Itzhak Bentov

Bentov was born in Humenné, Czechoslovakia (in present-day Slovakia), in 1923. During World War II, his parents, his younger brother and sister were killed in German Nazi concentration camps. He narrowly escaped being sent to the camps and moved to British Palestine, first living on the Shoval kibbutz in the Negev. Despite not having a university degree, and settled in Massachusetts. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1962. == Inventions ==

Bentov began with a workshop in the basement of a Catholic church in Belmont, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. Abele later recalled Bentov's workshop, In 1979, Abele and Peter Nicholas looked to grow the successful business and established Boston Scientific as a holding company to purchase Medi-Tech. Bentov was the holder of numerous patents. In addition to the steerable cardiac catheter, his inventions included diet spaghetti, automobile brake shoes, EKG electrodes and pacemaker leads. Patents == Spirituality ==

Bentov was fascinated by consciousness, in particular how it related to physiology. In his 1977 book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, he wrote that "consciousness permeates everything". Bentov's invention was a seismographic device to record the heartbeat, in particular the aorta's reverberations. Marc Seifer described the results: "During normal breathing, the reverberations in the aorta are out of phase with the heartbeat and the system is inharmonious. However, during meditation and when the breath is held, the echo off the bifurcation of the aorta (where the aorta forks at the pelvis to go into each leg) is in resonance with the heartbeat and the system becomes synchronized, thus utilizing a minimum amount of energy. This resonant beat is approximately seven cycles per second, which corresponds not only to the alpha rhythm of the brain but also to the low-level magnetic pulsations of the Earth." ==Personal life==

Bentov had a daughter, Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, with his first wife, whom he would divorce. Later he married soviet-born sculptor and poet (Kharkiv, 1929 - ). == Death and legacy ==

Bentov was killed on May 25, 1979, as a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 191 that crashed shortly after takeoff from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. At the time of his death, he was traveling to California where he had been set to present his ideas on science and mysticism to a group of scientists from Japan. He was 55 years old. His daughter, English professor Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, wrote a memoir about her father, ''The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives'' in 2005. It was not until after his death that she learned about his life in the Israeli Defense Forces and that he had created Israel's first rocket. Searching for answers as to why he never discussed this part of his life, Muir traveled to Israel and researched his years there. == Published works ==

• Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, E. P. Dutton, 1977, ; Inner Traditions – Bear and Company, 1988, • A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation with Mirtala Bentov, Dutton Books, 1982, • Micromotions of the body as a factor in the development of the nervous system, a centerpiece article published in the anthology Kundalini, Evolution, and Enlightenment by John White, editor, 1998, • A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness: A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation, Inner Traditions – Bear and Company, 2000, == References ==