The great realizers are legend, so are the martyrs. From Christ, to Krishna to the Buddha, the message was the same: ‘we can wake up to a new reality’. Those rare individuals that accessed this new awareness reported a direct merging of their individual consciousness with that of the divine.

This higher consciousness has yet to fully emerge in an accessible way within the great spiral of human development. But I am convinced, based on new information and developments that our odds today are better than ever. You have probably figured out that the ‘missing link’ to this enlightened state of consciousness, is the same ‘missing link’ that keeps many of us stuck in bad relationships, unfulfilling careers, unhealthy habits and apathetic about our lives. The ‘missing link’ towards enlightenment is of course also the slumbering higher human brain.

Due to the slumbering nature of the higher brain and the paralyzing grip of the lower brain, nearly all of the world’s physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual improvement techniques cannot fully deliver their potential for change. Without increased metabolism of the higher brain, synchronized to these personal growth techniques, the technique’s effects are muted and often temporary. In short, the key to this ‘missing link’ must be turned if we are to flourish in body, mind and spirit. I believe SCM turns the key. These ancient adepts provided us with a piece of the puzzle, a piece that we have now taken out of the caves and connected to an understanding of modern neuroscience, Integral Metatheory and set within a cosmic evolutionary context.

We have filled in the missing pieces to the puzzle of personal and cultural evolution and can map it into our modern lives and through this book make it part of the global commons. SCM is creating consistency and reproducibility to our transformation so the masses may not only improve their day-to-day lives but also pursue the path towards a new liberated way to be and become.

The Future of Yoga, Meditation and the Human Potential Movement

“Out of thousands, only one seeks me.
And out of thousands who seek me, only one is successful.”

— BHAGAVAD GITA

What the personal growth pioneers of the past discovered, eventually led to various techniques and practices now generally classified and categorized within the ‘human potential movement’. Amongst these techniques and practices are the two most popular and enduring: yoga and meditation. Due to the sheer rigor and unrealistic time, energy and commitment it took to become transformed by these techniques in ancient times, they were eventually simplified and diluted to become accessible for the masses. We now have more utilizers without any more realizers. This is not a criticism of these approaches. Put simply these techniques were not historically developed for modern seekers to pursue. They, inevitably, had to be modified for the busy schedules and short attention spans of the modern mind.

My concern now is that we have forgotten the ‘why’ of liberation and a radically transformed life. I want to assure you that transformation is possible and SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation is a vehicle that you can use as a complete system but that also doesn’t prohibit what you currently do for your growth and well-being. In fact you will realize new potentials locked away in the things that you have been doing for years. As one example, if you pursue this SCM approach, and also take your yoga classes, you will generate benefits from those yoga classes that you never could have imagined.

I have chosen to position SCM as a revolutionary ‘brain first’ meditation technique. However, when we include the 9 Summits of Transformation it could accurately be considered a 21st-century yoga but not a yoga based on asana (postures) as is heavily emphasized in American yoga. Instead SCM and the 9 Summits are reintroducing the intent of ancient yoga as a vehicle for the practitioner to attain full liberation in this lifetime. Part of the genius of early yoga was that asana (postures) practice was an early attempt to change physiology, followed by the introduction of meditation, while simultaneously learning how to live and engage the life process in specific ways.

In fact, the father of yoga, Pantanjali, included ‘eight limbs’ or components in his yoga model. Asanas were traditionally designed to be a precursor to meditation, not a means to an end in and of themselves. Importantly with Source Code Meditation this relationship of physiology and meditation can be reversed. When the brain is prepped and in a thrive state – initiated through SCM – and then a yoga class is pursued, the yoga class leads to much more dramatic and significant outcomes. In fact, one of the remarkable elements of the SCM technique is its ability to amplify the benefits of all other productive human potential promoting techniques. In other words, SCM is not in competition with anything but instead can serve as a hub that enhances everything.

Do We Really Believe Transformation Is Possible?

A recent study titled Yoga in America, released by the Yoga Journal in 2016, demonstrated that 36 million people currently practice yoga and that number is projected to rise. The telling parameter in the study was, ‘The top five motivations for practicing yoga,’ by yoga practitioners in America. These were reported as follows.

Top five motivations for practicing yoga in America:

  1. Flexibility
  2. General conditioning
  3. Stress relief
  4. Improve overall health
  5. Physical fitness

Consider the intent of traditional yoga and consider what is missing from the list. Not found on the list of the top five motivations for practicing yoga:

  1. Enlightenment
  2. Finding one’s life purpose
  3. Higher consciousness
  4. Evolution
  5. Spiritual awakening

Yes, missing from the list of the top motivations for practicing yoga were: enlightenment, spiritual awakening, finding one’s purpose, higher consciousness, creating a better world, transcendence, self-actualization, or personal evolution! My hope was that the study would find that a majority of students did indeed enter yoga practice with the hope of increasing flexibility or getting in better shape, but through the practice they would then aspire towards awakening, spiritual growth and evolution. Unfortunately this was not the case. What the study also found was the initial motivations didn’t change much even with long time established yoga students.

Considering that a personal transformation that led to a union with God was the original aim of yoga, and considering that yoga is currently one of our most popular vehicles for change, does this top five list imply that we have largely given up on the possibility of transformation? Do we even really believe it’s possible anymore?

My hope is that this book will restore our faith in the long held belief that we can transcend the confines of our limited awareness and access and grow to new vistas of consciousness and new ways to ‘be and become’ in the world.

More recently developed approaches amongst modern life improvement seekers are life coaching and psychotherapy, as well as practices associated with the popular new-age notion that merely ‘thinking’ the right thoughts will lead to the life of our dreams. All of these approaches face the same daunting challenge. Changing your thoughts, goals, strategies or creating affirmations etc . . . . without shifting the brain’s command center from the lower primitive survival brain to the higher thriving brain, will rarely lead to rapid radical real life improvement.

Consider this, if your higher brain is not adequately energized and associated with new, positive thoughts, goals, strategies or affirmations, those thoughts, goals, strategies or affirmations cannot be sustained and certainly not driven to right action. New ways of thinking, without being synchronized to new higher brain function, rarely leads to transformation. Thoughts are fleeting and ephemeral until they are anchored to the correct brain state. Life coaching, psychotherapy and positive thinking need to be introduced into your awakened higher brain to convert your new thoughts into new strategy, new experience, new behavior and a new life.

Later in this book you will discover that for the first time in history we have a way to associate ‘positive thoughts’ with an energized empowered higher brain state! This book will teach you how to do just that, how to anchor ‘right thoughts’ to the part of the brain that can promote ‘right action’ and convert those thoughts and actions into a new life.

What all of this seems to mean is that regardless of the technique, discipline or practice, it does not appear that rapid life transformation is occurring in most, nor that the percentage of people experiencing profound spiritual transformation of any kind, or attaining an enlightened state of consciousness has increased significantly since ancient times. Due to the missing higher brain state, many of our new methods remain superficial and our old methods and ancient knowledge did not become sufficiently advanced in a way that accelerated transformation in the modern world. Instead we found ways to take ancient knowledge, make it accessible for the many but with mitigated outcomes. Many techniques help humanity in many ways, but genuine transformation is still all too rare.

I am going to introduce a solution that is not only a completely new and unique stand-alone personal growth technique but one that can also accelerate and deepen the effectiveness of the wonderful, already existing techniques, such as yoga, psychotherapy, life coaching, meditation etc.

With that said, the adepts of the past were without question on the right track, and their ancient methods and sometimes ascetic practices opened a door that we can step through today. Enlightenment today however, must happen within the context of our modern world. How can we best incorporate all the wisdom of a 5,000-year-old path, create something entirely new, and apply that to our modern lives? What I discovered is that the only way to create a sustainable awakening in the modern world, is to energize the newest most evolved area of the brain, and then use that new brain state to improve the areas of our life that rob our energy and create stress (stress is a product of the lower primitive brain). Again, it’s simple; energy that is being used for the stress response (by the lower brain) is energy that is NOT being used by the higher enlightened brain.

Now That the Time Is Right

Many of the concepts in this book have previously only been taught in an elite Higher Brain Living® training and certification program. Higher Brain Living® is a technique I developed over a decade ago that requires hands-on facilitation – into the subtle energy pathways of the body – by a trained and certified HBL facilitator. Profound physiological responses and transformative life changes have been observed and reported in thousands of HBL recipients who have pursued the HBL programs administered by these trained and certified HBL facilitators. The outcomes of these programs have been studied (with study design approved by a major academic university) and numerous EEG scans performed demonstrating profound brain and life changes in the participants of HBL programs.

In 2014 and 2016, the University of Iowa in the department of social work approved two separate HBL research studies. This research was designed to assess quality of life changes in Higher Brain Living® recipients participating in HBL programs across the USA. Both studies have completed and both have demonstrated the following changes (see improved categories below) in the HBL recipients. Both studies were rigorously designed and passed university review boards. The second study even had a control group and has been demonstrated to be statistically significant. At the time of this writing the second study is being prepared for publication.

Improved categories:

“I never would have believed the brain could change this fast if I hadn’t measured it myself.”

(comment following a research study conducted on Higher Brain Living)

— DR. PENNY MONTGOMERY, Brain researcher, co-author of Whispers in the Brain

Out of a commitment to the integrity of the HBL system much of the information in this book has been carefully guarded. As stated, until now, the only way to learn any of this technique was through a very intensive training and certification program. However, massive change needs to happen in the world soon and we must impact more people if we are to do our part in the creation of our compelling future.

SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation were created from over a decade of research and development. At the completion of this book, and with adequate practice, you will have the tools necessary to create a dramatic upward shift in your own brain function and hopefully you will be inspired to discover our programs and retreats here at sourcecodemeditation.com.

I believe the key to the next major transformation both personally and globally lies in fully energizing the untapped higher brain and providing a path and a map for new consciousness and a new culture to emerge. Through this system we can directly participate in our own evolutionary unfolding and become the architects of a new age of transformation. We can usher in a world with more care, compassion, and consciousness and create a life of more joy, purpose and passion.

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Before we dive in any deeper I would like to clarify my stance on human development. Even though the SCM technique has positioned itself as a brain changing technique, it is so much more than that. I am not a materialist reductionist and do NOT assign ultimate primacy to the brain (more on this understanding in the Integral Metatheory section of this book). Throughout this book I will use the terms ‘produced by’ or ‘generated from’ the higher brain; this simply makes communication easiest.

In reality often the term, ‘associated with’ would be more accurate. I am an Integral Metatheorist and SCM, and the 9 Summits of Transformation are integrally informed techniques that promote evolution in ALL areas of life, BUT that take, as the starting point, a powerful change in the brain. In this book I represent the brain very generally. This book is not about brain science but is about the science of transformation in which the brain plays a key role. Secondly, modern brain research is just not clear enough to be overly precise, even if I wanted to be, so generalizations such as ‘lower brain’ and ‘higher brain’ will make our point just fine. I do not reduce reality to any particular dimension (including the brain), however, conversations have to start somewhere and the first step of any technique or discipline has to begin somewhere.

We begin then with a flow of energy that wakes up higher brain potential. In my view there is no better place to start than by loosening the grip of the lower brain and taking as our starting point for transformation the dramatic shift to higher brain function that accompanies the SCM technique. This profound energy shift into the higher brain provides the requisite physiology and much needed opening for the integral informed 9 Summits of Transformation to be pursued.

You will soon learn to create the ‘Source Code Meditation Base (SCMB)’ in yourself and proceed to the brain first meditation that builds onto the SCMB (SCMB + new meditation = SCM). As you develop proficiency with SCM you will simultaneously be reading the ongoing chapters that create the context you will need to begin the 9 Summits of Transformation in Part 2 of this book. Let the context of each chapter sink in as you approach Part 2 where you will bring the context to life!

As you read along in Part 1, your daily SCM practice will prep you for greater absorption of the information. Context cannot be separated from experience. In other words any and all experience is contextualized based on what you already know and most of this contextualization is occurring below your conscious threshold. Your experiences are being shaped and molded by the story in your head and the unconscious programming beneath your awareness. Thus context is ‘bio-psychoactive’, it literally shapes and alters your mind and body. Context is sewn into experience, therefore creating the best context provides the best experience. We will cover this ‘power of context’ in more detail later in the book, but for now just know that your understanding of your experience changes your experience, and knowing this requires that we create the best possible understanding.