Foreword

FOREWORD

Ron Russell has written the definitive biography of Robert A. Monroe.

But why would anyone want to read a book about Monroe? Who was he, anyway, and what did he do that we should care about?

For untold thousands of people, the answer is obvious: his work and writings have confirmed their sanity and opened their lives to some marvelous adventures and learnings. But if you're not among the readers of his books (you will be after you read this book) or a graduate of his training programs, why should you care about Monroe's life and work?

I will answer as a basic human being, someone who puzzles over life, wonders what its purpose is, tries to live in a sensible way, and faces my own and my loved ones’ inevitable death. This will bother almost all of my scientist colleagues, but it gets right down to essentials.

1. You have a soul.

2. The highest scientific authorities have repeatedly told you there is no such thing as a soul.

3. In fact, they think you are stupid or crazy to even think about such a nonsensical idea as a soul.

4. Most of us have suffered and continue to suffer from having our soul, our spiritual nature, denied.

5. Bob Monroe was a sane, down-to-earth, solid, and successful American who discovered his soul and found ways to work with it that benefit all of us wounded people. He was not some arcane, distant historical figure, but someone who speaks our language.

6. A better understanding of Monroe's life, both his talents and his shortcomings, can stimulate and inspire our own personal understandings of our souls and our goals.

At the end of this foreword I will say it again in more scientifically nuanced language, but that's the gist of why you would want to read a book about Monroe's life.

Robert A. Monroe. Those of us who knew him as a friendly and informal person called him Bob. You'll learn who he was in fascinating detail in this book, but basically Bob embodied a quintessential rags-to-riches American success story, going from young man bumming around as a hobo during the Depression, to successful New York producer of radio shows (remember The Shadow? That was one of Bob's productions!), to businessman. (He owned the cable TV business for a moderate-size city, Charlottesville, Virginia, when I first met him.)

In spite of his no-nonsense, practical, indeed irreligious attitudes (he was repelled by the hypocrisy of so many “religious” people), Bob was “drafted” by what he realized, many years later, was a “Higher Power.” At the height of his successful career, he started having what we technically call out-of-body experiences (OBEs, an abbreviation I had the honor of coining). In ordinary language, he experienced leaving his physical body behind and traveling places as a disembodied mind or soul. He worried, as any “normal” American would do, that he was going crazy. When his doctor couldn't “cure” him, he gave in to reality and started exploring his OBEs rather than rejecting them.

Bob was obsessed for years with the question of whether his experiences were real, as you or I would be if OBEs happened to us. Was his mind really traveling away from his body, or was this just some vivid, crazy kind of imagination or dream? As his experiences accumulated, he found that “real” was a tricky idea. His OBEs were sometimes partly “real”—in the sense of accurately giving him information about what was happening at a distance in the ordinary world—but there were a lot more places he visited, often more interesting places, than the ordinary world. What kind of reality did they have? Why was it happening to him? What, if anything, was he supposed to do with OBEs and the knowledge he was gaining from them?

My wife, Judy, and I met Bob in the fall of 1965, shortly after we had moved to Charlottesville so that I could take up a research position at the University of Virginia. I had looked forward to this meeting for several years, having heard about Bob's OBEs through parapsychologist Andrija Puharich (who wrote about him while protecting his identity by calling him Bob Rame). As you'll learn in this book, Puharich's writing was actually rather inaccurate from Bob's perspective and angered him, as it took some isolated instances where exposure to glue fumes preceded an OBE and made it sound like Bob was a habitual glue-sniffer. This was not a socially desirable role to be portrayed in, given the antidrug hysteria of the times—to put it mildly! Bob said nothing about this anger at the time I met him, though.

OBEs had long fascinated me and I had already done some research on them. I expected to meet an unusual person that I would be professionally interested in. Little did I know that this professional interest aspect would be a small part of a deep friendship that would span the next thirty years.

My interest in unusual areas like parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, and the nature of the mind was by choice, having been fascinated by them since I was a teenager. Bob's interest in these areas had been forced on him by his OBEs. Because our culture was ignorant, pig-headedly ignorant, prejudiced (“they must be crazy!”), and suppressive about these areas of life, Bob had been struggling to answer his questions pretty much in lonely isolation. But by 1965, cultural changes were occurring, the blossoming of what was later called New Age culture. Bob and I had many exciting conversations as we saw the world starting to open up to spiritual realities.

We discussed questions such as how we could learn more about OBEs, both scientifically and spiritually. What did they mean? Was there a soul? What did a word like soul mean? What parts of religion were about great truths, what parts were misleading? How could you teach other people to experience OBEs for themselves, and thus see for themselves what was real? How could the insights of spiritual experiences lead to a better world?

Since I'm a scientist, specifically a psychologist, by training, it's natural for me to ask “How do Bob's experiences, observations, and ideas fit into our official knowledge systems of religion and science?” In a formal sense, Bob was neither “religious” nor a “scientist,” yet in the highest sense, he was, deeply.

If “religious” is taken to mean dogmatic and narrow aspects of religion that are, unfortunately, all too common in our world—then “religious” certainly didn't describe Bob. But insofar as “religious” means trying to fathom the meaning of life and act with integrity and kindness along the way, Bob was deeply religious. Indeed, Bob had many experiences that would traditionally be classified as mystical, the kind of deeply moving revelations that people easily get overly attached to and inflated by, and which can lead the less mature to an attitude of “I know the truth and you don't, so just believe me and do what I say!” Not Bob. He always kept a light touch about his experiences, valuing them, trying to share them, trying to help others experience them too, yet staying open to learning from life and not getting carried away by them. People tried to place him on a pedestal and make a guru out of him, but he strongly resisted this.

And if “scientist” is taken to mean an establishment authority figure who explains away all the spiritual aspects of life, and insists on rightness because of formal credentials—and there are all too many dogmatic people like that—Bob wasn't a scientist. But in the best sense of “scientist”—someone who is always curious about reality and is willing to keep testing ideas and beliefs, to experiment—Bob was a scientist. I have always thought of him as a colleague in my investigations of OBEs, of the nature of the mind, and of the meaning of life.

Bob's first attempt to share what he'd learned from his OBEs was his 1971 book Journeys Out of the Body. He had mixed feelings about publishing it. On the one hand, he knew that a lot of people had also experienced OBEs and were worried that this was a sign of insanity or something, and his book could reassure such people. On the other hand, Charlottesville was a conservative Southern community. Would he be shunned as some kind of crazy or heretic? When we first met, this possible rejection wasn't a real problem yet (and indeed, fortunately, never became a major problem), for while he'd hired an agent to find a publisher for his book, the agent hadn't had a single response from a publisher (I wondered, had he even tried?) in the year he'd had the manuscript.

I was incensed at this, both for realistic reasons and from the impatience of youth: the manuscript was fascinating and important! So I got a copy from Bob and sent if off to Bill Whitehead, my editor at Doubleday. I don't think Bill was particularly interested in OBEs, but Doubleday had done well with the paperback edition of my Altered States of Consciousness book, so, as a favor to me, he took Bob's manuscript home to glance at after dinner.

Bill found he was still reading, fascinated, at three in the morning! At this point he forced himself to put the manuscript down, for, as he told me, he had reached the chapter on how to have an OBE and he was afraid it might work if he read it! He'd absorbed quite enough mind-expanding ideas for one night.

I wrote an introduction and Doubleday published Journeys Out of the Body. It's still in print today and has been a major source of relief to people who have had OBEs and worried about their sanity, as well as a contribution to the scientific literature on OBEs.

Bob devoted the last thirty years of his life to sharing what he had learned with others, while he kept experimenting and learning himself. The Monroe Institute and its training programs are as great a testament to his competence and kindness as could be given. Many people who have taken courses at the Institute have had deep experiences that have markedly enhanced the spiritual aspects of their lives. His three books have had, and continue to have, an even wider reach.

I began this foreword with some provocative statements. For those who prefer more nuanced scientific language, I will rephrase my points. You can say

1. You have a soul.
Or, to sound more scientific, you can say

Human beings, both spontaneously in everyday life and under rigorous laboratory test conditions, have sometimes shown abilities to gather information, communicate, and affect physical reality in ways that go beyond anything that can be reasonably attributed to the physical functioning of the brain or body. While “soul” carries too many untestable metaphysical connotations for scientists, we need to call this “something else” something, and soul is the best word we've got to date.

2. The highest scientific authorities have repeatedly told you there is no such thing as a soul.
Or

Almost all prestigious scientists, who carry enormous social authority in our culture, personally subscribe to a philosophy (not a science, a philosophy) of materialism. Nothing is real but physical matter and physical energies. The concept of a nonmaterial soul is inherently nonsensical to a materialist. (I think it's a serious mistake to confuse philosophy with essential science, but it's very widespread.)

3. In fact, they think you are stupid or crazy to even think about such a nonsensical idea as a soul.
Or

Materialistic scientists have a tendency to become arrogant, like successful people in all areas of life, and look down on those who take the idea of souls seriously. At best they see belief in souls as a sign of ignorance or stupidity, at worst as a sign of insanity or a deliberate manipulation of the ignorant by schemers cloaking themselves in the garb of religion.

4. Most of us have suffered and continue to suffer from having our soul, our spiritual nature, denied.
Or

From my perspective as a psychologist, people have experiences that are real to them, involving spiritual and psychic concepts like souls or the Divine or the psychic. While a small number of these people may be stupid, ignorant, or crazy (as in any area of life), most of these experiencers are normal or above-normal people. Aside from the scientific, parapsychological evidence that at least some of these experiences are real, it's harmful to anyone to arrogantly and ignorantly invalidate their experience. This needlessly increases the suffering in the world.

There are many ways to understand ourselves better, to learn from our own and others’ experiences rather than invalidating them, and one of the more successful is to hear about things from people like ourselves, people we can identify with, rather than distant authorities who are not like us. When the ideas come with practical methods to check them out—like Monroe's suggestions on how to experience OBEs for yourself—they are even more powerful than just ideas.

6. A better understanding of Monroe's life, both his talents and his shortcomings, can stimulate and inspire our own personal understandings of our souls and our goals.
Or

You can learn a lot from Monroe's books, where he does his best to make sense of his OBEs and other spiritual experiences, but all of us have our filters and biases that color our view of reality. Knowing about Monroe's life both enriches and refines our understanding of what he learned from his OBEs.

It's the same thing, either way.

And, as I mentioned at the beginning, Monroe's was a fascinating life, and Ron Russell has done us a great service in relating it in such a detailed and fascinating way.

Charles T. Tart, PhD
Berkeley, California
December 2006