CHAPTER 4
The Whistlefield Years
The year 1971 marked a major turning point in the journey of Bob Monroe. Now deeply in love with his elegant Southern lady, he aimed to acquire a Southern home that Nancy would be proud of. He sold the apartment blocks and bought a country estate of 430 acres, most of it forest and pasture, at Whistlefield, some twenty-five miles from Charlottesville. With six bedrooms and five bathrooms the house, together with a studio house used by Bob as an office, could comfortably accommodate all of the Monroes’ extended family. In February of that year Bob and Nancy were married, the civil ceremony followed by a spiritual blessing by Father Michael, a Catholic priest with whom Bob was friendly. The same year saw the publication of Journeys Out of the Body. All this he later described as repatterning his entire way of life.
Shortly after the book appeared, Monroe was invited to give a presentation at the Menninger Foundation Conference in Council Grove, Kansas. This was an annual event organized by Elmer and Alyce Green, the founders of Biofeedback. Attendance at these conferences was limited to ninety-six individuals, all invited by the Greens and all involved in investigating aspects of altered states of consciousness. This was probably the first time that the CEO of a flourishing television cable company had taken part in such a gathering. Monroe described his out-of-body experiences and the problems that arose with the various professionals he consulted while he tried to reach an understanding of what was happening to him. In the audience was a psychologist, Dr. Fowler Jones, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, whose interest was immediately aroused. He was impressed by Monroe, who seemed to him to be a down-to-earth sort of person whose accounts of his experiences sounded entirely credible. It was essential, he considered, to do whatever possible to validate Monroe's out-of-body skills and also to inform the professional world that the out-of-body experience was a distinct psychological state and should not be dismissed as merely a hallucination.
To further this, Fowler Jones attracted the interest of a psychoanalyst, Dr. Stuart Twemlow, chief of Research Services at Topeka Veterans Administration Medical Center. Together with another analyst, Dr. Glen Gabbard, they organized a questionnaire study. Some 1,500 individuals responded to an item in a national periodical asking for letters from anyone who thought they might have had an out-of-body experience. Almost half of the respondents claimed to recall occasions when they felt that their consciousness was separated from their physical body. Questionnaires were issued to all of these and 420 valid forms were received in return. Of these, 339 reported out-of-body experiences, detailing the preexisting conditions, the nature of the experience, its impact, and its after-effects, while the remainder were interested in learning more although they had not had such experiences themselves. The results of this questionnaire led to the publication of several papers in leading psychiatric journals.1 A few years later the authors gave a presentation at the APA's annual meeting in San Francisco. They were scheduled to speak early on the last morning of the conference and were dismayed to find that the room they would be using was vast. Anticipating an audience of twenty-five at most, they were amazed to be confronted by a full house, mostly supportive of their work. Fowler Jones continued to keep in contact with Monroe and eventually became a part-time trainer at the Institute and a member of the advisory board.2
Once the Monroes were settled in their new home, Bob would occasionally drive out for a meal at the Howard Johnson on Skyline Drive, a few miles away. One evening he had a word with a young kitchen worker, George Durrette, who lived with his wife, child, and father-in-law on land adjoining Whistlefield. Something about George appealed to Monroe, and he invited him to come over to his house the next Saturday. “That's the day I drink a lot of iced tea and maybe you'd want a glass of it,” he said. This was the sort of invitation that George, very much a down-to-earth character, was willing to accept.
That Saturday, after an hour or so of random conversation, Monroe changed the subject, broaching the idea that he needed someone to look after some of his land. George made no comment, but he did agree to bring his family over the following weekend. During that visit, Monroe asked him formally if he would come and work for him. “I don't know about that,” said George. “I just met you and you just met me.” Monroe smiled. “That's a good way to meet somebody,” he said.
On his next visit to the restaurant Monroe encouraged George to fix his hamburger the way he liked it, rare with sautéed onions, together with a glass of sweet milk. He asked him back to Whistlefield the next weekend, this time to accompany him to an auction some twenty miles out of Richmond where he persuaded George to act as the third bidder to fight off a competitor for a lot that he wanted. The ploy worked and they drove back with a truckload. “He called ’em goodies,” George recalled, “but in my mind it was all just junk.” This auction visit was repeated almost every month.
George agreed to work part time for Monroe, usually going over to Whistlefield between two and five every afternoon but occasionally responding to emergencies out of hours, such as when Monroe called him at one in the morning to change a tire on his Cadillac, punctured when he and his step-daughter Scooter were returning from a concert. Then one day Monroe told him that he really wanted him to work full time. He drove him around the area, pointing out some of his various business enterprises and explaining how he had designed the television cable network in Charlottesville. As they passed Cavalier Court he turned to George. “By the way,” he said, “I have something for you to do today.” George looked at him inquiringly. “I've got a hundred sofas to get rid of. I need you to carry them out to Whistlefield and stack them up in an outhouse there. Then I want you to go out and find someone to buy them.” George asked no questions. “OK,” was his only response. Within a couple of days he had moved the sofas and found the owner of a used furniture store, who drove out, inspected the sofas, and said he'd take them all.
So began George's full-time employment with Robert Monroe. Thenceforth whatever there was to do at Whistlefield—build fences, raise calves, keep an eye on young A. J., transport equipment, attend auctions, repair this, dispose of that—George did it. He soon became an essential part of the Whistlefield establishment and a friend and companion to Monroe for the next thirty-four years.
Life at Whistlefield was both stylish and fun. The house and grounds were modeled on the notion of an English country estate—an impressive house on a hillside, approached by a long driveway, extensive grounds with houses intended for the farm manager and greenhouse manager, two lakes, large greenhouses, barns and stables, with children of various ages running about, and several horses, dogs, and cats, all presided over by a mildly eccentric lord of the manor, usually dressed in a shabby tweed jacket and with a more than mildly eccentric hobby, together with a gracious lady who was patient, hospitable, and a wonderful hostess. Of the many well-proportioned rooms, the family's favorite was the den, formally known as the Quail Room on account of the pictures of hunting and quail scenes on the paneled walls. This was the most comfortable room in the house, with bookshelves, a fireplace, the television set, and several large, overstuffed chairs. Here the family spent most of their time together, all of them making the effort to be at home, if possible, for Thanksgiving. Outside scattered around the estate were seven cars and trucks in various states of disrepair. As Monroe remarked to his nephew Robert, he would trade them all for one that worked. The eccentricity was also manifested inside, with an organ installed in Monroe's office and one room displaying a collection of Monroe tartans.
There were now six children in Bob's new family. Maria and Laurie, in their early twenties, were completing their university studies and visited the farm during vacations, enjoying riding the horses and painting fences. Following graduation the two settled in Richmond, where Maria embarked on a career in real estate, while Laurie became a horse trainer and a teacher of riding to some 150 students a week. They both visited Whistlefield whenever they could. Looking back, Maria described her times there as idyllic and life-changing, recalling her talks with Bob on the possibilities of human potential and, in contrast, sharing with Nancy her interest in interior design. Meantime, Penny was “being a hippy in Charlottesville,” as she described it, moving on to become a bartender for a while. She called in at Whistlefield occasionally, especially when she heard that interesting visitors were to be staying for dinner. Monroe appreciated her sense of humor, at one time suggesting she might become a stand-up comedienne or a broadcaster on late-night radio. Scooter was at college, returning to the farm for vacations and, after the research laboratory was built, spending time there listening to the new sound frequencies that Monroe was experimenting with and discussing the effects these sounds had upon her. He appreciated her quickness of thought and adaptability, while she came to regard her stepfather as both friend and mentor.
While Penny, Scooter, and Cindy had grown up “in the Marine Corps,” with plenty of love but not much money, A. J., who was nine years old at the time of the move, had a very different upbringing. He greatly enjoyed his childhood on the farm, especially being able to drive the lawn mower over the acres of grass. He had plenty of freedom, and Monroe, perhaps sometimes relieved to have a boy to talk to among so many girls, provided him, as A. J. recalls, with sound advice, intellectual stimulation, and an initial education in the study of consciousness. However, Monroe did not always find it easy to fill the paternal role for the third of Nancy's strong-minded daughters. Cindy, now a teenager, he found especially challenging. She did not fit smoothly into the totally different life into which she was pitched and sometimes, despite her affection for him, she found herself at odds with her stepfather over issues such as boyfriends and experimentation with drugs. His attempts to lay down the law were not always kindly received.
The move to Whistlefield, along with the love, support, and confidence deriving from his marriage to Nancy, enabled Bob to make a major step forward in his investigation into the out-of-body experience. During the series of experiments that he had conducted on the possibility of sleep-learning, he had come up with the idea that a radio network could act as a nighttime teacher by broadcasting material, such as advanced multiplication tables, with a backing of soft musical sounds. With the radio on, the listener would absorb the material while asleep and hopefully be able to recall it next day. That was the theory, and he was now inspired to return to this idea and see if it could be adapted to more interesting purposes—perhaps even to creating the circumstances in which an out-of-body experience might occur. Then he realized that a radio network would not be necessary. The sounds could be recorded on tape and played to the listener through headphones, as he had previously tried with Laurie as one of the subjects. Taking the idea further, if sound could send you to sleep it followed that sound could alter your state of consciousness. Now he intended that the process would be carried out in as scientific a way as possible.
The interest shown earlier by Charles Tart had inspired Monroe to create a simple laboratory in the basement of his office building in Charlottesville. The move to Whistlefield provided the opportunity for him to construct a larger and far better-equipped research facility, using materials from his modular housing project that was shortly to be closed down. This laboratory incorporated a control room, a debriefing room, and three isolation chambers, one with electromagnetic shielding to protect against interference during experiments. Another room in which five people wearing headphones could listen simultaneously was also added. Using more of the modular materials he built a guest house—the Owl House—where participants in the experimental work in what he named the Whistlefield Research Laboratories could stay overnight. All that was now needed was help from scientifically trained individuals who would sort out the technical problems and work with him to further his investigations.
One of the first of these individuals to appear was Jim Beal, a researcher into electromagnetic field effects on living systems. Monroe invited him to visit and give a presentation on his work. Jim was impressed by the extraordinary beauty of the place. Close to the entrance was the laboratory building with the Owl House nearby. The drive was lined with white board fences: on the left was a green meadow with horses grazing and a red barn beyond. In a valley to the right was a lake with a dock and canoe. The spacious single-story white-painted house nestled on a hillside with a large garden close by where tomatoes were cultivated. To his surprise, the first item Jim noticed as he entered the house was a framed genealogy of the Beale family. Beale was a family name of Nancy's and this was also the middle name of her youngest daughter Lucinda. Although Jim's specialty was not immediately relevant to Monroe's research, his visit was the beginning of an enduring friendship.
Among the earlier readers of Journeys Out of the Body was a twenty-six-year-old physics graduate, Tom Campbell. He was working in a government organization in Charlottesville with some five hundred employees. His particular task was to apply classical physics and mathematics to electromechanical and electromagnetic systems. One day an electrical/electronics engineer, Bill Yost, who was in charge of Campbell's department, tossed a copy of Monroe's book towards him and told him to read it. Having done so, Campbell found himself both intrigued and nonplussed. Was it for real? Or just a wild concept intended to deceive the gullible? He said as much to Yost, who admitted he felt likewise.3
A few weeks later Yost told Campbell that a group from work had arranged to visit Monroe. Campbell agreed to join them and that Friday evening a party of twelve in three cars drove the twenty-five miles to Whistlefield. As they approached the house they were greeted by the canine establishment, two large Dalmatians and a German Shepherd. For some minutes everyone stood around wondering what to do until the heavy white-painted door swung open. All were silent, expectant. “The one, the only, the Amazing Out-Of-Body-Man was about to turn to flesh and blood before our eyes,” Campbell wrote later. “We would all soon know if this guy was nuts, or what.” He went on to describe what followed.
Out stepped Mr. Monroe into the doorway. For a second or two he seemed the slightest bit tentative—like a man who clearly knew he was about to be examined and evaluated like a captive alien or a strange animal at the zoo. He gazed out at the crowd of nameless heads staring silently back at him. After the briefest of pauses, he stepped onto the elegant open stone porch with confidence and a solid presence. He was not wearing a white suit with matching hat and string tie like Col. Sanders (the only Southern gentleman I could bring to mind). Instead he looked comfortable, informal and friendly—more like the dogs than the house.
Monroe greeted the group individually, making jokes and quips as he shook hands. He reminded Campbell of Santa Claus, “a jolly old elf, passing the summer sipping mint juleps on the veranda of his country estate.” As conversation developed, Campbell became impressed by Monroe's genuine interest in science and his rational approach, and deduced that what he was after was legitimacy rather than financial reward or public recognition. He found him “more straightforward and intellectually precise—less emotionally driven—than most of the technical professionals who were now pelting him with questions.”
The group was taken to see the laboratory, at the time still unfinished. There Monroe issued his challenge. He was seeking, he told them, some professionally qualified hard-core science and engineering types who could help him do proper research that would be acceptable to other scientists. Campbell, who had a keen interest in altered states of consciousness and also meditated regularly, was first to volunteer, followed by a young electrical engineer, Dennis Mennerich. Monroe waited, but no other hands were raised. He invited his two new associates to call him in a few days’ time.
Some three weeks later the two young scientists drove over to Whistlefield on Campbell's powerful Honda motorcycle. They arranged with Monroe that they would visit the laboratory two or three times a week and occasionally on weekends. Their first task was to complete the connections between the control room and the isolation chambers and to install various measurement devices. Included in the equipment that Monroe and his new team installed were an EEG setup for recording the electrical impulses produced by the brain, a professional standard audio mixer, electrostatic sensing equipment, an especially sensitive high input-impedance voltmeter (provided by Bill Yost), and a device for tracking galvanic skin response (measuring the voltage passing through the body) that Campbell and Mennerich themselves designed. Once all this was in place and operational, the investigation into the effects of sound on altered states of consciousness could begin.4
In intervals between the work on equipping and perfecting the research facility, Monroe took time to train his two associates in exploring nonphysical states by linking them up to his audio equipment and leading them into deep relaxation, guiding them to release their minds from their physical bodies and from the surrounding environment. He was particularly interested in the sleep state, as many of the reported OBEs, including his own, occurred when the subject was physically asleep. A small group of local volunteers, including a few doctors, social workers, friends, and family members, would call in after dinner to help in the research, but by the time they were wired up to the equipment with all the electrodes in place Monroe found them either too tired or too restless to be able to stay awake and sufficiently alert to report on their responses. A method was needed to enable them to stay awake and then move into a borderland sleep state—the hypnagogic state as it is known. As we shall see, the method that proved effective involved the use of sound.
All this took, as Monroe says, hundreds of hours of experiment. Many of the volunteer participants were able to report verbally on any changes in their mental or physical condition, finding that they could speak and perceive when the normal pattern would be to lose consciousness or fall asleep. Out of this research emerged a point of identification that was given a label that carried no connotations: Focus 10. This was a state defined as “mind awake, body asleep.” While the physiological responses are those of sleep, the brainwave patterns are different, showing a mix of waves ordinarily associated with sleep, light and deep, with overlying beta signals indicating wakefulness.
On occasion Bill Yost joined the research team, although he was not concerned with taking part in consciousness exploration himself. He was about the same age as Monroe; Campbell regarded him as “a very bright man searching for truth wherever he could find it…curious, professionally sharp and open-minded.” He saw himself as the support person in the investigations and experiments that Bob and his younger associates were undertaking. In a way Bill Yost acted as the elder statesman, observing, advising, and, as an experienced technical professional, legitimizing Monroe and his research. This was exactly what was required. Monroe greatly needed this kind of support from one of his peers whose opinion he respected, support that his much younger associates were unable to provide. Above all, he wanted to be taken seriously by credentialed scientists and technical experts, and Bill took him, and what he was doing, very seriously indeed.
While Monroe and his small group of scientists tucked away in their corner of rural Virginia worked quietly away, elsewhere in the United States, and especially in California, the late twentieth-century version of the New Age was in full flourish. “Human consciousness is crossing a threshold as mighty as the one from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” wrote M. C. Richards in The Crossing Point (1973). “Distinguished thinkers from many disciplines were describing an imminent transformation,” asserted Marilyn Ferguson in her comprehensive study The Aquarian Conspiracy. She quoted Willis Harman, then director of policy research at Stanford Research Institute, who maintained that spirituality might well become the philosophical basis for the New Left, “a matrix of linked beliefs—that we are invisibly joined to one another, that there are dimensions transcending time and space, that individual lives are meaningful, that grace and illumination are real, that it is possible to evolve to ever higher levels of understanding.” Along with this came a growing belief that before long we would see “a worldwide expansion of consciousness,” and an increasing number of consciousness-expanding techniques and practices. As far as the “growing belief” is concerned, subsequent history so far does not provide much encouragement that this is in process of being justified. But the last three decades of the twentieth century certainly witnessed an increasing number of consciousness-expanding techniques and practices, many of which were founded, in contradistinction to Monroe's efforts, more on the prospects of profit than on intensive science-based research.5
Many visitors now came to Whistlefield, most of them “middleaged, serious professionals looking for serious answers to serious questions,” as Campbell described them, drawn there by Monroe's growing reputation in the field of consciousness research. All were welcomed, except for those such as guitar-playing hippies who wanted to describe their personal drug-induced experiences and associate themselves with Monroe's work, who were soon sent on their way. There was also the occasional eccentric, including a man claiming to be the physical incarnation of both Alexander the Great and Thomas Jefferson, and a PhD aspirant writing a thesis on “The Tone of the Universe.” A different sort of visitor was a Swiss doctor, Frank Lang, who had forsaken medicine for filmmaking, who arrived with a small team to make a documentary on Monroe. His smooth, urbane manner made him popular with the local ladies, who were quite upset, to put it mildly, when he departed.
Nancy delighted in entertaining guests. She loved cooking, even though it drove Bob almost out of his mind to see his elegant Southern lady hard at work in the kitchen. The gracious hostess was a role she seemed born to play. Her dinner parties included many of those who attended meetings of the American Parapsychological Association at Charlottesville, although as a nonacademic Monroe was not able to attend those meetings himself. Among the more frequent guests were the physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, both researchers into psychokinesis and designers of the U.S. Army's Remote Viewing program at Stanford; Elmer and Alyce Green; Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology and a leading figure in parapsychological research; John Lilly, researcher into dolphin behavior; and the transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. Penny, as she said, would “blow in and out” and make a special effort to stay for dinner when some “visiting dignitary” was present. She recalled that her favorite dinner was when Edgar Mitchell came shortly after his voyage to the Moon. She was enthralled by his account of the return journey, seeing our planet as our home and our host, with no boundaries, an experience that transformed his life.
No matter who was present, dinner was always followed by lively discussions around the big dining room table. Would humankind survive into the next century? What did we really know about UFOs and aliens? Monroe, who was less than enthusiastic about dinner parties, would ask a question and then sit back to see where the discussion would go. Sometimes, when he remembered that Star Trek was on TV, he would slip out of the room to watch it in the den.
The attention that his work was attracting gave Monroe the confidence in its value that he hitherto had lacked. This confidence was enhanced by the content of the reports received from several of those undergoing sessions in the Whistlefield laboratory. It was becoming clear that he was on to something, but what that “something” actually was he was not yet able to define. So the research continued, although he could always find time to travel elsewhere, curious to find out what was going on in the area of consciousness exploration. One such experience was a visit with Nancy to John Lilly on the West Coast, where they tried out his flotation tank, designed to encourage deep relaxation and exploration of the inner self, which they found enjoyable if not revelatory. Then in April 1973 they drove to Elmira, New York, to meet Jane Roberts, whose books containing transcripts of her channeling of an entity known as Seth were becoming widely known. On the night of Sunday, April 1, Jane recorded that “Seth came through…in a long recorded discussion with the Monroes.” The following evening, Jane used her personal abilities to tune in on a diagram of a machine that Monroe had seen on an out-of-body journey. She drew her own version of this and gave it to Bob together with her notes. This meeting is referred to in her book The Nature of Personal Reality (1974).
Progress in the laboratory, however, was slow, despite the enthusiasm of Monroe's team and their willingness to try anything that looked as if it might show the way to a breakthrough of some kind. But, as so often happens in scientific discovery, when that breakthrough occurred it was, or so it seemed, almost by accident.
In October 1973 Dennis Mennerich came across an article in the current issue of Scientific American by Gerald Oster, a researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The article was entitled “Auditory Beats in the Brain.” Oster began with a clear explanation:
If two tuning forks of slightly different pitch are struck simultaneously, the resulting sound waxes and wanes periodically. The modulations are referred to as beats; their frequency is equal to the difference between the frequencies of the original tones. For example, a tuning fork with a characteristic pitch of 440 hertz, or cycles per second (A above middle C on the piano), and another of 434 hertz, if struck at the same time, will produce beats with a frequency of six hertz.
Oster went on to explain what happens when stereo headphones are used and the signals are applied separately to each ear:
Under the right circumstances beats can be perceived but they are of an entirely different character. They are called binaural beats, and in many ways they are more interesting than ordinary beats, which in this discussion will be called monaural…Binaural beats require the combined action of both ears. They exist as a consequence of the interaction of perceptions within the brain, and they can be used to investigate some of the brain's processes.
Farther into his article, Oster poses the question, “What is the neurological basis of binaural beats? The simplest explanation,” he continues, “is that the number of nerve impulses from each ear and the route they travel to the brain are determined by the frequency of the incident sound, and that the two nerve signals interact somewhere in the brain.” It took more than two decades before that “somewhere” was identified in the laboratory of The Monroe Institute.
Mennerich had known about the binaural beat phenomenon for some months (it had in fact been discovered by a German experimenter, H. W Dove, in 1839, but had been thought to be of little significance) and this article immediately captured his attention. He handed his copy of the journal to Campbell, who read it with growing interest. They agreed to try working with binaural beats in the lab. They soon found that listening to binaural beats in certain frequencies significantly affected the state of consciousness of the listener and concluded that it would be possible using this method to put anyone into a specific state of consciousness whenever required. Observing this, Bill Yost realized at once the importance of this discovery. Working with Monroe the team proceeded to create audiotapes, using binaural beats to activate in the brain the very low frequencies, not discernible by the human ear, which appeared to correspond to particular altered states of consciousness. At certain frequencies the left and right cortical hemispheres of the brain appeared to move into synchronization. This effect they described as a frequency-following response. The effect of these audiotapes, they hoped, would be to take the listener into a state that Monroe called “Non-Physical Matter Reality.” For several months Campbell and Mennerich tried out the tapes on themselves but one question kept occurring to both of them—“Is this stuff real?” Was what they were experiencing “inside”—was it simply imagination?—or was it “outside,” with its own independent existence?
Eventually the time came when Monroe considered that his associates were sufficiently versed in the material to begin collecting evidence. He settled them in separate soundproof units, each with headphones and a microphone suspended above so that they could record their experiences; applied electrodes to their fingers to obtain readings on temperature, skin potential voltage, and skin galvanic response; and began to feed the same audio signals to both of them. “Dennis and I met in the nonphysical as planned,” said Campbell. “We went places, saw things, had conversations with each other and with several nonphysical beings we happened to run into along the way.”
When the session ended they reported their experiences to Monroe. He looked quizzically at them. “So you think you were together?” he asked. They looked at each other. “Maybe,” said Dennis tentatively. “At least we perceived meeting each other.”
Bob rewound the tapes that each had recorded during the session. “Listen to this,” he said.
“The correlation was astonishing,” Campbell reported. “For almost two hours we sat there with our mouths open, hooting and exclaiming, filling in the details for each other. Bob was now grinning. ‘Now that tells you something, doesn't it?’ he exclaimed beaming. He was every bit as excited as we were. I was dumbfounded…The undeniable fact was: we had seen the same visuals, heard the same telepathic conversations, and experienced the same clarity…There was only one good explanation: This stuff was real!”
The experiment was repeated with similar results. Campbell and Mennerich found they could read numbers written on a blackboard outside the control room, make out-of-body trips around the neighborhood, and diagnose illnesses in other people. They learned to discriminate between those altered states of consciousness where things appeared to work well and those states where their findings were negative. Over the next two years they refined their processes and improved their efficiency, with trial and error the only methodology. However, it dawned upon them that the data alone, no matter how carefully it was collected and analyzed, would not be sufficient to provide conviction to the outside world. You simply had to experience it yourself. There was only one way of doing this: by designing programs using purpose-made audiotapes carrying the appropriate sound signals for groups of individuals with no prior knowledge of the process and who had no or very little idea of what they were letting themselves in for.
Toward the end of 1973 Monroe received an invitation from Michael Murphy, co-founder of Esalen (described by Charles Tart, who may well have suggested that Murphy issue this invitation, as “the prestige entry to the humanistic psychology movement of the time”), to present two weekend programs, one at Big Sur and the second in San Francisco. The opportunity to test out the new technology was too good to miss, even though it meant transporting all the equipment three thousand miles across the United States. Monroe and Bill Yost conducted the programs that continued around the clock, with food available when required and occasional short breaks for sleep. There were twenty-four participants in each program who had no idea of what they were about to experience, except for those who had come across Monroe's book and thought that it might have something to do with the out-of-body state. That, however, was not the object of the sessions; this was to introduce the idea of what Monroe called “Focus 10,” the state of “mind awake, body asleep,” and to show some of the potentials of this state. Because the participants in these programs were unknown to Bob, as a kind of precautionary measure he devised an affirmation, beginning with the words, “I am more than my physical body…” that they were to memorize before starting the session. This affirmation remains an integral part of Monroe Institute programs today.
Bob, Nancy, and Scooter at Whistefield
These workshops were generally accounted a success and requests for more programs began to arrive. It was becoming clear that what was needed was a full-time workshop trainer. It so happened that about this time Scooter, who had been studying in France and Japan and in 1974 had graduated cum laude from Wittenberg University, Ohio, joined the family at Whistlefield. She soon became deeply involved with what was going on. She agreed to act both as Monroe's secretary and as a program trainer. Being a fast learner, before long she was conducting a number of weekend programs in hotels in Charlottesville and the surrounding area, hauling along bundles of headsets, harnesses, and tapes. She also traveled to Richmond, where workshops were held in the Episcopal Diocesan Center. With George Durrette driving, Scooter would load a truck piled high with up to twenty mattresses, bought by Monroe at one of his auction visits, as well as all the rest of the necessary equipment. It was, she recalled, an amazing, but also an exhausting, experience.
Eventually, it occurred to Monroe that they should ask a nearby hotel if they could obtain permission to wire up several rooms for their programs. He approached the Tuckahoe Motel, a few miles from Whistlefield, and the management agreed. All the equipment needed, including that for measuring individual responses to the sound signals, had to be designed and created during evenings and weekends. Together with Yost, Campbell, and Mennerich, Monroe set to work. Each of the rooms allotted to them was wired for sound and connected to a control center, known as Mission Control. Bill Yost's engineering skills were especially helpful, as were Scooter's organizing talents. When all was complete, some twenty or so individuals who had previously shown keen interest were invited to attend.
Elegance at Whistlefield
Tom Campbell sums up the weekend:
During Friday night, all day Saturday and half of Sunday, the attendees had the time of their life. There were so many paranormal happenings that weekend that we had a difficult time getting them all recorded. These naïve subjects were reading numbers in sealed envelopes, remote viewing, manifesting lights in the sky, visiting their relatives, reading next week's newspaper headlines, and much more, It was a circus! Things were never the same after that.
It was not long before word got out about the effectiveness of this program. Monroe was swamped with requests from people of all sorts wanting to participate. He began to realize that there were far more possibilities than he had foreseen. Not only did he have something with the potential of great value to those who wished to share in it, but also his own life was moving into a completely new direction. He decided to sever one more link from his past by selling Jefferson Cable, in order, as he said, “to devote all my time to our present activities.” This marked the end of a long and successful career in public entertainment, as well as the end of a substantial income.
Courses continued to be held at Tuckahoe according to demand. Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, who had just sold his next book, Magical Child, to E. P. Dutton, had been intrigued by Journeys Out of the Body and, on a visit to Lexington to see his sister, decided to call on Monroe “to check in with him.” Bob invited him to join a workshop at the hotel. Pearce found it fascinating. He went out-of-body easily and enjoyed himself “doing barrel-rolls in space.” Knowledgeable in research into hypnotism, he found Monroe's voice possessed an almost hypnotic quality that brought about in the listener a willingness to suspend the ordinary way of creating reality and a willingness also to take a risk. Monroe, he thought, was creating a system, but at the same time he was doing no more than playing his tapes to people to see what would happen. He told him later that he had “a tiger by the tail”—a phrase that stuck in Bob's mind.
Jim Beal also attended one of these programs, recalling his experience after the workshop ended. Monroe had learned to warn participants not to rush off immediately but to allow a few hours for cooling down before returning to everyday reality. Jim, however, was booked to attend a conference at the University of Maryland on the farther side of Washington, D.C. He asked for a lift with a fellow participant who was heading that way. She worked for Psychic Magazine and wanted to interview and photograph Monroe, but he proved reluctant. Jim agreed to persuade Bob to give a brief interview in exchange for her giving him a lift. She asked a few questions and took several photographs, and immediately afterwards left with Jim. However, time and time again they mistook their route—an experience shared by many others who took to the road too soon after the end of a course—and by the time they eventually arrived at the university only the night watchman was awake. Not one of the photographs she had taken revealed an image.
Meantime, experimentation continued in the Whistlefield laboratory with Campbell, Mennerich, and Scooter testing out the signals that could produce identical experiences for the listeners. As word of what was happening at Whistlefield began to spread, more and more people called in, most of them hoping to investigate and try for themselves these new scientifically designed audiotapes that were apparently effective in moving the listener into certain altered states of consciousness. With the increasing demand for programs, Campbell and Mennerich, their confidence in the process now fully established, joined Scooter as program trainers.
Among those who visited to take a weekend program were the psychologists Stuart Twemlow and Fowler Jones, both of whom in subsequent years were to become involved in examining Bob Monroe both physically and psychologically. Another visitor was Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, already internationally famous as the author of the ground-breaking book, On Death and Dying, and for her courses on “Life, Death and Transition” that she conducted in several countries across the world. In her work with seriously ill and dying patients she claimed to have listened to hundreds of reports of near-death experiences. Early in her career she had been moved to consider the possibility of reincarnation, and she had become increasingly interested in what she described as “the mysteries of the mind, the psyche, the spirit that cannot be probed by microscopes or chemical reactions.” Jim Beal, who first met Elisabeth at Whistlefield, commented perceptively, “I remember that she was a delightful person of small stature; however, the more she spoke, the bigger she became!”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
It had happened that, one morning after leading a workshop in Santa Barbara, this dynamic, practical, argumentative little woman had what she felt was a spontaneous out-of-body experience. This led her to seek out and read Journeys Out of the Body and then to make her way to Whistlefield. She was immediately impressed by the well-equipped laboratory, as hitherto the only information she had come across with regard to mind experiments involved the use of drugs. She was also impressed by Bob Monroe, who was to become a dear friend and with whom she later collaborated in designing the Going Home program. Because of its significant effect on her subsequent life and work, Elisabeth's experience at Whistlefield deserves recounting in some detail.
Her first session in the soundproof booth was a failure in that she felt she had nothing to report, but the second one gave her what she hoped to find. She asked Scooter, who was her monitor, to accelerate the process. The sounds, she said, cleared her mind of all thoughts and took her inward, “like the disappearing mass of a black hole.” She continues:
I heard an incredible whoosh, similar to the sound of a strong wind blowing. Suddenly I felt as if I was swept up by a tornado. At that point I was taken out of my body and I just blasted away. To where? Where did I go? That is the question that everyone asks. Although my body was motionless, my brain took me to another dimension of existence, like another universe. The physical part of being was no longer relevant. Like the spirit that leaves the body after death, similar to the butterfly leaving the cocoon, my awareness was defined by psychic energy, not my physical body. I was simply out there.6
Elisabeth was angry at being brought out of this experience, which had lasted far longer than was usually permitted. Questioned by her monitor, she was in no mood at the time to say much about what had happened, except that two physical problems she had were no longer troubling her. Later that day she returned to the Owl House, where she was staying, and sensed, as she says, “a strange energy which convinced me that I was not alone.” She went to bed and fell fast asleep—and a succession of nightmares began. It was as if she was reliving the deaths of all the patients she had attended, “re-experiencing their anguish, grief, fear, suffering, sadness, loss, blood, tears.” She asked for three reprieves—a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold, and lastly a fingertip to touch. Each time she was refused. Then it came to her that to survive this ordeal, to survive life itself, it was a matter of faith—faith in God and faith in herself. With this, the agony ceased.
The nightmares were followed by a dramatic out-of-body experience during which Elisabeth found herself moving through an enormous lotus blossom towards a light—the same light, she believed, that her patients reported seeing during their near-death experiences. Merging with that light she felt an indescribable sensation of love, warmth, and welcome. Then she heard two voices. The first was her own, saying, “I am acceptable to Him.” The second came from somewhere else, with the mysterious words, “Shanti Nilaya.”
Early the following morning, she donned a hand-woven robe (it looked like a nightshirt, she said) and a pair of sandals and ran down the driveway from the Owl House to tell Monroe what had happened. As she did so, she said, she continued to see “every leaf, butterfly and stone vibrating in its molecular structure. It was the greatest feeling of ecstasy a human being can experience.” Bob, Nancy, and Scooter were sitting on the porch as she approached. “She looked gorgeous,” Scooter remembered. “I don't know what it was but she absolutely glowed!”
The experience gave Elisabeth a sense of grace that took many days to diminish. Then some months later, during a lecture she was giving to several hundred people at Berkeley, she described her out-of-body experience at the Owl House. Afterwards a monk in an orange robe stood up to clarify some of the points she had made. “Shanti Nilaya,” he said. “It is Sanskrit and means ‘the final home of peace.’ It's where we go at the end of our earthly journey when we return to God.” Some years later when Elisabeth founded her Center in California, Shanti Nilaya was the name she gave it. When she moved to Virginia to live at Healing Waters Farm, she transferred the name to her new Center close by.7
Elisabeth returned to Whistlefield at various times and became very close to Bob and Nancy. The family loved her visits. She brought boxes of delicious Swiss chocolates, made bouquets of four-leaf clovers—which she could find anywhere—laughed a lot (or cackled, as Penny recalls), and told stories of her childhood as the least favored of a set of triplets and of her struggles with the medical profession over her work with death and dying. Elisabeth maintained her contact with the family until shortly before her death in 2004.
Although the majority of those who visited Whistlefield were serious investigators into human consciousness, many of them being leading figures in their own specialties, there was the occasional exception. One was journalist David Black, who published a skeptical, if not libelous, article in Penthouse in 1976, claiming, among other accusations, that Monroe practiced astral sex. This article was picked up by the investigative writer Scott Rogo, who repeated some of the material in Fate magazine. In face of a threatened lawsuit, Rogo was compelled to issue a retraction. Some years later, in his book Leaving the Body, he expressed further doubts about Monroe's credibility, although he was unable to deny that his OBEs actually took place. Nevertheless, considering the significance and the implications of Monroe's discoveries, the amount of hostile criticism is surprisingly small.
A new phase of life was now opening for Bob Monroe. He was in demand as a speaker, mostly as a consequence of the increasing sales of Journeys Out of the Body. He continued to attend some of the Council Grove conferences, where he became interested in Elmer and Alyce Green's Biofeedback process. Always ready to take on anything that attracted his interest, he later adapted some of the Biofeedback techniques for use in his own programs. In conversation with others he became convinced that the name Whistlefield Research Laboratories was not sufficiently specific to indicate the direction of his work. After some thought he renamed his undertaking—The Monroe Institute for Applied Sciences. In 1975 he applied for and received a patent for the frequency-following response, under the name of Mentronics, the first name he chose for the new technology.
Although for the most part the results of the workshops at Whistlefield were, in Bob's words, “not spectacular” they provided a much broader base for experimental testing. As requests for more workshops came in, he decided to extend their scope. With his associates he designed what he entitled the M-5000 program. The M stood for Mentronics and the 5000 was a signal that Monroe's ambition at that time was to train five thousand people in the exploration of states of consciousness. For the benefit of program participants he developed a simple terminology to identify certain states. Focus 1 was the starting point, “ordinary everyday consciousness.” Moving on from there, the sound signals led you to Focus 10, the state of “mind awake, body asleep,” and thence to Focus 12, “a state of expanded awareness.” He was also creating frequencies to take the listener into two further states: Focus 15, “a state of no time,” and Focus 21, “the edge of here-now.” These terms continue to be used in Monroe Institute courses today.
It soon became clear that five thousand participants was an over-ambitious target at the time and the name of the program should be reconsidered. After some consideration Monroe came to recognize that, as he wrote in Far Journeys, “we were creating for the participant a doorway, a window through which he could achieve other states of consciousness.” Mentronics was dropped, the technology was titled Hemispheric Synchronization8 (Hemi-Sync for short), and the program became known as the Gateway Voyage. The instructional text accompanying the subtly engineered sound signals has been described as “the best play Bob ever wrote.” His recorded voice, gentle, encouraging, and authoritative, conducts the listeners through a sequence of states of consciousness as far as the very edge of our time-space continuum. As the program proceeds, the participants themselves are able to record on tape what they are experiencing. It is estimated that by 2006 more than twenty thousand individuals had taken this six-day residential program.
The first program under the Gateway title was held in 1977 with forty participants at Feathered Pipe Ranch, near Helena, Montana, a center for leading-edge workshops at the time. This was very much of a trial run. For this program Monroe designed a set of taped exercises that he called the Elation series, most of which carried frequencies to take participants into Focus 10 and Focus 12. Chris Lenz, who had followed PhD courses in history, philosophy, and psychology at the California Institute of Asian Studies and who first met Monroe at Council Grove in 1975, trained the program under Monroe's supervision. His experience was limited to training weekend courses in the previous year, having been inducted by Scooter and Tom Campbell. Lenz invited the young Karen Malik, who had been involved in spiritual practice for several years and had just completed a year of silence, to assist in the training. Karen's only previous contact with the Monroe material had been acting as cook for a program in California.
Monroe himself took no active part in the training. He was curious as to what was going on but as yet, despite the glowing reports, he had no real trust in the process. Then midway through the program he handed the trainers a new tape they had never heard before, with the instruction, “Just play this.” It took the participants into “the state of no time”—Focus 15. Fortunately, the sound signals that led the listeners into “the state of no time” were also effective in bringing them back. Many of them reported having mystical and kundalini- type experiences, and one claimed to have been in a state of utter bliss for three days.
Despite the success of these programs, this was a difficult period for Monroe. He had given up a highly profitable career and moved into an area where he was uncertain of his way. Whistlefield provided no source of income and was eating up his capital. He often felt both lonely and depressed; he looked unhealthy and, according to Karen Malik, whom he found to be a sympathetic listener, he thought he might be dead within six months. What was he going to do with this process—so powerful, so effective—that he had discovered? He recalled the phrase that Joe Pearce had used. “I have a tiger by the tail,” he told her, “and I don't know what to do with it.” But he realized that there was no turning back.
However, reports on the Feathered Pipe course were so encouraging that it was not long before Chris Lenz found himself training programs for Monroe Institute West, a rudimentary organization based in a handsome building in Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. Monroe then summoned Lenz to Whistlefield to train a ten-day program. This had quite dramatic effects on the participants, some of whom found themselves hyperventilating, much to the surprise of the trainer, who had no experience in dealing with this. As yet there was no philosophy or organized method of helping participants to handle their experiences. It was very much a matter of learning on the hoof.
Monroe then invited Chris to become director of training at Whistlefield. By this time what came to be known as the Explorer team was coming into being. This was composed of a number of individuals who visited the laboratory from time to time for sessions, usually conducted by Monroe himself, enabling them to explore what was becoming understood by those involved as “the realms beyond physical reality.” Joining this team was what Chris would have preferred, but Monroe's response was that he had plenty of Explorers but only one regular full-time trainer.
After Chris's move to Whistlefield, the Monroe operations on the West Coast were taken on by Karen Malik. Over the next two years she organized and presented workshops wherever required, as long as the venue was west of the Mississippi, continually improving her training skills. In 1979 Chris and Karen combined to train workshops on a “Holistic Life” cruise on the Eastern Mediterranean. Elmer Green, also on the cruise, declared he would only recommend Monroe workshops if Chris or Karen were the trainers, as they brought what he described as “a spiritual dimension” to what they were doing. Karen Malik remained dedicated to Monroe's work throughout the following decades and continued training courses for the Institute into the twenty-first century.9
Despite the promise of its title, the post of director of training at Whistlefield was not one to be envied. The early programs had no set pattern and in some instances Chris heard new taped exercises only a few minutes before a course was due to begin. He stayed with Monroe and helped to prepare for the move to Faber, but in 1980, feeling altogether exhausted, he resigned. However, he never lost his interest or enthusiasm and twenty-three years later, now working with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), he returned to the Monroe fold to present Gateway courses at IONS headquarters in Petulama, California.
Among the many visitors who continued to flock to Whistlefield was one who in later years was to play an important part in the development and understanding of the Hemi-Sync process. Lieutenant F. Holmes Atwater was a young army officer working in military intelligence. Early in 1977 Atwater joined the army's secret counterintelligence operation at Fort Meade, Maryland. This very small and select unit was investigating the possibilities of remote-viewing and Atwater was searching for information on organizations and techniques that might be relevant. Having read Journeys Out of the Body, which brought back to him memories of out-of-body episodes he had himself experienced as a child, he was attracted to the newly formed Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences to see if its techniques might be useful. He concealed the purpose of his visit, saying merely that he had read Monroe's book and wanted to know if others could be taught his methods.
Impressed by the handsome house with its outbuildings, huge greenhouse, and fields scattered with a medley of horses and tractors, Atwater was even more impressed by Nancy Monroe's “gracious, ladylike manner” and her way of speaking “with a gentle southern accent, a leisurely segue from word to word that mysteriously focused one's attention and stirred the fires of the soul.” She led him through a succession of finely furnished rooms to a patio, where a figure quite out of accord with the elegance of his surroundings was sitting on a divan. “Mr. Monroe,” records Lieutenant Atwater, “wore sweatpants, suspenders, slippers and a partially unbuttoned, coffee-stained shirt…As he brushed cigarette ashes off his shirt, he looked up and calmly said, ‘Well, hello.’ No southern accent here. No pretentious social niceties either. I thought—as a first impression—that perhaps he was more interested in who he was ‘out-of-body’ rather than what I might think of him or how I might perceive him in the physical.”10
After Atwater had described his childhood out-of-body journeys, Monroe took him across to the laboratory and made him comfortable in one of the soundproof booths. As he listened to the music and sound signals, he had the strong impression that the bed he was lying on was moving up towards the ceiling. He tried to work out how this was done—and suddenly became aware that he was traveling, in his own words, “through a white tube or tunnel, its walls lined with crystalline forms.” He then found himself in a boundless white space watching himself emerging from the tube—which he later described as a giant “Flavor Straw,” a confection he recalled from childhood consisting of a straw with sugar crystals inside that flavored whatever drink he fancied. Then he heard Monroe's voice, the sound patterns changed, the bed slowly descended, or so he thought, and the light came on. The first thing he did was to look under the bed to see how it was raised and lowered, but to his surprise there was nothing there except the floor. Monroe appeared and invited him out to lunch at a nearby restaurant, where he explained the workings of his new technology. Atwater then realized that the sound signals had lifted him out of his body. His interest fully aroused, he signed up for a program in Richmond in the following year. Although his visit made little or no contribution to the military operations he was then involved with, Atwater stayed in occasional contact with Monroe. There were hints and suggestions that he might be interested in a job at the Institute at some time, but no formal offer was made.
In the closing years of the decade things began to change. News of the Esalen program had resulted in inquiries and requests from all over the United States. The programs on the road, ranging from one day in Focus 10 to ten-day Explorations, made enormous demands on Monroe and his small number of helpers, particularly so on Scooter, who was in charge of this Outreach program, organizing and presenting workshops wherever they were requested. A program might be attended by as many as forty people with all their mattresses, blankets, and pillows, so there was a strong physical element to accompany the psychic adventures.
To meet the increasing demand for programs, Monroe accepted that it was essential to train more presenters and to recruit staff for purposes of administration. Various individuals were hired to act as directors or administrators, but none of them lasted for long. Monroe, who was very wary of anyone else taking authority and accustomed in his previous career to running his own show, would outline their duties and then perform them himself, with the result that, with nothing much to do, they quit. While he dealt—or failed to deal—with the administrative side, Scooter, who in addition to being a full-time trainer was also, as she says, “fan mail answerer, national program coordinator, secretary, monitor, Explorer, driver and public relations person,” was responsible for selecting and training new staff to run the programs, a task that often proved thankless, as most of those who offered themselves as would-be trainers fell far short of what was required. By the end of 1978, now twenty-six years old, she decided that enough was enough. She felt that she herself had something to say, but had no chance to be heard. Monroe, she said later, “was one brilliant man, and a tough one to work for!” and the family relationship did not make it any easier. Feeling frustrated, she resigned from the Institute and turned to the publishing world to make a living.
Tom Campbell and Dennis Mennerich began to find that the increased activity at the Institute was making more demands on their time than they could handle. Moreover, the research in which they had played so large a part was ceasing to be Monroe's chief priority. Financing the laboratory work was a strain on his resources; his venture into property development had collapsed years before and the time was approaching when he would need a new source of income. The Institute would soon have to be put on a sustainable footing if it were to survive. This meant that a residential center for courses was essential, together with accommodations for administrative support, a purpose-built laboratory, and eventually a conference facility also. Research would have to go on hold until all this was accomplished. Aware of the situation, Campbell and Mennerich realized it was time for them to pull out. Bill Yost also withdrew from the team after a disagreement with Monroe. Sadly, he died from lung cancer the following year.
Towards the end of the 1970s Monroe agreed to submit himself to the Research Department of the Topeka Veterans Administration Hospital for an in-depth psychological evaluation, conducted by Drs. Twemlow and Gabbard, to see if anything could be learned about how his personality and his out-of-body experiences, which were still continuing from time to time, related to each other. In their report they noticed his interest in flying and his preoccupation with movement, his creativity, and his mechanical ability. They commented on his leadership abilities, adding that he demonstrated a characteristic common to people exploring states of consciousness in that “he listened to and acted on his own subjective experience.” They continued: “Monroe has been able to take some experiences, which most people would try to deny and avoid, and place them in a highly creative context…People such as Monroe are thus able to utilize their internal mental experiences for guidance in their lives.” Later in their report they asked the question: “How can Monroe accept these highly esoteric journeys described in his book, and at the same time be the almost traditional businessman and father who is not a freak, does not wear unusual clothes, and does not put himself constantly on-stage for examination of his special abilities?” The question, however, remained unanswered. They summed up by saying, “He pursues relentlessly his own research, makes his own contacts, and takes responsibility for his own life.”11
The years at Whistlefield had seen one man's personal experience transformed into a scientifically based program, tried and tested by hundreds of individuals, with rich possibilities for further development. What had begun as something intensely personal had been transmuted into a set of experiences that was proving to be of value to all who participated in it. While many of his New Age contemporaries had lost no time in launching their projects or discoveries on the market, Monroe had, at his own expense, devoted almost a decade to investigating, developing, and refining the audio technology that, he came to believe, would prove of benefit to humankind. Reflecting later on his years of experience at Whistlefield, Tom Campbell felt that the course Bob Monroe had followed was the right one. He wrote:
He captained his ship flawlessly from the initial tentative launch, through tricky undercurrents of closed-minded rejection by the larger society, while at the same time skillfully avoiding the shallows of easy, safe, generally acceptable answers. With Bob at the helm, high standards of proof drove off pirate charlatans who wanted to co-opt his success and commandeer his hard won credibility. Through dedication to honest science, personal integrity, and an intuitive knowing that was steady and reliable, Bob optimized his gifts for the greater good.
Notes
1. This survey is reprinted in Monroe's book, Far Journeys.
2. Without drawing any conclusions, it is interesting to note that out of 151 references to the OBE state listed in Carlos Alvorado's article in Varieties of Anomalous Experience (APA, 2000) only fifteen were published before Journeys Out of the Body, and of those three were by Charles Tart commenting on Monroe's experiences before this book appeared. Both Fowler Jones and Stuart Twemlow later became occasional trainers at The Monroe Institute.
3. See My Big Toe, Book 1, by Thomas Campbell (Lightning Strike Books, 2003).
4. It is likely that Monroe's interest in the possibility of using sound to drive brainwaves derived from a conversation with Charles Tart, who had told him about the research by Andrew Neher, described in studies issued in 1961 and 1962, investigating how EEG responses could be driven by periodic acoustic stimuli, such as drumming. Neher used electrodes attached to the scalp to assess the effects. This study was replicated at Stanford in 2006.
5. The Fringes of Reason, edited by Ted Schultz (Harmony Books, 1989), provides a comprehensive survey of the New Age. The chapter on “Brain Boosters,” contributed by Joshua Hammer, describes some of the devices being advertised. Among them were the Synchro-Energizer (cost approximately $6,500 each), the Digital Audio-Visual Integration Device (or David 1) ($3,000), a “brain chair” called the Cerebrex, and the Modified Graham Potentializer. John-David, who claimed to have spent many years studying with Tibetan lamas, founded his own Learning Institute and ran several “brain fitness centers,” where he conducted seminars, as well as organizing Total Immersion Intensive Seminars in the San Francisco area. Another popular organization was the Universe of You, founded by Randy Adamadama (originally Mr. R. Stevens who, having found his mission, christened himself with what he declared was an adopted planetary name). Randy claimed to take a thousand dollars a day running Synchro-Energizer sessions at only ten dollars a throw.
6. See The Wheel of Life, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Scribner, 1997), from which these quotations are taken.
7. Healing Waters Farm was destroyed by arsonists from the locality in 1994. A man from Monterey was later overheard saying that he had “gotten rid of the AIDS lady.” (Elisabeth had been working with AIDS sufferers and was seeking to rescue babies of AIDS parents from hospital and place them with families who had lost their own young children.) She moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, not far from her son Kenneth, to a house on the edge of the desert identified by a tepee and a totem pole. After suffering a series of strokes, she died in a hospice in August 2004.
8. The following is adapted from a talk by David Mulvey, director of training, 1988-90:
In the early sixties four basic brainwave states were recognized, distinguished by letters from the Greek alphabet, measured in cycles per second, known as hertz (Hz). Beta is generally associated with waking consciousness—awake, alert, focused, attentive—and ranges between 12 and 24 Hz (or so it was thought at that time, when many scientists believed that brainwaves stopped at 24 Hz). Alpha, associated with relaxation, light meditation, and creativity, is approximately from 8 to 12 Hz. It is a state of relaxation leading into the early stages of sleep. Theta, from about 4 to 8 Hz, is associated with deep relaxation, deep meditation, and various states of sleep, as well as what may be described as inventive creativity. Delta ranges from just above zero to 4 Hz and is associated with sleep. Zero brainwaves means that you are dead.
Brainwaves, measured in the neocortex, are a reflection of consciousness—not consciousness itself. There are very strong correlations between brainwave patterns and consciousness but we should not confuse the two.
However, the human ear is only capable of hearing sounds down to 40 Hz or thereabouts. By using the concept of binaural beats, meaning that you simultaneously play two tones of slightly different frequency, the ear detects the difference between the tones. So if one tone is 100 Hz frequency and the other 104 Hz, creating a vibrato effect, the ear and the brainwaves respond to the difference, 4 Hz. As the frequencies shift, the brain follows them. Monroe called this the Frequency Following Response. By using stereo, playing one frequency into one ear, and the second into the other ear, the brain produces the difference between the two with both hemispheres responding to the same frequency and amplitude at the same time. This is Hemispheric Synchronization, or Hemi-Sync for short. This synchronization may occur without this type of stimulation, but only for a very short time.
The CDs and tapes used by the Institute may have sixteen or more sound tracks recorded on them—layers of sound designed to produce specific responses. The sounds may be embedded in pink noise, in musical compositions, or accompanied by verbal descriptions or instructions.
For a full technical explanation of the Hemi-Sync process, see the appendix.
9. A lively and positive individual with many interests and abilities, Karen was elected president of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISEEM) for 2003-4.
10. Quotations are from Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul, by F. Holmes Atwater (Hampton Roads, 2001).
11. This report was later published in Gabbard and Twemlow's book With the Eyes of the Mind (Praeger, 1984), together with an account of an earlier experiment conducted by Twemlow and Fowler Jones in the psycho-physiological laboratory at the hospital. Monroe was asked to put himself into what he considered to be an out-of-body state while various measurements were made, including tracings of his brain waves. Computer analysis of these tracings showed that “most of his brain energy was in the four to five (Theta) frequency range with nothing at all above ten cycles per second.” See Journeys Out of the Body, pp. 275-80, for a full report. This was the frequency that Monroe and his coresearchers discovered that, when produced by binaural beat technology recorded on tape, provided the gateway through which a whole new universe could be observed and entered.