MindPlace Proteus USB Light & Sound Meditation Mind Machine

A little bit of background: I've had a bit of a spiritual wakening over the last year. In the course of this, I have been trying many form of meditation with minimal success. I've been very frustrated.So last night my new Proteus arrived. I was excited but tried not to get my hopes up too high.First the machine: Everybody has already stated that it seems a bit flimsy. Well, it's cheap but has a two year warranty and the mindplace folks really seem to care a lot about their customers. It's not like you're gonna go jogging with this this thing on. There's a return policy if you don't like it.The multiple wire setup is easily tangled, but again, it's cheap. Get over it.So I tried the first preset. I did not care for the tones this thing made.So I tried a few more with the same effect. The sound was obnoxious enough that I hardly noticed the lights.So I tried an audiostobe mp3. Again the music as awful and completely distracting.Then I put it on a visualization preset and used my studio headphones with a very long, trippy Universal Mind mp3 and just used the glasses from the Proteus.5 minutes in and I was cruising the cosmos.I've listened to that meditation session many times. This time, It was amazing. Just amazing. It was serene, but intense and the colors.....Good Lord, the colors! Complete mental euphoria.So I got up this morning and tried it again. This time with a deep meditation mp3 designed to clear the mind of all thoughts. I used a different visualization setting this time. Again, I've listened to this meditation many times with very minimal success. This time, completely different. That was 4 hours ago and my mind is still completely at peace. I even went to WalMart about an hour ago. Usually I'm fit to be tied by the time I get out of a grocery store. I'm still totally calm. Feeling very relaxed.Can't wait to try this with my NLP collection. I've got the complete Eric Bandler Neurosonics series. I have a lot more cool things to listen to with these glasses on too. They just seem to really relax my mind and let it go on a journey.Summary: The sounds did nothing for me, but the glasses sent me tripping. So far, really seems to be worth the price of this thing. I'd have paid 160 bucks just for the 2 sessions I just experienced. Can't wait to experiment more.

I purchased this unit in hopes of improving my sleep and possibly getting some pain relief. I suffer from 2 forms of neuropathy and a sleep disorder. So far I have noticed some improvement in sleep, though I still need pharmacological help as well. I haven't noticed much pain relief overall, but the relaxation does relive the pain a little for a time. I have, so far, used only the preset programs as creating your own is a bit of a hurdle. First, the software is written in Visual Basic rather than a programming language, so it's absolutely Windows only. I have had no luck so far using Wine, a Windows emulator for UNIX-like operating systems such as the various Linux flavors, or the BSD flavors like Mac OSX. I dug out an old Windows notebook, but if you're Mac or Linux only keep this in mind. Secondly, the connection cable is serial, and most current systems don't have a serial port. You can buy a serial to usb dongle, but you will still need to configure a COM port. Amazon has some cheaper, but a good dongle will run another $30. I also had some difficulty with drivers as Windows Update could not identify the drivers needed. The software was a real challenge to find of the website and I had to create an account and log in to get it. The documentation is a bit sketchy and writing your own programs is fairly time-consuming, For example, the Help file contains no help--just the "About" page and the release notes about what is new in this release.That said, I have been surprised at how well the various programs work. I am definitely getting to sleep faster, and the relaxation and alertness programs work as well. I considered returning it for the less-expensive Sirius that doesn't allow your own programming since I don't see myself writing many of these programs, but the Sirius is a white-only light and I do feel the color adds to the effectiveness. I am using it several times a day including at bedtime, and it does what it's intended to do, and for a much better price than other color light and sound machines.