On the third day of a recent trip to Tarpon Springs, Fla., my body was asleep but my mind was very much awake. It was about 10 in the morning on a Saturday at Temple Mound, a remote facility inauspiciously located among empty plots of land and auto-body shops. But at this spiritualist speakeasy, I was about to have my consciousness elevated, as part of a weekend retreat titled “Excursion Workshop Level I.”
I was sitting in the atmospheric home of Steve DerDerian, founder of Temple Mound, a sort of New Age B&B amid his 17 acres of land. In his sprawling living room—bisected by a stone fireplace/bookshelf lined with texts about the afterlife, channeling, tarot, remote viewing and other metaphysical phenomena—I and six other participants reclined on comfortable chairs, covered by blankets and eyeshades, headphones blocking out everything except the tones piping through our mini mp3 players.
We were listening to a selection from the vast library of Hemi-Sync recordings. The name, branded by metaphysical pioneer Robert Monroe, stands for Hemisphere Synchronization. Monroe discovered that when specialized audio tones called binaural beats are combined in a certain way, the brain will by synced into a “theta state” of high creativity and an awareness that extends beyond the physical world—ultimately causing us to use some 90 percent of our brains. When people claim to have out-of-body experiences or communication with their “spirit guides,” Hemi-Sync is a popular tool to get there.
In my first Hemi-Sync experience, it was difficult to eschew logic, skepticism and self-consciousness. But eventually I went under, in a matter not unlike hypnosis. Nausea rippled through my body at one point—the only time, thankfully, in the entire retreat—which DerDerian suggested was caused by my brain not recognizing its paradigm shift. Soon enough, I was experiencing visions and sounds I wasn’t consciously creating.
One, and only one, lyric from an obscure song by The Smiths became a recurring soundtrack to the fragmented visuals I encountered. I had a vision of my wife collecting shells on a beach, a scene that manifested in our physical reality later that evening—that phenomenon is called precognition. And most significantly, I heard myself asking a question I wasn’t physically asking or even thinking about: “Where is my wife’s wedding ring?” Her engagement ring had disappeared a couple of weeks prior, and she’d been combing our home for it ever since. An answer immediately arrived from some higher source: “The closet!”
I vowed that, when I arrived back home, I would check our bedroom closet for the ring before I did anything else.
To read the full story, pick up the May/June issue of Boca Raton magazine.
