Centerpointe Research Institute
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Centerpointe Research Institute had its modest beginnings in the fall of 1989. Bill Harris and Wes Wait, both with a long-term interest in meditation and personal growth, had spent the previous four years with a small circle of friends researching and personally experiencing the effects of what later evolved into Centerpointe Research Institute's Holosync® audio technology.
The idea of using precise sounds to alter a listener's state of mind came from a 1973 article in Scientific American by researcher Dr. Gerald Oster of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. In this article, "Auditory Beats in the Brain," Oster describes a characteristic of the brain wherein electrical brain wave patterns resonate to certain precise frequencies when presented with audio tones of certain frequencies.
As long-time practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Harris and Wait were familiar with research done in the 1970s establishing a relationship between specific brain wave patterns and a variety of states including those of meditation, superlearning, increased focus and concentration, and enhanced creativity.
The initial idea was to re-create, with modern high-tech methods, the meditation experience usually reserved to those dedicated few willing to meditate many hours each day for many years. To recreate the second ingredient of the meditation process—the "rescripting" that takes place as meditators reach an altered, meditative state and then reprogram their unconscious mind through mantras, affirmations, or prayers—they added, beginning with the second level of the program, silent affirmations chosen by the participant and recorded in his or her own voice, and delivered using Centerpointe’s proprietary Autofonix® silent messaging technology..
The results were spectacular and participant feedback extremely positive. Participants reported a dramatic acceleration of positive results in their meditation practice, often reporting more change in a single year of the Centerpointe program than in ten or fifteen years of traditional meditation.
In 1990, Centerpointe Research Institute was formally incorporated in the State of Oregon, and shortly thereafter, Wait sold his interest in the company to Bill Harris and left the company to pursue other interests. Soon, Centerpointe began running full page ads in a number of national magazines including New Age Journal, Psychology Today, Yoga Journal, and Omni Magazine, and Centerpointe began to grow. Over the first four years, sales revenues grew at a rate of 400% per year as people from over 30 countries on six continents joined the program.
Between 1990 and 1993, Bill Harris adapted the work of Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine relating to the evolution of complex systems to higher, more complex levels of organization to the observed effects of Holosync. Prigogine's work provided a very elegant explanation of why (and how) Holosync causes such profound changes in those who use it. This new paradigm was subsequently incorporated into the Centerpointe support materials, greatly increasing their value and usefulness to participants.
Soon after, the Holosync Solution program had become so successful, with many thousands of participants in nearly 60 countries, that it became necessary to move the company to new and larger quarters. A building was purchased and renovated, the staff was doubled, and in October of 1997 the move was made. At the same time, the recording studio capacity was tripled to handle the flood of orders for custom program levels pouring in from all over the world. In 2003, Centerpointe again moved its headquarters to a much larger facility.
Between 1997 and today, Centerpointe has grown to be one of the largest personal growth companies in the world, with program participants in 172 countries. During this time Centerpointe Director Bill Harris published his second book, Thresholds of the Mind, and accepted an increasing number of speaking engagements, including a three-hour address to the United Nations Values Caucus in November of 2004.
It is mind-boggling to us when they look back and see how far Centerpointe has come from its humble "kitchen table" beginnings. For that they must gratefully thank the many Centerpointe program participants all over the world who, as in any successful company, are the ones really responsible for their success.