The Spark – iAwake Technologies

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THE SPARK

Fractal Sound Technology for Focus & Flow

Our inquiry into how recorded sound can further facilitate the harmonious functioning of our mental, emotional, and physical systems has sparked a new sound technology called Fractal Entrainment.

Experience: the kinetic resonance of nature

• relaxed alertness
• ability to stay focused while you are working or studying, on the computer
• mood brightening
• mind over chatter
• cognitive lift
• energy boosting
• emotional balance

The Spark’s advanced attention grabber, brain sharpener and anxiolytic (stress reducer) protocols allow you to ride the energy of sound and practice just being in a relaxed state of acute sensory awareness – the state of “belaxation”.

The Spark is a textured sonootropic composition that ignites some of the qualities of the natural state, such as improved cognitive function and emotional regulation. Its fractal soundscape can be considered enhanced access to flow made audible and it often leaves you in an awake yet relaxed state of vivid sensory awareness.

Put your headphones on and… “belax”

Mood brightening

More presence and optimism

Mind over chatter

Quiets internal dialogue and reduces worry

Energy boosting

Increased stamina and endurance

Enhanced mindfulness

Mixture of alertness and stillness

Cognitive lift

Greater neural flexibility and power

Emotional balance

Increased self-regulation and expression

Releases emotions

Stimulates growth and creativity

Joy and appreciation

Coherent breathing and heart rates allow us to welcome change

ADDITIONAL INFO

It can also help with:

• Lack of focus – Just follow the moving sounds for a noticeably sharper presence
• Feeling blue – Enjoy how its dynamic stimulation can charge you with optimism
• Brain fog – Benefit from its attention-grabbing and clarity-increasing protocols
• Tiredness – There’s enough energy packed here to wake you right up
• Edginess – Inhabiting a more natural baseline improves physiological resilience
• Anxiety – Meditate with The Spark and enjoy lower cortisol levels (stress hormone)
• Insomnia – Increased flexibility might help transition between sleep phases

The Experience

How to use it

Sound + intention = change

This piece can be listened to as part of a regular sound-assisted meditation session or just before your practice. As it uses bilateral stimulation protocols known to balance the frontal regions of the brain, this program can also help with emotional regulation and brain efficiency.

Please keep in mind that headphones and your attention are required for maximum effect.

Get The Spark – iAwake Technologies, Only Price $17

Active listening

Sound is the vehicle, you are the rider

Meditation is really about opening up to our place, feelings and body sensations. Tasting the details of what’s here and now, whether they are comforting or painful, is a simple yet radical take on things that can induce transformation.

For sound-induced meditation sessions, we suggest you use the audio environment to anchor your attention, just bringing it back to the sounds whenever it drifts away.

Spring forward

Standing at the doors of perception

Nature is the boundless state of ever becoming – as soon as anything takes shape, it’s time to let it go. The Chinese word “Pu” refers to the state of innocence and pure potential that exists before the arising of experience – “the uncarved block”. This is our natural state -our birthright- our ability to embrace change, fully dropping our attachment to outcomes.

The experience will be unique for every listener (and every time), but generally speaking, you can expect your body-mind progressively “belaxing” and becoming clear and spacious like a winter sunny day.

These are a few simple tips that can really help you make the most of your session:

• Plan to have enough time for your session to be experienced and integrated
• Make the place comfortable and cozy (use dim lights, incense…)
• Do some light stretching combined with a few deep breaths
• Sit comfortably, with your spine straight but relaxed
• Smile and wish/ask/trust that the session might take you wherever you need to go
• Gently return to the sounds, your breath or some body part if your attention wanders

The Story

From an interview with Javi Otero, creator of The Spark:

John: Today we will hear from Javi Otero, who lives in Spain and is one of the really interesting people working in this field of transformation, meditation, coherence, Integral practice—and bringing it to where the rubber meets the road. Javi, tell us about your new technology and the new product that will be released very soon through iAwake.

Javi: I’m developing a new type of technology I call “fractal entrainment.” Fractal is a mathematical term that tries to consider how nature is not regular. It is regular, but it’s always different; it’s rough; it doesn’t work in straight lines; or with precision, necessarily. For example, at the HeartMath Institute they’re finding that the heart is not a metronome but a very irregular kind of pulse. Basically, I try to imitate the way cycles happen in nature in order to create a way of using sound to increase coherence.

When you say coherence, what does that mean to the average person who wants to use this technology to grow, to feel better, to improve their lives?

Javi:Coherence can be understood as the capacity to flow and the capacity to accept things as they happen: accept life and accept the moment-to-moment experience. When we experience coherence, we tend to be in an accepting state that allows us to flow with rather than resist the unfolding of events. Coherence is a fluid state; a state that is relaxed; a state in which you have your full attention on the here and now—you inhabit your moment, your body, and your mind in the most relaxed and joyful way.

John: I think that’s a great definition, and I think that coherence is very important. I think a lot of the things that we suffer from as human beings—whether we’re addicts, depressed, have different types of pathologies, or have just forgotten who we are—is because we’re kind of clueless. We ask, “Why am I on the planet?” “Who am I?” “What am I here to do?” We can answer these basic human questions by achieving coherence.

At exactly the place you’re talking about, Javi, when we get into flow states, we’re in this relaxed, focused attitude where a lot of interesting things—neurochemical things—are going on. DHEA, one of the proto-hormones that’s released in the brain, is being secreted, and there’s a feeling of being present, being at peace, being joyful, and being very connected to reality all at the same time. It’s not a dissociative state; you’re right there and present. At this level of coherence and this level of flow, we can do exceptional things. We perform in exceptional ways, whether it’s in our relationship with our husband, wife, or children, playing music or creating new ideas and pathways, or being a creative cook. These extraordinary levels of capacity are just the best thing ever—better than drugs, better than this, better than that.

Javi: Yes. I use the term “belaxation” to describe the state that you’ve just described so beautifully. Belaxation is the capacity to be in a relaxed way. Basically, a state in which you appreciate the present as it is. And I’d say you even enjoy it, because it’s a really positive state. It’s a life-affirming state. And that’s what I’m trying to target with The Spark.

John: I just listened to all three tracks this morning. These are very different audio sounds than we’ve experienced before in any of our prior iAwake offerings or any that I’ve ever heard produced by anybody. Can you say a little bit about that?

Javi: Sure. My idea was to find a soundscape that was unpredictable—regular but irregular, which is very much like fractals—so as to keep the attention engaged. Normally, rain, streams, brooks, rivers, and sea waves are the kind of nature sounds that tend to be used in these kinds of products. I wanted to explore similar textures but with different sounds. This got me to The Spark, which can be understood as a track that uses sound and noise in a new way. In fact, this track uses the sound of sparklers, which is a completely man-made thing.

John: What qualities can people look forward to who are using this particular track?

Javi: Well, there are three versions of The Spark. The first two are about 15 minutes long, and the third version is about half an hour. The three of them contain a bilateral stimulation protocol that is inspired by the kind of stimulation used in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)—a reprocessing therapy in which you get visual, auditory, or tactile input that is moving from left to right, and a button allows you to go back to whatever you need to release or heal. Basically what I did was to incorporate some of the excursion rates used with this kind of therapy into sound, so that the three tracks have a prominent layer of bilateral stimulation in which the sound clearly goes from one ear to the other, all the time.

I did this because these bilateral stimulation protocols are known to balance the frontal regions of the brain, which has a brightening effect on the brain, and they also help with emotional regulation. For example, you could use The Spark at a very low volume in order to have a cognitive improvement kind of experience (brain brightening), and just have it on while you work, read, write, organize your day, or do any type of creative work.

You could also listen to The Spark at a medium to the highest comfortable volume in order to have a more immersive kind of experience, in which you can either just meditate (as you usually do with these types of products) or do a session of emotional release where you focus your attention on the moving sounds until you get the same effect that you would get with EMDR therapy. Your anxiety decreases as you distance yourself from whatever is worrying you. Some people use these kinds of therapies when they have a phobia, in order to think about their phobia in a very relaxed state. This breaks up the connection between whatever creates the phobia and the physiological effects that the phobia has on you.

John: Exactly. And of course in this case, you don’t need a therapist. In other words, if you’re working with a therapist who is an experienced EMDR practitioner, well that requires you to be there with the therapist. But when you go home, that support is no longer there. As with all the iAwake products, The Spark is portable. You can put it in your smartphone, your iPod, or whatever device you’re using. Bam! There you have it. You can use it every day.

Javi: Definitely. You go home and rather than forgetting about it until the next session, you just put your headphones on and continue working.

The bilateral stimulation layer that The Spark has going on all the time can anchor your attention as well. If you want to use the track for meditation, you can always choose any sounds in the soundscape to meditate on; or you can just put your attention somewhere else if you need to, on any part of your body, for example; or do any type of meditation that you like—it doesn’t matter. The nice thing about this is that if you focus your attention on various sounds that are quite prominent in The Spark, this should help you get into the “belaxed” kind of state that we talked about before.

John: When you’re doing inner work in this relaxed state, all kinds of things can be released: impressions from the last 24 hours, traumas from the past, even things that you have accumulated over a lifetime. It is in this type of aware and relaxed state that the work really gets done somatically. This is extremely important if you’re going to be an awake, alive human being.

Javi: The other fundamental layer—and there are a couple more—is noise. What I’m doing here is using both recorded and more organic kinds of noise. I use the noise of the sparklers themselves and also the impulse noise that you get from fireplaces—those little explosions and crackly kind of noises. I’m creating this dense layer of textured, organic, and naturally recorded sounds. I suppose most people have heard about white noise—what I’m doing is taking layers of white noise and redesigning sonically how the relationship between their various frequencies and intensities works, so that they reflect the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is a fascinating concept that I understand more or less as being the main energy signature of harmony.

I also use sub-threshold harmonics, which are tones that are mixed underneath the whole-texture sounds. They are always moving up and down between our levels of subliminal and conscious hearing. I use sine waves, which are the building blocks of sound, with a specific tone that I put really, really low in the mix, so you can’t quite hear them, but they affect your attention—especially in relation to how you do your cognitive tasks.

John: So, is this going to be a more stimulating meditation?

Javi: Yes. In The Spark I’m trying to create a feeling of relaxation, but the kind of relaxation that is non-drowsy—relaxed, but you’re really sharp and alert at the same time. It’s like an open focus. If it was a photograph, it would be a wide angle shot. There’s readiness about the state as well.

Before I forget, I think you will enjoy hearing about the other layers of sound in The Spark quite a lot. My idea was to find the most organic sonic image of sparklers possible—not just the recordings that I could make with the gear in my studio, which were very good already, but something way beyond that. So I got hold of a pair of amazingly well designed, matched microphones that a guy makes by hand… He’s got an amazing site. It’s called mynoise.net. These microphones are really, really tiny, so I could hang them in my ears and do what’s called binaural recording. This doesn’t have anything to do with binaural beats—it’s a 3D sound technique based on sound localization in which you try to recreate how sound arrives in our ears in order to capture a more realistic sound image.

Imagine I am talking to you while standing on your left. The sound will obviously reach your left ear before the right, and there will be time and frequency differences, a head in between, etc. For this recording method, people normally use dummy heads and put microphones on them to mimic the conditions of real hearing. I used my own head, which is quite dummy. (Both laugh). So I’ve got my own dummy head on top of my shoulders all the time… (laughs), and what I did was hang the microphones over my ears and get as close as I could to the sparkler sounds, recording various layers of sparklers in that way so the soundscape is as 3D as possible.

John: This is just fascinating to me. I hope that everyone can sense the meticulous work, the thought, and the really cutting edge of science and art that goes into creating these tracks.

Javi: Thank you. As you can imagine, I’m so thankful for being able to do all of this and so inspired as well.

Pam: I’ve got some practical questions for you, Javi. Is there what we call binaural beats or brainwave entrainment in The Spark?

Javi: No, there isn’t. I’m not using any of the traditional brainwave entrainment techniques such as binaural beats, monaurals, or isochronics.

Pam: I think it’s stunning what you’re developing with just your musical knowledge and spiritual knowledge.

Javi: Thanks a lot, Pam. I wanted to create a tangible enough experience without using any of the technologies that are normally used, solely based on sound. Not because I have any problems with them—I am so thankful for them—but just because I thought maybe it was possible to recreate all that stuff I explained at the beginning of the chat, about how certain sounds, patterns, and textures seem to take you beyond the aesthetic experience, turning your attention inwards into something that could be called spiritual.

John: Javi, are headphones necessary when you’re listening to The Spark?

Javi: Well, headphones will definitely improve the experience, but you can also not use them. In fact, some people are finding it quite beneficial to use these tracks to mask external noise. You can put on The Spark and find the volume that masks whatever sound you don’t want to hear. However, with headphones it will definitely have much more impact, because, for example, the binaural recording quality is only noticeable with headphones. The bilateral stimulation will work better with headphones than without, too. Everything else will work with speakers equally well.

John: Okay, awesome. Javi, I’ve had a great time. Thank you so much for what you’re doing. It’s really extraordinary. Very inspiring.

Javi: The really important thing is that The Spark helps people. I’ve designed it so that hopefully it helps in a few different scenarios. Meditation is amazingly important, but for most people it only happens a fraction of the time. My hope is that this track can serve people in certain situations that they might go through, in a way that they learn something that they can then apply during the rest of the day.

John: Beautiful, Javi. Here’s a big hug across the Atlantic and across the internet. Thank you so much for what you’re contributing. You’re such an elegant writer and speaker, too. It’s a joy to work with you.

The Details

 Full Package includes:

• 62 minutes – 3 Tracks of entrainment-encoded soundtracks
• Optional CD
• 1 Downloadable high quality MP3 zip file – Mac & PC compatible
• 1 Optional downloadable high quality M4A zip file – Mac compatible
• 1 Optional downloadable WAV zip file (uncompressed) – Mac & PC compatible
• User eManual (PDF)
• Ongoing support

The Technology

When beyond is within

Through intensive audio manipulation and an innovative use of resonance, The Spark’s juxtaposed layering of fractal sonic textures becomes as “liquid” and dynamic as the actual experience of changing our state.

Put simply, the idea that nothing stays ever the same in nature unfolds into a new sound technology which combines the application of advanced psychoacoustic principles, special recording techniques and cutting edge sound design tools.

Fractal Entrainment is inspired by the highly aesthetic and contemplative experience of witnessing how cycles occur in nature and designed to induce a unique kinetic sonic experience, able to induce the arousal of a harmonious physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well being.

Fractal soundscapes

to keep your attention constantly stimulated and moving, while increasing your ability to belax.

Sound is mathematics in motion and the session´s architecture is designed to allow for a more dynamic resonance to arise. Inspired by Nature, The Spark’s fine tonal and rhythmic processing techniques create irregularly regular soundscapes that are built to explore the threshold where randomness becomes coherence.

Bilateral stimulation

to optimize complex thought, emotional expression, body awareness and somatic release.

Specific excursion rates known to balance the frontal lobes are arranged three-dimensionally for a more immersive effect. Might help alleviation of PTSD.

Colored Noise

for a unique belaxing yet attention-grabbing soundscape

A mixture of natural impulse noise layers featuring binaural recordings of fire and sparkler sounds, together with fractal additive synthesis techniques -these are proprietary dynamic power spectral densities and overtones designed to resonate to the specific vibrations of the golden mean proportion, nature’s main harmonic energy signature, found by researchers to be associated with the beneficial spiking of nitric oxide.

Infrasonic tones

Ultra-deep frequencies for a calming and flow-inducing session which may increase vitality, strengthen the immune system and have direct healing benefits.

Infrasound technology is used to treat pain, inflammation and swelling and it´s remarkably useful in healing muscles of race horses. The inclusion of low frequency sound provides a more tactile (kinesthetic) kind of entrainment, similar to a sound massage. It is speculated that infrasonic sound may be one aspect of Qi (as observed during the low-level energy emissions of qigong healers), and that it’s something all humans and some animals produce – the most famous example is the cat’s purr and its alleged self-healing properties.

Spiritual harmonics

for a wider perspective based on a gentle mind quieting and a pleasant cognitive enhancement.

Extremely low amplitude, proprietary spectral harmonic energy blends masked by colored noise and mixed so they hover just below the threshold of awareness

Soniphication

for an immersive, three-dimensional sonic stimulation experience

Form follows energy and we have translated this natural design principle into acoustics through a unique and complex layering of geometric swirling shapes that have been binaurally recorded and geometrically engineered.

User Reports

Peaceful yet lucid’

“It was a whole body experience. My whole body seemed to be caught up in it. Profound and peaceful yet lucid. Immersion and peacefulness combined with heightened awareness – unusual and profound”

‘Possibly the cure for PTSD’

“Perhaps the most transformational sound technology meditation I have come across ever. This could possibly the cure for PTSD. It was extremely powerful the first time I heard it!”

‘Facilitated massive transformation’

“What I loved about earlier iAwake tracks was the gentle pull. TS seems to neither push nor pull, instead it appears to me like a catalyst, in the sense that it allows for transformation to take place without getting involved.

The whole track feels completely clean & clear. It works exactly as the manual describes, and has facilitated massive transformation. Congratulations to Javi and everyone involved!”

‘Helpful for mental applications… and anxiety‘

“The Spark moves me into a delicious golden awareness that I can only describe as peace of mind and clarity. I find it very helpful for mental applications, using it when I need to study or face the day.

Notably, on multiple occasions now, I have used The Spark during times of “bad news” and anxiety, and I have found within minutes that my mind has cleared, leaving me in a detached state where I no longer view events as “the end of the world”, but just happenings which can be interpreted in so many ways.”

‘Mitigates neurological overwhelm’

“I’ve been using it a great deal to mitigate the effects of neurological overwhelm, and it’s proving very reliable. The swirling from right to left is particularly helpful for integrating anything new or breaking up a stuck patterns, and is extremely relaxing.”

‘Ecstasy in my body and my brain’

“I went deep and far, and stillness was there, pervading, still, it was not without many things happening. the relation of stillness and thoughts and perspectives is unique.

I experienced experiencing in an appreciative way of everything I witnessed, or every way of witnessing. I experienced ecstasy in my body and my nervous system and my brain. The last time I did it, I came to “wanting to just stay here, sitting, forever”

‘Amazing clarity and insight’

“I love the Spark tracks. I get amazing clarity and challenge solving abilities when using them. And more info and insight with each listening. Especially if I listen to it before bedtime. It truly does ‘spark’ my thought process and imagination!”

‘Incredibly effective for mind enhancement’

“I have a clear sense of functioning better. I find this to be very positive and helpful. These tracks are incredibly effective in enhancing my day to day life. I am impressed, I will recommend this as a first option for mind enhancement.”

THE SPARK

Package Includes

• 3 tracks of entrainment-encoded soundtracks (62 minutes total)