Light: The Perennial Healer

This interview with Drs. Engelbert Winkler and Dirk Proeckl is published at The Light Connection.

Publishing since 1985 (as The Light Connection), The Life Connection (TLC) is distributed the first of each month, and provides a guide to San Diego County’s resources for improving health, the environment, relationships, and expanding human potential.

We do not represent any one organization or philosophy and believe that diversity of thought strengthens us and allows for greater understanding. We do not necessarily agree with all of the articles published, nor do we think there is any single solution that works for everyone. Ultimately we feel that each of us must decide what is best for ourselves; and that there is power in knowing ourselves.

Light: The Perennial Healer

An interview with Drs. Engelbert Winkler, Ph.D., and Dirk Proeckl, M.D., Ph.D. by Beverly Brodsky

Drs. Engelbert Winkler, Ph.D., clinical psychologist , and Dirk Proeckl, Ph.D., M.D., neurologist and psychologist describe their Lucid Light Stimulator, which they will demonstrate at the First Spiritualist Church on Oct. 15, from 5 to 8pm. See their website: www.gesund-im-licht.at (click on the British flag for English).

BB: I have been studying your website and work with the Lucid Light Stimulator (LLS), with great interest. What does the LLS do?

EW: Our intention is to help people go into the hypnogogic state and beyond. It’s the state in between being awake and dreaming, a kind of altered state of consciousness. We get people to go beyond that state, into a trancelike state, similar to a shamanic state of consciousness.

What motivated you most to come up with this device?

EW: When I was a child, I had a Near-Death Experience. While studying psychology, my main interest was the neurology when an NDE appears. As a psychotherapist, I found a way to use the healing potential of that light state. First, I used ordinary hypnosis to suggest imagining having an NDE. To improve clients’ visualizations, I used external, steady light. People went much deeper in the trance, and reported experiences and changes similar to what occurs after an NDE.

DP: That was the beginning. We studied people’s EEGs; then used both steady and flickering lights, producing a much more intense experience. I came from the neurology, where a flickering light is to map the brain. Later, combining Englebert’s research into mystical states with mine, we had more effective outcomes. Now, with the LLS, we can induce a state like the shamanic experiences, or even the ancient Greek Mystery cults, which initially took place in caves, inducing altered states of consciousness.

What a serendipitous partnership.

DP: We also we contacted some specialists from the United States, including Rick Strassman, about the neurochemistry of DMT.

I read in Dr. Strassman’s book that people taking DMT had both positive and frightening experiences. Do your clients have more consistently positive experiences with your device?

EW: We have a better way of reacting to the negative experiences, because we can just switch it off. The other thing is that we can use it in our therapy.
Tell me about your research.

EW: Consciousness is variable for everybody. It’s our own consciousness, and we can nudge it. That’s not only therapeutic, but also transformational. If you are open to the experience, the healing effect is maximized. When people sit in front of the lamp many do get better, but not everyone.

How can you tell which ones are helped?

W: Only the client can know. It can be used for ordinary therapeutic purposes. Many symptomatic problems, say anxiety or depression, may be a healthy reaction to an unhealthy situation. Working with the lamp changes people’s attitude, and the attitude changes everything.

I understand. How long have you been working with light?

EW: The lamp we are using we’ve had for four to five years, but before we had different prototypes, including the original steady light in hypnosis, going back to 1990.

This is such a wonderful idea. Have you written a book?
EW: Yes, the Western Book of Death, which is about using NDEs with hypnosis for people who feel suicidal. This is not yet available in English.

Have you worked with terminally ill people? What happens?
EW: Yes. Today in hospice a young man went to Brazil to see the healer John of God, and when he returned he described seeing all those colors. His experiences with the lamp were identical to what occurred with the healer.
That’s fascinating. In Stanislov Grof’s book The Human Encounter with Death, he did a study where he gave LSD to terminal patients who lost their fear of death. Would the LLS allow people to achieve their own sort-of psychedelic and near-death-like experience, without drugs, and be healed by it?

EW: Yes. The lamp can be used in that way, but if the patient doesn’t want a psychedelic experience; they just want deep relaxation, it may be used for that. Or if someone just wants the aesthetics, they see beautiful colors and forms. When we worked with Tibetan monks, they reached a state ideal for meditation. It gives you a trip into yourself, and whatever you want to be there, you’ll experience.

What are your plans to bring this to the US?

EW: As you know we are coming in October. Our main interest is just to show the light to as many people as possible. People change in a valuable way. We don’t usually make plans, because since we started working with the Light Device, everything happens in its own way. I don’t think that we have found the lamp; rather, the lamp has found us.

It sounds like a way to shift our consciousness to perfect health—in mind, body, and spirit.
EW: Yes, the idea that there is something like health or disease is unhealthy. If everybody could let themselves be the way they are, everything would be perfect. I know many people who are very ill, yet they are very healthy at the same time.

In my NDE I felt that everything is perfect just as it is. Yet it’s hard to remember that without shutting down the ego.

EW: The ego is the wrong point of reference. From that perspective, everything is wrong.

You say on your website that mind and con-sciousness defy our ability to put a definition on them. Can you explain that?

EW: I don’t think consciousness can be defined. Consciousness is a word, and nothing more. We are making mental images of things that we think are real. If we just say what we experience, everything would be fine.

That is why, as Kenneth Ring says, the light experience is very important. If things go on as they have, we will become sicker. Only a change in attitude can help. The light experience in all times changes attitudes quite dramatically. Our device is not the only way to achieve this change. For some, they can go out in nature and reach the same state. It’s easy to do, but is not generally known.

On Saturday, October 15, from 5-8 pm, Engelbert Winkler Ph.D., and Dirk Proeckl, M.D., Ph.D., will demonstrate their Lucid Light Stimulator. See more information on their website. www.gesund-im-licht.at/ First Spiritualist Church is located at 3777 42nd Street, San Diego, CA. 92105. 619-284-4646 www.1st-spiritualistchurch.org Love Donation $15.

The benefits of out-of-body experiences

Gianna Kali over at Beyond Meds sent me this article from Discover Magazine, an extract of which appears below. Thanks, Gianna! I’m pleased to have my own intuition about the benefits of out-of-body (OBE) experiences validated by Dr. Sohee Park’s research team at Vanderbilt University. You may recall that my son Chris underwent several OBEs when we visited the sound shaman a couple of years ago. You can read about his reactions to this wonderful therapy here, here, here and here. I dragged Chris to this therapy and to other therapies such as The Alexander Technique, because I knew from observing Chris as a child that he had a fragile sense of self, as the Vanderbilt study hypothesizes is the case with many people who have received a schizophrenia diagnosis. The sound shaman helped Chris get a better sense of who he really is. The Alexander Technique together with voice lessons to bolster his love of music have really made a difference in his growing sense of self.

Park’s student Katharine Thakkar was testing the idea that people experience psychotic experiences because they have a weak sense of self. It’s an idea that others have suggested before but it seems like something that would be hard to test with experiments. But not so: over the last decade, psychologists have shown that our sense of self is far from the fixed, permanent feeling that we assume it is. Instead, it is disarmingly pliable. You can tweak it. You can study it. Our brain continuously constructs our sense of self using information from our eyes, skin and joints. By tweaking that information using simple illusions, scientists have warped and displaced our sense of self in the lab.

The study has broader implications for helping people with schizophrenia. Activities that promote a stronger sense of body awareness, such as yoga, dance or playing a musical instrument, might help to alleviate some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

But for RM, it seems that learning more about his condition was enough. A year on, his diagnosis is unchanged, he still gets out-of-body experiences, and he still hears voices. But gone are the days when his experiences would require a stay in a hospital. He is now hoping to establish himself as a freelance writer, and he’s even had a paper on religion accepted in a peer-reviewed academic journal. For him, knowledge has proven to be a potent treatment. “We check up with him regularly and he’s been doing really well,“ says Park.

Coincidentally, today I received my invitation to an upcoming lecture on the same topic. Keep in mind that your mainstream psychiatrist will be against your participation in these kinds of activities. However, if properly handled by the clinician, they are a pathway to growth.

The Hypnagogic Light Experience: Engelbert and Dirk invite you to a trip with Lucia, the Lucid Light Stimulator (LLS)

Engelbert Winkler, PhD. (clinical psychologist, psychologist for health and psychotherapist) and Dirk Proeckl PhD MD (specialist for neurology and certified psychologist) have invented a LUCID LIGHT STIMULATOR called Lucia Nr. 3.

Lucia Nr. 3 is a neurostimulation lamp which allows the person who is exposed with closed eyes to the lamp to enter immediately into a profound trance which otherwise can be achieved solely after many years of meditation practice, through psychedelic drugs, or through stimulus deprivation, etc.

The computer-operated interplay of its light sources activates a large variety of experiences (the vision of intensive worlds of color and shapes, the impression of existing without a body/immaterialness, etc.) and allows for an individual light experience which is every time anew highly impressive.

Lucia Nr. 3 induces a transcendental experience which otherwise occurs only under extreme conditions like high performance sports, through consumption of entheogen substances or at the onset of death. The neurostimulation lamp opens completely new perspectives for therapy and self-awareness.

Website: http://www.gesund-im-licht.at/ (also accessible in English)