Originally Posted by
juroara
spiritually speaking, the idea is to align yourself with what is good for your being. not because aligning yourself will suddenly make you a guru, but because living out of alignment makes spiritual practice, like meditation difficult. not impossible. just harder.
on one side you can argue westerners are always in a rush, expecting immediate results. the hippies cheated and took drugs. the result was most of them never really obtained true balance, became really unbalanced people, and made the whole being spiritual thing look foolish. so I can see how binaural beats can be the new soma. but on the other level you can argue that spiritually speaking, our time is speeding up. the evolution of our minds is speeding up, and there is more urgency to keep up with time. we have to achieve certain things within a much shorter time frame
these tools should be used to help you get over a barrier thats slowing down your progress. maybe the surface thoughts are preventing deep meditation, or stress, or depression, who knows. but like training wheels on a bicycle, you shouldn't become completely dependent on these things to achieve alter states of consciousness. if you can never achieve these things on your own, you haven't learned much.
these tools can also be inspiring. helping westerners indoctrinated into a material world view, understand the mystical. maybe experiencing deep meditation, or a lucid dream for the first time is enough to create a placebo affect making the next time that much easier. and any research into the brain is good research. we might find that these sort of devices work better to heal clinical depression then drugs, and with more positive side effects than negative.