The Pendulum and the Tree

How Unity Emerges from Polarity

Have you ever been awake and asleep at the same time? Perhaps you’ve lingered in that colorful, liminal state that hovers just after closing your eyes at night. Or maybe you’ve “woken up” inside a dream and discovered that you could do almost anything. Thanks to the good people at the Monroe Institute and GlideWing—an online learning company committed to meaningful personal development and inner transformation—I recently experienced an unusual state of consciousness that felt like a deliberate step into that territory.

The state was partially induced through a novel use of sound. The technology, called Hemi-Sync (short for hemispheric synchronization), was developed by Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute. It uses binaural beats—slightly different tones played into each ear through stereo headphones—alongside guided narration, music, and layered sound design. The subtle frequency differences between the ears prompt the brain to generate a third internal tone, encouraging the left and right hemispheres to align their electrical activity in amplitude and frequency.

Here’s what I can tell you: it works. The sensation was strange and unmistakable. I felt as if I were asleep, yet I was fully conscious and aware of everything unfolding. It was the middle of the day, but I saw the swirling colors that usually accompany the hypnagogic threshold before sleep. Some advanced practitioners report out-of-body experiences, vivid visionary states, even imagery reminiscent of near-death or psychedelic experiences. My own experience was more modest—but it left me with a powerful intuition: something profound happens when the divided aspects of the mind begin to move in rhythm with one another.

A related therapeutic technique from the world of psychology approaches this integration from the opposite direction. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a structured, evidence-based form of psychotherapy designed to help people heal from the emotional distress caused by traumatic or disturbing life experiences. The therapy involves eight structured phases, but its most distinctive feature is bilateral stimulation during the reprocessing phase.

While the client briefly focuses on a traumatic memory—its images, negative beliefs, emotions, and body sensations—they simultaneously experience guided side-to-side eye movements (following the therapist’s fingers or a light bar), alternating taps on the hands or shoulders, or alternating auditory tones through headphones. This bilateral stimulation appears to reduce the emotional intensity and vividness of the memory, allowing new, more adaptive insights to emerge. Many compare these eye movements to processes that occur during REM sleep, when the brain integrates experience.

What is it about left-right-left-right—like the classic swinging watch in hypnosis—that seems to hold the power to enlighten, heal, and transform? Why does it create integration rather than fragmentation?

The Divided Mind

Image: Iain McGilchrist, iainmcgilchrist.substack.com

About a year ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing former Oxford psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher Dr. Iain McGilchrist. His work is a tour de force exploration of brain hemisphere differences and their profound implications for culture and human experience (see his magnum opus, The Matter With Things). Part of his thesis is that the two hemispheres of the brain process the world in fundamentally different ways: the left hemisphere focuses on detail, analysis, categorization, and control (often in a narrow, mechanistic way), while the right hemisphere grasps context, wholeness, meaning, intuition, and interconnectedness.

McGilchrist contends that Western culture has increasingly favored left-hemisphere modes of thinking—leading to reductionism, bureaucracy, environmental disconnection, and a loss of meaning—while neglecting the right hemisphere’s more holistic, embodied perspective. He describes the right hemisphere as the “master” and the left as its “emissary” that has gradually usurped undue dominance. Like a troubled marriage in which one partner has seized control, the left hemisphere has increasingly drowned out the right. These two equally critical modes of awareness have not been communicating well, leading to a spiritually and emotionally stunted worldview. Perhaps oscillation temporarily restores a lost conversation between them.

But here’s the deeper question: is it oscillation that heals, or synchronization? Hemi-Sync does not alternate stimulation; it seeks alignment. EMDR alternates. One destabilizes through movement; the other harmonizes through coherence. Perhaps these are not opposites. In complex systems, synchronization often emerges from oscillation. A musical chord is not a single tone but distinct notes vibrating in harmonic relation. What we hear as unity is not sameness, but coordinated difference. Perhaps higher states of consciousness feel unified because differentiated processes are moving in rhythm rather than in competition.

Unity Through Polarity

Long before modern neuroscience, spiritual traditions described consciousness itself as a dynamic interplay between opposites. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a depiction of spiritual structures and their interactions. The Tree is arranged in three columns: the right, representing expansion and big-picture awareness; the left, associated with discipline and limitation; and a middle column that integrates and balances the two. The interplay between the polar aspects is known as ratzo v’shov—“running and returning”—a rhythmic oscillation that deepens awareness and sustains spiritual vitality. The mystics may have been describing more than metaphor. They intuited a structural truth: consciousness advances through oscillation.

Widening the lens, it becomes clear that life itself is rhythmic polarity. Static unity is death; dynamic unity is life. Breath (inhale/exhale), heartbeat (systole/diastole), the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, day and night — polarity is woven into everything. Learning to understand, integrate, and effectively work with it is a great challenge and opportunity. Each pole alone produces distortion. Consciousness expands when neither pole dominates, and in the gap between poles, a third state emerges. We might call this superordinate consciousness.

So in my Hemi-Sync experience, was I merely being neurologically stimulated — or participating in an ancient spiritual technology? Perhaps the distinction is less important than it seems. What feels increasingly clear is that spiritual and emotional growth lives somewhere in the movement between polarities.

Many of us grow accustomed to inhabiting one pole. Some identify as rational and structured; others as intuitive and creative. But perhaps we are meant to be larger than either. Perhaps our opposites are not obstacles but engines — forces that propel us toward integration. Enlightenment may not be about transcending polarity, but about learning to move between poles without getting stuck — until movement itself becomes harmony.

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Each week, you’ll get a guided exploration of a single state of mind — from everyday states like focus, flow, and daydreaming, to deeper emotional, meditative, and contemplative states we all pass through in the course of a human life.

Think of it like a map + travel guide:

1. Clusters / Regions (like US regions):

Everyday States = “The Lowlands” (common terrain of life).
Emotional States = “The Heartlands.”
Meditative States = “The Mountains” (higher elevations of awareness).
Altered / Substance-Induced States = “The Islands.”
Mystical / Transpersonal States = “The Skies.”
Extreme / Edge States = “The Deserts & Depths.”

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