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Rating: 
Summary: A reader
Review: After looking at 5 of the 6 reviews, all I can say is...Man, You all talk to much!!!! Spend less time meditating and more time actually socializing with real people...not just biofeedback machines. Get a life!! Oh and by the way please work on your obsessive compulsive personality disorder
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Guide for Exploring States of Consciousness
Review: Anna Wise's book is a treasure. I have been a student of meditation and transpersonal psychology for over 30 years. I have experienced many workshops, teachers, meditation retreats, and also have read innumerable books on spiritual subjects. "Awakening the Mind" is one of the best guide books I have ever found for gaining mastery over states of consciousness.It suggests many effective techniques for taming the "monkey mind" and deepening meditation. It shows ways to access healing energy, personal insight, and greater creativity. It is filled with meditations that help one lead a richer every day life. At the same time, it is much more than a "how to" book. "Awakening the Mind" also provides many guided meditations that are poetic and revelatory. When practiced with care, they can lead to profoundly meaningful and transcendent experiences. For several years I have had the privilege of studying with Anna Wise in person, participating in her workshops, working with her individually, and training to do her work using biofeedback to help gain mastery of states of consciousness. I have also used Anna Wise's excellent set of CD's, entitled "High Performance Mind", along with her previous book of the same title. I cannot begin to express how much my life has been enriched by this work and by knowing her. I highly recommend "Awakening the Mind" and the CD set to anyone interested in exploring the further reaches of consciousness and in awakening to their full potential.
Rating:
Summary: A Real Class Act!
Review: I cannot praise this book enough! I am 55 years young and have been serious about the pursuit of inner exploration and the search of something (I already have) but lost in the quagmire of living...my true essence. For the past 20 years,I have doggedly read all manner of books, listened to countless audio-neuro tapes, engaged in seminars, lectures, and other spiritual and "so-called" consciousness endeavors, and even "brain machines"! After awhile, I realized I was spinning my wheels, something vital was missing. Undaunted and still in search, I later happened upon an excellent book, The High Performance Mind by Anna Wise 1995. That book changed my life! Then I purchased her very professional companion guided meditations CD package based on the same book. My point is that Anna Wise's superb research deals with the one essential factor that, from my point of view, most, if not all other researchers in the consciousness field of science do not address, and that is that our consciousness, in any form, is not based on any ONE dominant brainwave frequency. Our states of mind and their contents consists of a SYMPHONY of finely woven and intricate interrelationships of brainwave frequencies and to reach the really deep meditational states, you have to be able to open the CHANNELS from the subconscious to the conscious in order to gain any meaningful experience! Anna showed me how! My meditations have over the last 6 years have not only become real to me, but thanks to Anna's realistic approach to this fascinating field emplementing the Mind Mirror EEG which registers the WHOLE brain for real-time biofeedback which she fundamentally bases her work on, has given me the capability to empower myself in taking control of my brainwaves (and consequently my mind states) from my mundane affairs to my spiritual quests. Anna writes with warmth and unparallel clearness and logic, her meditations and excercises really gave me a handle on my personal meditations and ways of thinking. As if that wasn't enough, she comes up with another masterpiece with a capital "M"!! Awakening the Mind has been a long awaited treasure for me because I know Anna has been working all over the world gathering more knowledge and experience dealing with some of the best minds in all walks of life. Not only does she review the core theme of her research which stabilizes the integrity of it and makes it accessible to anyone new to this work, but she embellishes it with exciting new knowledge based on her latest findings, including, new meditations and very useful tips!!! In keeping with her emaculate style, she is consistent with her authoratative, precise, clear no-nonsense, but warm and spiritual presentation of information that provides the tools for anyone who wants to get "down to business" in his or hers quest for consciousness work be it whatever you want to do in life, healing, self mastery, creativity, problem solving, the universe is the limit. We owe alot of gratitude to the dedication of people like Anna Wise in these interesting and exciting new times as our global consciousness undergoes the next levels of evolution. We can walk this earth as sleeping zombies or WAKE UP and really live as WHOLE people. I URGE everybody to read this book because EVERYBODY WILL BENEFIT!!! And you will not lose in getting her other book and audio CDs too. Thanks again Anna!! You're the BEST!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: light that incense
Review: If the phrase "aligning your chakra" sets your teeth on edge, don't buy this book. There is science behind what she is saying, but it's hard to dig out from underneath all the metaphysical garbage.
Rating: 
Summary: insight for meditation . . . not brainwaves
Review: In the "enlighted" state I've achieved after reading Wise's Awakening the Mind, brainwaves are still good for one and only one reason: I can monitor them using an external device to more quickly and accurately recognize nuances of my own cognition. Though the waves emanating from regions of my brain might have some influence over other regions within my brain or even more distant phenomena (e.g. people) - that is, though they might carry some intrinsic quality of power as the subtitle suggests - Wise fails to make a clear point of it. She does, however, convince me that she has studied the recorded brainwaves of many people widely recognized as "spiritually enlightened" and that she has uncovered a pattern or "signature" for the cognitive state most people call "enlightenment". From those observations, and many years teaching techniques in meditation, she has refined her meditative "induction scripts" (to borrow from the lexicon of hypnotherapy) to quickly achieve the various modes of cognition associated with each pattern. Before you get too excited, let me explain that the patterns, as she describes them, aren't sophisticated. Our brains generate four quite distinct brain waves (in varying combination) corresponding to four modes or qualities of consciousness that we experience in four distinct spatial regions of the brain. Beta, alpha, theta, and delta map to linguistic, sensory, and the emotive subconscious, which map to the cortex, etc. Anna doesn't get much beyond this simplicity except to say that brainwave recordings of enlightened people tend to show equal participation of each wave and thus each mode of thought in the mind. To make the point, Anna beats quite a few horses to death after torturing them with her writing and straining to turn brainwaves into something more than they are. For example, when describing theta waves, Anna writes: Theta is where we hold our "stuff." If you have any "stuff" (and who doesn't), you know what I'm talking about-the unclear emotional material that each of us collects over the course of our lifetime, sometimes called "baggage" or "garbage." -- pg. 11 From this and passages like it, Anna leads us to believe that she considers brainwaves actual "regions" of the brain . . . "repositories." It gets worse. And this passage isn't the only one in which she reveals a bias toward psychtherapeutic techniques for personal change and healing. If only she could stick to brainwaves. In fairness, she has probably worked with the concepts so long that, for her, they have become a bit blurry. But this quality of thought - fuzzy mental categories and hyperbole - smacks of a smart person that failed to get over the novelty of an experience . . . or just bad marketing. I've yet to spend time with her exercises. And maybe only then will I understand. So I will keep this text around, if only on the faith that what Anna's learned about brainwaves make the meditation all the better. Better yet, I'll get an EEG machine for myself.
Rating:
Summary: light that incense
Review: please spare me your vast overuse of the words. i made it through half a review then looked at all the others. wow. you must of all liked this book i need read no further. your so smart you forgot tht in the process of writing such endowed reviews that most dont want to read your thesis on the subject.
keep it short and sweet. otherwise your wasting space.
Rating:
Summary: a man
Review: please spare me your vast overuse of the words. i made it through half a review then looked at all the others. wow. you must of all liked this book i need read no further. your so smart you forgot tht in the process of writing such endowed reviews that most dont want to read your thesis on the subject.
keep it short and sweet. otherwise your wasting space.
Rating:
Summary: Practical tipsto explore the higher reaches of consciousness
Review: This is a wonderfully practical book on how to explore the further reaches of human consciousness and potential. Anna offers us a gift of practical tips, techniques and strategies on how to, with or without EEG / brainwave biofeedback, tap the strengths and resources and find the highest aspects of our selves. Her decades of experience as a master teacher, and her serious commitment to pursuit of training from her own teachers has enabled her to write a clear, easily followed book that makes it so much easier to find what so many people used to go to the Himalayas to seek-- inner wisdom, peace, higher consciousness. After thirty years in this field myself, I don't recall any other book that has done such a good job of providing the exercises and techniques you can use to "Get there." As a speaker at my Futurehealth Winter Brain Meeting, Anna has always been a favorite among the cognoscenti-- the people who are experts themselves. Her heartful insights and wisdom shine through in this book.
You might also want to try out her book High Performance Mind, or her CD set which she did with Andrew Wile, on Meditation.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent start...
Review: Well, Anna Wise has basically taken her previous book "The High Performance Mind", polished all the rough spots, added some more information and, thankfully, come up with a relatively good title. This book uses the previous as its core and adds a number of additional meditations, more examples and references to other disciplines. She has removed some of the material found in the previous book, notably the graphs about brainwaves which, although they are a bit useful from a theoretical point of view, are mostly useless to those who don't own an EEG. In their place are a lot more guided meditations and many more personal stories. In particular, I think the addition of the anecdotes rather good since they help show that there are many possible paths besides just EEG; this should be obvious since many of the other disciplines (Zen and Taoism/Qigong for instance) have been around for a very long time. This is a great advancement in the continuing quest to start to reconcile the differences between Western medicine/scientific method and Eastern disciplines. Wise notes that some Qigong masters she monitored during healing exhibited Delta brainwaves in excess of 50 times a "normal" person; she takes this as further evidence of great movements of energy since this could not likely be produced by the brain alone. Wow, well, this is what the Qigong masters have been saying for thousands of years! The only weak points of the book concern holistic views. That is, Wise focuses on the brainwaves only when no solution is going to come only from work in one area. That is, meditation based on a diet of softdrinks, chips and other junk is probably not going to help you that much; you need a holistic view and methodology. Of course, this has been preached by many Eastern traditions for quite a while and I think Wise probably should have commented on this aspect. Anyway, despite a couple of weak points this is an excellent place to start for anyone starting to work on his/her lifestyle. Check out the old classics "Mindfulness in Plain English", "Zen Training" and perhaps "Scholar Warrior" and start on the road to centering yourself.
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