Two men arrested early Easter Sunday just north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were charged Monday with a shooting spree that left three black males dead and two wounded.
The shooting wasn't a kneejerk reaction to a provocative situation. As a local pastor, Rev Warren Blakney, told CNN, "For a white male to come that deep into that area and to start indiscriminately shooting, that lends itself for many to believe that it probably was a hate crime."
The gunning down of these bystanders is only the latest in a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks in the United States, which now seem to be occurring on a regular basis. Such killings—whether committed in drive-by attacks, in restaurants, or in schools—have become so commonplace of late that they barely make news anymore.
Last week in El Cajon, California—a city that's home to some 30,000 Iraqi refugees—a 32-year-old mother of five from Iraq was killed. This too may have been a hate crime, in this case directed at a woman wearing a headscarf. Or it may have been the result of domestic violence. Between 2,000 and 4,000 women die in the U.S. every year from domestic violence.
We seem to be living in a time when even the most civilized nations on the planet are experiencing an escalation of outright hatred and cruelty.
On Easter Sunday evening, the BBC in Britain broadcast a program that investigated the crime of "badger bating." Killing badgers for sheer pleasure is a barbaric pastime, banned in 1835, that's again occurring in the hundreds today. So much so that the British police have mounted a nationwide campaign against the practice.
The badgers, once rooted out of their burrows by smaller dogs, are then savaged by larger dogs, while the owners of the dogs stand around betting and laughing. Because badgers are powerful animals, the dogs themselves suffer greatly in the attacks and, when found, have to be taken into care by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Those who carry out these acts of cruelty readily admit they do so because it makes them feel good. As one woman commented, they find it "relaxing" to watch such suffering at the end of a working day. It's a form of "entertainment."
What's happening inside a human being when violence is committed wantonly for thrills? What drives such cruelty?
In my book, Limitless You—The Infinite Possibilities of a Balanced Brain, I describe how, when people become violent or are cruel, we are seeing the result of a brain imbalance. The autonomic nervous system is "stuck" as if the person was pressing on the brake pedal, and the "thrill" of killing or committing an act of cruelty is the brain's way of gunning the accelerator so that the person can feel something other than their numb state.
It may seem surprising that emotional numbness is what leads to such cruelty. But when you understand that the normal state of the human brain when it's balanced and in harmony is one of kindness, caring, and compassion, you realize that people who are vicious have simply lost touch with their true being—the state of homeostasis in which the brain functions on an even keel.
Working with people with a tendency to violence, especially in a prison environment, we at Brain State Technologies® have been privileged to watch the calmness, cooperativeness, and concern for others that returns to a person's life once the brain is balanced and harmonized. We've witnessed this in the lives of even seriously violent individuals in the prison system.
If you have any tendency to cruelty—if you feel any kind of thrill at seeing another person or animal suffer—Brainwave Optimization is a powerful antidote, enabling you to feel the full range of feelings that a human is meant to experience.
To feel in a normal manner, after years of being shut down, so enriches your everyday experience of life that you have no need of either sadistic or masochistic behavior in your life any longer.
When you experience the balancing and harmonizing of your brain's hemispheres and lobes, you almost may not be aware of the subtle changes at first, in terms of becoming a more peaceful and loving individual. They are so gradual in many cases that they transform you without your really realizing how different you have become.
The reason for this is that these changes are intrinsic to who you are. You just find yourself automatically handling situations more calmly and wanting to reach out to others in a caring manner. Often it's those close to you who notice the differences before you do.
In other words, Brainwave Optimization isn't something extrinsic to you. It's not at all like a behavioral change that's being impressed on you.
Rather, it's quite simply you becoming more truly you, which is a gentle process that occurs in many cases over a period of weeks and even months after you complete brain training.
The more "you" that you become as your brain functions in the magnificent manner for which it was designed, the less do you want to harm either yourself or other people—and the more you realize just how many in even the most civilized of our world's societies unnecessarily endure a life that's really quite miserable, the result of an unbalanced brain state either in themselves or in someone close to them.
Lee Gerdes, Founder and CEO of Brain State Technologies®, is the creator of the cutting edge technology Brainwave Optimization with Real-Time Balancing™, which is transforming lives all over the world.
As the author of Limitless You: The Infinite Possibilities of a Balanced Brain, published in 2009 by Namaste Publishing and now in soft cover, Lee's work emanates from a combination of his interests in how the brain works and its effect on mind, body, and spirit, coupled with his personal experience of trauma in the form of a violent assault in 1992.
This effort has now evolved into the neuro-technology known as Brainwave Optimization™, which is produced and distributed by Brain State Technologies®, with nearly 200 affiliate offices in 18 countries worldwide serving over 50,000 clients.
As a result of this trauma, in 2000 Lee began working with his own brain to relieve post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His success in overcoming the effects of trauma led him to dedicate his life to understanding neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change itself) and how the breakthrough insights of neuroscience can be applied to improve peoples’ lives. His work is daily proof that by optimizing our brain, we can optimize our entire life, empowering us to "at last be the limitless individuals we were born to be." www.brainstatetech.com