In the early 1970s an increasing number of people appeared at the Whistlefield Research Laboratory curious to see what was going on there. Monroe would satisfy their interest, as well as further his research, by inviting them to a session in one of the three isolation units, which he named Controlled Holistic Environmental Chambers, better known as CHEC units (Monroe loved acronyms), monitoring them himself and questioning them as to how they were affected by the Hemi-Sync signals being fed to the headphones they were wearing. Each unit was equipped with a warm waterbed. Electrodes were attached to the user so that various readings could be measured throughout the duration of the session. This enabled Monroe to observe the physical state of the subject and to make minute adjustments to the frequencies to assist, for example, the maintaining of the appropriate degree of relaxation. A microphone was suspended in the booth so that two-way communication was always open and the complete dialogue was recorded on tape.
Some visitors just came, had one or two sessions, and left, but others, their interest awakened, returned whenever they could. Before long Monroe began to gather an informal group of the more regular, and more fluent, visitors that became known as the Explorer team. These were people who not only showed interest in what was going on at Whistlefield but were also prepared to give up many hours of their time to assist in the research. Monroe described them as “a very special group, a total of some eight subjects completely familiar with the Focus 10 state. Verbal communication in Focus 10 through the microphone/headphone system became as normal as if we were sitting across from one another in a conference room.”
One of the earlier Explorers was a cheerful, lively minded, young married woman, Rosalind McKnight. Rosalind had traveled widely, held a master's degree in divinity, and had been working as a counselor at a YMCA facility in New York. In 1971 she and her husband rented a farmhouse in rural Virginia. Soon after they moved in, a friend from New York arrived on a visit and offered to take them to meet two long-standing friends of hers, Robert and Nancy Monroe who, they discovered, lived about an hour's drive from the McKnights’ farmhouse. Arriving at Whistlefield, Rosalind's first impression of Monroe was of a man who, despite his wrinkled clothes, “had a rare mystique that completely set him off from other people.” In conversation they discovered that the friend who introduced Rosalind and her husband to the Monroes had once been visited by Bob in the out-of-body state, an incident that he recorded in Journeys Out of the Body.
The McKnights were fascinated by the discussion that took place on out-of-body experiences and made a second visit to Whistlefield a few months later. On this occasion Monroe asked Rosalind if she would like to try a session herself in one of the isolation units. She readily agreed, was wired up, and, as the sound signals were played into her headphones, gradually fell asleep. At first she thought she had flunked her first experiment, but Monroe was impressed by her inquiring mind and interest in what was going on and invited her to return to try again.
Rosalind returned in April the following year, determined this time to stay awake. Soon after the session began she found herself in what she described as a blackout period, which she later interpreted as her consciousness “changing gears.” Emerging from this she felt somehow detached from her physical body. “I suddenly experienced my consciousness as existing outside my body,” she said. She felt as if she was “pure energy,” able to move anywhere instantly “just by the mere thought of being there.”
Then, so she said, she became aware of “two forms of light” who began communicating wordlessly with her, helping her out of her physical body and gently instructing her in techniques that would enable her to move out of body by herself. They told her how to create an “energy balloon” around herself to facilitate this. As she followed their instructions she became aware that her conscious awareness shifted from outside herself to inside what she described as her “light body.” The two “forms of light” let her know that their intention was to take her into different levels, although she had no idea then what that meant. It seemed only a matter of minutes before they told her it was time to return. To her surprise she discovered that the session had lasted for nearly two hours.
Fascinated by Rosalind's report of her experience, Monroe invited her to join the Explorer team. She was, however, to meet very few of this group, as the policy was to keep them apart as far as possible to prevent them from comparing notes with each other. Rosalind was to become one of the longest-serving members, taking sessions with Monroe on many occasions over the next eleven years.
Some of Rosalind's explorations are recounted in her book Cosmic Journeys.1 These range from accounts of greater energies and energy systems to a meeting with extraterrestrials on a spaceship, advice on healing, and a lecture on food and physical fitness. On most of these explorations she was instructed and aided by her “Invisible Helpers,” as she calls them. The members of this “amazing team” were obviously familiar with human psychology, “having decided to assign just two light beings to work with me during the first session and then to bring in others when I was more familiar with the process.” Sometimes one of the Helpers would speak through her, or would speak directly to Monroe. Looking back over her eleven years of sessions, she says that her Invisible Helpers “were always there guiding, directing and evidently planning the sessions ahead of time, even though there is no ‘time’ as we know it in their dimension.”
On one occasion Rosalind had to cancel a session at short notice. The next time she saw Monroe he seemed to be in especially good humor. Something odd had happened on the day she missed her session, he told her. A visitor had arrived from Washington, a female psychologist, who wanted to learn more about what he was doing. After some discussion, during which she expressed much skepticism, he felt she ought to experience Hemi-Sync for herself. She agreed, and he placed her in the booth that Rosalind normally used. Some five minutes later her voice came through the intercom. “There is someone else in the booth with me,” she said. “More than one…there are four of them…There are two at my feet and two at my head.”
“What are they doing?” asked Monroe.
“They are trying to lift me out of my body, if you can believe that.”
Monroe made a note of the time. It was ten past five, the precise time of Rosalind's regular session.
“What are they doing now?” he asked.
“They have stopped trying to lift me out of my body. And they are arguing…The four want to lift me out. And now there is a fifth that is arguing with them that they should not.”
Soon afterwards the psychologist reported that they had stopped arguing and left. She relaxed into sleep until Monroe awoke her and released her from the booth. She was totally bewildered. He then played her a recording of one of Rosalind's sessions where this “lifting out” had been reported. She left “very puzzled and preoccupied,” and never returned.
To begin with, Monroe took a keen interest in the Explorer sessions. He was persistent in his questioning and sought to elicit as much information as he could. Rosalind considered him to be very left-brained and scientifically oriented, in contrast to herself. She said, “I was so non-scientifically oriented that I had no idea what the tapes were all about until my husband explained the Hemi-Sync process to me after about six months of being an Explorer.” She added, “I was able to relax into the tapes and have the experiences whereupon Bob could question my guiding energies about how they did what they did.” These sessions sometimes lasted nearly three hours and were often followed by dinner together at the restaurant on the top of Afton Mountain.
Rosalind's Invisible Helpers provided her with information and advice on a host of different topics from recommending eating green leaf vegetables to the ability of domestic pets to read each others’ minds, to tracking spaceships, the nature of gods (or God), the death of planets, the birth and nature of souls, and so on. Sometimes the subject was in answer to a question posed by Monroe, sometimes it arose seemingly spontaneously. Many of the sessions resembled lectures dealing with topics such as greater energies and energy systems or the hierarchy of Nature. In one intense experience Rosalind observed herself and the Earth “in both time and timelessness.” She continued: “The balancing of my energies is related to my earth existence. We come into the time zone of earth at certain levels for special lessons in balance. Our souls choose these time-zone lessons, and we go to specific areas where the energies are right for our personal growth.” She saw some of her past-life incarnations, in Scotland, in a Germanic country, in the Golden Age of Greece, and in an Indian nation in Central America. She viewed “the very highly evolved cultures called Mu and Atlantis” and commented that these and other similar cultures collapsed because of the misuse of energy and their imbalance in relation to the rest of the world. She moved on to sense “the overall presence of all the souls who have ever lived on earth” which, because there is no time, “actually exist in all levels at once.” It was revealed to her that the highest energy is love energy, which Jesus came to Earth to demonstrate. Then she looked into the future of the planet, when “the highest and lowest vibratory souls will be back on earth at the same time.” There will be shifts in the Earth's physical structure as it moves into a higher energy; new continents will appear “and many types of energy beings from other dimensions will be coming into the earth's atmosphere.” Man's physical nature will change and our bodies will become less dense.
This session ended with positive messages. “Life is how you perceive it. Live every day on the tiptoes of excitement…Go with the flow of life and do not resist your lessons. Give everything away that you receive. You will find that what you receive in return is a greater understanding of your oneness with all. All is one, and one is all.”
Some of the details from Rosalind's out-of-body explorations so intrigued Monroe that he later incorporated them into his Gateway program. One of these was what she described as a balloon of energy that she formed around her physical body as a kind of protection. Another was a bar of energy that she was told to create to cleanse her physical body. Both these concepts appear in Gateway exercises, although put to rather different uses. Rosalind also saw consciousness as a form of energy, a definition or explanation that appealed to Monroe, and in her explorations she was guided by her Invisible Helpers, who reappear in the Guidelines program—the follow-up to Gateway—as Inner Self Helpers, working with the program participants. Although Monroe was insistent that whatever an Explorer session revealed its validity was restricted to the individual explorer, he had no hesitation in adapting ideas or concepts emerging from a session that he felt would be of value to others.
Invisible Helpers, Guides, Energy Beings—these are the apparent sources of the information that the Explorers reported. Some have names, some have personalities; others are voices audible only to the Explorers, who record what they are hearing. The term channeling is generally used to describe this process. This has been defined by Jon Klimo, in his substantial study of the phenomenon, as “the communication of information to or through a physically embodied human being from a source that is said to exist on some other level or dimension of reality than the physical as we know it, and that is not from the normal mind (or self) of the channel.”2 Writing some ten years later, Michael Brown provides a slightly different explanation: “the use of altered states of consciousness to contact spirits—or, as many of its practitioners say, to experience spiritual energy captured from other times and dimensions.”3 One point that needs to be made about Monroe's Explorers is that they were delivering their information before the publication of Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb, the book and subsequent TV movie that were largely responsible for the promotion of the channeling phenomenon.
In his survey, Klimo discovered that, for the most part, there was nothing particularly distinctive or special about those who claimed to channel. “A pattern emerges of typical relationships, family settings, money worries, usual life problems and challenges being met.” Many of them were private individuals, some of whom were willing to demonstrate their gift before others. “Channeling sessions,” said Ted Schultz in his fascinating survey, The Fringes of Reason, “filtered into the middle class like a 1980s metaphysical version of the Tupperware party.” There were also a number of “commercial channelers” such as J. Z. Knight and Kevin Ryerson, whose public performances gained them both wealth and notoriety.
As well as visiting Jane Roberts,4 Monroe showed some interest in some of the other well-known channelers. Out of curiosity he attended sessions by J. Z. Knight, whose channeled entity, Ramtha, the Enlightened One, claimed to have incarnated some thirty-five thousand years ago in Lemuria, and by Penny Torres, a young housewife from Southern California, channeler of Mafu, who declared that he was at one time a Greek living in the first century A.D., yet who somehow seemed to have adopted several of Ramtha's turns of phrase. Although he was hugged by both Ramtha and Mafu, Monroe did not feel that either of them had especially enlightened him.
There is a marked distinction, however, between Monroe's Explorers and the New Age channelers, whether commercial or private. The Explorers worked in strictly controlled conditions and with a monitor who could observe and modify those conditions if necessary and stayed in communication throughout the session, asking questions and commenting from time to time, so that the session was a dialogue rather than a monologue. They were essentially private individuals with no followers and no financial rewards. Shut away in the soundproof booth they were freed from the constraints and conditions of daily life and could allow their consciousness to move away from the limitations of time and space.
While Monroe, speaking both for himself and for the Institute, was careful not to endorse information gained from the Explorers’ sessions, he was alert to anything that appealed directly to his own interest in consciousness. One concept that particularly impressed him emerged from the experiences of an Explorer, Shay St. John, a social worker by profession, referred to by her initials SHE. What emerged from Shay's sessions Monroe described as “one of the most interesting descriptions of total reality we have yet encountered.”
During several sessions this Explorer made contact with a guide, a male energy who gave his name as Miranon. We have seen that Monroe had already devised a kind of code for referring to certain states or levels of consciousness. Focus 1 was “ordinary, everyday consciousness”; Focus 10 was a state where the mind was awake and alert and the body to all intents and purposes asleep; Focus 12 was a state of expanded awareness. In conversation with Monroe, SHE describes her experience of moving through levels 15 to 22, which Miranon had previously referred to as the levels of human life on Earth. Miranon (who refers to SHE as “Leana” and keeps careful watch over her physical condition) then enters the discussion, promising to help Monroe explore the various levels in a future session.
Before the commencement of the next session, SHE produced a complex diagram of the twenty-one levels of physical existence on Earth that, she said, “just came” to her. During the session Miranon referred to this diagram and then proceeded to deliver what amounted to a lecture on the seven planes that, according to him, express the entire spectrum of consciousness. Each plane contains seven levels that comprise various stages of existence, physical and nonphysical. The first three planes contain the whole of physical life on Earth. In summary: levels 1–7 are the region where plants exist; levels 8–14 are where animals exist; levels 15–21 are the realm of human life on Earth. At level 21 the individual has the choice of staying in human form or moving higher into the fourth plane—if one wishes to do this, then physical form must be abandoned. On physical death you enter levels 22 to 28, described as the bridge. Once the bridge is crossed, said Miranon, “for consciousness to evolve higher it would not again assume human form of any kind.” The upper three planes comprise the spiritual realm. Here, says Miranon, is “where much of the work is done” and where the guides who choose to help those still in human form may be found.
This spectrum of consciousness described by Miranon is both coherent and comprehensive. Each level from 1 to 49 has its appropriate color and the whole concept can be clearly depicted in diagrammatic form. Miranon explained that he was on level 46. When he reaches level 49, which he says he eventually will, he is destined to leave “all of this realm of existence.” He continued: “It does not mean I have reached the highest point by any means. It simply means that I have left this group of seven…Imagine, if you will, the seven circles enclosed in an even larger circle upon which seven more circles are stacked. Which is in turn enclosed in an even greater circle. And then you can have some idea of what infinity is. It does not ever stop.”
Throughout these sessions Monroe came to regard Miranon as a dear friend and also as a teacher. He was so impressed by the quality and consistency of the information he was given that he later made use of the levels 22 to 27 in the Lifeline program, the last residential program he completed, and in the Outreach workshop Going Home. He also authorized the use of Focus 34 and Focus 35 in Exploration 27, the final program he devised although he never lived to complete it.5 As a tribute to the inspiration he had received, he gave the name of Miranon to the picturesque lake within sight of the Institute buildings after the move from Whistlefield.
There is a particular detail in the account of the Miranon sessions that is of special interest. At one time when Miranon and Monroe were in discussion, the Explorer herself was occupied with other deeply personal matters. She established connection with her deceased godfather, whom she found in what she described as a beautiful garden where he awaited her. So profound was the connection that she was unaware that the Miranon session was finished, and she failed to respond to the recall signal that Monroe sent to indicate that it was time for her to return. As the time passed—more than two hours—he became increasingly anxious and it was not until, as she reported, her godfather reminded her that she had children and loved ones who needed her that she rejoined her physical body in the laboratory. Miranon explained to Monroe that she was too strongly connected to her godfather to continue to work in this way and she needed at least a year before she resumed. SHE later commented that this was the closest Monroe came to losing one of his Explorers.
The program continued after the Institute moved to Roberts Mountain, where a purpose-built system for exploration was constructed. A control area was installed in the laboratory linked to an adjacent room containing a double bed for the Explorer. Later this room was replaced by a specially constructed shielded unit, familiarly known as the “black box.” By this time most of the earlier team had moved on to other things, but there was no shortage of new Explorers eager to try out the equipment and record their experiences.
Rosalind McKnight was one of the Explorers who continued to work with Monroe after the move. There was one particular session, known as “The Patrick Event,” that impressed him so deeply that subsequently he often included a recording of it in the Gateway program. It took place soon after the Institute was relocated but before the laboratory was ready for use, so the session was held in one of the units in the Residential Center. At the time it appeared that a group of “entities” were accustomed to speaking through Rosalind McKnight. As the session proceeded, they began to talk about “earthbound spirits” or “ghosts.” “There are many millions of souls that are in the earth vibration with the feeling that they are still in their physical bodies,” they declared. “They are locked into a time zone. It is necessary to penetrate their time zones, to talk to them individually and bring them into the awareness that they are no longer in physical form.” Such souls, Rosalind was told, need an especially sensitive approach, as they feel they are still in their Earth bodies and it requires someone from the Earth to make them aware of their situation. Once they realize they are, in Earth terms, dead, then helpers from the spirit dimension can take over and “help them adjust to their new vibrations and new reality.”
The entities added that they were going to send one such soul, “lost in the earth-time zone,” who needed help. Monroe intervened to question whether there was any risk to the Explorer herself. He was assured that she was quite safe, adding that the only souls who would be sent were those “on the threshold of enlightenment.” Those who were in “great darkness” had to be worked with in a different way, they added. They went on to clarify the situation:
There are many delightful souls who are locked into the physical universe of reality because they are imprisoned by their own thought-forms. Often it is fear that confines them, brought on by the trauma of the event of death. It is such souls that we bring through in a crying need of help, and on the verge of breakthrough.
All souls have surrounding them many helpers…That is why no soul is really lost in the universe. The term “lost soul”—a concept that a soul can be lost for eternity in “hell”—is not a reality in our dimension, because there is no time. Time is a creation of the earth-consciousness. Hell is actually a level of consciousness—in which a soul can exist whether in the body or out…We work in a timeless level, and souls exist in a timeless level. It is a continuous process to help souls become aware of the true nature of their reality.
The soul who needed help then spoke through Rosalind, identifying himself as Patrick O'Shaunessy. He said he was born in Oban, Scotland, in 1821. In answer to Monroe's questions he said he was floating in the sea, holding on to a log. He was a cook on board a small vessel, the Laura Belle, transporting lumber to various countries. There had been an explosion and as far as he knew no one else had survived. He thought he had been in the water for something like twelve hours. He was freezing cold, he said, and had almost given up hope of rescue. He told Monroe that both his parents were dead.
“Well, one of the things you have to consider is that you are like your mother and father now,” said Monroe. “You have graduated. You have grown; and you are ready to move to another place.” As Monroe continued to talk to him, Patrick began to accept that he was in fact dead—and yet he was still alive! “Naturally, you're still alive,” said Monroe. “You do not die when your physical body dies. Let go of the log and see what happens.”
Patrick released his hold on the log. “I feel so light,” he said. “I've been clinging to my log, and to my life…” He found himself floating above the water, feeling light and free. He saw his parents reaching down for him and grasped their hands.
Rosalind's “Invisible Helpers” commented that this soul had transformed into a new level of energy and would be able to continue on from there. It had been locked in by fear. “Often it is the emotional level that locks the soul into the earth plane. Because of a very strong emotional earth attachment, it still vibrates on the slower earth level. Therefore the complete transition cannot take place until the soul mentally and emotionally releases the earth vibrations.”
The complete recording of “The Patrick Event” invariably makes a deep impression on its hearers. The whole episode has a coherence that is sometimes lacking in the Explorer materials. The sailor's voice as it emanates from the Explorer in an altered state of consciousness has an urgency and plangency that stir the hearts and minds of listeners, while Monroe's total commitment to the task in hand is unquestionable.
The episode is unusual as it deals with an event that appears to have occurred in what we know as earthly or everyday reality. Patrick O'Shaunessy, born in Oban in 1821, whose parents died from influenza and who had four brothers and sisters, who became a sailor on the Laura Belle, a vessel carrying lumber to Ireland and other countries, that sank following an explosion in 1879—there is so much detail that one would think it possible to discover whether Patrick really existed and whether the shipwreck really happened. However, certain questions do arise. Patrick O'Shaunessy is an Irish, not a Scottish, name. Oban, where Patrick says he was born, is on the west coast of Scotland (not the north, as Patrick says—but the name O'Shaunessy does occur in the Oban registers), and the family, like many others over the years, could well have migrated from Ireland. Patrick said he worked in the kitchen of the vessel, not the galley—the usual term; but it has been claimed that kitchen was an acceptable alternative during the nineteenth century. Even if there may be a few lurking doubts, to the vast majority of those who have heard it, the information in the episode has a kind of solidity very difficult to ignore.
Soon after the move, Monroe, who hitherto had monitored the Explorers himself, withdrew from active participation in the program and invited two of the residents of the New Land, Rita and Martin Warren, to take it over. Rita had been a participant in two of the early Gateway programs on the New Land and the Warrens, along with their friend Nan Wilson, were among the first to buy a plot there. They lodged nearby while their house was being built and were looking forward to an easygoing retirement. Rita, with a PhD in psychology, had recently completed a distinguished career during which she researched and published her findings concerning the causes of juvenile crime and the treatment of offenders. She also taught psychology at the State University of New York. Martin spent much of his career in youth welfare, holding positions in the Departments of Health and of Social Welfare in California. Their interest was aroused by Monroe's offer and ideas of retirement went out of the window. They ran the Explorer program as unpaid volunteers for four years, often working for seven days a week. It transpired that this work, as Rita later said, “was among the most exciting and personally rewarding of their careers.”
Well over a thousand recordings of channeling sessions are stored in the Institute archives or in the personal collections of the Explorers themselves. Occasionally, some brave individual will express interest in working through this material but faced with the immensity of the task soon thinks better of it. From the samples that are available—recordings of thirty-two sessions were made available for purchase in 1991—it appears that much of the content could be broadly described as spiritual. Jon Klimo comments that this type of personal, as opposed to public, channeling “involves receiving knowledge or understanding, ineffable though it may be, which includes the sense of revelation and the uplifting of one's spirit, and feelings of oneness with the Universe and all that is.” The messages, information, and insights received may be of great significance to the channeler, and are often of interest to the monitor also. Looking back on the Explorer program, Monroe commented that “without exception, each ‘entity’ has as an original purpose the well-being and growth of the living human individual through whom the contact was made. If others benefited from such counseling, this was incidental and relatively unimportant. None had as an avowed purpose or intent the delivery of a vital message for humankind in general.”6
As for the channeling process itself, Monroe pointed out that “it has always been a part of history under various guises, reaching back into antiquity and pre-Biblical eras.” He adds that “prophecy, meditation, hypnosis, and certain dream states all bear a remarkable resemblance to the basic phenomenon.” In all these phenomena, as with Monroe's Explorers, movement into an altered state of consciousness, no matter how achieved, is an essential part of the process.
In their sessions Monroe's Explorers are transported from the world of physical reality that is subjected to the time-space continuum to regions where physical reality, time, and space no longer exist. Their consciousness is not controlled by mood-altering drugs, medication, or any stimulus apart from certain subtle sound frequencies. They are able to understand and respond to the voice of the monitor and to describe the experience that they are undergoing. As an Explorer you may make contact with nonphysical beings who provide information that may or may not be relevant to your earthly life. You may move into the distant past or into the future; you may participate in conversations on consciousness or meet the inhabitants of Mars. There are no restrictions—and whatever your experience may be, you are always brought safely back to “normal, everyday consciousness” when your time is up.
The monitors themselves were careful not to frontload issues about beliefs or discuss expectations, although one Explorer, with the initials HBW, appeared to question this approach. HBW was in the booth discussing with the monitor, Rita Warren, the process of this kind of exploration and said that it was important to warn Explorers that what they might discover was likely to be in accordance with their belief system and expectations but this did not mean that their beliefs were true. It simply means that the information they do discover is in accordance with their expectations and beliefs. To gain a higher level of knowledge Explorers should move their belief structures and their expectations out of the way so that they obtain the freedom to get in touch with uncolored knowledge—meaning knowledge not colored by one's expectations and beliefs. For the majority of those who took part in the program, this was asking too much.
It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the content of the Explorers’ channeling, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, reflects the ideas and aspirations of the New Age. There are many references to “energy” and “energy-beings,” to “vibratory patterns” and “entities,” although there are few, if any, attempts at explanation or definition. There are warnings of Earth-changes in the near future and an unquestioning acceptance of the concept of reincarnation. Yet there are also occasions when the Explorer seems to be taken over by something other, and is used as a mouthpiece for messages, ideas, and concepts that the Explorer was previously unaware of, although he or she would probably not disagree with them. After monitoring countless sessions, Monroe himself came to compare the Explorer sessions to gold-mining. Most of what you unearthed was dross, but every now and then you might hit upon something that was of significant value. So you persisted, in hope rather than expectation that reward would come.
An example of such reward resulted from the experience of an Explorer known as Winter. For a time Winter was an Institute trainer working with the Guidelines program. As a participant in that program she slept through the whole six days. During that period, she said, she made a number of decisions at an unconscious level. Sometime later she was in a group of Explorers, guided by Rita Warren, practicing remote viewing in the laboratory. She was given a target but instead of continuing with the exercise she made sudden and unexpected contact with a cartoon character—Yosemite Sam—who proceeded to scrutinize Rita's body and produced, through Winter, an accurate medical diagnosis. Soon afterwards Winter met the professor of biochemistry at Brown University, who was a member of the Institute's board of advisors, and shared this experience with him. He invited her to work with him and was impressed by her (or Sam's) diagnostic accuracy as they toured the hospital wards, so much so that he persuaded the National Institutes of Health to finance two medical students to study what she did and hopefully to learn from her.
On another occasion Winter found that she was channeling an energy by the name of Kryndon, who claimed to be “anything you want me to be.” The Kryndon energy, she said, was extremely direct and was always ready to bring out anything you didn't want discussed. Monroe was fascinated by this energy and asked Winter if she was prepared to channel in public before an audience that would include Charles Tart and two leading proponents of J. Z. Knight's Ramtha. Winter agreed, although she had little idea of what it was all about, and a sizeable group assembled to witness the event. Winter sat behind a table with Rita and Martin Warren on either side of her. In his introduction, Monroe declared that no one to date had ever opened their eyes during a channeling session. “All I remember,” said Winter, “was that after Bob introduced me I was sitting in the middle of the table. I had swept all the papers onto the floor and asked that they turned down the lights. I remember watching from a distance, thinking, ‘So this is what they call channeling.’” Everything that happened, including Winter's open eyes during the process, was contrary to what Monroe expected, but subsequently he had several conversations with Kryndon. Winter believed he was trying to find out just what Kryndon was, but neither she nor Monroe ever came up with an answer.
Another Explorer, Ria, developed a remarkable ability to perform body scans. In so doing, she was able to visualize and detect any impairments or obstacles that were detracting from the physical, mental, or spiritual health of a given subject. That subject would normally be present in the laboratory at the time, although Ria was also able on request to perform a scan at a distance. On one occasion Monroe and Martin Warren were in the lab with Ria when Martin asked if the entity or channel that she worked with had a name. “It doesn't matter,” was the reply. “Are you part of this earth plane?” asked Monroe. “No, I am not,” came the response. “Well, if you're not Here then you must be There,” said Monroe—and the name stuck.7
Many of Monroe's Explorers were professional people with some interest in spiritual concerns. There were, however, a few exceptions. Once the Institute was established on its present site, it created a certain amount of suspicion among the neighboring rural community. “That's where they do brain transplants” was one of the rumors floating around. To allay these suspicions, open house sessions for the local people were arranged from time to time. On one such day, after completing the tour of the Center and the laboratory, Marie, a young woman living in the locality, asked for a particular taped exercise and told Monroe that she would work with it and come back in a year's time to request a job at the Institute. And so she did. Every day of that year, she said, she listened to that tape, one of the introductory exercises in the Gateway course, and discovered in herself such a capacity to channel that she was asked to join the Explorer program. She became, in the words of Rita Warren, who was then coordinator of the program, “one of our most prolific Explorers,” adding that “the energy that speaks through her always has a great deal of useful information to share with us.”
In several of her sessions, IMEC, as this Explorer was known, discussed what she described as “the countless Aspects that make up the individual's personality and emotional characteristics.” She allowed some of these Aspects—they included several young children, a nun, a doctor of philosophy, two older children, and a psychopath who sometimes tried to kill them all—to speak through her, each in its own voice and in its own way, and all under the charge of a “protector” identified only by initials. Commenting on the various messages, one of those monitoring her sessions said that the information “provides fascinating insights for us into questions of multiple personalities and the seeming phenomenon of possession.” According to IMEC's guides, “such appearances occur when the central consciousness abandons its leadership role and allows various of the Aspective energies to gain control of emotions and behavior. It illustrates what an ordinary individual can do through conscious awareness of his own Aspects to facilitate his growth towards freedom for the central self to choose more consciously the reality that one desires to experience.”
Early one morning, Rita Warren was awakened by a telephone call from IMEC, who said that she had been up since 4 A.M., waiting until the time was right to phone. She told Rita there was a man in Richmond, diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, who was being treated by a psychologist that she and Rita knew. She was afraid because one of the personalities of this patient was trying to kill both himself and his other Aspects by drowning them. She asked Rita to call the psychologist and warn him. Rita did so and was told that the patient was at that moment in the waiting room.
A couple of days later the psychologist called to see Rita and asked for any more information about what had happened. She told him about IMEC's abilities, whereupon he produced a tape from his pocket—a record of the session with the patient talking about his various personalities and explaining that one of them was trying to kill the others by drowning them. Rita commented that all these interactions were occurring in the ether, with no contact between the participants.
IMEC herself monitored a few Explorer sessions and also addressed course participants from time to time, revealing a degree of knowledge and perception remarkable in one from a comparatively limited background. She admitted that these talks sometimes presented difficulties as everything she said was actually channeled—she and her guides, whom she called Friends, had become as one and could no longer speak separately. So when, after her introductory remarks, the participants asked her to channel she feared they would be disappointed, as that is what she was already doing.
All this gives rise to a vital question. Is information received in an altered state of consciousness of any greater significance than information received in the normal course of events? To the individual receiving the information the answer may well be yes. In this regard, however, two sentences quoted by Jon Klimo from a letter to the editor of Common Boundary are highly relevant. “Each of us has the ability to get information specific to our life situation from our personal inner source. It is dangerous to rely upon the inner voice of someone else, as it is to accept our own without careful evaluation.”8 Most, if not all, of Monroe's explorers, who never sought publicity in any shape or form and never attempted to force acceptance of their experiences upon others, would agree.
In 1987 Monroe felt it necessary to clarify the Institute's attitude towards the channeling phenomenon. He pointed out that since 1975 the Institute had conducted more than 800 experimental sessions in the laboratory with a total of 156 volunteer subjects, adding that throughout all these sessions the Institute acted only as a reporter, making no judgment on the validity, source, or intent of the material. Reviewing the program, he concluded cautiously: “there may be many profound benefits from the wide and growing interest in the channeling process. More and more individuals are discovering that they, too, can ‘channel’; in so doing, each can become his own authority with his own source.”
It was about this time that the Explorer program, which was entirely free of charge for its participants, was terminated. Rita and Martin Warren felt that they were no longer able to continue with the program as it stood, and there were no suitable volunteers to take on the tasks of organizing and monitoring the sessions. Monroe's own interest in the program had waned, although he still felt that it might be able to produce information of value. Rita then proposed that it would be possible to continue under a different protocol. She suggested that Dr. Darlene Miller who had recently become a trainer and, like Rita Warren, had a PhD in psychology, be appointed to administer what became known as the Personal Resource Exploration program (PREP). This provided a session in the isolation chamber for all participants in the Institute's Guidelines course. In addition, anyone who wished could pay for a personal monitored session in the isolation booth. Each session was recorded on tape, one copy for the participant and the other for the Institute records.
It is, of course, not necessary to undergo a session listening to phased sound signals, whether in a laboratory or in your own home, to contact your personal inner source. The transcendent or mystical experience, those “astonishing moments of insight,” as Alan Watts described them, or that “awareness that transcends the individual and discloses to a person something that passes far beyond himself,” to use Ken Wilber's words, can come to anyone at any time. An altered state of consciousness may also be induced by fasting, dreaming, substance-ingesting, over-breathing, or flashing lights, although the result may be hallucinatory rather than insightful. But the advantage of the laboratory session is that the subject is held in an altered state for a considerable time—an hour or more. The presence of a monitor, able to check on the condition of the Explorer and to prompt when required with questions or comments, helps to add direction to the session, and the recording of what is being said enables discussion and development when the session is over.
Whether the Explorer is an adept, having experienced forty or fifty sessions, a participant in a regular Monroe Institute program that includes a session as a matter of course, or a person who is ready to pay in dollars for the experience, what happens during the event may sometimes prove of great personal significance. Then again, it may be a fun trip—a visit to a playful planet, for instance—or it might deliver an answer to a question or solution to a problem. An advantage of considering questions or problems in an altered state is that perspectives are changed, complications can be resolved, the crooked becomes straight and the rough places plain—and all this with or without the help of “entities.” But what Monroe and his scientific colleagues could not have foreseen is that a project originally designed to investigate the effects of certain sound frequencies on human consciousness would become a means of acquiring insights, information, ideas, even entertainment, that has proved of interest and sometimes of value to thousands of people who have allowed themselves to be installed on a waterbed in a sensory-deprivation isolation unit, wired up to various recording instruments, equipped with headphones and a microphone, and given permission to explore.
Notes
1. Rosalind McKnight, Cosmic Journeys (Hampton Roads, 1999).
2. Jon Klimo, Channeling (Tarcher, 1987).
3. M. F. Brown, The Channeling Zone (Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. See Brown, The Channeling Zone, p. 194.
5. The Starlines program, devised by the Monroe trainer Franceen King and first offered in 2003, takes participants even farther into hitherto unknown territory.
6. Not quite so. There are references to Earth Changes and various natural disasters, topics much discussed in certain New Age circles, in some of the transcripts.
7. On one occasion I submitted myself to a body scan by Ria in the Institute laboratory. She (or “There”) indicated a block located at a point on my right shoulder that she said had been there for many years and was a consequence of intensive study in my late teens. As this block caused no pain I paid little attention to it at the time. Then a few years later I was being examined by a leading osteopath specializing in craniosacral work. At the end of the treatment I asked what if anything he had found. “Just one thing,” he replied. “There was some sort of block on your right shoulder. It must have been caused by something you were doing many years ago—working too hard perhaps. Anyway, I've released it.”
8. The writer of this letter was James B. DeKome, of El Rito, New Mexico.