Robert Monroe

The teaching

Taught from his books, Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Far Journeys (1985) and Ultimate Journey (1994), and his courses.

The first method

Monroe's first book teaches a way out that rests on one state: the body asleep and the mind awake. Relaxed at the edge of sleep, the traveller passes through stages he named, meets a rush of vibrations and smooths them, and then leaves the body by thought, lifting out or rolling out; a thought of the body brings them back. Every step, with the house's cautions, is taught on the astral art's branch The gentle way to try. What follows is what he built on it.

The second body

The experience, in his account, happens in a second body that is not made of matter as the first is. It passes through walls and floors, it is moved by thought rather than by muscle, and it goes where the thought goes: to think strongly of a person is to find oneself with them. He felt it tied to the physical body and drawn back to it, and its senses are not the body's senses, so that what it perceives has to be learned like a new language.

Three locales

He sorts what he met into three locales. Locale I is the here and now: the world of matter, the people and places one knows, where what is seen can in principle be checked. Locale II is a world without matter and without end, where thought is the stuff of everything and like attracts like, so that the traveller is drawn at once to the places that match their own deepest wants and fears; it holds, he believed, all that the faiths have called heaven and hell. Locale III is a world of matter much like ours yet not ours, with its own history and machines unlike any we have, where he found himself living for a time in another man's life.

The focus levels

In his courses the states of consciousness are numbered as focus levels, so that a listener can be guided to each and learn to return to it. Focus 10 is mind awake and body asleep. Focus 12 is awareness expanded beyond the body's senses. Focus 15 is the state of no time. Focus 21 is the edge of time and space, the bridge to other systems of reality.

In the later courses the levels from 23 to 27 are the regions where, in his teaching, the dead go. Focus 23 holds the newly dead who do not know they have died or cannot let go; 24 to 26 are the belief system territories, where those who shared a belief in life live together in the world it builds; and 27 is the Park, a place made by human minds for rest, healing and choice before the next life.

Sound in two ears

His way of reaching the levels is sound. Two tones a little apart in pitch are played, one to each ear, and the brain hears the difference between them as a slow beat; he held that this draws the two halves of the brain into step and leads the listener into the state the beat matches, and he patented the method as Hemi-Sync. In the courses the sound is joined to a guiding voice and a set of simple tools.

The house teaches it as his method and adds its own limits: never while driving or working machinery, not for anyone who has had seizures, and stopped at once if it brings a fear that follows into the day.

The tools of the Gateway

Before each session the listener puts every worry and distraction into an imagined box, the energy conversion box, and closes the lid. Then comes resonant tuning: a few deep breaths, each let out as a long hummed note that fills the body with vibration. Then the resonant energy balloon: a flow of energy pictured rising within, pouring out at the crown and falling round the body like a fountain, to enclose it in a shell. Last comes an affirmation in the listener's own mind: that they are more than their physical body; that they wish to expand, to experience, to know and to understand; and that they ask the help and protection of those whose wisdom is equal to or greater than their own.

Far journeys

His second book reaches further. Each person, he came to teach, is part of a greater self, which he called the I-There: the whole of all their lives, of which the present personality is one expression sent out to learn. Beings who live without bodies exchange knowledge in compressed balls of thought, which he called rotes. And he tells, as a rote given to him, that the earth was made as a garden to grow an energy called loosh, given off by living creatures in strong feeling and gathered by beings beyond it, and that the finest loosh comes from love. These are his reports, and he gave them as such.

Retrieval

In his last book the journeys turn to the dead. Those caught after death in the lower levels, confused or held by an old belief, can be met and led on, and he taught his students to do it: to go out in the focus states, find such a one, speak with them, and bring them to the Park. He called it retrieval. Life on earth, in this teaching, is a school from which each soul graduates when it no longer needs the pull of physical experience, and death is a crossing into the levels above it.