Wonders of Sound Therapy with David Khan

In this Episode

• • [00:39]Stephan introduces David Khan, a lifelong spiritual practitioner, musician, engineer, and healer. His main passion is in research and developing therapies associated with sound, music, and frequencies.
  • [06:48]Stephan and David talk about the possible outcomes of sound healing, one of which is access and bringing up memories.
  • [13:09]David expresses his fondness for Bali and describes how the environment helps him grow as a person.
  • [20:41]What is an Isochronic Tone, and what are its benefits?
  • [27:26]David explains why opening the pineal gland is somehow necessary to read the signs being presented in your life.
  • [33:48]Stephan and David discuss the beauty and effect of Gregorian Chants on their emotions and spirituality.
  • [40:08]What is an Entrainment? How does it work in sound healing?
  • [47:40]David tells a fascinating story of his most powerful sound healing experience
  • [54:03]What is Christ Consciousness?
  • [62:05]Visit David Khan’s website at thebladeandchalice.com to check out his sessions, courses, podcast to learn more about sound therapies.

Jump to Links and Resources

David, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Good day, Stephan. It’s excellent to be here. 

Let’s first of all talk about what is sound healing? How does that work?

It’s a bit of a misnomer to be honest because we always do our own healing. It’s activating the body’s innate wisdom.

There are two ways in which sound can have a deep effect on us. One is vibro acoustically where it actually resonates inside the body. It actually starts moving stagnated life force energy in the body.

What I’ve seen with that is it’s usually where it moves emotional blockages out. It’s like blanket acupuncture and just moves masses of stagnant emotions out. 

The other is vibro neurologically which is basically where it shifts the state of consciousness. It can happen through music and also through brainwave entrainment, but your brain essentially isn’t trained into either deeper states or faster states. You can’t have more accelerations high-performance states happen music as well, as we all know from dance music and loud, heavy metal.

Right. When you say stagnant emotions, what would be something that would be an example of that? Maybe if you could share an example from your life or from a client’s life—anonymizing them of course to protect their privacy.

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Sure. Totally. My partner and I worked at a sound healing complex in Bali, Indonesia. They’re called the Pyramids of Chi. It’s a very unusual place because they built scale replicas of the Pyramids of Giza, the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon in the middle of the jungle in Bali.

It gets a lot of traffic because they literally just have a poster in town and everybody’s like, “There are pyramids out there? We got to check this out.” It’s this beautiful open space area, but people come specifically for sound healing.

At the time, most of what I had been doing was related to the vibro neurological side. When I showed up there, I had this new experience of basically lying down on a bed with 70 other people in this large pyramid structure. There would be a group of people that were playing gongs, singing, and using crystal balls and various instruments that basically are tuned in a specific way to resonate with different sympathetic resonances within the body. 

The big thing that I experienced myself was I’m feeling distracted. I’m feeling angry. I’m feeling irritated. All these emotions are coming up. I literally just felt them come out because, by the end of the 45-minute session, I was completely tranquil. 

I likened it much to the most common processes I find with any activity we do for self-improvement, whether it be running or whether it be breath-working. The first part is always difficult. Stuff is always coming up. The inner critic is getting in. 

With any activity we do for self-improvement, the first part is always difficult.

These are all ways of really processing our emotions, you could say, but sound healing goes a bit deeper because it really shakes up that which is in the body, that which might be stuck. 

A lot of practitioners—I’m thinking of acupuncturists, medical Qigong, they might say, “Your liver is holding a lot of anger.” That doesn’t mean a lot of things to people, but maybe it’s their habitual use of the anger emotion that causes anger to back up in that organ and express inappropriately. 

After a few sessions, I basically got talking and somehow got my way in there as a practitioner at these pyramids. I was working there with rather advanced technology. It was fun. 

We used a strobe light that was tuned to our musical compositions. Then, we’d use a water bed in which all the music would travel up through the water bed. Everything was mic’d up. People would be lying down and the strobe light would be entraining their brain into a deep theta. 

The music we’d be playing would be coming up to the bed. We’d be massaging them as they’re getting this vibroacoustic effect traveling through the body. Every single time people come out of their bed, they move very slowly. 

A lot of the time, people were quite new to this. Some people hadn’t even heard of sound healing. Some people haven’t really heard of alternative modalities. Some people were really just tourists that literally saw a pyramid in the jungle and said, “This looks interesting. I’m going to go try it out.” Or they heard about it from a friend who was more into the stuff than they were and decided to try it out. 

We would really get a huge range because other people were very well-adapted to alternative modalities, so we could get more articulate descriptions of what was happening from them. But it was always described as a release. 

A lot of the time, people were very emotional afterwards. There’s a lot of crying, a lot of tears coming up. They were remembering things they had forgotten, remembering what was near and dear to their heart, what they actually cared about in life that maybe they had been neglecting. The recommendation was pretty much unanimous. 

There’s a beautiful area. You can go and sit in the garden, have a cup of tea, just relax, just integrate. Usually, after that integration, we would give them our email or something. We hear from them later. We usually hear some story a few days later, “Hey, that experience really brought me back in touch with a part of me I had been neglecting because I’ve been working too much. I really want to do something more artistic or creative so I’m going to take a painting. 

Then, lo and behold, five days later, they’ll message us. They’ll be like, “I bought all these painting stuff and I’m really excited. Thank you guys for the experience.” That would be an example of what can happen from this.

Really cool. When you said it can access and bring up memories from the distant past, early childhood memories—I had an experience when I did 40 Years of Zen which is a program in the Seattle area. It’s run by Dave Asprey and his team. He’s not there. It’s his team that runs it, but it’s really powerful. 

It’s a week-long program where you get into alpha and theta brainwave states through neurofeedback and then you also do these augmented reset processes. It’s super powerful. I had memories unlocked that I hadn’t had since I was a little child which is really, really cool.

When I was growing up, I always had this attachment or affinity for other lives.

I’m curious, did you have any particular memories or scenes come to you from early childhood or maybe even from a past life in doing this work?

For me personally, I don’t really have a lot that happened in my childhood that was traumatic, believe it or not.

But the thing is this wasn’t traumatic. This was just a really nice, fun memory.

For me, a lot of stuff is other lives. That feels like that’s what drove me into mysticism. 

When I was growing up, I always had this attachment or affinity for other lives. Whenever I go into these deeper states, it becomes almost fantasy-like. That’d be the best way to describe it. 

It’s fantastic in a way because it doesn’t feel like this reality. It feels like a very different time and place. However, if I look at those stories or images as allegories, there’s usually some sort of an atypical significance to them, so I don’t tend to sensationalize them more, try to run off into these other experiences, or even really talk about them too much, but I look for the common threads because our subconscious minds are so brilliant in revealing to us some of the aspects of our lives that may have played out elsewhere, or they might tell it a different way.

I don’t know if it’s true or not but sure is a nice story to tell. I feel it’s true but I can’t verify that scientifically.

There are two ways in which sound can have a profound effect on us. One is Vibro-acoustically, where it resonates inside the body. The other is Vibro-neurologically which shifts the state of consciousness. Click To Tweet

How do you start down this path? If you’re a listener to this podcast and you’ve never tried any sound healing or mystical kind of work, where do you suggest starting? Is it maybe even something more traditional like acupuncture or medical Qigong, or is it more like just jump in, do a sound bath, or do some mystical experience, accessing past lives?

I would say one of the most profound experiences I’ve had is going out into the desert, taking a walk, and finding a nice shaded area where you can’t really hear 50–60 cycle hum of electricity anymore. That is key. 

I’ll tell you. Since the Industrial Revolution and electricity, we’ve been surrounded by 50–60 cycle hum. It’s basically the AC power in the wall. That is entraining our brains higher. It keeps us in a more beta state if not moving us toward gamma at times. However, when we’re out in the desert, you hit that true silence. You don’t hear planes. You don’t hear cars. Desert or forest—anywhere that has natural sounds again. 

There’s another thing. There’s this stereoscopic imaging. That’s a big word, but what that means is where in your sound field do you hear something? If you hear a bird flying from right to left, your brain has to recalibrate that. It actually has a very soothing effect if you pay attention. Okay, there’s a bird flying from right to left or there’s something moving. You hear a fox shuffling through the bushes in front of me, it’s moving closer, and then it’s moving further away.

When we pay attention just to sound in a natural environment, that has an extremely powerful therapeutic effect.

When we pay attention just to sound in a natural environment, that has an extremely powerful therapeutic effect.

One of the things that I use in the soundscapes that I create is that we actually go to places that have a very high natural charge to them. You can just feel the land there. We record sounds of ambient nature and we’ll leave the recorder on for a while. We’ll be very quiet and we’ll just let nature come back and express itself. Then, we put those into the soundscapes as opposed to using just stock nature sounds because my partner and I like to keep our signature on everything we do. 

That would be my first, really be going to nature and experience the profound peace that you get from there.

Have you been to some of the more powerful vortices in the world like Sedona and recorded soundscapes there?

I got into the recording in Bali. Since Bali, I’ve lived in South Africa. South Africa has some incredibly powerful places. 

That’s another discussion because it’s got these ancient sites that are archaeoastronomy sites that for hundreds of thousands of years had been used for rituals on the equinox and the solstice because the sun will come in, hit a rock formation like a Stonehenge effect. That’s a whole different story. 

We visited these places and we got some of our sounds from there. The sounds themselves are charged up but I’ve wanted to—especially when I feel travel opens up again—go back to some of the places in the Western U.S. 

Some of my fondest experiences in life are from Sedona, places in Eaton, Colorado up through Montana and California. That part of the world to me really sings.

What brought you to Bali?

I was always very interested in Bali. It just seems like a place where people could gather and talk freely about some of the things that might not be so easy to talk about in consensus reality and in our normal society. 

Usually, we have a couple of friends in our city or town that are like-minded, but in Bali, it’s all the weird people get-together. It feels like a little bit of a big organic dance party a lot of the time. The energy is very high.

Then, you meet some of the most amazing people that are building these island communities, for instance, they’re developing free energy machines or something on the line. 

You get this brilliant innovator and you get enough of that together in an area. You can feel the collective consciousness of the area really rise. 

For me in particular, I’m very sensitive to the psychic soup of wherever I live. If I live in an area that’s quite industrial, I tend to get duller. If I live in an area that’s very vibrant, I open up and expand. For me, it’s quite important to live in some of these places where the land’s powerful and people are quite powerful.

What would be an example of an early experience psychically where you realize, wow, I have a lot of psychic sensitivity?

When I was 17, I had a near-death experience. That was the start of the whole thing. 

It’s quite important to live in some of these places where the land’s powerful and people are quite powerful.

I was out in the Canadian winter. I got trapped outside, suffered hypothermia, and my body temperature dropped way too low. Somehow, I woke up, I got myself back to safety and then I collapsed for several weeks after that. 

That experience there at first didn’t really sink in, but in the months after that, it started to thaw in a way that I think of it. My consciousness thawed out, and I started asking much bigger questions about life. 

Then, the universe brought me a friend actually at the time who was quite an interesting character. He was a very gifted martial artist who had a Jedi-like awareness. Running around at 18 and having a friend to be able to connect with on that level was very helpful for me. 

After that, I went off the deep end. I went way too far in spirituality and then pulled back for a few years. Right now, I found more of a healthy balance between the physical material world and the spiritual dimensions.

Tell me more about how you went over on the deep end of spirituality. It seems like an oxymoron. I don’t know. It doesn’t compute for me. It’s like, “Oh, I’ve just been too kind, too thoughtful.”

I guess for me, it would be the inability to integrate and to relate with other people. One of the things that’s very important in life is to be relatable with whoever I’m with.

One of the going off the deep end was, I remember in early university, I wasn’t really showing up for class. I think I was studying engineering at the time. I’m just like, I just want to do spiritual stuff, so I was doing Kundalini yoga six days a week. I was going on hiking trips for multi-days. 

It was nice on one hand, but it was a bit disconnected. My strategy after that just became to be, okay, I’m going to become more integrated. I’m going to really find that. Then, I went far in the other direction of science, engineering, really understanding the material sciences. 

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Now, I’ve struck a balance that I find very helpful because this work I do with sound is a blend of being very intuitive, really tuning in, and bringing a quality of attention and frequency to work but also using the science as a structure, as a framework to pull from.

What does intuition mean for you? I’m curious.

It would be an arising that I can’t explain. It’s like moving in real-time in response to the environment that I’m in.

Would you say that it might be accessing something beyond you in some way?

I think it’s accessing more of me. That’s the way I feel it. It’s just the deeper layers of myself. Those deeper layers become more interconnected between all people, forming almost like a membrane throughout the whole universe.

The deepest level is the pure love force that connects everyone. From there, we become more and more separate. I believe, too, from what I’ve seen with brainwave research—that is a deep delta state. That’s from where we sleep. But as we go through theta, we become transpersonal so the boundaries between people are a bit more malleable. But then in alpha and beta, we view ourselves as very separate individuals.

Intuition is like moving in real-time in response to the environment that I’m in.

We’re an ego.

Yeah. I don’t think ego is bad per se. I think egos can be healthy and they could be unhealthy. I also don’t think that we need to be in theta all the time. Theta all the time is looking at the stars or lying on the beach. It might not serve as if we have a purpose that involves creating something.

Taking action. It’s because we do live in a physical universe, we have to pay the bills, and build stuff.

Absolutely.

Let’s talk more about sound. What is this soundscape? I’m not really that familiar with that term.

That’s a term that I’ve used because what I’ve created contains many layers that are musical and non-musical. What I put into the soundscapes that I create, I’ll start with an intention. What do I actually want to do?

Recently, we did one for the spring equinox. The spring equinox in astrology is really just the astrological new year. That’s when everything starts again. We end Pisces, which is the house of ending. We begin Aries, which is the house of new initiation. 

Actually, the whole astrology is based on where the sun rises on the spring equinox. Spiritually, the sun is the solar consciousness. It’s the soul of Christ’s consciousness in many traditions. It’s evolving the Earth. Whenever the sun hits the Earth on these solstices or these equinox days, there’s a certain quality of light that the Earth unintegrates. 

This has been seen across the world in many ancient cultures. What we did was we took a frequency of 136 Hz which is found in many of the temples around India. The instruments are tuned to that frequency. 

This is going to sound a bit mathematical. It’s related to the frequency at which the Earth orbits the sun. It’s just that we multiply it enough so it actually speeds up into a sound because 365 days if you multiply that by two enough times, you’ll get a sound. That’s the law of octaves.

On a piano, if you play A down here and you play the next A, they sound the same. If you keep going up in As, you eventually reach the end of the piano. You’d eventually reach the end of the audible range but the As don’t stop. They then go into a different range, an ultrasonic range. 

We take an intention first. Our intention was to basically use sunlight to activate the pineal gland during this time, so helping people let go, decondition any mental impressions, and reset themselves in a way where they’re more tuned in to themselves for the spring. 

Once we get the intention, I’ll go and create a brainwave isochronic. It’s similar to the binaural beats which people heard of. Isochronic has some qualities and research has been shown to be more effective, first of all. Second of all, it doesn’t require headphones. You can just listen to it on speakers. Third of all, it doesn’t rely on the brain to actually imagine it. 

With the binaural beat, what happens is the brain does all these calculations. Not everybody’s simulation of reality works the same. Binaural beats can just not work for some people because their brains don’t compute what’s happening. 

Not everybody’s simulation of reality works the same.

A binaural beat is when a frequency comes in the left ear and comes in the right, and they’re slightly offset. When we smash them together, you get a resulting frequency, but that resulting frequency is called an image because the brain actually calculates that. It’s a bit of a scientific process there but it doesn’t always work.

The isochronic—I’ll give you a very, very easy real-world example. It’s the shaman’s drum back in the ceremony. That’s what it was. Because I really was very interested in shamanism for a number of years and I always knew how powerful drumming was. The drumming could bring you into trance states. I’m like, “That’s amazing. How does that do it?” Because the beat of the drum is usually around 7 Hz or so.

We can’t go faster unless we’re really, really skilled with our right hand. But we can’t go much faster than that so the shamans of old would just basically play this beat. Eventually, the brain would be entrained into that frequency of 7 Hz which is between alpha and beta.

That’s how the isochronic works, but it’s created by a computer so I can alter it. I can basically start somebody in beta so they can walk in off the street out of their day. We start at beta and then I gently bring them down to various alpha and theta frequencies.

But depending on the intention, I’ll use a specific frequency that does a different thing. We create this frequency schedule and that takes care of most of the vibro neurological effect. That frequency alone without any music—some hardcore people like to listen to it—can shift to consciousness very deeply.

We use that as a base and then we add music. The music we add is, again, tuned to that frequency whatever the intention is. In this case, we took the sun frequency. That has been shown especially through a fellow name Hans Cousto. He’s a Swiss mathematician. He’s shown that a lot of these Indian yogis actually meditated. That’s a frequency they came to through meditation.

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He studied temple bells around India and found they were all within 1 Hz of 136.1 Hz. He’s like, “What, that’s crazy!” Then, he found out it’s actually related to the Earth’s rotation around the sun because they saw that as the development of the soul in Hinduism. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing how these astronomical events can relate with spiritual concepts, spiritual development in a lot of ways.

It seems like it’s an auditory equivalent to sacred geometry.

Yes, exactly. And through cymatics, which we can talk about later, we can show the sacred geometry patterns sound creates. It’s absolutely fascinating because it made me realize that this whole universe is sound. When you become musically-minded, you understand the whole vibration frequency and energy thing pretty well. You just have a natural sense of it from playing music.

That reminds me, there’s a study I heard about. I don’t remember the details of it, but it’s that when you listen to the ‘hmm,’ the sound of the beginning of the universe, you get into a certain brain state and all these healing things happen. But when you listen to some other auditory sound that is created by humans, it didn’t have any impact.

When they were measuring—this is a scientific study—they found only the ‘hmm’ did something valuable, and then the other sound that they made up did nothing. Do you know what I’m talking about?

That’s quite fascinating. I’d like to actually see that study to see what the parameters were around that. One of the things I work with people with is making various vowel sounds to release the tension on the body. Humming that actually sits around the heart space. It actually begins to break away tension in the heart.

As you get lower, as you go humming, those are more guttural sounds. They hit lower. Hmm, for me, is the sound that opens up. It unzips the whole torso up to the throat and the mouth. It’s having a very powerful effect because it actually involves the entire front line of the body, but I hadn’t actually seen that study.

Yeah. I’ve got to figure out who told me about it. Maybe it was Dr. Michael Breus, but I’m not sure. Fascinating.

Can you tell us a little bit about what the pineal gland does? Because you’ve mentioned that sunlight can activate that. I’m curious, what’s the activity or the main function of the pineal gland?

Sure. I’ll get to that in one second. We didn’t finish the last two components of the soundscapes. The next one is nature sounds. That is very important, especially the recently captured because it captures the sounds around that time of the year—the particular energy, the different birds, even the wind patterns, the weather patterns are making at that time which is very soothing. We had a big rainfall event as we had a gushing river. We captured the gushing river as a part of the soundscape experience.

Finally, my partner is a little bit mystically-minded than me. She’ll open up space and she uses her voice to channel. Her voice becomes a very powerful channeler. A lot of people afterwards will gravitate towards her saying, “Oh my God, your voice did this,” or “Your voice had opened this for me.”

These four layers are all working. People tend to notice the voice even when the other stops pouring it. That’s the formula for soundscapes—four parts.

Now, the pineal gland is basically located right in the middle of our head. I’m trying to think of the best way to put it. If you go between the eyebrows and you go back, between the back of your head and front of your head, you’ll hit your pineal gland.

In ancient Egypt, they said that it was about the size of a walnut when people were basically exercising their higher bodies, exercising their psychic senses, staying in alignment with the multi-dimensional nature. Nowadays, they claim that the pineal gland is about the size of a pea, and it’s a bit shriveled up.

Different people say different things. I’ve never cut open a head and seen a pineal gland, but various people say that the pineal gland is calcified for others due to environmental toxins, and other people say that it’s just other underused.

But what I’ve noticed in myself is that when we begin to really value our inner world—you could call that your spiritual practice, you could call that whatever, but when we start to trust that inner authority, our pineal gland becomes very necessary because sometimes the way that we feel drawn to move in life involves things that aren’t outside of us. They aren’t logical. They aren’t part of society.

Like why I went from Bali to South Africa and then got involved with this line of work and that line of work that ended up becoming something that I would’ve never seen in hindsight. I could have never seen that beforehand.

I think a lot of people have these experiences where they’re like, I was just drawn to this place. I got a sign since being able to read the signs that life is presenting to us to move us in the direction of our optimal evolution, but in order to see them, we have to have that open. We have to be able to think symbolically. We have to be able to think atypically.

I’d say there’s a whole list of things that people can do to open their pineal gland. They should probably choose the ones that appeal at the most.

I just was Googling while you were talking to see if I could find more about the pineal gland. I found a book called The Pineal Gland: The Eye of God by Manly Hall. Are you familiar with that book?

Manly P. Hall. I know Manly P. Hall’s work quite well, but I have not heard that book. He wrote about a book in 1927, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, that was it, where he basically combined all the ancient mysteries into one encyclopedic text.

If it’s his work, I can verify he’s very thorough. He does a very good job. He was a young man. He was sponsored essentially by a very rich woman when he was 19 years old to speak about spiritual things and travel to Egypt. He’s one of those characters that live with a high voltage in life.

Interesting. This book got rave reviews, 4 1/2 stars, 1500 ratings. Very cool. Maybe I’ll check it out. 

Anyway, let’s talk a bit more about cymatics because you said you could come back to that. I’m curious. What is it and how does it relate to our listeners?

Excellent. Cymatics is where sound becomes tangible and it becomes material.

Essentially, here’s the easiest explanation. Take a metal plate. On that plate, you scatter some sand—not too hard to visualize—and you take a speaker, put it under the plate. Then, you play a frequency through that speaker into the plate and watch what happens to the sound. 

Naturally, if you have something reverberating on the plate, the sand is going to move. The interesting thing with cymatics is anybody could go into YouTube and pull up a video.

I’ve seen some of these videos. They’re really cool. 

At various sound frequencies, we form harmonious, sacred geometry patterns. They can form some of the most beautiful patterns. The frequencies between these—we get these discordant intermediate things. 

What cymatics shows is that at certain patterns, there is great harmony in sacred geometry. When those frequencies are played into our bodies, we can assume that the water in our bodies is probably going to have some correlation with the structure of the sound of the sacred geometry of the sand.

Is it the sacred geometry of the sand or there’s some sort of field?

It has nothing to do with the sand. It has everything to do with the field created by the frequency. The sand is just essentially a medium. You could use iron filings, too. You could use anything sufficiently small that would be scattered by sound.

Very cool. Have you played around with this much, creating different interesting sacred geometry patterns with these plates?

I’d love to say that I have, but I’ve mostly watched other people’s work. I’ve watched the work of Rupert Sheldrake. He did some stuff of this actually. He did some very interesting stuff with water. He formed cymatics with water. I watched his work and the Japanese guy who worked with water.

Dr. Emoto. 

Dr. Emoto, that’s right. I’m just completely drawn a blank there but yes, his work. 

Then, there are a few other guys that I’ve seen just working through on YouTube. But essentially, there is consistency in what frequencies actually create these harmonious notes. 

The other set of frequencies too that are well-known are the Solfeggio frequencies which had been used since ancient times in the Gregorian chants essentially. Those also form harmonious notes with different sacred geometry patterns. 

Some of these sacred geometry patterns—I would just call them harmonious geometry—might not form a perfect flower of life or anything like that for people, but there is harmony in them. There’s a harmonious interconnectedness between the way that these sand grains form.

I love Gregorian chants. I listened to those many, many years ago before I was really anywhere near to being spiritual. Something attracted me to listen to Gregorian chants. Then, I listened to Enigma because they use Gregorian chants quite a lot in their music. Something’s really magical about it.

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Definitely. I felt the same way when I was younger. Even when I was a teenager, I liked these Gregorian chants. They did something. I was a bit of a tough kid but they would soften me out. They’d make me cry sometimes listening to them. They’re so powerful. They move me so much. 

We all get that effect whether we’re spiritual or not. That’s the beauty of sound. Sometimes, we get people who would never identify as being spiritual or even care about anything. They just say, “Oh, I love music. I love the sound.” Then, they try a sound bath and they just get it. 

Sometimes, spirituality can be very bubbly. What do you think about life after death? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in all this stuff? None of that really matters at the end of the day. It’s really what we experience, what’s happening inside of us, and how we live.

Sound is a powerful vehicle for attuning us to a life that’s more symbiotic with nature and our deeper nature.

I remember hearing in India from the Oneness Monks that The Divine is an experience, not a belief. 

Yes.

Sound is a powerful vehicle for attuning us to a life that’s more symbiotic with nature and our deeper nature.

Awesome. Could you describe what’s it like to be in a sound bath for somebody who’s never experienced it?

There are different types of sound baths. 

Just imagine, you go into meetup.com or something, and then you do a search area for sound baths. There’s one locally a few miles away. What would that experience be like?

I’ll give you a couple of different types. There’s the guy with the didgeridoo on meetup.com. This is the common sound bath. Everyone lies on the floor and the guy basically gets out the didgeridoo and he goes, didgeridoo sounds over everyone’s body. 

It feels really cool because it’s this powerful sound that overtakes you. He’ll be blowing what’s in your chest but you feel it in your back because that’s the vibroacoustic effect. It’s blowing right through your body. Everything gets shaken up. 

If you have any tension on your back or anything, it starts to dissolve pretty quickly. It’s a very cool feeling. It can also trigger you like, “What the hell is this guy doing with the didgeridoo on my body?” But that’s good. That’s part of the experience—type one.

Type two is usually a more ethereal spiritual types. They’re very more tranquil, with crystal bowls with the help of the crystal tuning forks, the metal tuning forks. That’s more subtle. That’s more like correcting subtle things in your field. 

Those are really cool experiences, too, but unless you have more sensitivity, you might not notice as much except for the fact that “Oh, I feel a little bit better afterwards. I feel a little bit clearer. I feel a little bit more emotionally calm.” But if you have more psychic-sensing or you’re just more sensitive, you might notice specifically what’s going on in your field and what’s happening during the actual experience.

Why crystal bowls and not metal bowls?

That’s a good question. There is something called overtones. Overtones are what give an instrument its sound. It’s called timbre in music.

A trumpet playing the same note, a piano playing the same note, and the crystal bowl hitting the same note all sound different. They’re in tune because the fundamental pitch where they all start is the same, but it’s the sequence of that doubling effect which is called harmonics. 

In the higher octaves, it’s like, where do these get weighed? Some instruments sound lower in pitch because they don’t have these higher overtones. Other instruments sound higher in pitch because even though they have the same fundamental frequencies, the first instruments have more of these overtones. They go off. 

The sound is a composite of these lower frequencies and higher ones. This is very interesting because crystal bowls have these higher harmonics that extend way beyond the audible range of sound. This gets into the work that Royal Rife was doing. Are you familiar with him?

No.

He invented the Rife machine. In the ’30s, this is documented but it was one of those things that were shut down much in the same way Tesla was shut down.

Essentially, he found out that between 100,000 Hz and 300,000 Hz, he could zap cancer and obliterate it. He was curing people in his centers. That work did continue after he passed, but he was actually very badly mistreated by the American Medical Association. 

At first, they were funding him, and then they rescinded their funding. It turned very bad. But essentially, he claimed and a number of people said that he basically zapped cancer. 

Rife machines are still in circulation today. They’re very expensive but you can find them in places like Hawaii. I know this doctor out there and in other parts of the U.S. They’re rare in other countries but they are around.

Basically, what it is is using frequencies to blast things that don’t belong in the body. Some of these overtones with crystal bowls actually start to get into the range of those things. It’s about the 11th harmonic in sound healing. It’s where it starts to basically blend into this range, where it starts to have actual physiological effects, and actually can be used—I’m not saying it’s a cure, but it basically can start to vibro acoustically break down some malignant cells in the body.

Rife machines are using frequencies to blast things that don’t belong in the body.

Interesting. I’ll have to check that out. Rife machines, very cool. 

You used a term earlier that I want to circle back to. It’s called entraining or entrainment. Could you talk a bit more about what entrainment means to you? 

Sure. I’ll go back to my desert walk analogy. You could also consider this a walk in the national park. That is a form of entrainment, especially if the walk is steady. 

If you’re on a steady walk, the first hour, you’re warming up to the walk. You might be a little bit more out of breath. Then, after a certain point, it becomes a little more effortless and you’re just in it. The thoughts quiet down. You find this symbiosis with the landscape that you’re in. Your brain has calmed down. You became more entrained with the environment. 

If you were to camp for five or six days, you’d be even more in tune. You’d be waking up with the sun. You’d be going to bed when it gets dark out. You’d be moving with the natural rhythms even more. 

If you lived outside or if you lived in a cabin in the woods for a few months, you’d probably be walking through the forest and the animals wouldn’t stop. You’d just be another creature there. You know how to walk properly. In that way, you’re entrained into the natural environment. You become part of the flow of frequencies that are happening in that situation. 

Entrainment, when we talk about it in sound, healing isn’t much different. It’s essentially when we’re playing a frequency with either a shamanic drum or with this tone that I generate with my computer. Your brain begins to synchronize it. 

It’s called the frequency following response. Whatever frequency is being emitted, your brain begins to say, “Oh, I’m going to shift my dominant frequency.” This is very well-studied like we were talking about earlier in neurofeedback. Neurofeedback is just that. When we learn to basically shift our consciousness, it’s measurable. Different states of consciousness exist at different frequencies.

I like to say the brain is simply a frequency volt of experience. That if the dominant frequency is operating at 12 Hz versus 10.5 Hz, they’re going to be different experiences of reality. Often, people want to know how deep can I go? Essentially, it says how deep you let yourself go.

Not everybody entrains the same because there is this thing I call the chronic or I call a crust. What that means is that people are not used to relaxing. Their brain is going to entrain into this frequency and they start following it. As the frequency descends, their brains will start going down. They’ll go from a resting frequency, maybe 14 Hz. It’ll go down to about 10, then they’ll get distracted, and they bounce back. They might get irritated, fidgety, or something and they bounce off of that. They just lose track of the sound.

That is common in the beginning with some people. What I’d say is keep trying again because when your brain becomes malleable enough to relax, then it basically follows the frequency and it can go down into alpha. It could go down to theta. It could go down to delta. When it goes there, there is a lot of magic that can happen.

A lot of very quick healing can happen when the body exists at those deeper layers of the subconscious and when the brain exists at those deeper layers of the subconscious because the neuropeptides that run through our entire nervous system basically relax. They were sending new messages so we can reprogram at this very deep level of being. It’s all state-based.

A lot of the time when people try to heal, if they’re healing when they’re in a beta state—when they’re in a normal consciousness—it’s a very weak signal. But when they get down and they actually are experiencing the deeper layers of the subconscious mind, they’re in a very tender place where they can rewrite themselves.

It’s like a receptivity that you don’t normally have if you’re just in your head thinking about, I got to pick up the milk or whatever on the way home, etc. You’re not in a receptive place then.

No. Not at all. Exactly.

I’m curious, how do you see entrainment relating to Kundalini yoga and just the Kundalini itself?

I’m studying Kundalini. I haven’t been practicing. I can only talk about my own practice which is about 17 years now at this point. I practiced it very intensely until I had a Kundalini-related injury. Kundalini got stuck in the middle of my back so I’m like, I got to try something else for a while at the time. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. I’m just saying the way that I was doing it may have been a bit unsustainable. That was a part of my life when I was a bit too gung ho about things.

The Kundalini is a physiological energetic experience. It’d be very interesting to map what’s going on with some of this brain activity because I think that what happens is there’s a common brainwave activity or map that goes along with people who have these breakthrough experiences whether it be Kundalini, whether it be a eureka moment. They’re usually in the flow state. They’re usually in alpha during theta—probably in alpha if they’re just doing something and it’s working. They have this meditative experience.

Then, they should hop into gamma. Gamma is a faster brainwave pattern than beta. You’d think, “Oh, if beta is our normal waking consciousness, what is gamma?” Gamma is very rapid. It’s when people say they’ve downloaded information very quickly or the brain activity is very holistic. It’s very well-distributed across the entire area of the brain both hemispheres. The brain becomes very activated so it’s very holistic thinking but it’s just happening very fast.

I would say when people get these mystical visions and euphoria, that’s what is likely happening neurologically. Again, the neurological effect of a Kundalini awakening isn’t happening because the brain is doing this. The brain is doing this because of the experience. The brain is responding to this immense rush of energy throughout the body.

It’s like the brain is coming along for the ride. It’s not created.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like if you load a certain program on your computer, you’re going to get a certain CPU usage. The RAM is going to be allocated in the background. The RAM is not allocated and then the program opens. The program opens and then allocates the RAM.

It’s like you’re biking to a place and the tires are moving as a result of you biking to the place. It’s the mechanism for the experience to happen. 

What was the most powerful experience that you got out of doing 17 years of Kundalini yoga?

Oh, sorry. I only did Kundalini yoga for a couple of years 17 years ago.

Oh, 17 years ago. Okay, got it.

For me, it wasn’t anything too out-of-this-world type of stuff. For me, it was just accessing these blissful states more regularly and feeling more integrated. Just being able to sit comfortably, having these beautiful sensations up my spine, and being perfectly happy just sitting with boredom because before that, I was very fidgety. I moved around a lot. A lot of tension in the body so I found Kundalini. 

It actually relaxed my nervous system. It allowed me to just experience bliss which for me was perfectly okay. If you ask me what’s my most powerful sound healing experience, that’s different.

Kundalini actually relaxed my nervous system. It allowed me to just experience bliss.

Tell us about that.

I had a friend and this is the guy I learned a lot from. He studied psychology for 25 years. He’s my computer guy and a psychologist. He’s this very interesting guy to study brainwave stuff. 

Somehow, he got his hand on some research done by a fellow named Maxwell Cade. He studied zen monks that were five months in retreat. He was studying their brainwave patterns after being in retreat for five months—how they fluctuated throughout the day. 

My friend got this brainwave pattern. Then, he created a schedule out of it, basically taking somebody from a normal state into the brainwave pattern of the zen monks. He’s like, you got to try this. I’m like, absolutely, I’ll have to try this. 

There I go, I’m lying down on my bed. It’s about 50 minutes long. I lie down. I put headphones on. The first eight minutes are pretty typical. You feel relaxed and you’re going along. Then, at some point, there’s a very distinct shift and you can really feel yourself being pulled into these deeper states. You’re becoming very aware. It’s like, okay, the thing’s kicked in. 

As I continue to go with this, I had no idea of time at this point but I remember not being able to feel the boundary of where my skin ended and the room began. At that point, I literally felt my consciousness basically extending out. It was non-localized in my body anymore. It was basically fluid and it was just this amazing sense of peace, bliss, and tranquility. 

Then of course, at some point, the track ended and I just lay there. It took me about an hour. I just got up slowly afterwards. I was like, that was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had in life. 

I shouldn’t call them altered states, I should call them deeper states of consciousness.

Right. Were you able to repeat that or was that one-off?

I don’t tend to get repeatability. I tend to get different experiences each time. That’s the thing when we hit these, we change. Every time we do one of these, we change because we’re metaprogramming ourselves. 

If we do the same thing again, it’s going to have a different effect. Every time I’ve done that same monk again, I haven’t got the same experience. I’ve had different experiences, but not that one.

How does one get access to that program, that frequency, or sound?

That particular schedule was given to me by a friend who holds that one very dearly. That isn’t in public circulation. I have created ones that are very similar and they can create extremely powerful shifts. 

Mostly, what I work with is I work with the Earth frequency, this human resonance. It’s my personal belief that that is how we have done everything in the ancient world. It’s because we tune into this frequency 7.83 that was found.

Even when the astronauts go into space, they have to put a little box to them. It’s the human resonance. It’s because it’s called the heartbeat of the Earth. They were getting very ill when they went in and then they went to Dr. Schumann.

He said, “Do you know why this might be happening? They’ve left the natural heartbeat of the Earth, they don’t have this human resonance. We got to get them this human resonator that broadcasts this frequency. It’s because we are very connected to this planet.” 

In the work that I do, I try to really move people through that frequency so they connect to the Earth. Then, from there we can go to whatever place we want to. We can go deeper. We can go into the astral traveler Tibetan state of consciousness as they’re called. These weird ones you read in the books where people are journeying through different lands.

People have had these experiences. People have written to me afterwards and like, I literally was flying through time and space. I was in this different realm. I was meeting all these guys. I’m like, that’s amazing. They do actually work. You have to be able to do the work.

Even the military—not publicly necessary, but they admit that this is a real thing that they can utilize and they have people trained in remote viewing. 

I’ve known several remote viewers actually. One of my mentors was a remote viewer. I can’t talk too much because he can’t talk about it. But in the 60s, he was part of a division that was engaged in the Cold War at a different level. They were doing it because the Russians did it first. 

I also know another fellow who works at The Monroe Institute. They use these technologies more than people would actually have known. They use them in police services for various tasks. They can’t tell people this. People won’t believe it. They have to see it in the movie but yes, this is well-documented. It gets used. 

The Monroe Institute had done a whole bunch of research. They were one of the first people that worked with this technology. There’s a very famous remote viewer named Joe McGonagle. I read some of his material. 

It’s fascinating when he talks about when they’d had him go back to look at the planet Mars a million years ago. That type of thing. Anyway, they actually downloaded his brainwaves and they uploaded it into a binaural beat. Some people could listen to that.

Allegedly, you’ll have the same ability to remote view. They’re basically using brainwave entrainment from a famous remote viewer for helping people to build their remote viewing skills.

What’s the name of that binaural beat?

That you have to get from The Monroe Institute. They guard their stuff quite heavily meaning that usually, you have to take a course and then you have to buy the CD at the end of the course. I think they’re still on CD at this point in time.

Is there a movie that was about remote viewers? Like men who stare at goats or something like that.

Yes. A movie came out a few years ago about remote viewing. 

Wild. There is something that you just alluded to very briefly earlier in our conversation. You talked about the Christ consciousness. Could you elaborate more on that?

This Christ consciousness is a term that gets used to a lot of new-age spirituality but what I feel really is at the heart of it. When I look at spirituality, I look at what many traditions did across the world—indigenous and more advanced.

The sun has always played an integral role. Personally, one of the most powerful traditions I found is encapsulated in Christian Gnosticism. It’s much in triumph with freemasonry.

That whole tradition dates back to the flood. It actually hints at advanced technology. All these are forms of the remnants of a more advanced civilization that existed before, but of course we haven’t proven this yet. Essentially, what they say is that the sun is what we are becoming. Our consciousness is becoming that of the sun.

It’s a higher order of reality and the sun is becoming the center of the galaxy. The galaxy’s becoming the center of the universe in consciousness. 

Our lower efforts basically when we are unconscious, when we’re angry, or when we’re expressing in a way that’s negative is food for the moon. The moon is in a lower sphere of reality than the Earth and the sun is in the higher reality.

Alchemy in the Egyptian tradition and even in India is based on the things we produce are excrement in a way or energetic excrement to the sun, using it as fuel for the sun. That process actually helps the Earth create energetic fuel for the sun as opposed to the traitors that the moon eats in a way.

That’s the esoteric side of it. The sun actually, ubiquitously across many traditions, in Buddhism, they call it the celestial Buddhist. They live in the sun. It’s not the physical beings in the sun, but the solar consciousness is one of the brightness of love, of unity, of our higher will, our higher intellect, our higher mind, and our healthy ego.

Even in astrology, the sun is always what we aspire to become. The sun is what we’re moving towards should we embrace life in a conscious, loving, and expansive manner.

Interesting because fairly recently, I heard that phrase, “the Christ consciousness.” I’ve been, for the last couple of months, doing this prayer daily which is the Metatron Prayer of Protection. You create these three rings or series of protection around you and visualize this. The first one is a silver sphere of the Christ consciousness. It’s a very powerful prayer. It’s very protective. I do it morning and night.

Even tapping into the frequency of that is I believe the highest level of consciousness that humans can have or aspire to or that we can name. Because individuals have reached that, it’s like the hundredth monkey effect. Because individuals have reached that, other people can now tap into that field.

What is the hundredth monkey effect?

Essentially, the four-minute mile. Here’s an even easier explanation. One person crosses the four-minute mile. It’s really hard. No one could do it before. That one person crosses it.

Then all of a sudden, five people cross it because that one person did it. Once 5 people cross it, 100 people cross it. 

Rupert Sheldrake‘s work is very interesting. He calls this morphic resonance. Basically, it’s a field, the field of the four-minute mile. At one point in its evolution, it was unbreakable.

Once one person does it, the field changes. It becomes possible but rare. The more people do it, the more the field becomes easier to access, easier to attune to.

The more people believe something, the more power it has to be spread.

That’s how religions work in many ways. The more people believe something, the more power it has to be spread. The more people tapping into the Christ consciousness, the more juice it has to attract more people.

Very cool. I think everybody should do this Metatron Prayer of Protection. It’s very powerful and very helpful. I got it from Michelle Whitedove. She channeled this from the Archangel Metatron. 

We’re getting up to time here. I wanted to get one last question in and then for you to share how our listeners can work with you, maybe get your soundscapes, and so forth. 

But one last quick question, why is your organization name or company name called The Blade and Chalice?

That’s a great question. The blade and chalice is the perfect harmony of the masculine and the feminine. In brainwave entrainment or anything spiritual, essentially it’s the right brain and the left brain. When we bring our right brain or our left brain into balance, we get hemispheric resonance. 

This mystical notion of the right brain being feminine, left-brain being masculine, right-brain being holistic, left-brain being analytical, when we bring into the balance neurologically, it activates the corpus callosum in the middle and we get access to higher wisdom. We access and move beyond the logical, rational mind into the higher mind. That forms the first gate of moving into a higher life, you could say, beyond the ordinary mechanical nature of reality. 

For me, that symbol, putting it as an emblem for everything is a reminder for myself. It is also a way to show people. Actually, the way that I do it is with Metatron’s Cube. I really have a resonance with Metatron as well, much as you like this prayer. I use that sacred geometric pattern to encapsulate it. 

The blade and chalice, too, another reason is it’s an old term. It goes back to the Knights Templar. It goes back to King Solomon. I’ve always felt an affinity with the Western mysteries, the Middle Ages. It encapsulates on a cultural level that level of this past life archetypes that I’ve always tapped into. It really captures that. It has something about my personality and my essence in there as well as having something that encapsulates the work that I do.

Very cool. I’m also a big fan of Metatron’s Cube. In fact, I just got my wife a pendant, the Metatron’s Cube. It’s from Ka Gold Jewelry. I’ll include the link in. It’s a very powerful, amazing, sacred, geometry jewelry made here in Israel. Really, really cool.

Alright, thank you so much. You remind me a bit of Doctor Strange if you’re familiar with that comic book character and the whole mythology of that, maybe the movie with Benedict Cumberbatch. Are you familiar with that movie?

It all sounds very familiar but did Marvel do a recent one on Doctor Strange?

Yeah. He tapped into the metaphysical and became this incredible, powerful sorcerer. But it was all for power if not for his ego to just do amazing things but yeah, you remind me a little bit of him.

Thank you. Big shoes to fill.

Thank you so much. For folks who wanted to listen to some of your soundscapes, work with you, all that stuff, where should we send them?

I do a number of things. I do work one on one with people. I do sell these programs. You can work on them at home and I also do live events.

Now, the beautiful thing with the live events is they’re 100% by donation. They’re a way that anybody can come out regardless of means. Those were done on Youtube Live. You just have to register on our page. 

You read the disclaimer, the safety stuff. Obviously, I want everyone to stay safe with that. Go to my website www.thebladeandchalice.com. You can get an overview there. If you hit www.thebladeandchalice.com/events, you’ll see the YouTube Live link to the next upcoming event. 

Also, it’s probably better that I just send you the link to actually get the program. If people are interested, they can try a free one first. They don’t have to pay anything. They don’t have to get their credit card. They can just sign up and try the free one. 

The first one’s called Relaxation. If they like that, they can purchase the rest of the program. That’s an at-home program that they use sequentially to go deeper and deeper and experience some of the stuff that we’re talking about today.

Amazing. I look forward to that. Thank you so much. This was fabulous, David. I really enjoyed it and I got so much out of it. I’m sure our listeners did, too, so thank you so much.

I felt the passion. Thank you so much, Stephan. You’re very engaged with this and you brought some excellent questions. I truly appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you, listeners, for sticking through to the end and for your enthusiasm and interest. I hope you take this to the next level and apply some of these in your life. We’ll catch you on the next episode.

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About David Khan

David Khan is a life long spiritual practitioner, musician, engineer, and healer. His main passion is in research and developing therapies associated with sound, music, and frequencies that have powerful effects on allowing people to shift into deeper states of consciousness to activate their own innate self-healing capabilities.

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments, or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Stephan Spencer, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.