Full Spectral Dominance (Part One)

You could go down to the canyon
piss away this incarnation
but just remember that you pay for what you get - Bruce Cockburn

As I said in an earlier post, I'm finding the correspondences between boundary experiences a fascinating and instructive study. And an aspect which almost always appears present, whichever boundary is breached, is the electrical. Perhaps not surprisingly so, since the electric is also a irreducible aspect of physical life. It's not only out there, but it's in us. (In other words I suppose, wherever you go, there you are.) Our brains are not just grey matter; they also carry a frequency. And it seems, or so we're told, when we tune it just so, we can pick up other stations of reality's broad band.

It's what Bob Monroe was talking about, as he detailed his 40-year astral travelogue. Monroe developed a technique he called "hemi-sync" for inducing altered states of consciousness by entraining the brain towards certain frequencies. In the early '80s, INSCOM officers and the military's remote viewers were visiting Virginia's Monroe Institute every few weeks for it's five-day "Gateway Lifeline" program to hone their paranormal skills, though for their sake it was given the less squishy title of "Rapid Advancement Personal Training." (Monroe's military-intelligence connections might have been a birthright: it is said that his father was James Monroe, Executive Director of the CIA's mind control cut-out the Human Ecology Society.)

Monroe's first book, Journeys Out of the Body, includes a number of diary entries from the late '50s and early '60s which recount his early experiences with astral projection before hitting upon hemi-sync. For instance:

11/5/58 Afternoon

The vibrations came quickly and easily, and were not at all uncomfortable. When they were strong, I tried tolift out of the physical with no result. Whatever thought or combination I tried, I remained confined right where I was. I then remembered the rotating trick, which operates just as if you are turning over in bed. I started to turn, and recognized that my physical was not "turning" with me. I moved slowly, and after a moment I was "face down," or in direct opposition to the placement of my physical body. The moment I reached this 180 degree position, there was a hole. That's the only way to describe it. To my senses, it semed to be a hole in a wall which was about two feet thick and streched endlessly in all directions.... I felt that if my vision were good enough I could probably see nearby stars and planets.

Monroe spends weeks cautiously exploring the hole. He reaches in a hand, and is astonished when a hand took his and shook it. He hears his name called, and voices exclaiming "Come here quick! Look!" On one occasion he puts his hand through and feels something sharp dig into his palm, "like a hook, and dug in more deeply when I tried to withdraw it." On another, his hand feels as though it's been thrust into "electrically charged hot water."

Finally, "gathering courage, I pulled myself through in a sweeping rush, just as a swimmer might pull himself through a hole under water."What followed were a series of experiments "that were remarkable in their consistency of data, and defied any historical explanation." (Also, we ought to say, defying corroboration.) Monroe found, on repeated visits, a "physical-matter world almost identical to our own," though with weird details askew. (There were no electrical devices, and even the smallest car had a "single bench seat that will hold five to six people abreast.") He could travel in this realm he called "Locale III" largely undetected, ghost-like. What's more, he found he could "possess" the body of an inhabitant, and directly experience life in Locale III.

(I know the fallacy of interpreting the next thing I read by the last thing I've read. Still, I can't let it pass how much Monroe's description of pulling himself through the hole reminds me of the account from Skinwalker Ranch of the "tunnel" alleged to have appeared before the pair of NIDS researchers, and the black humanoid which was seen to hoist itself out and walk away.)

During an early passage of discovery in the realm, Monroe noticed something suddenly fly past him. "I turned just in time to see it heading for the wall and the hole. I was afraid for some reason that this was something that would go through and try to enter my body." Maybe so. In the early '80s, an alleged spirit named Miranon, picked up somewhere outside our space-time, "seemed actually to possess Bob Monroe one day... speaking through him like a spirit through a medium," writes Jim Schnabel. "Miranon still possessed Bob fairly often" when military personnel were frequent visitors to the Institute. Monroe was so taken by the Seth-like pronouncements of his astral friend that he named a pond on the property "Lake Miranon."

Monroe died in 1995, and Skip Atwater became the Institute's Director of Research. From 1978 to 1988, Atwater served as the Operations and Training Officer for the US Army Intelligence remote viewing program.

Journeys Out of the Body also records visionary alleged "precog" side-effects Monroe experienced during his early astral experiments. They are usually dreadful with strange menace and futility:

11/5/61
I am standing alone outside my house.... I see a group of aircraft emerge from the cloud cover, just above it. They approach, and I note that they are not typical aircraft or rockets.... They are not like any airplanes I have seen before. No wings are visible, and each machine is gigantic.... Each is shaped like the head of an arrow, V-shaped....

6/12/63
Gasoline is unavailable, electric power has been shut off. there is a great sense of fatality among everyone. It doesn't seem to be the product of atomic war, and there is no concern as to radioactive fallout. There is principally a feeling of doom and the breakup of civilization as we know it due to something momentous having taken place, a factor beyond human control.

Monroe adds, "I hope some of them are hallucinations."