Lifeline ahoy!
I've booked my trip in May to TMI for Lifeline, the seminar that I feel is pretty much a culmination of everything my life has led me towards. Yeah, it's that significant to me.
Lifeline
Service There is accomplished through becoming knowledgeable about Focus™ Levels 23 through 27. Focus 23 is often perceived as an area in which certain souls, for a variety of reasons, may become "stuck" following their transitions from physical life. Lifeline participants learn to comfortably make contact with such souls and offer assistance to help them move to Focus 27, the area Bob Monroe described in Ultimate Journey as the Park, or Reception Center, or Way Station. Upon arrival in Focus 27, they are met by loved ones and guides who direct them to the specific areas of the Reception Center most appropriate for their next stages of development.
Participants also are given the opportunity within this program to explore Focus Levels 24, 25, and 26 (the Belief System Territories) and to investigate facets of their own current beliefs and structures for operating within the world. Questions which arise often take the form of "What is my most limiting belief? And "How do my present beliefs support me in exploring as freely and fully as I would like?"
Perhaps the most significant impact of this week, however, comes from the personal revelations that frequently evolve from those "rescue and retrieval" activities. Beyond the considerable satisfactions of helping others move forward, many participants realize that at the same time they are also retrieving lost parts or fragments of themselves, and thus coming into more wholeness, completion, and balance.
Lifeline participants gain familiarity with additional Focus levels:
Focus 22 -
where humans still in the physical have partial consciousness, remembered as dreams, deliria, and patterns induced through chemicals;
Focus 23 -
inhabited by humans who have recently exited physical existence and have not adapted to such change;
Focus 25 -
the Belief System territories where those who have exited the physical are residing in a particular belief system;
Focus 27 -
the Reception Center, Way Station, or Park, designed to ease the trauma and shock of the transition out of physical reality, and to assist those there in evaluating options for their next steps in growth and development.
Here's a neat article from the Fortean Times mag about TMI
Remote Viewing at the Monroe Institute
Since its perhaps surprising acceptance as a surveillance device within the intelligence community, Remote Viewing has gone through a transformation to become part of the New Age toolkit. Mark Blacklock visits one of RV’s elder statesmen in the USA.
By Mark Blacklock August 2004 .
At the Monroe Institute in Virginia, non-local consciousness is a reality. Ditto life after death. Out-of-body experiences occur on a daily basis and in the labs they’re conducting research into the reported collapse of sub-atomic randomness during periods when human consciousness is focused on particular events. Oh yes, and you can learn Remote Viewing techniques from alumni of the US military psychic spying programmes. It seems fair to say that it’s not your average rural retreat.
As F Holmes ‘Skip’ Atwater, Research Director at the Institute and, from 1977 to 1987, Operations and Training Officer for the Army Intelligence Branch of the US government’s RV programme, points out: “A week-long cruise in the Bahamas is about the same price as a week-long cruise in consciousness.”
The Institute emerged out of the experimental work of Robert Monroe (pictured below), a radio producer and television executive, who had become interested in human consciousness research in the late 1950s, when he began having what would come to be termed ‘out-of-body-experiences’. His first thought was that he was suffering some sort of mental illness. When his doctor could find nothing wrong with him, Monroe decided to investigate the matter himself, setting up a small research programme within his company to look into the feasibility of learning during sleep.
According to Monroe’s official biography: “In the ensuing years, Mr Monroe and his group began work on means and methods of inducing and controlling this and other forms of consciousness in their laboratory. As specialists in creating patterns of effective sound, they used this base for their research.”
By 1974, the set-up had been christened the Monroe Institute, and by 1975 Monroe’s researchers had discovered (and patented) Hemi-Sync audio technology.
The genteel Blue Ridge Mountain range in south east Virginia is steeped in history. Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson lies in the Piedmont foothills nearby; President James Monroe lived on the Ash-Lawn Highland Estate near Charlottesville and James Madison lived in the city itself. Within a 150-mile radius of Washington DC and rising above the surrounding seats of Federal and military government, this American paradise has long attracted the wealthy and well-to-do, while tourists come from all over the States to see the colourful display put on by the autumn trees, when all around the hills are covered in russet and brown leaves. Visitors can hike along the southern stretch of the Appalachian Trail, stopping by one of the numerous orchards to pick their own apples. The temperatures stay in the 20s and 30s Celcius until mid-October. When the temperatures do drop in winter, the luxury Wintergreen Ski Resort keeps the holidaymakers coming.
But none of this can quite match what’s on offer at the Monroe Institute.
Cycling nut Martin Verhuys, owner of the Acorn Inn, hasn’t been on a course at the Monroe Institute but he has plenty of contact with the organisation. A lot of his guests are either about to begin or have just ended a course there. He has also used Hemi-Sync tapes. “Some years ago I had a serious cycling accident and a friend lent me some of their tapes - just for helping me sleep. I’m not interested in big hocus pocus but they did work. His voice and the sounds... After a while I didn’t need the tapes any more, I could do it on my own.” The voice in question was Monroe’s. “He was a very good man,” says Martin.
He is a little less generous about some of his other neighbours, whom he views in a slightly comical light. Because, unexpectedly, the Monroe Institute turns out to have some very local competition in the meditation game.
“This is a hot-bed of, I guess you say, New Age stuff,” explains Martin. “There is a meditation centre just the other side. Brother Charles came to Monroe and he must have thought ‘I’ll set up nearby’. He has his own tapes.” This centre is called the Syncronicity Center. “Bob Monroe didn’t want to be a guru,” adds Martin. “His approach was more scientific.”
Hemi-Sync has become a key feature of Monroe’s legacy. Not only has it provided the platform and basis for his tapes and CDs which compete seriously in the New Age market for relaxation and meditation aids, but it has inspired a number of imitators, including the Synchronicity Center. Hemi-Sync is a tool for achieving the altered states of consciousness in which Monroe was interested. How does it work?
The continuous electrical activity of the brain was first recorded by Dr Hans Berger, the “Father of Electro-encephalography”, in 1924. Berger described this symphony of electrical activity in terms of frequency bands: gamma (greater than 30Hz) beta (13-30Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), and delta (less than 4 Hz). He noted that these frequency bands were roughly associated with different states of consciousness; beta being the waking, alert state; alpha, a relaxed state; theta, a transitory, intermediary state before sleep; and delta, deep sleep, the frequency of brain activity being faster for more alert states.
Berger’s work has allowed modern researchers interested in consciousness to monitor the activity of the brain and note its changes, thereby providing some externally recorded empirical data to accompany records of subjective experience. Berger simply classified activity already occurring. Monroe’s discovery was apparently a tool for accelerating the alternation between these different bands of brain activity, an automatic gearbox which improved upon evolution’s manual transmission.
Skip Atwater explains how Hemi-Sync effects these patterns: “Different frequencies are played in each ear, which causes the brain to interpret a phase difference. So, the phase difference is interpreted by the brain as being a vibrato. And because we can adjust the frequencies between the two ears, we can change the rate of that vibration within brain wave frequencies and route it where we want the person to go in terms of their consciousness.”
The idea of altering the electrical frequency of the brain with an audio signal was fairly radical and remains the main focus of the Monroe Institute’s proselytising. Dr Darlene Miller, the Institute’s Director of Programmes, explains how the Institute is working to have Hemi-Sync enshrined in traditional scientific literature.
“We have a Professional Division,” she says. “These people do research away from here in universities and we’re getting a body of scientific study that shows that this Hemi-Sync technology leads people into certain states of consciousness and also leads to certain prescribed results. For instance, we have a series of exercises called the Surgical Support series, which is used before, during and after surgery. And there are a number of studies now that show that people using this series require less anæsthesia, their blood pressure is lower, they come out of the recovery room more alert, with less need for pain medication and their stay in hospital is days less than without the Hemi-Sync. That’s good information. You have that compared to a control group who didn’t use the Hemi-Sync, that’s traditional Western scientific methodology.”
And indeed, this work does seem to have been rigorous enough to have been published in a handful of respectable journals such as Physiology & Behavior and Anaesthesiology. But some of the other claims made at the Institute, and also for Hemi-Sync, are rather trickier to pin down. “If you ask me for a study to prove that this leads to the out-of-body state or enables someone to talk to a loved one who has died, then we get into areas that are very difficult,” admits Dr Miller.
Dr Miller has been working at the Monroe Institute since 1984. “I was actually working and living in Colorado and I had friends who came to one of the very first residential programmes here. At the time I was the director of a 180-bed institution for violent sex offenders. I’m also a clinical psychologist. My training is very traditional.” Her upbringing was similarly traditional. “I’d been raised a Fundamentalist Christian. My family is still to the right of Jerry Fallwell. I had a lot to overcome in terms of that. To their minds this is still the work of the devil. It’s not biblical.”
Dr Miller’s medical background is useful at Monroe. In dealing with altered consciousness, it is important to be able to recognise those who might react adversely to further consciousness alteration. “The only thing I’m bothered about is whether they’ve had any hospitalisations for mental health disorders,” says Dr Miller. “Or, if they’ve been in therapy, what was the diagnosis and circumstances of that and are they on any current medication? Obviously, because this is powerful stuff, you want people to be pretty well-hinged to handle the intensity of it.”
Occasionally, unhinged people slip through the net. “There have been a few circumstances where people have been on the edge and we didn’t know because they didn’t fill out their application honestly. They’ve lost the distinctions and actual boundaries - how to classify things. They just lost those distinctions, and we don’t want that to happen.”
I’ve arrived at the Monroe Institute for just a couple of days. Because the currently running course is an advanced programme called Lifeline, open only to graduates of the Gateway Voyage Course, I am not permitted to participate. I had been hoping to meet some of the students on the course but, sadly, this is not to be.
“Almost solely it’s because part of the learning experience and quite a lot of what people come here for is the group energy, the synergy of what happens with people of similar intent,” explains Dr Miller. “And so there’s a confidentiality around that. There are a lot of deep sharing experiences.”
It’s disappointing, but my trip is confined to a couple of chats with Dr Miller and a guided tour of the facility in the company of Atwater. After an introductory chinwag, Dr Miller takes me to a conference room to watch a promotional video featuring Monroe describing his early out-of-body experiences. Dr Miller has to wrangle with the video and isn’t enjoying much success. Suddenly, the whole thing comes to life. “Wow,” she says. “That’s strange. That kind of thing happens a lot round here.”
After the video, we head over to the main building to have a look at where students stay, in two-bed dorms with little bunks which are referred to as “check-in units”. There are audio speakers on the walls in each unit, level with the pillow. These are used to pipe in the Hemi-Sync tapes of the student’s choice. The student is encouraged to use the meditation aids as much as possible. Given that Monroe’s initial research was focused on learning during sleep, this includes the hours after lights-out. This is an immersive experience, as explained by Dr Miller.
“We don’t have TV, we don’t have radios, we don’t have newspapers. We encourage people not to call their businesses and find out what the stock market is doing - we encourage people just to be here. There’s a sense of community and family, people get very close to the group, people say they feel like they’ve known these people before, there’s a great synergy.”
As I’m looking around a check-in unit with photographer Justin Canning, the two students whose room it is return from lunch. Dr Miller is a little flustered, presumably worried about disturbances in synergy, but the students are okay with us being there. One of the girls spots Justin’s digital camera. “Hey,” she says, “did you get a glow on your pictures?”
Justin is politely noncommittal, but the student won’t be dissuaded. “I took some pictures of my check-in unit and it’s like there’s a strange glow around it. Like some kind of aura.” She fetches her camera to show us a couple of out-of-focus and blurry shots of her bunk. Once again, Justin’s politesse is to the fore.
After we’ve made our excuses and parted company with the students, Dr Miller, looking rather serious, turns to Justin and asks: “Do you think there was anything to what she showed you?” Justin does his best to describe his doubts without being rude, rambling a bit about exposure speeds. Dr Miller nods sagely but seems a little disappointed. Later, Justin tells me that the student’s camera was worth several thousand pounds.
Skip Atwater has an infectious and girly giggle, which sounds rather odd when you first hear it coming from a six-foot-plus ex-army man with a crew cut. He is one of the main reasons for our visit here, as I suspect he is for many who now venture to Monroe. His military background is almost legendary, and his presence at Monroe lends the proceedings a certain ‘black ops’ cachet.
He’s now Research Director at the Institute, and he takes obvious joy in showing us around a lab which, one suspects, is even more richly equipped than those he used in the army. There are vast banks of recording equipment, computers in which all the digital audio processing work is done, an isolation chamber kitted out with gear for recording pulse rates and electrical brain activity… and a water mattress.
“This is a flotation bed,” says Atwater. “While students lie on the flotation bed it’s very womb-like. The water is warmed to skin temperature. You can get very relaxed in this bed. The booth is lined in copper on all six surfaces, so that it makes a Faraday Cage while you’re in here and outside radiation doesn’t penetrate in here and affect the person - it’s a neutral electronic environment. And they prevent sound from getting in here. It’s a quiet kind of environment.”
Atwater chuckles as he tells us that the mattress once escaped the cage of its own accord. “Capillary traction. You remember the movie The Blob? It was just like this big huge blob had escaped.”
His background is well known. In September 1995, the US military officially shut down its RV operations, launched at the height of the Cold War to close a perceived ‘psychic spying gap’ with the USSR. [See FT87: 27-30; 95: 34-39; 98: 57; 116: 66; 118:46]. At various times called Project Scanate, Flame Grill, Sun Streak and Stargate, these programmes had been funded to the tune of m over the course of 23 years.
“There were many different things going on,” says Atwater. “I was just the Army Intelligence branch. So I wasn’t the only thing in the whole world. I was a company grade officer, a captain, in a small unit in the Army, doing this for 10 years.”
Most of those involved remain convinced of the validity of this level of investment and point, for example, to Ingo Swann’s alleged Remote Viewing of a ring around Jupiter, discovered and confirmed in early 1979, six years after the Jupiter Probe had taken place, or various results achieved in double-blind experiments.
Others claim that even these results are inconclusive and, certainly, the scribbled drawings produced as evidence of the sites viewed are difficult to accept as anything other than ambiguous sketches. The waters are muddied even further, however, by some of those who have made a career from telling the story of their experiences.
I raise one such muddy area with Atwater. Part of the US psychic spying programme focused on attempting to remotely influence the minds of individuals. In some of the wilder stories concerning the Soviet programmes, there is talk of remote murder, of the exploration of psychic techniques for use in assassinations. Given the immersive nature of the experience offered to students at the Monroe Institute, it seems appropriate to raise the spectre of mind-control.
“The subject of mind-control comes up because it is thrilling, exciting and dangerous,” intones Atwater. “With my experience of Remote Viewing in the military there was never any mind-control or remote influencing. Now, you’ll get some people to say there was, but I think they’re motivated by wanting to sell some sort of book.”
“Recently, Joe MacMoneagle - another alumnus of the RV programme now also working at the Monroe Institute [see FT116: 66] - actually went to the Soviet Union and studied some of the research they’d done on these things and found that it was flawed research, that they had not looked at their data in the correct way, used the correct statistics. So the Russians were very happy that he had looked at it and they re-did the experiments and found that there was no link at all. The things that leaked out - there’s a famous book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, I think it came out in the Sixties or Seventies - were really thrilling and dangerous. Well, the science behind that turned out to be flawed science. So, at the present time, to my knowledge, there is no concept of direct mental influence.”
But was Atwater party to experiments exploring potential influencing of remote subjects? “We have used with Remote Viewing a form of remote hypnosis. During interrogation, having a remote viewer suggest to the person that’s being interrogated that if he cooperates he’ll get to see his family again. Now, could someone twist that story into a wild tale of mind control? Yes, but those same people would take a psychiatrist and say that the word therapist, when you spell it out, is ‘the rapist’. In my experience this idea of mind-control is mostly fiction and sells books and makes good movies.”
I mention that Atwater’s life now, at the Monroe Institute, seems a far cry from his military career. For him, it was always going to be thus. “I think that in my younger years I was sort of guided into that unit in the military so that I could learn about that. Now I think that the real value of this ESP or Remote Viewing is not in the information that you uncover, not in finding missed children or hidden secrets of the enemy, or missing terrorists for that matter, I think the real value is in self-discovery: who you really are, that you are more, in fact, than your physical body; that you’re interconnected, one with everyone else, in a very unusual way. That you are on a path of evolutionary consciousness and that when you become aware of this you are responsible then for the evolution of your own consciousness.”
It will perhaps come as little surprise that Atwater, like Dr Miller, was raised by “metaphysically oriented parents… What the normal population would consider quite odd was normal in my family. So when I stumbled serendipitously into this programme in the military, it seemed quite natural to me.”
He speaks in incredibly measured tones and seems like a man at home with everything he says and does. He carries his large frame lightly and often talks in homilies, or what seem like pre-prepared spiels.
I become conscious of the fact that whatever I ask him, he seems happy with. This could, I am sure, in another mind become evidence of his influence over the conversation. Occasionally, however, and particularly on questions which refer to proof or evidence, his homilies wander a little.
For example, Atwater’s answer to the admittedly obvious question “is there anything to do with altered states of consciousness that can be empirically verified?” while expressing laudable sentiments, does seem to dodge the issue:
“I understand where your question comes from. I think that the answer is that love is a common experience. I think that people in these various states of consciousness, when they approach their situation with love, they all tend to report the same thing. For example, healing. Healing and love are connected in all instances of reporting. So there is a feeling that that must be a universal truth, that true healing comes from this emotion we identify as love.”
He points out, reasonably, the impossibility of measuring subjective experience and drawing direct lines between brain activity and what is actually appearing in someone’s mind’s eye. He does, however, put great faith in research being undertaken at the Paralabs at Princeton University which does seem to produce measurable results, research into the idea that “when there is some sort of focused awareness of an event happening, subatomic randomness seems to collapse just a little bit.”
“It is as though consciousness itself is affecting the subatomic world,” he says. “Note that I said, ‘as though’. It may not really be that. It may just be that a property of focused consciousness is non-randomness, that they may be co-existent events, not one causing the other.
“We’re interested in that in terms of our group classes here. When we run group classes of 25 people and they’re all intently concentrating on one thing, is that affecting our local random number generators? I’m running random number generators for our programmes to see if that’s happening. Can we recreate that anomaly with smaller groups of people?”
But any hope that we might see these results is also slim. “We don’t have the data yet,” he says. “This is ongoing.”
The idea of collective consciousness is key to the Monroe credo. There is much interest in a particular interpretation of the Jungian idea of archetypes (see FT171:42-47), and specifically light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel type near-death experiences. But a couple of different archetypes, perhaps better referred to as clichés, can be found scattered around the Monroe Institute buildings.
“Dolphins are big here,” explains Dr Miller when I ask her about these. “Rainbows. Crystals. I don’t think it’s any mistake that certain common ones keep coming back and show up here. If we all share this consciousness and there’s something like a dolphin, which represents non-human intelligence, it becomes a symbol for that that’ll pop up wherever appropriate.”
I suggest that the selection of such symbols is at best arbitrary and at worst based on ignorance of what lies behind the symbol in question, with reference particularly to the behaviour of male dolphins, which have been discovered to perpetrate group rapes upon females. Dr Miller isn’t phased. “We don’t like to talk about those. They diminish the spirituality.”
Atwater is slightly more cagey on the New Age clichés. “Because Bob Monroe was a serious businessman himself, the imprint that he left here was that this was not so much ‘woo-woo’ - I don’t know how you’re going to spell that - it’s not airy-fairy, it’s ‘this is the facts the way I discovered them’. We don’t have a doctrine. We don’t wear white robes or eat only tofu. But you will find the occasional crystal out here. People like that kind of thing.”
Indeed, you will find “the occasional crystal” out here. A five-ton monstrosity sits eight feet (2.4m) high in the field below the Nancy Penn Center. Back at the Acorn Inn that night, Martin tells us it was transported from Brazil, at great personal expense, by a Monroe student.
Perhaps the strongest message coming through from both Atwater and Darlene Miller is that ‘the group’ is very important to Monroe Institute programmes.
The idea of group energy and synergy is held aloft like a holy chalice, and this necessarily raises certain questions about the psychology of groups, about what might happen when a group of people intently wants to achieve a prescribed result in terms of their conscious experience.
“Do I think there’s any kind of mass hallucination going on? No, I don’t,” says Dr Miller.
An odd sticker on Atwater’s desk elucidates the behaviour of Monroe groups quite unexpectedly. The sticker reads ‘Ask me about Focus 55’. Mainly because it seems churlish not to, I do ask Atwater about Focus 55.
“This is a cute sticker,” he says. “Bob Monroe assigned number levels for these different windows in consciousness, starting out with 10, 12, 15, 21. Well, there is no such thing as 55. But people get what I call focus envy. They start saying, ‘Well I was in 27’ - ‘Well I was in 36’. And so this always reminds me the numbers don’t always mean anything and a bigger number is not better than a smaller number. They are just arbitrary labels.”
A valley away, past the handful of bars, restaurants and shops that makes up Nellysford, Jim Meissner lives in a ramshackle house surrounded by trailers. In his trailers he keeps his equipment: electronics gear, machine tools, enough solder, nails, screws and wire to fill a hardware store. We’d met Meissner in Bistro 151, a sports bar and pizza joint in Nellysford, the night before we went to Monroe. We’d been chatting to Jane, the bar lady, when Jim had overheard our conversation.
“You guys are here to go to Monroe?”
“Yeah, we’re writing a story about it.”
“You should write a story about me.”
Meissner was in his early sixties, wearing thick-lensed prescription glasses and a stripy short-sleeved shirt with pens in the top pocket, a look immortalised by Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down. But he exuded none of the aggression of Douglas’s character. He was calm, friendly, perhaps a bit of a nerd. And, as he explained that night, he could heal people.
He had been drawn to Nellysford by the Monroe Institute. Following the death of his wife, he’d upped sticks from his home on the West Coast and come to Monroe to show them his invention: a box which took Robert Monroe’s Hemi-Sync technology and amped it up ten-fold. Or so he claimed.
“I used to listen to Bob Monroe’s tapes but they weren’t strong enough for me. So I improved on the Hemi-Sync technology.”
As an electrical engineer specialising in audio engineering, Jim had the skills to do this. He’d made his Brain State Synchronizer and taken it to Monroe and to Atwater. “Skip Atwater called me a snake-oil salesman,” Meissner told me with a hang-dog look. He’d been sent packing, condemned to reside in the next valley and to sell his invention online.
I’d asked Atwater about Meissner. He had remembered him, referring to him as a “Mr Wizard type of guy, an inventor”, and explained that he’d politely passed when offered the invention, having no need for it. But if Meissner’s version of events was true, and Atwater’s comment to him more than a little disingenuous, it wasn’t hard to see why Meissner’s presence might not have been seen as helpful to the smooth operation of the Monroe Institute.
Within minutes of being invited into Meissner’s house, I felt a little uneasy and wondered if Meissner himself might be having second thoughts about seeing us. Perhaps his bravado of the other evening had been fuelled by alcohol. Certainly, he was a little more nervous as he showed us around his messy, cobwebby home, the perfect habitat for a mad inventor.
He made it clear that he would rather I didn’t report certain areas of his research. He was concerned that in so doing I would draw the attention of the Federal Government to his activities, which he didn’t want. He explained why what he was doing represented such a threat to government, particularly the Health Administration. I promised him that I would not report on this research and intend to keep my word.
Suffice it to say, however, that unless I’m very much mistaken, Meissner’s research is in no way illegal, nor indeed of any particular use to anyone but a handful of people who share the same interests as Jim. His speakers are pretty impressive, though.
A lot of jargon is employed at the Monroe Institute. There is much talk of “mental dimensions”, “conducive states of consciousness”, and “realms of hypnagogic imagery”.
It must be hard for those who have undergone what they feel to be consciousness-altering experiences to put such experiences into words, and it is perhaps unavoidable that this sort of jargon has to be employed to pin down concepts larger than words themselves. Nevertheless, by the time we leave I’m not sure I’m any the wiser about consciousness.
Before we did leave, I asked to try out some Hemi-Sync tapes. Atwater put me in the isolation chamber. Protected from electrical radiation and wearing headphones which brought his gentle coaxings to me through the Faraday Cage, I dozed off, listening to the sounds of lapping water and Bob Monroe’s voice as they mixed down into phased tones.
I was in for an hour, apparently, and Atwater and photographer Justin Canning were able to hear my snoring through the microphones. I came out feeling incredibly spacey. I couldn’t say whether it had been any more positive an experience than your average mid-afternoon snooze, but I know I’d need a lot more Hemi-Sync before I could attempt Remote Viewing.
One thing is certain: Bob Monroe has achieved immortality, in a fashion, and proved his theories about life after death.
And it’s not just that the Institute is named after him. His voice lives on in the very fabric of the buildings, piped into the check-in units, the isolation chamber, spooling and spinning on tapes and discs. The Institute is a temple to Monroe, sculpted from the sound of his voice. His benign presence is everywhere. Whether it actually interferes with the video presentation equipment or forms non-corporeal hazes around the check-in units is open to debate. But it is undeniable that he lives on as long as the Institute remains in this beautiful corner of Virginia… and elsewhere, as long as his recordings are played.
Lifeline
Service There is accomplished through becoming knowledgeable about Focus™ Levels 23 through 27. Focus 23 is often perceived as an area in which certain souls, for a variety of reasons, may become "stuck" following their transitions from physical life. Lifeline participants learn to comfortably make contact with such souls and offer assistance to help them move to Focus 27, the area Bob Monroe described in Ultimate Journey as the Park, or Reception Center, or Way Station. Upon arrival in Focus 27, they are met by loved ones and guides who direct them to the specific areas of the Reception Center most appropriate for their next stages of development.
Participants also are given the opportunity within this program to explore Focus Levels 24, 25, and 26 (the Belief System Territories) and to investigate facets of their own current beliefs and structures for operating within the world. Questions which arise often take the form of "What is my most limiting belief? And "How do my present beliefs support me in exploring as freely and fully as I would like?"
Perhaps the most significant impact of this week, however, comes from the personal revelations that frequently evolve from those "rescue and retrieval" activities. Beyond the considerable satisfactions of helping others move forward, many participants realize that at the same time they are also retrieving lost parts or fragments of themselves, and thus coming into more wholeness, completion, and balance.
Lifeline participants gain familiarity with additional Focus levels:
Focus 22 -
where humans still in the physical have partial consciousness, remembered as dreams, deliria, and patterns induced through chemicals;
Focus 23 -
inhabited by humans who have recently exited physical existence and have not adapted to such change;
Focus 25 -
the Belief System territories where those who have exited the physical are residing in a particular belief system;
Focus 27 -
the Reception Center, Way Station, or Park, designed to ease the trauma and shock of the transition out of physical reality, and to assist those there in evaluating options for their next steps in growth and development.
Here's a neat article from the Fortean Times mag about TMI
Remote Viewing at the Monroe Institute
Since its perhaps surprising acceptance as a surveillance device within the intelligence community, Remote Viewing has gone through a transformation to become part of the New Age toolkit. Mark Blacklock visits one of RV’s elder statesmen in the USA.
By Mark Blacklock August 2004 .
At the Monroe Institute in Virginia, non-local consciousness is a reality. Ditto life after death. Out-of-body experiences occur on a daily basis and in the labs they’re conducting research into the reported collapse of sub-atomic randomness during periods when human consciousness is focused on particular events. Oh yes, and you can learn Remote Viewing techniques from alumni of the US military psychic spying programmes. It seems fair to say that it’s not your average rural retreat.
As F Holmes ‘Skip’ Atwater, Research Director at the Institute and, from 1977 to 1987, Operations and Training Officer for the Army Intelligence Branch of the US government’s RV programme, points out: “A week-long cruise in the Bahamas is about the same price as a week-long cruise in consciousness.”
The Institute emerged out of the experimental work of Robert Monroe (pictured below), a radio producer and television executive, who had become interested in human consciousness research in the late 1950s, when he began having what would come to be termed ‘out-of-body-experiences’. His first thought was that he was suffering some sort of mental illness. When his doctor could find nothing wrong with him, Monroe decided to investigate the matter himself, setting up a small research programme within his company to look into the feasibility of learning during sleep.
According to Monroe’s official biography: “In the ensuing years, Mr Monroe and his group began work on means and methods of inducing and controlling this and other forms of consciousness in their laboratory. As specialists in creating patterns of effective sound, they used this base for their research.”
By 1974, the set-up had been christened the Monroe Institute, and by 1975 Monroe’s researchers had discovered (and patented) Hemi-Sync audio technology.
The genteel Blue Ridge Mountain range in south east Virginia is steeped in history. Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson lies in the Piedmont foothills nearby; President James Monroe lived on the Ash-Lawn Highland Estate near Charlottesville and James Madison lived in the city itself. Within a 150-mile radius of Washington DC and rising above the surrounding seats of Federal and military government, this American paradise has long attracted the wealthy and well-to-do, while tourists come from all over the States to see the colourful display put on by the autumn trees, when all around the hills are covered in russet and brown leaves. Visitors can hike along the southern stretch of the Appalachian Trail, stopping by one of the numerous orchards to pick their own apples. The temperatures stay in the 20s and 30s Celcius until mid-October. When the temperatures do drop in winter, the luxury Wintergreen Ski Resort keeps the holidaymakers coming.
But none of this can quite match what’s on offer at the Monroe Institute.
Cycling nut Martin Verhuys, owner of the Acorn Inn, hasn’t been on a course at the Monroe Institute but he has plenty of contact with the organisation. A lot of his guests are either about to begin or have just ended a course there. He has also used Hemi-Sync tapes. “Some years ago I had a serious cycling accident and a friend lent me some of their tapes - just for helping me sleep. I’m not interested in big hocus pocus but they did work. His voice and the sounds... After a while I didn’t need the tapes any more, I could do it on my own.” The voice in question was Monroe’s. “He was a very good man,” says Martin.
He is a little less generous about some of his other neighbours, whom he views in a slightly comical light. Because, unexpectedly, the Monroe Institute turns out to have some very local competition in the meditation game.
“This is a hot-bed of, I guess you say, New Age stuff,” explains Martin. “There is a meditation centre just the other side. Brother Charles came to Monroe and he must have thought ‘I’ll set up nearby’. He has his own tapes.” This centre is called the Syncronicity Center. “Bob Monroe didn’t want to be a guru,” adds Martin. “His approach was more scientific.”
Hemi-Sync has become a key feature of Monroe’s legacy. Not only has it provided the platform and basis for his tapes and CDs which compete seriously in the New Age market for relaxation and meditation aids, but it has inspired a number of imitators, including the Synchronicity Center. Hemi-Sync is a tool for achieving the altered states of consciousness in which Monroe was interested. How does it work?
The continuous electrical activity of the brain was first recorded by Dr Hans Berger, the “Father of Electro-encephalography”, in 1924. Berger described this symphony of electrical activity in terms of frequency bands: gamma (greater than 30Hz) beta (13-30Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), and delta (less than 4 Hz). He noted that these frequency bands were roughly associated with different states of consciousness; beta being the waking, alert state; alpha, a relaxed state; theta, a transitory, intermediary state before sleep; and delta, deep sleep, the frequency of brain activity being faster for more alert states.
Berger’s work has allowed modern researchers interested in consciousness to monitor the activity of the brain and note its changes, thereby providing some externally recorded empirical data to accompany records of subjective experience. Berger simply classified activity already occurring. Monroe’s discovery was apparently a tool for accelerating the alternation between these different bands of brain activity, an automatic gearbox which improved upon evolution’s manual transmission.
Skip Atwater explains how Hemi-Sync effects these patterns: “Different frequencies are played in each ear, which causes the brain to interpret a phase difference. So, the phase difference is interpreted by the brain as being a vibrato. And because we can adjust the frequencies between the two ears, we can change the rate of that vibration within brain wave frequencies and route it where we want the person to go in terms of their consciousness.”
The idea of altering the electrical frequency of the brain with an audio signal was fairly radical and remains the main focus of the Monroe Institute’s proselytising. Dr Darlene Miller, the Institute’s Director of Programmes, explains how the Institute is working to have Hemi-Sync enshrined in traditional scientific literature.
“We have a Professional Division,” she says. “These people do research away from here in universities and we’re getting a body of scientific study that shows that this Hemi-Sync technology leads people into certain states of consciousness and also leads to certain prescribed results. For instance, we have a series of exercises called the Surgical Support series, which is used before, during and after surgery. And there are a number of studies now that show that people using this series require less anæsthesia, their blood pressure is lower, they come out of the recovery room more alert, with less need for pain medication and their stay in hospital is days less than without the Hemi-Sync. That’s good information. You have that compared to a control group who didn’t use the Hemi-Sync, that’s traditional Western scientific methodology.”
And indeed, this work does seem to have been rigorous enough to have been published in a handful of respectable journals such as Physiology & Behavior and Anaesthesiology. But some of the other claims made at the Institute, and also for Hemi-Sync, are rather trickier to pin down. “If you ask me for a study to prove that this leads to the out-of-body state or enables someone to talk to a loved one who has died, then we get into areas that are very difficult,” admits Dr Miller.
Dr Miller has been working at the Monroe Institute since 1984. “I was actually working and living in Colorado and I had friends who came to one of the very first residential programmes here. At the time I was the director of a 180-bed institution for violent sex offenders. I’m also a clinical psychologist. My training is very traditional.” Her upbringing was similarly traditional. “I’d been raised a Fundamentalist Christian. My family is still to the right of Jerry Fallwell. I had a lot to overcome in terms of that. To their minds this is still the work of the devil. It’s not biblical.”
Dr Miller’s medical background is useful at Monroe. In dealing with altered consciousness, it is important to be able to recognise those who might react adversely to further consciousness alteration. “The only thing I’m bothered about is whether they’ve had any hospitalisations for mental health disorders,” says Dr Miller. “Or, if they’ve been in therapy, what was the diagnosis and circumstances of that and are they on any current medication? Obviously, because this is powerful stuff, you want people to be pretty well-hinged to handle the intensity of it.”
Occasionally, unhinged people slip through the net. “There have been a few circumstances where people have been on the edge and we didn’t know because they didn’t fill out their application honestly. They’ve lost the distinctions and actual boundaries - how to classify things. They just lost those distinctions, and we don’t want that to happen.”
I’ve arrived at the Monroe Institute for just a couple of days. Because the currently running course is an advanced programme called Lifeline, open only to graduates of the Gateway Voyage Course, I am not permitted to participate. I had been hoping to meet some of the students on the course but, sadly, this is not to be.
“Almost solely it’s because part of the learning experience and quite a lot of what people come here for is the group energy, the synergy of what happens with people of similar intent,” explains Dr Miller. “And so there’s a confidentiality around that. There are a lot of deep sharing experiences.”
It’s disappointing, but my trip is confined to a couple of chats with Dr Miller and a guided tour of the facility in the company of Atwater. After an introductory chinwag, Dr Miller takes me to a conference room to watch a promotional video featuring Monroe describing his early out-of-body experiences. Dr Miller has to wrangle with the video and isn’t enjoying much success. Suddenly, the whole thing comes to life. “Wow,” she says. “That’s strange. That kind of thing happens a lot round here.”
After the video, we head over to the main building to have a look at where students stay, in two-bed dorms with little bunks which are referred to as “check-in units”. There are audio speakers on the walls in each unit, level with the pillow. These are used to pipe in the Hemi-Sync tapes of the student’s choice. The student is encouraged to use the meditation aids as much as possible. Given that Monroe’s initial research was focused on learning during sleep, this includes the hours after lights-out. This is an immersive experience, as explained by Dr Miller.
“We don’t have TV, we don’t have radios, we don’t have newspapers. We encourage people not to call their businesses and find out what the stock market is doing - we encourage people just to be here. There’s a sense of community and family, people get very close to the group, people say they feel like they’ve known these people before, there’s a great synergy.”
As I’m looking around a check-in unit with photographer Justin Canning, the two students whose room it is return from lunch. Dr Miller is a little flustered, presumably worried about disturbances in synergy, but the students are okay with us being there. One of the girls spots Justin’s digital camera. “Hey,” she says, “did you get a glow on your pictures?”
Justin is politely noncommittal, but the student won’t be dissuaded. “I took some pictures of my check-in unit and it’s like there’s a strange glow around it. Like some kind of aura.” She fetches her camera to show us a couple of out-of-focus and blurry shots of her bunk. Once again, Justin’s politesse is to the fore.
After we’ve made our excuses and parted company with the students, Dr Miller, looking rather serious, turns to Justin and asks: “Do you think there was anything to what she showed you?” Justin does his best to describe his doubts without being rude, rambling a bit about exposure speeds. Dr Miller nods sagely but seems a little disappointed. Later, Justin tells me that the student’s camera was worth several thousand pounds.
Skip Atwater has an infectious and girly giggle, which sounds rather odd when you first hear it coming from a six-foot-plus ex-army man with a crew cut. He is one of the main reasons for our visit here, as I suspect he is for many who now venture to Monroe. His military background is almost legendary, and his presence at Monroe lends the proceedings a certain ‘black ops’ cachet.
He’s now Research Director at the Institute, and he takes obvious joy in showing us around a lab which, one suspects, is even more richly equipped than those he used in the army. There are vast banks of recording equipment, computers in which all the digital audio processing work is done, an isolation chamber kitted out with gear for recording pulse rates and electrical brain activity… and a water mattress.
“This is a flotation bed,” says Atwater. “While students lie on the flotation bed it’s very womb-like. The water is warmed to skin temperature. You can get very relaxed in this bed. The booth is lined in copper on all six surfaces, so that it makes a Faraday Cage while you’re in here and outside radiation doesn’t penetrate in here and affect the person - it’s a neutral electronic environment. And they prevent sound from getting in here. It’s a quiet kind of environment.”
Atwater chuckles as he tells us that the mattress once escaped the cage of its own accord. “Capillary traction. You remember the movie The Blob? It was just like this big huge blob had escaped.”
His background is well known. In September 1995, the US military officially shut down its RV operations, launched at the height of the Cold War to close a perceived ‘psychic spying gap’ with the USSR. [See FT87: 27-30; 95: 34-39; 98: 57; 116: 66; 118:46]. At various times called Project Scanate, Flame Grill, Sun Streak and Stargate, these programmes had been funded to the tune of m over the course of 23 years.
“There were many different things going on,” says Atwater. “I was just the Army Intelligence branch. So I wasn’t the only thing in the whole world. I was a company grade officer, a captain, in a small unit in the Army, doing this for 10 years.”
Most of those involved remain convinced of the validity of this level of investment and point, for example, to Ingo Swann’s alleged Remote Viewing of a ring around Jupiter, discovered and confirmed in early 1979, six years after the Jupiter Probe had taken place, or various results achieved in double-blind experiments.
Others claim that even these results are inconclusive and, certainly, the scribbled drawings produced as evidence of the sites viewed are difficult to accept as anything other than ambiguous sketches. The waters are muddied even further, however, by some of those who have made a career from telling the story of their experiences.
I raise one such muddy area with Atwater. Part of the US psychic spying programme focused on attempting to remotely influence the minds of individuals. In some of the wilder stories concerning the Soviet programmes, there is talk of remote murder, of the exploration of psychic techniques for use in assassinations. Given the immersive nature of the experience offered to students at the Monroe Institute, it seems appropriate to raise the spectre of mind-control.
“The subject of mind-control comes up because it is thrilling, exciting and dangerous,” intones Atwater. “With my experience of Remote Viewing in the military there was never any mind-control or remote influencing. Now, you’ll get some people to say there was, but I think they’re motivated by wanting to sell some sort of book.”
“Recently, Joe MacMoneagle - another alumnus of the RV programme now also working at the Monroe Institute [see FT116: 66] - actually went to the Soviet Union and studied some of the research they’d done on these things and found that it was flawed research, that they had not looked at their data in the correct way, used the correct statistics. So the Russians were very happy that he had looked at it and they re-did the experiments and found that there was no link at all. The things that leaked out - there’s a famous book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, I think it came out in the Sixties or Seventies - were really thrilling and dangerous. Well, the science behind that turned out to be flawed science. So, at the present time, to my knowledge, there is no concept of direct mental influence.”
But was Atwater party to experiments exploring potential influencing of remote subjects? “We have used with Remote Viewing a form of remote hypnosis. During interrogation, having a remote viewer suggest to the person that’s being interrogated that if he cooperates he’ll get to see his family again. Now, could someone twist that story into a wild tale of mind control? Yes, but those same people would take a psychiatrist and say that the word therapist, when you spell it out, is ‘the rapist’. In my experience this idea of mind-control is mostly fiction and sells books and makes good movies.”
I mention that Atwater’s life now, at the Monroe Institute, seems a far cry from his military career. For him, it was always going to be thus. “I think that in my younger years I was sort of guided into that unit in the military so that I could learn about that. Now I think that the real value of this ESP or Remote Viewing is not in the information that you uncover, not in finding missed children or hidden secrets of the enemy, or missing terrorists for that matter, I think the real value is in self-discovery: who you really are, that you are more, in fact, than your physical body; that you’re interconnected, one with everyone else, in a very unusual way. That you are on a path of evolutionary consciousness and that when you become aware of this you are responsible then for the evolution of your own consciousness.”
It will perhaps come as little surprise that Atwater, like Dr Miller, was raised by “metaphysically oriented parents… What the normal population would consider quite odd was normal in my family. So when I stumbled serendipitously into this programme in the military, it seemed quite natural to me.”
He speaks in incredibly measured tones and seems like a man at home with everything he says and does. He carries his large frame lightly and often talks in homilies, or what seem like pre-prepared spiels.
I become conscious of the fact that whatever I ask him, he seems happy with. This could, I am sure, in another mind become evidence of his influence over the conversation. Occasionally, however, and particularly on questions which refer to proof or evidence, his homilies wander a little.
For example, Atwater’s answer to the admittedly obvious question “is there anything to do with altered states of consciousness that can be empirically verified?” while expressing laudable sentiments, does seem to dodge the issue:
“I understand where your question comes from. I think that the answer is that love is a common experience. I think that people in these various states of consciousness, when they approach their situation with love, they all tend to report the same thing. For example, healing. Healing and love are connected in all instances of reporting. So there is a feeling that that must be a universal truth, that true healing comes from this emotion we identify as love.”
He points out, reasonably, the impossibility of measuring subjective experience and drawing direct lines between brain activity and what is actually appearing in someone’s mind’s eye. He does, however, put great faith in research being undertaken at the Paralabs at Princeton University which does seem to produce measurable results, research into the idea that “when there is some sort of focused awareness of an event happening, subatomic randomness seems to collapse just a little bit.”
“It is as though consciousness itself is affecting the subatomic world,” he says. “Note that I said, ‘as though’. It may not really be that. It may just be that a property of focused consciousness is non-randomness, that they may be co-existent events, not one causing the other.
“We’re interested in that in terms of our group classes here. When we run group classes of 25 people and they’re all intently concentrating on one thing, is that affecting our local random number generators? I’m running random number generators for our programmes to see if that’s happening. Can we recreate that anomaly with smaller groups of people?”
But any hope that we might see these results is also slim. “We don’t have the data yet,” he says. “This is ongoing.”
The idea of collective consciousness is key to the Monroe credo. There is much interest in a particular interpretation of the Jungian idea of archetypes (see FT171:42-47), and specifically light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel type near-death experiences. But a couple of different archetypes, perhaps better referred to as clichés, can be found scattered around the Monroe Institute buildings.
“Dolphins are big here,” explains Dr Miller when I ask her about these. “Rainbows. Crystals. I don’t think it’s any mistake that certain common ones keep coming back and show up here. If we all share this consciousness and there’s something like a dolphin, which represents non-human intelligence, it becomes a symbol for that that’ll pop up wherever appropriate.”
I suggest that the selection of such symbols is at best arbitrary and at worst based on ignorance of what lies behind the symbol in question, with reference particularly to the behaviour of male dolphins, which have been discovered to perpetrate group rapes upon females. Dr Miller isn’t phased. “We don’t like to talk about those. They diminish the spirituality.”
Atwater is slightly more cagey on the New Age clichés. “Because Bob Monroe was a serious businessman himself, the imprint that he left here was that this was not so much ‘woo-woo’ - I don’t know how you’re going to spell that - it’s not airy-fairy, it’s ‘this is the facts the way I discovered them’. We don’t have a doctrine. We don’t wear white robes or eat only tofu. But you will find the occasional crystal out here. People like that kind of thing.”
Indeed, you will find “the occasional crystal” out here. A five-ton monstrosity sits eight feet (2.4m) high in the field below the Nancy Penn Center. Back at the Acorn Inn that night, Martin tells us it was transported from Brazil, at great personal expense, by a Monroe student.
Perhaps the strongest message coming through from both Atwater and Darlene Miller is that ‘the group’ is very important to Monroe Institute programmes.
The idea of group energy and synergy is held aloft like a holy chalice, and this necessarily raises certain questions about the psychology of groups, about what might happen when a group of people intently wants to achieve a prescribed result in terms of their conscious experience.
“Do I think there’s any kind of mass hallucination going on? No, I don’t,” says Dr Miller.
An odd sticker on Atwater’s desk elucidates the behaviour of Monroe groups quite unexpectedly. The sticker reads ‘Ask me about Focus 55’. Mainly because it seems churlish not to, I do ask Atwater about Focus 55.
“This is a cute sticker,” he says. “Bob Monroe assigned number levels for these different windows in consciousness, starting out with 10, 12, 15, 21. Well, there is no such thing as 55. But people get what I call focus envy. They start saying, ‘Well I was in 27’ - ‘Well I was in 36’. And so this always reminds me the numbers don’t always mean anything and a bigger number is not better than a smaller number. They are just arbitrary labels.”
A valley away, past the handful of bars, restaurants and shops that makes up Nellysford, Jim Meissner lives in a ramshackle house surrounded by trailers. In his trailers he keeps his equipment: electronics gear, machine tools, enough solder, nails, screws and wire to fill a hardware store. We’d met Meissner in Bistro 151, a sports bar and pizza joint in Nellysford, the night before we went to Monroe. We’d been chatting to Jane, the bar lady, when Jim had overheard our conversation.
“You guys are here to go to Monroe?”
“Yeah, we’re writing a story about it.”
“You should write a story about me.”
Meissner was in his early sixties, wearing thick-lensed prescription glasses and a stripy short-sleeved shirt with pens in the top pocket, a look immortalised by Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down. But he exuded none of the aggression of Douglas’s character. He was calm, friendly, perhaps a bit of a nerd. And, as he explained that night, he could heal people.
He had been drawn to Nellysford by the Monroe Institute. Following the death of his wife, he’d upped sticks from his home on the West Coast and come to Monroe to show them his invention: a box which took Robert Monroe’s Hemi-Sync technology and amped it up ten-fold. Or so he claimed.
“I used to listen to Bob Monroe’s tapes but they weren’t strong enough for me. So I improved on the Hemi-Sync technology.”
As an electrical engineer specialising in audio engineering, Jim had the skills to do this. He’d made his Brain State Synchronizer and taken it to Monroe and to Atwater. “Skip Atwater called me a snake-oil salesman,” Meissner told me with a hang-dog look. He’d been sent packing, condemned to reside in the next valley and to sell his invention online.
I’d asked Atwater about Meissner. He had remembered him, referring to him as a “Mr Wizard type of guy, an inventor”, and explained that he’d politely passed when offered the invention, having no need for it. But if Meissner’s version of events was true, and Atwater’s comment to him more than a little disingenuous, it wasn’t hard to see why Meissner’s presence might not have been seen as helpful to the smooth operation of the Monroe Institute.
Within minutes of being invited into Meissner’s house, I felt a little uneasy and wondered if Meissner himself might be having second thoughts about seeing us. Perhaps his bravado of the other evening had been fuelled by alcohol. Certainly, he was a little more nervous as he showed us around his messy, cobwebby home, the perfect habitat for a mad inventor.
He made it clear that he would rather I didn’t report certain areas of his research. He was concerned that in so doing I would draw the attention of the Federal Government to his activities, which he didn’t want. He explained why what he was doing represented such a threat to government, particularly the Health Administration. I promised him that I would not report on this research and intend to keep my word.
Suffice it to say, however, that unless I’m very much mistaken, Meissner’s research is in no way illegal, nor indeed of any particular use to anyone but a handful of people who share the same interests as Jim. His speakers are pretty impressive, though.
A lot of jargon is employed at the Monroe Institute. There is much talk of “mental dimensions”, “conducive states of consciousness”, and “realms of hypnagogic imagery”.
It must be hard for those who have undergone what they feel to be consciousness-altering experiences to put such experiences into words, and it is perhaps unavoidable that this sort of jargon has to be employed to pin down concepts larger than words themselves. Nevertheless, by the time we leave I’m not sure I’m any the wiser about consciousness.
Before we did leave, I asked to try out some Hemi-Sync tapes. Atwater put me in the isolation chamber. Protected from electrical radiation and wearing headphones which brought his gentle coaxings to me through the Faraday Cage, I dozed off, listening to the sounds of lapping water and Bob Monroe’s voice as they mixed down into phased tones.
I was in for an hour, apparently, and Atwater and photographer Justin Canning were able to hear my snoring through the microphones. I came out feeling incredibly spacey. I couldn’t say whether it had been any more positive an experience than your average mid-afternoon snooze, but I know I’d need a lot more Hemi-Sync before I could attempt Remote Viewing.
One thing is certain: Bob Monroe has achieved immortality, in a fashion, and proved his theories about life after death.
And it’s not just that the Institute is named after him. His voice lives on in the very fabric of the buildings, piped into the check-in units, the isolation chamber, spooling and spinning on tapes and discs. The Institute is a temple to Monroe, sculpted from the sound of his voice. His benign presence is everywhere. Whether it actually interferes with the video presentation equipment or forms non-corporeal hazes around the check-in units is open to debate. But it is undeniable that he lives on as long as the Institute remains in this beautiful corner of Virginia… and elsewhere, as long as his recordings are played.