Monroe's exploration, and consequent explanation, of consciousness is grounded on a firm philosophic base. Professor Joseph Felser sums up Monroe's philosophy as deriving from two key principles. “Expressed in imperative form, they are: ‘Explore everywhere!’ and ‘Question everything!’” These, he explains, may be understood as the principles of “radical empiricism” and “radical iconoclasm,” respectively. Taking “radical” in its literal meaning of “deeply rooted,” Felser affirms that “Bob's philosophical roots are so deeply and closely intertwined as to be practically and theoretically inseparable. Like the Taoist root principles of Yin and Yang, each leads to, and complements, the other.”1
A working definition of an empiricist is, Felser says, “someone who believes that knowledge is based primarily on experience.” He continues: “The more experience we have, the faster our knowledge grows. So it's quite logical and natural that an empiricist is an explorer of new worlds of fact, a patient, but persistent, gatherer of raw data.” As for iconoclasm, we have Monroe's own words from Ultimate Journey:
What we need to do, whether in or out-of-body, is to ignore or tear down the No Trespassing signs, the taboos, the notice that says Holy of Holies, the distortions of time and translation, the soft black holes of euphoria, the mysticisms, the myths, the fantasies of an eternal father or mother image, and then take a good look with our acquired and growing left brain. Nothing is sacred to the point where it should not be investigated or put under inquiry.
Personal experience uninhibited by belief systems is at the core of his thinking.
The preoccupation of so much of humankind with belief systems was a major concern of Robert Monroe, especially those systems applying to science and religion. He became convinced that belief systems were incompatible with genuine freedom, inhibited personal experience, and hence also impeded the expansion of consciousness.
Through his personal experience Monroe came to understand that, as he expresses it, “the physical universe, including the whole of humankind, is an ongoing creative process. There is, indeed,” he continues, “a Creator.” Monroe regards the existence of a Creator as a “Known,” not as a belief. He takes this “Known” a stage further, adding that the Creator “is beyond our comprehension as long as we remain human.” The Creator does not require worship or recognition, does not punish or intercede in human lives, has a purpose that we do not comprehend, establishes simple universal laws, and “is the designer of the ongoing process of which we are a part.” In the light of current controversies, there are some who would leap upon that last statement in order to recruit Monroe to the host of contemporary believers in Intelligent Design. At this he would raise an eyebrow, murmur that his statements, however others might understand or interpret them, came not through any belief but through his own personal experience. So, if you want to know, go find out for yourself. It was to help others to find out for themselves that he created the program known as Lifeline.
One of Monroe's greatest gifts is his ability to express profundity in language that anyone can understand, an ability that he acquired from his many years in radio. He avoids jargon and technicalities, writing and speaking in straightforward English, never seeking to overwhelm or persuade the reader or listener by displaying his superior knowledge. When it comes to the contentious area of consciousness studies, whose practitioners, with very few exceptions, are not famous for economy or simplicity of expression, Monroe stands out as a beacon of clarity. To describe the various states or phases of consciousness he developed what Felser calls “a neutral terminology”—the Focus states—each accompanied by a number and a simple phrase—“mind awake, body asleep,” “a state of expanded awareness,” and so on. In so doing he succeeded in demystifying the subject so that his audience required no training in science, philosophy, meditation, or linguistics to understand what he was talking about.
Monroe expresses his own thoughts on consciousness, as evidenced in the philosophy and practice of his Institute, in two paragraphs in chapter 2 of Far Journeys:
Stated simply, the Institute holds to the concept that (1) consciousness and the focusing thereof contain any and all solutions to the life processes that man desires or encounters; (2) greater understanding and appreciation of such consciousness can be achieved only through interdisciplinary approaches and coordination; (3) the results of related research effort are meaningful only if reduced to practical application, to “something of value” within the context of the contemporary culture or era.
This leads us to the base that consciousness is a form of energy at work. The first step must therefore be to perceive the energy itself—no small trick when you are using yourself to measure yourself, as it were. Once it is perceived in its raw form, you are on the way to understanding how it is naturally used. Such perception will permit a broader and more deliberate control of such energy fields. From control, it is a logical step to apply it in new and expanded forms. This is no more than a circumlocutory way of saying that if you can find the stuff that makes you think and be, you can use it in ways that you are not using it now.
In the epilogue to Far Journeys Monroe takes his thoughts further. Here he makes a single positive statement: “Consciousness is Focused Energy.” It is, he claims, “a manifestation of a system generated by a form of dynamic energy yet to be identified and measured by mainstream human civilization, a system that is present in all carbon-based organic life.” While consciousness is not dependent on time-space, it is, he says, “widely focused into time-space physical matter. This is not the totality of energy consciousness involved, as other forms of the same consciousness are active concurrently in divergent systems of reality.” He also comments that, when we are deeply asleep, our consciousness is completely detached from physical reality.
In Ultimate Journey Monroe expands on this in a section headed “Consciousness is a Continuum”:
In our focused wakefulness, we as Human Minds employ that part of the consciousness spectrum limited to time-space. This is made possible by the device we identify as a physical body, with its five physical senses. This physical body permits us to express externally our mind-consciousness through physical activity and communication.
When this focusing is affected for any reason, our mind begins to drift along the consciousness spectrum away from time-space perception, becoming less aware of the immediate physical world. When this happens, we become conscious in another form. The fact that we often have difficulty in remembering correctly our participation in that other part of the consciousness spectrum does not negate its reality. The problem lies in perception and translation, diffused and distorted as they are by the use of current time-space systems of analysis and measurement.
The spectrum of consciousness ranges, seemingly endlessly, beyond time-space into other energy systems. It also continues “downward” through animal and plant life, possibly into the subatomic level. Everyday human consciousness is active in only a small segment of the consciousness continuum.
Among scientific and philosophical investigators of consciousness, Monroe is almost always confined to a footnote, if indeed he is referred to at all. One of the more dismal features of contemporary consciousness studies is that almost without exception their authors confine their references—and hence presumably their reading—to other academic consciousness studies. The so-called anomalous experiences such as near-death and mystical experiences, telepathy, psychokinesis, and the out-of-body experience itself, seldom, if ever, get a mention, and the same can be said of those novels, autobiographies, and poems where consciousness is examined and explored, implicitly if not always explicitly. With Monroe, consciousness is at the center of his work. The exploration of consciousness is the principal theme of his books, and the ability to move voluntarily into different phases of consciousness is what the participants learn from the courses he devised.
However, when Monroe is referred to in published works—and there are reference to him and the Institute in some two hundred books published between 1965 and 2005—almost all of their titles will be found in the “Metaphysical” or “Mind, Body, Spirit” sections of bookstores. This is where his own books, and the books of other writers on consciousness from a first-person perspective, are likely to be found also. So we need to investigate whether it is possible to relate Monroe's work to any of the current scientific and philosophical approaches to the study of consciousness.
In recent decades, consciousness has come to the fore as one of the great problems confronting Western science and philosophy. The attempt to explain consciousness has developed into a sort of academic business, with professorships and lectureships accumulating and publications multiplying year after year. It has also become a hunting ground for many professionals with qualifications in other disciplines: physicists, neurologists, neurobiologists, geneticists, cognitive scientists, and so on, as well as philosophers, psychologists, and the occasional theologian.
Researchers have come up with a variety of definitions and explanations. We look at just three examples: For clinical neuropsychologist James Newman, “consciousness is a function of an identifiable neural architecture which we have termed the extended reticular-thalamic activation system.” For the neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, “consciousness is an outcome of a recursively comparative memory in which previous self-non-self categorizations are continually related to ongoing present perceptual categorizations and their short-term succession, before such categorizations have become part of that memory.” The philosopher John Searle tells us that “consciousness is a natural biological phenomenon that does not fit comfortably into either of the traditional categories of mental and physical. It is caused by lower-level microprocesses in the brain and it is a feature of the brain at the higher macro levels.” These quotations demonstrate a special difficulty: consciousness is a function, an outcome, a phenomenon—but none of these attempts at definition succeed in clarifying what consciousness is.
What seems to have happened is that the problem of consciousness (where it comes from, what it is) has been interpreted as “science's last great frontier.” It has come to be regarded as if it were one more territory that must be conquered, mapped, and taken into control, using weapons and technologies that have proved themselves in other fields. The philosopher Mary Midgley, however, puts it slightly differently:
Investigators using this map approach their new problem on the jigsaw principle, armed with puzzle-pieces from various existing physical sciences such as neurology, quantum mechanics, genetics or the study of evolution…They try to fit their chosen pieces into the problem. But the problem does not accommodate them because it is one of a quite different kind. It is actually about how to relate different puzzles. It concerns how best to fit together the different aspects of ourselves—notably, ourselves as subjects and ourselves as objects, our inner and our outer lives.2
In fairness it must be said that not all scientists are confident of finding answers. “I think I can safely say that no one understands human consciousness,” wrote the physicist Richard Feynman in The Character of Physical Law (1992). Danah Zohar described it as “one of the least understood phenomena in the world.” Nobel prizewinner Brian Josephson declared that “science has as yet made little headway in understanding the phenomenon or even deciding what it is,” and the physicist Nick Herbert said, “About all we know of consciousness is that it has to do with the head rather than the foot.”
What, then, is this consciousness that Monroe spent so many years exploring? Leaving aside the problem of definition, (because, generally speaking, most of us do have some idea of what we are talking about) it may help us to understand more about Monroe's explorations by referring to the well-known statement by William James.
Our ordinary waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.
These potential forms of consciousness are what Charles Tart defined as altered states. “A state is an altered state if it is significantly and discretely different from some baseline to which we want to compare it,” he says, in Open Mind, Discriminating Mind (1989). “Since we usually take ordinary waking consciousness as our standard of comparison, a state like nocturnal dreaming is an altered state.” For examples of different altered states, we can refer to meditation, mystical and transcendental experiences, lucid dreaming, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Where mood-altering stimuli are employed, such as drugs or alcohol, altered states can become uncontrollable and sometimes harmful. Monroe's Hemispheric Synchronization, which is neither mood-altering nor physically stimulating, enables those who use it to move freely into different phases or states. Such states may be accessible by anyone at any time, but the Hemi-Sync frequencies can hold you in a particular state for as long as you are listening to them. They act also as training wheels; once you are accustomed to moving into these different states, you can discard Hemi-Sync and do so of your own free will.
These different states are first-person experiences, which Western science has much difficulty in handling. Such experiences are generally considered to fall within the province of those comparatively recently developed disciplines, psychiatry and psychotherapy—or possibly to that much older discipline, divinity—where advice, treatment, or consolation may be administered by professional practitioners.
But this is not the whole story. There are other ways of approaching the matter of consciousness than those currently popular in the West. “Consciousness in the western discourse is a much abused concept,” says the Indian philosopher and psychologist K. Ramakrishna Rao in a recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. “The bewildering multiplicity of meanings of consciousness left many in the West wondering what exactly consciousness means.” He points out that “the phenomena of consciousness appear to have an intrinsically subjective character,” and need to be studied from the aspect of the person having the experience, in sharp contrast to the approach of Western science, always happier with a third-person perspective. Only when it is thought there may be something wrong with the person having the experience—he may be physically ill or mentally deranged—does Western science or medicine attend to him. This is what happened with Monroe in the early days of his out-of-body experiences, when he subjected himself to physical and psychological examinations to see if anything amiss could be found in his body or mind to explain what was happening to him. The doctors and psychologists who examined him found him sane with no evidence of physical malfunction. They later went on to evaluate reports from 339 individuals who claimed to have experienced out-of-body travel, of whom 228 had more than one experience and seventy-four had more than ten. No indications of mental imbalance or physical malady were revealed in this survey.
Those well-qualified and experienced researchers who investigated Monroe's Hemi-Sync process are satisfied that it is scientifically valid and can be applied legitimately and helpfully in a number of different situations. Improving sleep patterns, inducing relaxation, accelerating the learning process—these and many more applications have been tested and proved to work. Monroe's personal experiences, however, occurred without the use of Hemi-Sync or any other process or stimulus. Western science, therefore, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to provide any sort of explanation and has paid scant, if any, attention to the content of his experiences.
Turning Eastward, however, we find the approach is very different. Ramakrishna Rao includes the following points in a summary of the scope and substance of classical Indian psychology:
• Indian psychology is study of the person.
• The person is embodied consciousness.
• Consciousness is fundamental and irreducible to brain states.
• Consciousness in the human context appears circumscribed, conditioned, and clouded by a vortex of forces generated by the mind-body complex.
• The mind is different from consciousness. It is a material form, but has the capacity to interface with consciousness at one end and the brain at the other.
He adds that in the classical Indian tradition “consciousness-as-such is essentially non-intentional. It has no content, and consequently is not an object of cognition. It is non-relational and yet foundational for all awareness and knowledge.” The quest in the Indian tradition “is for the transformation of the individual and for achieving higher states of consciousness.” Yet he is not convinced that the Indian tradition answers all the questions, because it tends to ignore or overlook “what are very pervasive and basic to human nature, i.e. the normal processes.”
Rao ends his discussion by comparing Indian and Western ideas on consciousness as representing “two distinct conceptual streams that flow in two different directions.” He suggests that the Eastern stream may be too narrow, “with steadfast focus on consciousness-as-such.” In contrast, the Western stream is too shallow, “involving only the periphery of consciousness and thus unable to navigate with the heavy weight (hard problem) of subjective and pure conscious states.” If there were a confluence between the two, he adds, “we may be in a better position to understand consciousness in its multiple facets.”3
Viewing Monroe's journeys in the light of Rao's account of the classical Indian tradition, we can see that they accord more closely with Indian thought than with contemporary Western scientific notions. Aspects of his journeys can also be viewed in the light of the Buddhist contemplative tradition. According to this, writes B. Alan Wallace, “the essential stream of consciousness of any sentient being—human or otherwise—cannot be utterly destroyed, nor can it be freshly created.” There is “an unbroken continuum of consciousness throughout life, the death process, an intermediate state, and on to the next life.” At first this seems to imply that the population must always remain stable, which is manifestly absurd, but this argument is answered by the Buddhist contention that the process of rebirth also occurs between human and nonhuman forms. Moreover, “there are countless other worlds inhabited by human and non-human forms of life: and a being that dies in one world may be reborn in another.”4
Tibetan Buddhism divides our existence into four continuously interlinked realities: life; dying and death; after death; rebirth. As explained by the Tibetan scholar Sogyal Rinpoche, these are known as the four bardos: the natural bardo of life; the painful bardo of dying; the luminous bardo of dharmata; and the karmic bardo of rebirth.5 Several of Monroe's out-of-body experiences appear to involve visits into one or more of these bardos. The bardo of dying and the karmic bardo of rebirth are realities that are encountered in Far Journeys, and the luminous bardo of dharmata (defined as “the naked unconditioned truth, the nature of reality, or the true nature of phenomenal existence”) is revealed in Ultimate Journey. There are also similarities with the concept of all four bardos in elements of the Lifeline and Going Home programs.
Sogyal Rinpoche points out that most people understand reincarnation to imply there is some thing that reincarnates, traveling from life to life. But Buddhism does not accept an entity such as a soul or ego that survives physical death. “What provides the continuity between lives is not an entity, we believe, but the ultimately subtlest level of consciousness.” Although Monroe nowhere expresses anything similar to this concept, it is unlikely that he would disagree with it.
With the above in mind, it becomes clear that many of Monroe's ideas and conclusions, derived from his several hundreds—possibly thousands—of out-of-body experiences, have stronger connections with the philosophies of the East than of the West. Professor Christopher Bache declares “it is not surprising that mainstream philosophers have ignored Monroe's work, as it presents a profound challenge to the materialist vision that rules the modern mind.” He comments on Monroe's “sophisticated understanding of the bardo,” on his “profound vision of human evolution,” on providing “permission to believe that the majority of intelligent life in the universe is actually non-physical,” and on his vision of reality that “assumes the concept of reincarnation, and therefore…is a vision that sees human beings developing across enormous tracts of time.” He adds that, according to Monroe, “all our lives on Earth represent only a small portion of our true existence…However, if we begin to understand and integrate the hidden half of our life cycle, the half that takes place between death and rebirth, we can begin to reappropriate the large trajectory of the soul-being that we are underneath our present human identity.”6
Monroe's three books contain no footnotes, no references, no quotations from other authors. They are simply records of certain experiences obtained in an altered state of consciousness. Some of these experiences may seem banal and in some the reader may suspect a degree of contrivance—as if the material has been trimmed here and there, polished possibly, with the intention of making a point. Many—perhaps most—are fully convincing as they stand, however. In this they are reminiscent of reported mystical experiences such as those of Hildegarde of Bingen or William Blake. Yet Monroe's vision is distinctive in that it owes nothing to the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, or any published text. What is most remarkable is its coherence. It is grounded in logic, not in faith.
We may not share his vision nor may we feel like adopting it as our own. But we have to acknowledge that Monroe's experiences were not inspired—or sullied—by mood-altering drugs, nor were they induced by religious practices, by fasting, or by physical or mental disorder. They simply happened, spontaneously to begin with and later through purposeful contact with what may be described as guidance, at first defined as the Inspec—Intelligent Species—and later understood by Monroe as part of himself. In his final journeys it was revealed to him that his guidance came from his “I There,” that non-physical “I” that contains all previous and present lifetimes and is composed of energy outside time-space—(M) Field energy, as Monroe calls it.7
There is an extensive literature describing ventures into non-physical reality including religious texts, mystical writings, and personal accounts carrying varying degrees of conviction. What distinguishes Monroe's approach is that he not only described many of his experiences occurring over more than thirty years, but that he also sought to devise a means by which others might explore these non-physical realms. In this he was not seeking to make converts to a particular belief system or to set himself up as some sort of guru. His approach reveals a generosity of spirit in that his main intent was to help those who, aware that they might be more than their physical body, were curious to find out about that “more” and hence were willing to transform themselves.
This was his aim from the outset, reinforced in the penultimate chapter of his last book. “How could I organize all that I had experienced into such a shape that it could be absorbed and put into practice by others?” he asks. “Not only that: how could those experiences, which for me had stretched over years, be compressed into a timeframe which others would find practical and appropriate?” His answer to these questions, to some extent at least, was the Lifeline program, whose effect can be measured by the many hundreds of reports in the Institute's records.
Monroe's reading did not include books on the scientific study of consciousness. His conversational approach in his writings and talks is devoid of the weighty vocabulary of academia. He was an explorer, not a theorist, and, certainly to begin with, he had no clear idea as to where his explorations might lead. At the outset of his journeys there was neither planning nor intention. The sharp-suited, left hemisphere-dominated businessman found himself following an uncertain track through a kind of jungle with no guide, no map, and nothing but a torch powered by his own consciousness to light his way. It took much courage to move forward, leaving security and certainty behind.
Christopher Bache points out how these explorations intensified and developed. “The metaphysical vision contained in his first book…is primitive compared to that found in his second, published fifteen years later, and his third is more complete still.” He adds by way of explanation, “What becomes available in non-ordinary states is always governed by the consciousness one brings to the encounter. Repeated immersion in these states slowly changes one's baseline consciousness, and as one's baseline changes, new levels of reality open around one. Thus Monroe is constantly outgrowing himself.”8 As time passed, Monroe was able to exert more control or management over his experiences so that they achieved a greater degree of consistency. While for many of his readers his earlier journeys raise a number of questions and, in some instances, doubts—that oft-quoted bruise where he claimed to have pinched his friend, for example—the later expeditions into the farther reaches carry strong conviction. So effective are some of his descriptions that it is only too easy to fall into the error of regarding the regions he traverses as actual geographical locations rather than states or phases of consciousness.
We have seen that the theories and conclusions of mainstream Western research into consciousness have little, if any, connection with Monroe's experiences or ideas. This, however, is not quite the whole story. Researchers outside the mainstream, perhaps regarded as mavericks or oddities by some of those within it, have through experiment and observation suggested alternative approaches to the problem. One account of consciousness to which Monroe's concepts and experiences show some approximation appeared in The Conscious Universe, by Dean Radin, sometime director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada.9 While Radin does not provide a definition, he suggests a number of properties which, he says, are derived from a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies. Some of these properties are summarized as follows:
Consciousness extends beyond the individual. The strength of consciousness in an individual fluctuates from moment to moment and is regulated by focus of attention. Some states of consciousness have higher focus than others. A group of individuals can be said to have group consciousness, which strengthens when the group's attention is focused on a common object or event. Radin also maintains from the evidence of a vast number of experiments that consciousness can affect the probabilities of events and that it injects order into systems in proportion to the strength of consciousness present.
Participants in the Institute's programs would provide any amount of anecdotal evidence to support Radin's conclusions. Using the term psi as a neutral term for all extrasensory perception and psychokinetic phenomena, he includes out-of-body experiences, reincarnation, near-death experiences, remote-viewing, telepathy, and precognition under this heading. Many of these so-called paranormal experiences are reported by these participants and also by Monroe himself. Radin comments: “What psi offers to the puzzle about consciousness is the observation that information can be obtained in many ways that bypass the ordinary sensory system altogether.” These phenomena are all first-person experiences—the type of experiences that the purely scientific approach does not cope with very effectively. The information obtained from these experiences is as subject to scrutiny and examination as information obtained by any “normal” means—from newspapers and journals, television and radio, and so on. Once it has been tested and, if possible, corroborated, then it may well prove to be “something of value” not only to the individual but quite possibly to society at large.
Another relevant observation is a result of research by psychiatrist and neurophysiologist Dr. Peter Fenwick, who has made an intensive study of near-death experiences.10 Fenwick found that reports of these, along with certain transcendent experiences—a term that applies to many of Monroe's OBEs—appear to give “a subjective view of what lies beyond the physical, suggesting that the very structure of the world is spiritual, that consciousness is primary and unitary and that individual consciousness is part of the whole and survives death.” This subjective view is shared by many—probably most—of those who have participated in Monroe's programs, whether they have had previous personal experience of psi or not. The prompting that the program material provides enables the individual to let go of the visible and tangible external world and move quickly and easily into a deep meditative state. This state can be so profound that Buddhist priests who have attended Institute programs say that it resembles the state that had taken them many years of disciplined practice in meditation to achieve.
This meditative state for many program participants is a staging post rather than a terminus. Instances of telepathic communication, precognition, and remote-viewing are occasionally reported and their accuracy has frequently been confirmed. Transcendent experiences, often ultimately indescribable because words are too limiting to express their fullness, are not uncommon. Participants sometimes sense that they have moved into another dimension beyond time and space, or into a different reality that they find themselves able to revisit when on another occasion they move into that same state of consciousness. This ability to move freely and safely into these farther regions, to explore beyond the scope of imagination, and then to return unharmed to the demands and necessities of daily life is a priceless gift that Monroe's researches have made available to anyone who chooses to accept it. In such an altered state you can recognize and perhaps share the vision of the poet William Blake:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
There is also another facet to this gift. Program participants often find that they can tap in to information that they have previously found inaccessible. All information is available “somehow and somewhere” so that moving into an altered state of consciousness—a state of expanded awareness perhaps—may reveal answers to questions or solutions to problems that the usual methods of inquiry have failed to produce. Nor do you need to put on headphones and tune in to the Hemi-Sync material to seek your answer or solution. Once you are accustomed to the feeling of the space—the state of consciousness—created by listening to particular frequencies you are able to re-create that feeling when you need it, no matter where you are and what you are doing. As Monroe often said, the tapes and CDs that carry Hemi-Sync are no more than training wheels, to be discarded when you no longer need them to help you on your journey.
It is appropriate at this stage to look again at Monroe's one formal statement on this very important and topical subject: “Consciousness is Focused Energy.” “Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves…Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.” So says Nobel physicist Werner Heisenberg. Another Nobel prizeman, Wolfgang Pauli, answering the question “What remains of the old ideas of matter and substance?” states simply “The answer is energy. This is the true substance, that which is conserved: only the form in which it appears is changing.” This relates to what Monroe discovered in his explorations and called the (M) Field, defining it as “a nonphysical energy field that permeates time-space including our Earth Life System.”
It so happens that there is a particular theory of consciousness, developed by Professor Mark Woodhouse of Georgia State University, that has some relevance to this. Woodhouse calls his theory “Energy Monism.” It is based on his contention that “energy and consciousness are fundamentally understood as aspects of each other,” and they share some of each other's properties. Woodhouse, however, would not accept Monroe's assertion that one actually is the other. This is how he explains his idea:
The core foundation of Energy Monism…is that energy is, everywhere throughout the universe and up and down the Great Spectrum of Being, the “outside” manifestation of consciousness, and consciousness is everywhere the inner aspect or “inside” of energy…Both energy and consciousness parallel each other all the way up and down the spectrum so to speak. Neither grows out of the other.
In illustrating his argument, Woodhouse, whose approach is notably open-minded, makes reference to the out-of-body experience.
Whatever it is that travels from a body to a target destination and back again has several key features: a sense of self, rudimentary cognitive, emotive and perceptual abilities, location in space, travel through space, and in some cases the ability to create physical changes in a target area. Thus, this traveling sense of self carries with it both conscious and energetic aspects. Something not normally visible to the naked eye, which also occupies space, would have to be energetic or force-like—whether or not it is currently measurable by physics.11
Another investigator who uses the out-of-body experience as part of his case for a theory of consciousness is the physicist Amit Goswami. At first his scientific training caused him to regard the OBE as an illusion, but relating it to the evidence of the reality of remote-viewing caused him to think again. “The validity of the out-of-body experience as a genuine phenomenon of consciousness has gained credibility,” he wrote in The Self-Aware Universe, declaring that it is “the nonlocality of our consciousness” that provides the explanation. “The technical name for signal-less, instantaneous action at a distance is nonlocality,” he explains.12
Goswami's argument for the nonlocality of consciousness develops from the famous “Bell test experiments” by the French physicist Alain Aspect and his colleagues at Orsay in the early 1980s, which demonstrated that “when two quantum objects are correlated, if we measure one, (thus collapsing its wave function) the other's wave function is collapsed as well—even at a macroscopic distance, even when there is no signal in space-time to mediate their connection.” So far, so good; but Goswami still believed that consciousness could be understood by science and that—somehow—it emerges from the brain. It needed a friend—an experienced mystic—to convince him. “Comprehend what the mystics are saying,” he was told. “Consciousness is prior and unconditioned. It is all there is. There is nothing but God.”
“We do not see it,” Goswami writes, “because we are so enamoured of experience, of our melodramas, of our attempts to predict and control, to understand and manipulate everything rationally. In our efforts we miss the simple thing—the simple truth that it is all God, which is the mystic's way of saying that it is all consciousness. Physics explains phenomena, but consciousness is not a phenomenon: instead all else are phenomena in consciousness.”
Whether or not we agree with these ideas, they do seem to show that the hold of materialist science on theories of consciousness is beginning to weaken. It may be that in the future more attention will be paid to the significance of transcendent, mystical, and other so-called anomalous experiences, including the well-documented out-of-body experiences of Robert Monroe. In a chapter on the OBE in the comprehensive study Varieties of Anomalous Experience, Carlos Alvorado expresses the hope that “future discussion on OBEs will not have to be conducted solely in the context of a psychology of the exotic or the unusual, but in the wider context of the study of the totality of human experience.”13 It is in this context that we should place Monroe's contribution to the understanding of consciousness.14 Inspired by his personal experiences, he succeeded in designing a means of enabling many thousands of individuals to expand their awareness and explore their own consciousness without recourse to drugs or other stimulants. In addition, he introduced hundreds of thousands of individuals to the perspectives of the altered state defined as out-of-body, enabling them to acquire knowledge and experience thereby. But it would be a grave injustice if he were to be measured in the future only by the number of paragraphs and footnotes devoted to him in publications dealing with research into consciousness. It is his gift to others that is his most valuable legacy.
Notes
1. Quotations are from Professor Felser's keynote address to the 2005 Professional Seminar at The Monroe Institute. His book, The Way Back to Paradise, was published by Hampton Roads in 2005.
2. Science and Poetry (Routledge, 2001).
3. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12, no. 3 (2005).
4. Choosing Reality, by B. Alan Wallace (Snow Lion, 2003 [1996]).
5. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
6. Dark Night, Early Dawn, by Christopher Bache (SUNY, 2000).
7. Ervin Laszlo (interview in Network Review 91 [Summer 2006]) talks of “a field that conserves and conveys information across the universe,” which he terms the Akashic field. This has interesting similarities with Monroe's (M) Field.
8. Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn.
9. The Conscious Universe, by Dean Radin (Harper Edge, 1997).
10. The Truth in the Light, by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick (Headline, 1995).
11. Energy Monism, by Mark Woodhouse, in Scientific & Medical Network, Network 62.
12. The Self-Aware Universe, by Amit Goswami (Putnam, 1995).
13. Varieties of Anomalous Experience, edited by E. Cardena, S. J. Lynn, and S. Krippner (APA, 2002).
14. Justine Owens, PhD, of the University of Virginia, who enjoyed several conversations with Monroe on the connections between academic psychological research and his own independent investigations, commented that “Bob Monroe had deep intellectual ties with the scholarly study of the human mind and his self-taught understanding of the basic principles of learning, memory and self-organizing principles or systems theory was truly impressive.” Although there was a certain tension between the academic approach and his own independent investigations, Monroe had no need to see himself as a second-class citizen in this respect.