Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 286: The Monroe Institute Part 1 - Robert Monroe

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Chiluminati Podcast episode 286. As always, I'm one of your hosts, Mike Martin today, joined by the Gomez and Morticia Adams of LA. Oh! Oh! Alex and Jesse. This is an incredible question, actually. Which one of us is Gomez and which one of us is Morticia?

Because I feel like there's a lot of both Gomez and Morticia going around. Like, this is a rare time where both of our Venn diagrams almost look the same as, yeah, it's almost a circle. A pure circle. Yeah, it's, it's, it's wild. Like, I don't know. I don't know. I think my gut immediately goes to Jesse is Gomez, Alex is Morticia. That's where my gut goes. But you two also know each other much

better and for much longer. So it's tough because they're such a great couple. Yeah. It's like one thing. It's like, that's what I thought when I saw you on stage during pack south when I pitched you the podcast, I saw the two of you and SGS, I said those two that's Gomez and Morticia. That's a, that's what I thought. Those two have a loving, sexually healthy relationship despite their whole family wanting to kill everything. These middle-aged adults find a way to keep the flame lit 24-7 despite being vaguely perhaps some type of paranormal creatures of the night.

And also very emotionally mature with your children for the most part. Basically Californians from 2037. Yeah, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well adjusted, therapeutic adults who just happen to be monsters. Yeah. Aloys and the Morlocks.

Yeah. What? Is that from? Is that? Don't worry about it. But your kids are going to love it. Wait, but Morlocks sounds familiar. My grandma. Morlocks, dude. Well, your grandfather will love it when he's a child.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm now you're I'm out. I don't know anything about what you're talking about. And it's a it's a incredibly smart joke about H.G. Wells is the time machine. Don't worry about it. Oh, I saw that movie. It's all right. Yeah. Where he stuck his hand out of the time machine, his hand age really quickly. And that kind of thing. Yeah.

Yeah. That was cool. That's why I know when more locks. It's very similar to the actual story. Yeah, it's kind of almost the story. I've seen it one time in a movie theater. The more locks are also in the X-Men, but they're not like the Morlocks. They're not like the Morlocks. No, no, just a borrowed concept. And Aloy's Aloy, right? Or the Eloy? Eloy? I know you got to, we got to segue to Patreon, but the comic books and like specifically who is the comic artist who's very psychedelic

and kind of like did a lot of psychedelics rather. Grant Morrison. Oh, Grant Morrison is a incredibly psychedelic comic book writer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That aspect, keep that in mind as we go in today's series today. But that would be a good segue to the episode if we didn't have to do Patreon. Well, let me tell you something about Patreon.

If we wanna talk about Grant Morrison and we wanna talk about Patreon so that this segue can still work from what Math has said to what we're about to say right now. We can say that I think that Grant Morrison would be behind the idea of a Patreon because Grant Morrison believes in art as its own thing that deserves to exist in its own right. And that's exactly what Patreon lets you do. You know what I mean? And just like Grant Morrison has a sub stack, we have patreon.com slash ChiluminatiPod.

So you can support us in the same way that you might support Grant Morrison, who is a great comic book writer who writes very psychedelic comics at patreon.com slash ChiluminatiPod, where there will be no psychedelic comics, but there's tons of psychedelic art from studio electro who could probably also do art for the famous comic book writer, Grant Morrison, that Morrison, which does great who would really enjoy the series. We're about to dive into here today. Yes, gentlemen. You're welcome. Thank you very much. This has been a big one. This is rivals and maybe even is bigger than the MKUltra kind of like amount of research

that was done for the series because we're about to embark into a three part journey all about a man by the name of Robert Monroe, the Monroe Institute, the government's involvement with the Monroe Institute and consciousness government's involvement with the Monroe Institute, and consciousness and meditation as a whole as we come to the final part. We're gonna be talking about all those things more and less, but today in particular, we're only gonna be focusing on the man himself,

Robert Monroe, the man who created the Monroe Institute, which is still in existence today with the goal of exploring consciousness and even more higher consciousness states or subconscious states But I don't want to get too much into the Monroe Institute right now because that is episode 2 today We're just going to talk about the man who he is where he came from What sent him on this journey to fund this the found this new foundation that ended up, like I said, working with the government. It's a fascinating journey. Now, before we get into this, I'm curious, do you boys have any experience or familiarity with meditation in general?

In general? Definitely. I have done it many times. Have you tried it before? Have you tried it very long time? Yeah, many times I've done many different kinds of guided meditations and like little breathing induced meditations and things like that. And even like psychedelic drug based meditations. But I've never really like, I wouldn't say that I'm an expert in any of them.

I just kind of am more of a tourist. Sure, but do you find it bring, like I'm curious, even if you just kind of dabble in it, do you find it helps in any way? What has been your experience with it? I sometimes get into a good headspace from it. Like, like, can we talk about the meditations that are related to this yet? Should I hold on that? We're going to talk about that for sure in next episode when the when we talk about the

Monroe Institute, but we can talk about it a little bit here. Well, I'll say just about it a little bit here. Well, I'll say just the doing those meditations recently. The first time I did them, I did them on really nice headphones, the ones I'm wearing right now, which are like studio monitor ones. And it kind of like fuck me up and give me like kind of like a headache. I will get into the technology of it, I'm sure later. But because I think probably because of how that works, I was like kind of having a problem and kind of feeling kind of sick. But but I but that was like months ago when we first were talking talking about getting started on this whole

thing. Yeah, I went back to do the first one to get ready for this episode. And I felt so powerful doing it. I did on my air, air, air, air pods. Is that what they're called? Yeah. Air pods. I was going to call them air buds, which is just not nice. It's better.

I like it's better. Yeah. Air buds is like, you know, how I got there too. Uh, anyway, anyway, uh, I did it and I was like, I don't know if it was like the slightly worse quality or what, but I was really locking in and like feeling the altered state of consciousness that it was offering me. And I was like communicating with my dog, like telepathically and like, well, you know, not, not like, not like speaking to my dog.

No, no, but more of like an, uh, an understanding. Yeah. Like I was able to like communicate things to my dog non-verbally that I normally use. Did you just think Alex is going to be the math of the series? Did you just think you were doing it? Like, did you just think it was happening? No, yeah, that's exactly, yeah, but that's what I'm saying. It's like, it doesn't really matter if I was doing it.

The point is that like, I felt this sort of like situation, like, and, and every time that I do a good meditation, I kind of reach this same, or at least a familiar sort of mind state that gives me this sort of feeling of agency over the world around me, even though it's not necessarily true, right? Like, did I sit there and like, truly communicate the words that I was putting into my hands, into my dog's brain when I was grasping him by the head and like Staring into his eyes and focusing all my willpower and telling him it is like you like listen, dude Blackball is actually awesome. No, I was trying to he already knows cuz he doesn't even talk at all I was trying to explain to him

how Everybody's his friend and like we're not trying to get him and that he shouldn't lick me on the mouth. I'll say this, I'll say this, he's licked me on the mouth way less. Wow, it really works. No, but it's not that it really works. That's the point. The point is that doing the meditation, doing the exercise, which is something that I'm usually quite skeptical of, it's very hard to get me to do a touchy-feely quote unquote, like group exercise in a therapy and take it serious. Like, I would never try and ruin somebody's time. And I, you know, I would never try to like, be a contrarian, but it's really hard for me to like, surrender myself to like that type of

exercise. But when I do, when I do it, it's usually with meditation and it's usually like this, exactly this feeling of like, I'm trying to like focus my, my energy to do things. I'm trying to like concentrate power on concepts or ideas or whatever, even just like a lot of the time in guided meditations, right? Not just the gateway tapes, but like in all kinds of guided meditations, like they always tell you to like do things to your own body that like probably you don't normally have like control over like, all right, here we go. Like warm energy come up, spread the warmth through your body and you know, stuff

like that. And you really do sort of get into this headspace where you feel like whether it's true or whether it's not, like you're like kind of putting a sheen of like imagination over your intention and letting it be that regardless of whether it's true, kind of like a tarot reading, you know, like you kind of just turn. Yeah, yeah, I guess you're not really like, well, 100% believing in the tarot, but somehow the tarot ends up insightful. You know what I mean? I mean, even if you are one of those people that do 100% believe, I think very much like with meditating or tarot or whatever, most of it is about centering yourself. So when

you're, you're doing meditation, I don't buy the like spiritual nature of it, but I do buy the health nature of taking a moment to reset your body and sit there and just breathe and block out outside stuff and just focus on the moment. I think that's probably very helpful to people. And I think much like Tarot, Tarot is in my mind, just really cool, fun guesses and being vague enough to be like, that does apply to me. Right? It's a, it's a vehicle for introspection of yourself.

And if you, even if you don't buy into it, if you're willing to sit down and have someone do a tarot reading, you can walk away with it and be like, that was a lot of fun. And I think the same thing can apply to any of these things where it's like, yeah, you don't have to buy into the, like, you're connected to the stars now. You don't have to buy into that. You can literally just embrace the moment and what it is. Let the person doing the reading buy into it. Let the person guiding you buy into it. Even if you don't buy into the, like you said, the spirituality and any of it, there is like, provably medical benefits to meditating, to just having that presence and not being because it reduces stress, which is, you know,

it does a lot of good things for it. With that meditation in mind, while we won't be jumping into meditation immediately, hold it into your head. And for you listeners, we're going to end this episode with homework for you. No, no. Yeah. And it's over. Wow. That was the power of meditation. Transform time. This episode was actually five hours long and we're just sending done. No, at the end of this episode homework for you all. There's gonna be something I want you all to do and we'll see how it goes in the next. I know. I know. This has been a long, a lot of work for the series. There's a lot of

sources, but for today's episode in particular the main source is gonna be Robert Monroe's biography Journeys out of the body. He has a lot of different Different books out there, but this is like the first his very first one that kind of talks about How he got to where he is in creating the Monroe Institute and whatnot and that is where our story begins with where he is in creating the Monroe Institute and whatnot. And that is where our story begins with Robert Monroe, the man who would become synonymous with, for a lot of people, out of body experiences. And what I would consider some, I wouldn't call,

maybe controversial is a strong word, but it's the only word I could think of, the gateway experience tapes. I say controversial because there is this aspect of them that does ask you to just, even if it's for the point of meditation, buy in to the woo of what is about to happen here. And a lot of people in the meditative community, as I've kind of scoured through it, do have a very positive look on the Gateway Experience tapes, even if just

as a tool to get you to start meditating, if you've never meditated before, even if you don't buy into all of the stuff that kind of comes along with it, it does seem to be valuable, a valuable tool. And from my own experience, it has been valuable so far. But yeah, it seems at least seems valuable in the sense that if it feels valuable, it is valuable. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you're one of those people who I would say like, you listen to guided meditations, but a lot of that like flowery language is not for you.

Robert Monroe, while still I would consider him having a very relaxing voice to listen to, he's way more about trying to get you to a place via steps that you can understand. It's like, here's what you're gonna do. It sounds like the fucking, it sounds like Disneyland. Yeah, it really does. Yeah, it really does.

It really sounds like an old Disney television special or something. Yeah, yeah. But his story is not like a mystical, far off, wondrous beginning of this man who would go on to experience what he described as out of body experiences. But his origins are decidedly unmistical. The unmistical setting of Fairmont, Indiana, in fact, and he was born in 1915,

before eventually later moving to Lexington, Kentucky. The origin story of this self-proclaimed astral traveler doesn't involve ancient lineages, doesn't involve secret societies or secret masters like Madame Blavatsky's will when we eventually discuss her? No childhood spent meditating in any remote temples. The reality, at least according to Monroe's own accounts, and again this is a biography,

are far more mundane. He was the son of Dr. Robert Emmett Monroe, a college professor, and Georgia Helen Jordan Monroe who was just a homemaker and interestingly, also a physician at the time. Remember, we're talking late 1800s, early 1900s. He came from an intellectual and medically inclined household to be sure, but hardly like a breeding ground for meditative interdimensional exploration. He was one of four children and by all accounts, his childhood was remarkably normal. I mean, it was just like a normal upbringing.

Monroe himself described himself as a fairly typical boy immersed in the usual childhood activities, playing with his siblings, attending school, and generally just experiencing the life of an average American child in the early 20th century. There weren't any early signs of supernatural abilities, no X-Men or power awakening scenes, no precognitive dreams reported, he wasn't levitating in the backyard, none of that. Monroe did hint at subtle sense of difference among him and his peers though. He said he

felt a sense of being slightly apart from his peers. This wasn't attributed to any burgeoning psychic powers, but rather what he described as quote unquote, defective vision and hearing. In the book he writes quote, in the book he writes quote, I was different in other ways. My vision was not the same as that of others. My hearing was such that I seemed to hear sounds

others did not and missed sounds that to others were obvious. To me, he seems to describe ADHD, the idea of like sometimes obvious sounds are not like, it takes him a minute. And sometimes he hears like a high pitched noise or something that other people aren't noticing, but ADHD has a hard time filtering out all sensory. It really does sound like that he was probably

neurodivergent on some level in a time where there was no way to diagnose that. Yeah, there was just like 19 fucking 20s. What are you going to get? But for him, like, you know, might as well put that out there, minor detail as it may be. To me, it just kind of gives him a little bit of an outsider feeling, just that neurodivergent kid. The trajectory of Monroe's early childhood further reinforces the image of an ordinary dude though, if not a successful one. He attended Ohio State University, graduating in 1937 with a degree in engineering.

This is a pretty practical background to have and he goes on to use it. Rather, throughout all of this, even through the meditation, his engineering background comes into play. One might imagine like an engineering building bridges or designing machinery, not necessarily exploring ethereal realms, but that's what he ends up doing.

The juxtaposition, this pragmatic engineer versus this astral explorer is a constant recurring theme in Monroe's story and one that really does obviously evoke a little fascination, but the thing I love about Monroe is he invites skepticism in all of his books and even the one at the beginning of his books. It's the opener of the book is written by somebody who is skeptical of him and he welcomes that and says, I want you to do these things for yourself. See like see if they're real.

Don't take my word for it. Do it and see what happens. Which again, I very much appreciate. Yeah, it's kind of like a deal breaker otherwise almost any time that you're going to talk about something. I always hate the word woo woo. But it's a common word. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's like metroidvania. Just get over it. We're just going to use it. Yeah. Yeah. His background in engineering didn't take him into the construction industry, but it did take him into the radio broadcasting industry. He entered the field of writing and

production demonstrating a pretty creative flair that maybe perhaps unexpected from an engineer certainly wasn't unheard of. He eventually formed his own company, Ram Enterprises, and achieved pretty considerable success producing radio programs, writing scripts, and composing music. He was, by all appearances, just a successful businessman, a creative professional, and a family man. He did marry a woman by the name of Jeanette

and had children, settling into seemingly a conventional life in the 1950s. To be fair, he doesn't talk a ton about his kids in the book. It's not really the focus about it, but they do pop up every so often as just little side notes from stories that he's talking about. My kids, my little side notes. I remember them. My little side notes. I remember them. My little side notes. Yeah, this dude was not living in, like I said, any mystical world. He was in boardroom studios and suburban homes.

He was just plain and ordinary. Monroe provides some further, albeit limited insight into his personality. Pre out of body experience in his books, he kind of portrays himself as a rational, practical individual. So like vibed him out that hard that he's like a different, he's just like, I would not. Yes.

And I feel like if, if you know what happens to him ends up being like, if you'd believe it, it would, it would throw anybody's life. Maybe that's what John Constantine's superpower is, is that he just never had that change happen to him. Maybe, maybe that's a weird comparison. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know. But the, uh, the other part too, that's important is there are witnesses to his life. He wasn't living alone and saying he was normal. He had a family, kids that, wait a minute, you guys don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of vertical comics? No, no, no, no. Aliens though. Yeah. I do know a lot about cliffhanger comics though that

That's kind of lit. Yeah, that's gonna lit like based off the movie or was the movie based off the no It's nothing to do with them. They're not yeah, they're unrelated just a similar thing. It was like just how there was cliffhanger movie You know what that's unexpected Yeah, I saw it doesn't a camping trip in the Boy Scouts. I had no That's unexpected. Yeah. I saw it on a camping trip in the Boy Scouts. I had no choice. Whoa, of all the films to show.

I had no choice. I don't know, yeah. All right. Yeah, no, yeah. Anyway. Uh, yeah. Like I said, this dude was, like I said, it vibed him out, yes, it did vibe him out that hard.

He says, quote, I was a product of my time and my culture, thoroughly conditioned to believe only in the reality of the physical world. That is how we saw himself. This self-assessment, I think, is crucial moving forward because it highlights, like you said, the dramatic shift from this ordinary dude to mega vibed out bro. He was like a guru bro. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, but like a weird, like scientifically minded guru about all this shit because he didn't like it happened to him and he wasn't like, boom, hippie. He was like was like he became once his name from control. Dr. Darling. He became he became like

That's such a good comparison. Yeah, he became Alvar Hanzo from from the Dharma initiative. I Don't know that's from good I Ain't see much. I felt like a couple episodes of it, that's all. Let's start watching Lost 2 on top of X. Great. Listen, one series at a time. We've got to finish the X files first.

Yeah, we'll get around to that eventually. How many episodes have we had to season the 90s television? 20. 20 something. 28? Oh, yeah. You got it. So the question becomes, how did this seemingly ordinary

mid-century American businessman, a man rooted in the tangible realities of radio production and family life, become an accidental astronaut in the inner realms or outer realms, however you want to fucking label them. And the answer, as we'll see, involves a sudden, unexpected, and thoroughly weird series of events that would further, forever alter his perception of reality. Having established who this man is a Midwestern dude out in Indiana, Kentucky, it's time to talk about what the fuck happened to him. This dude, it's, it's, how do I, how do I

phrase this before just jumping into it? I think you just defined my mini-sode because you just connected. So sorry, just let me tangent real quick. We're talking about Grant Morrison at the beginning of this episode. Grant Morrison wrote a book called Super Gods, in which they talk about how they believe that comic books basically are reality and that they had an experience in Kathmandu or do or something like that somewhere where they were like, you know, like I third eye wide opened by a drug induced sort of like psychedelic meditation experience as well. So that's kind of interesting to me. So I don't know. I'm excited to hear what I'm gonna just read a quote. I'm gonna just like read a quotation from it. Maybe I've already done it.

I feel like maybe somehow I've already done it on the show before, is that possible? We, I don't know, we may have covered something a couple times in real right now. What is life? Is this a dream? Is this a fucking dream, bro? Did you meditate and talk to your dog and now you're just waking up?

My dog is cool with me, man. Don't worry about it. Oh, we had a conversation. Sup guys. We worked it out. Yeah. Before we jump in, I also like I like to do let's paint the picture of the 1950s by the way. Oh yeah.

This is happening. This was the era of the Cold War, McCarthyism, pervasive fear of communism and a strong emphasis on conformity and traditional values. It was a time of rapid technological advancement, but also a deep-seated conservatism. The idea of a successful businessman, like a pillar of a community type of dude, suddenly claiming to have experiences that defied laws of physics and an accepted understanding of reality would have been met with at best skepticism, at worst, ridicule and ostracism.

I think, you know, if it was happening more in these times, you'd probably have a more accepting community to find. But in the 50s is when this is happening. So keep that in mind. The year specifically was 1958. Robert Monroe, the pragmatic mismisman, was just living his quiet mid-century American normalcy. His world didn't get flipped upside down gradually. It was shattered instantaneously.

Alex, did you have like a thing triggered in your head that was like, flipped upside down? Well, got twisted upside down. How did drugs meditate? Now my entire worldview has been shifted. That's what I was thinking, too. According to Monroe, all he was simply trying to do on this day I did drugs, meditated. Now my entire worldview has been shifted. There you go. That's what I was thinking too. Yeah. According to Monroe, all he was simply trying to do on this day was get some rest. The initial experiences as described in journeys out of the body,

weren't immediately recognized as OBEs either. They began with a strange unsettling sensation first as he was laying down just to kind of take a nap or rest, he felt a vibration. Not an external vibration like the passing of a truck or anything, but an internal one originating deep somewhere within his body. He described it as powerful, a rhythmic pulsation accompanied by a feeling of paralysis. He couldn't move, he couldn't speak, he couldn't even open his eyes. He was in effect a prisoner within his own body

He says quote it was as if some great and visible engine had started up inside me vibrating every cell in my body And he goes on to say this wasn't a gentle blissful sensation. It was jarring disorienting Because in a moment after he was, uh, if he felt that vibration, he felt himself lifting, not in a metaphorical sense, not a feeling of lightness or euphoria, but a literal physical sensation of rising up out of his bed. And then he threw up his matrix oatmeal. I, man, I want to like instantly poo poo all of this, but I will say one time I might have had way too many edibles and I was like, you know what, I'm gonna lay in bed and like, let this thing pass.

And there was a moment where I was like, dude, I feel like I'm five feet off the ground. I was like, you know what, I'm not going to knock it. I've definitely been there. I felt something. I would even say to you, Robert Monroe would welcome you poo-pooing it, would welcome you being a skeptic about all this and listeners as well. You know, please like be very skeptical. My feeling is that it's not strictly real, but that there's power to it anyway, because it's like a concept, you know, like that's the thing that's kind of interesting about it to me Like and this wasn't something he was just trying to do it was he lay down after a day of work basically, right? It's like it happened. He vibed himself out. Yeah as he was feeling this

Yes, he was vibing himself out quite literally as he was feeling the sensation of lifting He was still paralyzed still felt the vibrations But now he was just also floating, ascending upward toward what we would imagine the ceiling of his bedroom. He describes with remarkable detail the experience of looking down and seeing his own body lying motionless on the bed, his wife Jeanette asleep beside him. Quote, I looked down and there, clearly visible was the bed and two bodies lying upon it. Oh, that's interesting. One was my physical body I knew instinctively and the other was Jeanette's.

Now this is another moment, a crucial moment, because this where he sees the physical being of like his of his body and his wife's body. This is it. This is the kind of thing that sends him into like shattering his reality. This is where Monroe's life pivots from mundane to extraordinary in this instant. He wasn't in his mind anyway. He wasn't dreaming. He wasn't hallucinating, at least not in the conventional sense.

He was according to his own account, just outside of his physical body, looking down on it with a clarity of detachment that defied all logic. He didn't seem to be afraid. It almost was like a curiosity rather than a shock in that moment. Well, like while he's outside of his body, it was not wonder or excitement, but eventually he described sheer terror started creeping in.

What he started questioning is he dead? Did he just die? Is he looking at his body in his bed? And is this the end? Honestly, that's probably the realist. I too would be like, that's exactly what I come on. Am I dead? This is some bull. Yeah. I've been very upset. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, I can, I can picture like in that moment he's looking down. I can see it too, where I'm looking at my body and like, huh, I think that's me. Oh wait. Oh no. Am I fucking dead? Yeah. We're like, had this preconceived notion of, you know, through tales and whatnot of people leaving their bodies because they're dead. And they're like, I saw myself on the operating table. Like, yeah, I too would feel the same way. I'd be

like, what the hell? Yeah. This terror that seemingly built that kind of like overrode him seemed to initiate getting yanked by, not gently floating down to his body. He said it was like a snap being pulled back by an invisible force with a sudden jarring reawakening back from his eyes opening. The vibrations instantly ceased. The paralysis was gone. He was just awake. His heart was pounding.

His mind was racing and he was just bewildered. I agree. I agree. I agree with that instant sort of awareness. Like anytime that I've ever regained consciousness, it's like, yeah, you're like, whoa. I will say since beginning meditation, I have dreamed, I usually just don't remember my dreams because I know people dream just don't remember it, but I have had about three or four dreams that I still very vividly remember. And the most recent one actually was one where I was, I was seeing it from above, but I wasn't like

out of body. It was a dream. I was just like the camera was at the top of my ceiling and I saw me sleeping. And two cops like came into the room, said something and left. Later when I was asking Jess about the, I'm like, what did the cops want? She's like, oh, you were just dreaming. You were just asleep. And I was like, oh, okay. I'm awake now. And then from that moment, it turned into a horror dream where two like almost claymation looking female heads conjoined

at the neck with huge grinning mouths started tackling me. And then they started shoving popcorn into each other's mouths. Yo, it was fucking wild. What fucking wild. Those girls, they single? Like, what's the vibe there, man? I don't know, man. I think probably are. Those two popcorns sharing twins? And twins? It happened to be the same face? I'm in.

That's true. You're in. Twins. And twins. So anyway, back to, so this, you know, he he wakes up this, the aftermath of that first to him earth shattering out of body experience was understandably a period of very profound disorientation and fear. Monroe was an engineer and a pragmatic radio executive was suddenly confronted with something

that he couldn't neatly put into a box where he could explain it away. He didn't greet this, and he didn't greet this new reality with open arms and new age pronouncements either. He wasn't like suddenly a hippie or anything like that. His immediate reaction was way more visceral. He was just fucking terrified. He thought he might be dying, or perhaps he was just going insane.

His first impulse, and I think this is kind of a natural one, he was to seek medical attention and a medical explanation, which I medical attention. Really? He like went to the hospital. He didn't go to the hospital, but he went to with the doctor. Love that. Yeah. He basically just needed to see if there was anything he could do. So he consulted doctors. He underwent a battery of different tests, desperately hoping for any diagnosis, a physical cause that that could explain the weird thing that happened to him, and then the feeling of being ripped from his own body.

But this is also crucial. He also didn't tell the doctors the whole truth. He was afraid of being labeled mentally ill in 1958. Yeah, I remember that. This is the time. And he strategically omitted the most unbelievable part, the part where he got shot out of his body. He literally left the part where he got shot out of his body. He literally left the part where he like got shot out of his body out of it. He's like vibrations felt like paralyzed and can't move. Yeah. Like that kind of stuff. And he, but yeah, he just focused on the more readily explainable or at least so he hoped physical symptoms, the

intense vibrations, temporary paralysis, et cetera. He presented himself as a man suffering from a mysterious but hopefully physical ailment and the doctors working with incomplete information that he provided, though I'm not even entirely convinced that knowing that out of body part would have helped anything at all. They ran their test, they examined his heart, his nervous system, his brain, but they found absolutely nothing. And quote, I went through a series of medical examinations, each more thorough than the last and the results were always the same.

Quote, you're in perfect health, Bob. There is nothing going on right now that is not also the story of Charles Xavier. Wait, I don't know, is that his origin? He's like, you're like at the point in the story where it's going to be like, and then I discovered I have something called the X gene. It wasn't an out of body experience. It was my psychic powers manifesting.

That's a little bit like him. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. a little bit like him, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're doing a great job. It's like, uh, Vernon Herzog. Like a little, yeah. Not enough, yeah, not deep enough. You, oh no, you have some mental powers that you have discovered.

It is God's raw joke on humanity to give him a taste of abilities beyond his nature. Your 90s cartoon, X-Men, Professor X, a little more Herzog than your actual Herzog. No, my Herzog is perfect. It's Perf-Zog. So either all your shit turns into Herzog or it turns into a Rolf.

Rolf, Rolf is not, like I'm just trying to outrun Rolf. You know what I mean? You can't, cause you are Rolf. Yeah dude, you are man. And I think maybe through this series you might realize Maybe I was Rolf. You're everything. Maybe I'm every Muppet there ever was.

Maybe we're all Rolf. We just have to achieve Muppet sync. Muppet sync dude,uppet sync, dude. That sounds kind of fun. You sync the brain of your human brain with the brain of your Muppet brain. And then everybody looks like a Muppet to you in real life? At the same frequency, yeah. Dude, life would be... The state of our nation would be more acceptable if everybody was a Muppet.

If I could just do that all the time? Yeah. We run around like that's, yeah, that I could just do that. Yeah. Yeah. When we run around, like, that's, yeah. That checks out. It feels about right. Anyway, these pronouncements of him being in perfect health were not comforting to Monroe at all. In fact, this just made him more nervous.

They offered no explanation, no solution, no way to make sense of any terrifying experience that he was now just, that just happened to him. And he felt like he was kind of trapped in a nightmare, experiencing something so, that felt so profoundly real, but so unable to be shared or explained to anybody without them being able to let them labeling him as crazy. He felt like he couldn't safely confide in anybody without risking not only his

reputation, but his career and perhaps even of his freedom. If they did deemed him mentally ill and shoved them into a 1958 mental hospital hospital never to be seen again, which I get that's scary, dude. I wouldn't want to ever do that. The experiences, however, stubbornly refused to cease actually. It wasn't just a one-time thing. They started to continue, often striking randomly in the middle of the night while he was asleep, turning his bedroom into an unlikely like weird astral launch pad for involuntary journeys into some out of body land.

The pattern for him became chillingly familiar. He'd suddenly wake up to a sudden onset of intense vibrations through his entire body, a feeling of then complete paralysis. And then the terrifying sensation of being yanked out of your body. Sometimes it have violently pulled up. What do you being yanked out of your body. Sometimes it have violently pulled upwards. What do you mean yanked out of your body though? What? What?

Nevermind. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's just a gross joke. It was a gross joke. Oh, you want to like yank. Oh dude, I get it. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I've been meditating too much. My brain ain't in the good. I don't understand. What were you talking about, Alex? This is- Yanking the body? This is like when George Costanza stops- So people are watching, they know what you're doing, but for those who are listening, what

exactly are you trying to do right now? Mathis is doing an Elon Musk impression right now for the camera. Yeah, he's doing some sort of dance like a president would do, but what is- Weird, right? What kind of, like, what are you referring to? What are you guys talking about? It helps you get out of body. This gets you out of the body. Jane, we're talking about Jane off into a transcendental state. My man. No, I didn't read Jane off. That was not a book that was in my eighth grade curriculum.

I didn't read Jane Eyre though. Yeah. Jane Eyre is the same thing. You kind of Jane off to Jane Eyre. I don't know. We're talking about Jane off you guys. Welcome to the Chillin' Night podcast of your first timer. I don't know what that is. Do you Jay off while listening to the podcast? Jane off you guys. Welcome to the Chillin' Night podcast of your first timer. I don't know what that is. Do you Jay off while listening to the podcast? Jane off? I've never done it. I've never done it. What is that? You, I'm listening to this for the listeners.

I've never done it. Who is Jay off? John Offenheimer? Yeah, John Offenheimer. He made the Fugula bomb. I'm glad you ran with that. Thank you. I'm glad you ran with that. Thank you. Thank you. The pattern, the pattern usually was he would get pulled out of his body, sometimes forcefully ascend to the ceiling.

And usually when you get to the ceiling, he would then get snapped back into his physical body reawakening. He describes the feeling of the, he could even sometimes describe the feeling of the plaster against his non physical form, though he does talk about how that might be what he's expecting to feel. And therefore that is why he is feeling it because it is more of an expectation than what's actually happening. He was always able to see his wife sleeping beside him below on the bed as

well, but also the feeling of like, uh, just the bizarre disorienting, juxtaposition of the familiar and the utterly impossible left him just more and more panicked every single time it happened. And he just became convinced that it wasn't just an imagination. He was experiencing them with a sensory vividness that defied dream states. This was much more clear than dreams were. Another common feature of these early forays into his exploration of his own home, which was his familiar surroundings, rendered a strange and alien by his disembodied perspective, was his decision to take that

fear, try his best to put it aside and see if he could explore, explore his own home very specifically. He would find himself sometimes floating through walls, a feat that to him should have been impossible, yet felt strangely natural in this new altered state. He would observe his children sleep in other rooms, which is kind of creepy when I when I word it like that. They're small, they're childlike forms also rising and falling with each breath. He could see basically every little detail in the physical realm from this supposed non-physical point of view, which I don't know, I guess like,

it's almost like being a ghost, though he wasn't convinced he was a ghost. I feel to me this is very ghost-like kind of things like when ghosts are depicted, these are floating, you know, room to room kind of watching you. And I say this because if we are to look at this from the perspective of within his own mind, if this is all just here, is this being a projection of things he's, he would be expecting to be able to do if he was, you know, in this ghost, like state and just interesting. I put that in your heads. I don't know.

Ghosts like state is a great like place to try and even put yourself mentally at all. Yeah, it's fascinating. He says he could see the details of the furniture, the patterns on the wallpaper, even the dust motes dancing in the air that are filtering through the moonlight in the windows, with the clarity that he said often even exceeded his normal waking perception. He didn't have perfect vision, he wore glasses. He recounts in one instance noticing a minor detail out of place, a book left on a table with a picture slightly askew and then later confirming its accuracy when he was back in

his physical body to go and check. These small but verifiable details to him added another layer of unsettling reality to these experiences making them even harder to dismiss as near dreams of hallucinations but as always I tag these could also just be things he subconsciously remembered were laying around in the house that he didn't maybe didn't know how many times do you pull a memory oh yeah I knew that you know if you prompt something and you pull a memory out like it happens As Monroe continued to endure though these involuntary and often for him terrifying experiences,

a subtle but significant shift began to occur. He was still understandably grappling with fear and confusion, still desperately seeking a rational explanation for what was happening to him, but amidst the terror and uncertainty, a flicker of agency, the glimmer of control started to emerge. He was no longer simply a passive victim swept along by the currents of this new bizarre out-of-body existence. He was starting to, hesitantly, and with considerable trepidation, experiment. He was becoming, in his own awkward and unintentional way, a researcher and explorer of his own

consciousness, with his bedroom as his unlikely place where he would begin to explore this newfound willingness. One of the most significant developments during this period was his growing awareness of his ability to control what he starts deeming his second body. This wasn't the sudden realization, this one was a gradual process of discovery, unlike the initial realization, born out of repeated experiences and a desperate need to understand and perhaps even to master what was happening to him. He describes this second body not as some ethereal ghostly apparition, but as a tangible, albeit non-physical form with a definite shape and a sense of presence. It was in essence a duplicate of his physical body,

but it was kind of composed differently with less dense substance capable of being able to pass through solid objects and sometimes even moving at the speed of thought, which we will get to. Jesse, you looked like you were gonna maybe want to ask something. I just want to give you an opportunity. No, I just, there's a lot of what he is describing.

And oh, I guess in this case, what you're describing that has the, the makings of a really good horror story. Oh yeah. I mean, I don't know that it's going to go there, but it has the makings of one that I just in my head was like, Oh, that actually would be like a good plot for a thing, but whatever is the movie where Nicole Kidman, uh, spoiler. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's the movie. I was going to say that's kind of a spoiler, but it's, yeah,, but whatever. What was the movie where Nicole Kidman? Spoiler. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, that's the movie. I was going to say that's kind of a spoiler, but it's, yeah, it's whatever. Well, I mean, shit. I was thinking about the plot of, uh, oh man, there's one storyline in Dr. Decker, that video game where a guy, uh, experiences an extra hour of the day where he like, everyone is is paused but he can move around and he like does whatever he wants and he lives his extra hour like a 25th hour but over time he starts to see there are other people there with him and they're watching him and I was like yeah

that's cool I love so like I was I know that's where my head was at and that's just thinking I was like oh I like a good spook so yeah, he learned occasionally through trial and error, but most often by sheer accident that he could actually control the movements of this new body, not by physically moving, but by intending to move, which is a very difficult concept to kind of like wrap your head around. And I still struggle with I'm not I'm not having out of body experiences, but like wrapping my mind around the idea of intending something, but not doing it.

Sure. He didn't, he said he didn't need to physically walk or fly. He simply thought about being in a particular location. And then he would almost find himself there instantly. Like he did kind of blink and he was like, oh shit, I'm here. This is what he called quote unquote thought transference as best he could term it. It became a fundamental principle in his out of body explorations moving forward. Quote,

movement was accomplished by a form of thought transference. If I thought of being at a certain point, I would be there. The speed seemingly instantaneous. Uh, this particular discovery was not only empowering, but it also provided a crucial insight into the nature of this nonphysical realm. And again, we're looking, I'm just going to, cause I'm going to go as if this is all real from this point on. It's all through his perspective. I don't want to keep clarifying. It suggested that the rules governing this reality were fundamentally different from

those of the physical world. Here, consciousness, intention, thought, all held to power that defied conventional laws of physics. He also crucially began to feel a connection to his physical body, like a link of some kind that kept him, he feared from drifting too far off. And if you ever research astral out of body projections astral body, a very common theme is like a silver or golden cord that leads you back to your body almost like an anchor that literally Dr. Strange. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Strange pulls from this. Yeah. This kind of thing. Very much. Uh, he also crew. Uh,

yeah. So he says, quote, I became aware of a strong pulsing force or pressure upon my astral body. It seemed to emanate from my physical body. And the further away I went, the stronger the pole became. I thought, uh, I thought of it as a giant rubber band. And if it ever broke or became detached, I would be lost forever in some strange and foreign environment with no return possible. Otherwise known as he'd die. He'd be worried he would die if he got detached from his body. It's like another definition of death though, right? Really, yeah.

It's kind of interesting. Yeah. But sometimes even intention wasn't always enough. Early attempts for him to control the second body's movement were clumsy. He often ended up bumping into walls when he thought he was supposed to go through them, ceilings, and even on a few occasions finding himself accidentally outside of his house entirely. He did not mean it and he would be on the outside. One of these occasions Monroe described a particularly vivid and unsettling experience where he found himself floating above his house

Looking down at the roof in the surrounding neighborhood the sense of vulnerability He says of being exposed and kind of unmoored was overwhelming He struggled to control his movements feeling a strong pull back towards where his physical body was a force or cord quote-unquote That kept him tethered to his sleeping form. And this fear of becoming permanently detached, of losing his connection to the physical world was a constant like pressure on him as he did these things. And another significant and initially terrifying discovery was his accidental development

of what he calls the rollout technique. During one of his vibrating paralysis episodes, he decided he'd try to turn over in bed, a natural reaction, I would think to being like uncomfortable, maybe fearful, like getting on your side and almost fetal positioning it. Instead of simply rolling over in his physical body, however, he felt a distinct click he describes or pop and found himself suddenly separate floating above his bed. So

basically tried to roll and whatever happened, like the sensation of rolling detached his physical form, his non-physical form from his body. And in the meditation tapes, he does try to go on to describe a process where if you start to feel like a rocking while you're meditating, to let just go with it, don't try and fight it, let it go,

because there's something there maybe about it being like your astroform wiggling free almost from unstuck or from your and it might be just like a mental stick. But again, we'll talk about that another episode. Sure. He goes, quote, when the vibrations reached a peak, I had an irresistible impulse to turn over as if I were rolling over in bed. The instant I had the impulse, I felt a second when I seemed to click out of phase and with no further effort, I was floating upward, bumping lightly against the ceiling.

This simple maneuver, a specific rocking motion combined with intention, became pretty much one of his most crucial tools later on for more deliberate attempts at inducing these out-of-body experiences. We're not at the point where he's attempting to induce them yet, he's just simply trying to control them when they happen. He had stumbled upon basically a physical trigger, a key that could kind of unlock that door between physical and non-physical. He describes practicing the rollout, rarely actually intending it to work, just to test it out. And finally, the first glimmers, the very earliest of his meetings with other entities.

These almost are like at this point when they're happening, they're very much after thoughts, more blips and fragments. Quote, underneath the fear, the loneliness, there was something else, a pressure, a feeling that something was there nearby watching and waiting. Now these weren't yet elaborate encounters with clearly defined entities. He just felt a presence like you're being watched or something nearby that you can't see. And these were to him at these moments

just fleeting impressions, ambiguous sensations, maybe something's there, maybe not, but it was all beyond the range of what he could perceive. He described feeling watched as if unseen eyes were observing his clumsy attempts to navigate this realm. He mentioned, quote, shadow figures lurking in the periphery, movements that seemed to coincide with his own, but which would then vanish when he tried to focus on them directly. These early encounters were more unsettling than informative for him in any way, just

adding another layer of fear while he's trying to grapple with what's going on. He also began to perceive sounds and vibrations that had no apparent physical source. He describes hearing humming noises, buzzing sounds, and even what he interpreted as distant voices, although he could rarely make out any distinct words. And I will say, since meditating, and I've been doing it for a couple months now, I have had one occasion where I heard a voice.

It was, and again and we'll, again, we'll talk more detail in the third episode about our personal experiences, but I will say it was off to my right hand side and it sounded like a European girl going, hello? Hello? And that was it. That was it. It's ice in English. Yeah. In English. Like, just like, if they said like, uh, like maybe it was a, yeah, like a European accent, but just, she was like, Hello. Yeah. Hello, that American man. Hello. They like made my heart jump and snap me out of the meditation immediately. I'm aware like but I was saying

is audio hallucinations are known to happen in meditation as well. Like that does happen. I heard like not words like that, but I definitely heard like Someone like falling by you just like just like vote voice voice Level voice adjacent sounds. Yeah, you know, yeah Yeah, like sounds that weren't quite words, but that were definitely like vocal I just had the imagination of like souls plummeting by you while you're in meditation. Just hear them. Ah, ah. Daryl Strawberry falling through the void in The Simpsons.

I haven't seen that. That's okay. That's all right. That's for somebody out there. I haven't seen like, I've seen, I will say I've seen probably like four episodes of The Simpsons. These audio hallucinations, audio phenomena, whatever you want to call them, to him reinforce the sense that he was entering a weird realm that operated according to different rules, a realm

where the familiar boundaries just kind of blurred into meaninglessness. Quote, it seemed to be another stage beyond the vibrations, an effortless state of floating with only a small amount of conscious thought or action needed to move in any direction. It's in this second state that his experiments began to intensify. One particular instance that stands out in the book journey is out of the body. Please go read it involved an attempt to consciously travel to a specific location outside of his home for the first time. The only time he's been outside of his home has been accidentally and it's like

above his house and only happened like once or twice. Up to this point, all of his explorations had been largely confined just to the familiar surroundings of his own home. This time, he decided to try and reach a friend's house, which was a few miles away. Pretty cool. I imagine after feeling relatively comfortable exploring your own home after many, many, many of these, I'd probably get to a point where I'd be like, let me see if I can go like, it's like Simpsons hit and run. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Not to go back to the Simpsons, but you know what

I'm saying? No, I do. Yeah. This, so few miles out, his, he, so he focused his intention, visualize the location and using what he considered again, thought transference principle, he described a rapid disorienting movement, like a feeling of being propelled through a huge amount of space at incredible speed. He then found himself not inside his friend's house as he had intended, but outside of it, hovering above the street. He could see the house, he recognized the surroundings, but he couldn't seem to get any closer. He felt, even though he tried, he had the intention, he tried to get in. He felt a strong resistance, a barrier preventing him from entering.

He described a feeling of frustration at that moment, some disappointment saying, quote, I tried to go further, but it was like pushing against a strong, invisible wall. I couldn't penetrate it. This particular experience is like really stuck with him, though, because now he's wondering, is this because of a lack of my ability or is there something to do with other people's consciousness where I'm not able to simply just intrude? But he's able to go around his family. so I don't really know where that thought of his really leads. Does he just imply that he has implicit permission from his family to be around, or is it the ownership of his home, or is it his perceived ownership of his home that it gives him that?

That's kind of where I'm at. That's where I'm at with it. I'm like, you just give yourself your own rules because it's literally your own little, like if you're observing the universe, right? And it's you generating the universe, then it's your brain that's deciding what's where, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, technically yes.

If your brain is vibrating and you're in the universe is vibrating and that's what's creating it, maybe that's it. Yeah. Um, during all of these early explorations and experiments, he was also accumulating all this data. He was taking notes. He was writing things down. He would experiential data. He would try developing rudimentary techniques to try and control things, like I said, and he began to formulate kind of a tentative map of this uncharted territory, not an actual physical map, but just through notes and understanding of what was going on.

He was in effect kind of transforming himself from a passive victim of these bizarre experiences into active explorer and researcher, driven by a desperate need to simply understand, but most importantly for him, control this shit. Because he was, even though he was exploring, he was still being shot out of his body unwillingly. He would, he didn't want this. He would just wake up and it would happen.

And it wasn't every night either. That's not like, it wasn't happening every single night. He could not predict when these events would happen, but they just would. He was still far from any confident astral traveler that he would indeed later become. But the seeds of that transformation are basically sewn here as Robert Monroe's involuntary out-of-body experiences continued the profound shift started taking place No longer that simple passive recipient of these bizarre events He has evolved from bewildered businessmen thrust into the reality of the woo

slowly and painstakingly an of the woo slowly and painstakingly an active participant and experimenter in something even still to him didn't really want to believe was real but he was also just a one-man research team for this determined to understand control this stuff but he had nobody to turn to this transformation this transition from OBE inducted techniques to growing understanding of the physical realm would completely reshape his life and his family's life in the coming years and this rollout technique would become his go-to way of making Intentional out-of-body experiences began to happen this simple technique meticulously repeated He wasn't always aiming for a full separation,

but he was also just trying to see and understand the mechanics of the process, which is why he liked the rollout technique, because he could kind of gently roll as opposed to being shot out, and he could just push it to see like, what and where are the limits? When does it happen?

When does it end up pushing me out of my body and whatnot? He also experimented with other techniques which were inspired by literature because he had gone on a deep research hole now. He had been reading book after book after book trying to figure this shit out. And so he had other techniques he was trying to incorporate. He explored relaxation exercises, breathing techniques, visualization methods, all to see what it would do. Jesse, I feel like you were going you were gonna say something. No, I wasn't gonna say anything. I was definitely thinking of other techniques. Like the jack off technique?

Like the pull out technique. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a sick technique. Yeah. So what I thought he was, what I thought he was doing, if he's rolling out, pulling out, and then he was gonna keep going. He was gonna get other techniques.

Yeah, yeah. He calls it a method. Yeah. As his ability to intentionally induce OBEs with greater consistency improved, he began to focus on extending the duration and expanding the range of his explorations. Tantric. I get it. Yeah, exactly. He learned that he could maintain the out-of-body state for longer periods by focusing his attention and avoiding strong emotions, particularly fear.

Fear almost always just shot him right back to his body. He also discovered that he could travel to specific locations by intending to do so. He began with, like I said, the familiar locations of his friend's house and so on, but he would begin to try and push that out even further. But we're going to move away from the physical exploration of areas and into what Monroe would begin to describe as locales. As Monroe's explorations continued, he began to discern patterns, to identify recurring features of the non-physical landscape. He realized that he wasn't simply floating through

a random chaotic void. He was navigating a structured, albeit incredibly strange and fluid reality. He began to categorize these different regions or states of consciousness into what he termed locales. These weren't necessarily physical places, mind you, in the way that we understand them at least. They were more like different vibrational frequencies, man. Yeah, bro. You know what I'm saying?

Like not planes, but just like zones. Yeah, zones. Exactly. Each with its own unique to its characteristics and sometimes inhabitants and even rules of engagement. Now, understanding these locales is like really fucking important to grasping what we're going to do. So I'm going to go over the three locales that he ends up labeling and describing as locale one, the near physical realm.

This was the locale closest to our everyday reality. This is where Monroe found himself in a world that was basically identical to ours, where he would initially be shot out into where you could see his house, see his family, familiar furniture, friend's house with the clarity of actually being there. It was like a perfect three-dimensional mirror image of this physical realm's surroundings. However, even in this seemingly familiar realm, there were still subtle differences.

The lighting might be slightly different. The color is a bit more intense or a bit more muted. He might hear faint humming sounds or sense a subtle vibration that had no apparent source. And most importantly, he was not obviously in his physical body. That's how you know you're in locale 1. No physical body, everything else seems to be the same, though maybe different colors and whatnot.

Then there's locale 2, the realm of what he deemed thought and emotion. This was where things started to get really fucking weird. Locale 2 was a realm of what he described as pure energy, a place where thoughts and emotions had immediate and tangible consequences. It was a landscape that shifted and changed in response to the observer's inner state. A place of incredible beauty, but also sometimes unimaginable terror. In Locale 2, the familiar laws of physics seemed to dissolve entirely, time and space became fluid malleable concepts, and solid objects could melt away or transform into

something else entirely, and most significantly, this is the realm Monroe began to encounter other entities for the first time. That ranged from benevolent helpers to terrifying predatory things. Spooky monkeys to scorpions with robot legs. Oh, but then there's the last locale locale three that he simply labels the realm beyond Monroe's description of locale three are far more limited in the main book that we're using here and I didn't read the library of like eight or nine books he has.

He describes it more as a realm that transcended individual consciousness. It almost sounds like to me, ego death, like one would have taking too much of a psychedelic. I've never had it myself, but I've heard of it where like you lose sense of self. You just feel like sure. Have you ever had an ego death? No. Okay, me. I wish.

I'm on YouTube, so yes. Yeah, it's a different kind of ego death, unfortunately. The reason he doesn't talk about it much is because in the first book he says, is mostly, and he didn't know he was gonna be writing other books after this. This is just saying, during this time, it was very rare that he got there

and it wasn't purposeful. He just didn't understand it very well. So he just has a very limited description of what this thing is. It was also during these early locale one explorations that Monroe began to sense a presence, as I stated earlier, that feeling of being watched. He described it as a subtle pressure, like a prickling of the skin or a sense of unease that would just creep over him without any apparent obvious cause. These were the first hints of otherness that kind of permeated the non-physical world. The first indications that he was at least not alone on his journeys. This is, as Monroe gained in confidence and crucially developed that rollout technique,

the appearance of other entities became very regular. You would often want to push to locale two where these entities were more physically, yeah, more free, more, more, I don't know, yeah, more present is a good word to put it. Able to do their thing or whatever? Yeah, yeah. He said, he would go on to say that the transition

between locales one and two wasn't even always all that sharp or like defined. Sometimes it was such a subtle gradual shift that it was he would just kind of realize, oh shit, like, no, I'm here. I didn't really like notice it until now. Locale two not simply like it's not it's not it's not a distant place. You have to also keep that in mind to locale one, two and three also all exist in the same area. They're just different vibrational states

of the same area. Area. Does that make sense? Like in a way? Yeah, it's like when you're playing Dragon Quest Monsters and you go to one map, but then sometimes it's sun, sometimes it's spring, sometimes it's winter, but it's all the same map.

The way he, and I appreciate him for this, it's just the way he labels things and the way he tries to understand them are very like physical reality based and kind of remain that way for a good long time. So like when you hear Locale, it sounds like you're moving to a different location, but you're not. It's very much the same place. Like in Locale 2, the solidarity, the solidity of his home, the reassuring presence of his sleeping family gave way to a reality that was way more fluid, malleable, profoundly unsettling in what he would call a semi-darkness. And it's in this semi-darkness of Locale 2 that he would encounter the first entity that he was able to give like a proper, not a name, but a definition to,

he simply called it at the seductive female. Like something that he could like. Label. Tangibly. Yeah, yeah, like tangibly label, yeah, yeah, yeah. And when this encounter happened, he wasn't seeking an encounter. He wasn't conducting any like intention, vocations,

or meditations to meet something. He was just simply there in locale 2 at some point adrift this ambiguous landscape in a place that he said lacked clear boundaries, that he became aware of this other presence. It wasn't a visual perception, not at first anyway. It was just an intuitive awareness, a feeling of being observed of this other consciousness that he deemed the seductive female. Quote, I seemed to be in a semi-darkness and became aware of the presence of someone nearby. I couldn't see clearly.

Not yet. Not yet instantly I knew it was female and that she was not a member of the world as I knew it. The immediate instinctive knowing of the other presence's gender and its non-human origin is really fascinating, particularly, and I don't want to like, tie it back and say that I believe this guy, but the testimony of the other whistleblower that came out during the egg UAP nonsense about how he felt a feminine like presence and whatnot. And I don't know how like, I don't know, I just don't know what that means. You know what I mean? But like-

I think it also is the same thing. Like, it comes from the brain, like, we understand it that way, we understand feminine, and so maybe the presence is falling into that perception area for him. You know? I don't know. A feminine presence is one, when you think about comforting or want a welcoming presence, it, when you say a feminine presence in my mind, I don't think like it's a woman. I think it's someone who is not aggressive with you, who is more like here, I baked you cookies. Welcome to the third plane or whatever. You know what I mean? That'd be sick. If we get cookies, when we get making it to the third plane for the first

time, you get spirit cookies. That'd be sick. Uh, cookies when we get making the third plane for the first time you get spirit cookies That'd be sick as his presence drew closer though a visual form did begin to coalesce Although it remained somewhat hazy and indistinct. He describes her as quote incredibly beautiful and very alluring but these words are he goes on to say these words are drawn from a limited vocabulary of human experience. And what he says is inadequate to kind of capture the full impact of what he was. Where his head was at. Yeah, exactly.

It wasn't simply physical beauty in the conventional sense. For him, it was something more profound, a projection of pure desire, a promise of fulfillment that kind of resonated with him and the deepest, most primal level that he had. He described it as a warmth radiating from her, a feeling of invitation, of welcome, almost a siren's call in the non-physical home.

The way he describes it like that is almost like hard to resist. He did, and he goes on to say he did feel drawn to her, pulled by an almost irresistible force because it wasn't just a visual attraction it was a total sensory experience this feeling of being enveloped in her presence of being offered something he didn't even know he desperately needed even if he couldn't articulate what that something was but whatever was, she seemed to have it. And to him, it was a temptation tailored to his specific vulnerabilities, his subconscious desires that are kind of like hidden

in the recesses of his memories made manifest. He was looking at this as almost more of like a reflection of other aspects of him back at him, the temptation to be pulled to something that he doesn't even, that would be not necessarily good for him. But he also felt something else, quote, "'She was incredibly beautiful, alluring, "'radiating a warmth and a promise of something "'I couldn't quite define. "'But underneath it all, I felt a coldness, "'a sense of emptiness.'"

And that coldness, that sense of emptiness is the one thing that kind of like kept him from being like giving in completely Like the subtle sense of dissonance the discordant note in the symphony of seduction And thank you for that. Come on. Give me that was a good one. Come on That's very Stanley. I like that. Come on. I wrote that work hard on this fucking script I'm gonna do a lot of alliteration. You gotta hand to the man Yeah, this was basically intuitive warning bells that prevents him from being completely consumed by the allure of whatever this was For him it was a testament to his own inner resilience and his ability to at least maintain some degree of critical awareness

of what the fuck is going on no matter how Trippy and weird actually is. He described it as a feeling in his gut, like a deep-seated unease that he just like knew, no, there's something cold and empty there. Though he did say he was still kind of torn. His defense method and his method of resisting this psychic seduction wasn't only a physical act

because he would encounter this being multiple times as he'd slip into locale too. So we started having an internal act of will, almost a desperate plea for help directed toward, well, if there's things out there, maybe there are helpful things out there that can help keep this thing away from me because even though we could resist it, it was still an effort. It was just like trying. He didn't want to deal with this. It stopped him from being able to explore being able to understand this stuff

So he said quote I learned to call on the helpers as I called them It became obvious that the appeal was not unheard So many times at a crucial moment there would be the calm the quiet the peace and no more problems at the time Someone somewhere was listening and actively helping someone somewhere was listening and actively helping. So we would like almost think of it like a prayer in a weird way where he'd like pray, but he, no, no figure showed up. Just like that seduction sense would disappear

and he would just feel calm. And to me, that almost sounds like meditating a little bit. Like just a little bit more. It sounds just like finding that little quiet space in your head, yeah. And every time in the aftermath of meeting this individual, Monroe describes feeling drained physically and emotionally exhausted as if he'd been some through a grueling ordeal. But at least he got through it.

And I want to and I tag on to this, though I've never had any any encounters at all. There are times after meditating where the next day or two I'm like, I just can't. I'm not in the headspace. I'm like tired still from the previous night's one. Yeah, definitely. It's weird because it's like it is a weirdly. It takes energy. Yeah, it's so strange. Well, after the unsettling and subtly manipulative encounter with this seductive female, Monroe faced a far more direct and what he calls violent threat in locale to this was encounter with what he calls violent threat in locale 2. This was an encounter with what he simply called the thing, an entity that lacked any discernible form

of recognizable features, but exuded a raw, overwhelming power and a sense of malice. This wasn't seduction. It was assault, a brutal, terrifying demonstration of what he deemed the dangers lurking in this non-physical realm. He said the setting was once again the familiar semi-darkness of Locale 2, that ambiguous in between space, and Monroe was adrift in his astral body, floating in this indeterminate

void already on edge from his previous experiences. He was learning through painful trial and error that Locale 2 was not a place that you could just casually explore when you found yourself here, that it demanded constant vigilance and a deep respect for unseen forces at play. Then, without warning, it happened. There was no visual precursor, no auditory cue, no subtle shift in the environment to signal the impending danger. There was simply a sudden, crushing pressure on his chest as if an

enormous weight had just been plopped right on the center of it. Quote, it felt like an invisible octopus was attacking me. Its tentacles wrapped around my chest squeezing the life out of me. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I couldn't even scream. This invisible octopus analogy that he uses can kind of like, it almost reminds me of, in my research, there were, I was reading a lot about, I ended up in a lot of Ayahuasca trip reports and stuff. And I found myself reading this article about this octopus beast that a lot of people end up encountering on like, I got Ayahuasca trips that it like, it appears out.

It's actually really terrifying. Sometimes it like grabs you and throws you out. Sometimes it just kind of like watches you. And I found it interesting because I, you know, I had read about this first and then I did my research and I found this other thing. And there's even ancient depictions of, of like civilizations that did a lot of like psychedelic ritual stuff of like this creature with like eight tentacle kind of things. So it's weird. It's interesting that he's having what he describes as this encounter with an invisible

octopus thing. And there's evidence of people encountering it on psychedelics. And people who say in deep meditation is almost the same as psychedelic use. If you can really get into a trance, you can have some wild visuals, which I've never had. But it's interesting. I wonder if, I do wonder if deep meditation, where you get that, is producing similar chemicals

that you would get. I think that's exactly what it is. I think there's a state, genuinely. I think it's just a mode that you shift into. That's why I think why he calls it clicking is because it's just like you go into it. It's not, it's like, it feels natural. Did you do any of the reading prior to the meditation?

Do you know what clicking out is? Or are you just using the term? I read it like in September. Gotcha, gotcha. I don't know. Yeah, for those who don't know, click, we'll talk about it more in next episode, but clicking out is during meditation, where you lose sense of time and awareness and then you come back. And sometimes it feels like an

hour has passed and it's just been 30 seconds. Sometimes you click out and you're at the end of the tape and you don't know what happened. It's like dozing off, but not asleep. Because when you come back, you're not like, oh, I fell asleep. You're almost like, oh, I was... It almost feels like you just kind of blinked and you were there. It's called clicking out. And the goal is to like not click out. You're trying not to click out and like maintain awareness when that happens. Um, but he's getting grabbed by this invisible octopus back to the octopus and he couldn't breathe. He couldn't move, couldn't scream, paralyzed, trapped in his own non-physical form. And he was just confused. Nothing in the books that he'd been reading

had talked about this. Nothing he had done any research and had talked about an actual physical like grabbing. And even the seductive female didn't really physically touch him at all. It was just like an emotion. It wasn't, yeah. It wasn't a sensation, yeah.

He immediately panicked. What is this thing? What do I, what does it want? How do I stop it? Am I gonna die here? He was truly being panicked and he described feeling his energy being drained, like he was getting more and more tired as if this thing was like drawing the energy

off of him quote unquote feeding on him. The concept of like energy draining or energy entities feeding on life force of others would also become recurring not only in his experiences, but it's like all it's in theult literature. It's everywhere. Like even energy vampires are pretty well known thing of like these idea of these entities who don't feed off you physically, but feed off of your emotions, sometimes negative, sometimes positive. So it's interesting that he's kind of having this weird experience with that. He couldn't fight it and he had no escape route.

He could only just internally resist it by trying to focus all of his mental energy on just like getting out, going home, just breaking free. He said, well, I fought back with all my strength, with all my will. I focused on pushing the thing away, on breaking free from its grip. It was a silent, desperate struggle, a battle fought entirely within the realm of consciousness. And this silent, desperate struggle, like he would eventually realm of consciousness and the silent desperate struggle like he would eventually break free and by breaking free. He would just feel the pull and he would wake up in his bed. It's not like he broke free and he ran away in the astral plane or any of that stuff.

No, he just he's done. He woke up and he was like, you know, he felt the pull he woke up and he was exhausted. Yes, Jesse. Nothing. It's just it's I'm just letting the whimsy wash over me. You got it. You got this whimsical adventure. It's all you got to do, man. It's all you can do. Ignore my head shakes and various like, ah, it didn't happen. Ignore me. I want to make sure you get your opportunity to say

what you want to say. I got nothing I want to say. I am of the mind that this could very well just be M of the mind that this could very well just be a thing that you perceive in your mind. And it's all that it is, is in the mind. It is that, but what is the power of the mind is the question. Well, no, sure. Exactly. So I'm not, I'm not going to poo poo anything. I'm along for the ride. But just for those who are going to go to Reddit and be like, Jesse didn't say anything.

What do you want me to say? What do you want me to say? Like, what can I, let the man speak and tell the story. It looked like you want me to say? What do you want me to say? Like, what can I? No, I just, it looked like you were going to say something. I just want to make sure you got your opportunity before we're done. I got you, dude. No, we're all good. That's all. Yeah. Okay. So he's got this, the thing attacks him, seductive female, but there were still other things in locale too that were more elusive, but still very present. He says, quote, I would often see these shadow figures out of the corner of my eye, dark shapes moving just beyond my range of focus

that seemed to be aware of me watching me but never directly approached me. At least not at first. He describes them being darker than the surrounding darkness. Have you ever, have you guys ever seen the shadow people or like waking up and seeing a shadow person or the hat man? Like personally have I seen one? Like I've seen shadow people like in the classic sense of like, what's that? Like but I've never like, gotcha, gotcha. Never seen like a, like an entity from my subconscious like that.

No, I didn't know. I, because I know some people do. My mom used to a lot, but she's also mentally ill. So you know, it happens. Uh, he describes them as being darker than surrounding areas, almost like, uh, like I guess it's hard. I've never seen a shadow person, but it must be, it must be like a void, like a void of light as opposed to, cause even darkness, you can still see darkness. Like,

there's a weird like you still see it, but avoid of darkness is just like more. Like the classic shadow person is it's a figure Yeah, that is shadowy dark in the corner of a room. Yeah, the fact that yeah Yeah, yeah And in the same thing too like in they would always like you look over and they seem to move But this just kind of made him more intent on figuring out what these things were the fact that they repeatedly Did try to move away from his vision drove him to want to figure it out. They were masters of his periphery, constantly in the side vision, but he would still do

his best to see if he could maybe develop some sort of awareness of what these things actually were. This wasn't like a visual auditory cue either. It was just more of a feeling. Quote, it was like having an invisible radar, constantly scanning my surroundings. I couldn't always see them, but I could feel them, sense their presence nearby. This invisible radar wasn't great.

It didn't always work, he would go on to say. It wasn't always enough to provide him with even enough warning that anything was even, or that they were even there, or what the danger was. In the intercompensations, think of intuition is really kind of what he's talking about here. What he intuits is happening. But for him, that was just better than nothing.

It helped. It gave him something to hold onto that he could control and use, which gave him the ability to have the confidence to put the fear down to explore. So these little shadow people would watch him for a very, very, very long time. The other thing attacked him a few more times and he would always call on the helpers and they would

also continually arrive in his way of helping. But Locale III, he only ever flickered into no more than like a couple of times prior to going into the Monroe Institute. This is a place, like he said, is kind of just like beyond understanding of physical realities. No, like you're not looking at anything there. It's a oneness. It's that ego death that I personally might attribute to ego death, similar to ego death, this feeling of pure consciousness.

And I think one day we should do enough mushrooms that one of us has an ego death, similar to ego death, this feeling of pure consciousness. And I think one day we should do enough mushrooms that one of us has an ego death. We keep talking about it. I know. Listen, you name the time and the place and I'll have an ego death. I was driving in an Uber one time in San Jose and this lady was telling me, I was an Uber driver, I was going nowhere in my life, I went into the jungle, I did ayahuasca. I had ego death and I adopted a child. Here's a picture of the child.

And I was like, taking you by my weed, please. I don't want that to happen. I cannot do it. If I walk away from you, you're gonna feel I'm quitting the podcast. I need to go be a dad. Stop me. Let me like, give me like, tell me to give myself two weeks for it. And make any of those insane things.

God, yeah, that I've heard like, I don't know make any of those insane things. God, yeah. But I've heard like, I don't know, this idea of what do they like the feeling of like losing a sense of self that is impossible to conceive unless you experience it, because like. That's all you exist as is a sense of soul. It is. Yeah, it is. It sounds pretty cool. You said you said you felt that. No, I've never I I wish I could, I wish I could feel, it just seems cool to me. Oh, okay.

I thought you meant like, I forgot if you said you had actually fucking like, No, no, no. Moved around it or not. Uh, Locale 3, I don't even think it's going to be something that we really dive into all that much in the series because it's not really the point of the series, but just know it's one of the, it's just a feeling of oneness and kind of leave it. Just know it's like the coolest one and we just won't talk about it. It's sick. I mean, there's nothing to say. Yeah. There's really nothing to do. There's nothing to say about it. Like

it's tight. I've never experienced it. So I can't give you anything about it. And the wish I wish. Yeah. Maybe you guys need to catch up. It's not like play final fantasy. It's the live stream. You got it. But stream You weren't in but you weren't in there bro Today You can play for free up to the second expansion As Monroe's explorations of these locales continued He wasn't just focused on where he could go or who he might encounter or what he might encounter. He was also intensely curious about how and the why of this OBE

phenomenon itself. He was after all an engineer by trade and by graduate with a diploma, a man that wanted to get a physical grip on understand how this shit worked. Even for when the things defied conventional understanding, it didn't stop him. He needed to figure this out. This drive to understand him led him to begin experimenting, not just within the OBE state, but also on the OBE state itself, trying to identify factors that might influence his ability not to induce control and understand how this was going on. It was during this period of experimentation that Monroe began to explore the potential

role of sound and vibration within the OBE phenomenon and state. And this wasn't a completely random line of inquiry either. He had already noted the intense vibrations that came that accompanied the onset of OBE. The vibes were large. The vibes were large. The feeling of his also second body separating from his physical form with the pop or a click. He began to wonder if these vibrations were not simply a symptom of the OBE, but maybe they're a cause or at the very least a contributing factor to them happening. And his early experiments were very rudimentary, reflecting kind of like the limited technology that was available to him in the 1950s. He describes using simple audio oscillators,

devices that produce pure tones at specific frequencies, to see if he could induce or enhance the vibrations that preceded his OBEs. So what he would do is he would lie in bed in the same position he used for his rollout technique and listen to these tones through headphones experimenting with different frequencies and amplitudes. He was meticulously documenting his observations noting any correlations between specific sound patterns and his subjective experiences. Quote, I began to experiment with the use of sound to see if it could have any effect on the vibrations or on the out of body experience itself. These early experiments were crude.

I was using simple audio stuff, oscillators, headphones, but they were enough to convince me that there was a connection. And he later goes into far more detail about binaural beats, which is kind of the core of the Robert Monroe Institute. Super simple. Hemi-sync, which is what, hemisync in the binaural beats, like that's what the gateway tapes are. That is what his creation. That's what's happening. That's that sound. Yeah. Quote, he goes on to say, quote, if two tones close to the same frequency are presented one to each ear, the listener many times will report a third tone.

This will seem to come from some point inside or outside of the head. This third tone is called a binaural beat and it's the frequency and its frequency is equal to the difference between the two original tones. For example, if a tone of 100 cycles per second Hz is presented to the left ear and a tone of 104 Hz is presented to the right ear, the third and binaural beat will have a frequency of 4 Hz. This amplitude or loudness of the 4 Hz beats is very low, some 30 to 40 decibel points below the original tones.

It's exactly this. It's exact, just to give you an idea. Everybody thinks they don't understand this because it's very complicated, but there's the one sound on one side and it's like, it's like a solid unbroken sound. If you pull your headphone off, you can hear it. It's still, it's still, and this one, but then that sound that everyone knows, the, the feeling of it, that, that, that you don't really know how to cause it. It's like, that oscillation is the, is the sound. Yeah.

Yeah. Is the fourth, the four hurts in between. So it's nothing like binaural ASMR where one girl's like, and another girl's like, and I just sit there and I'm like, is this supposed to be porn? Is that? You're J Allian off? I mean, it's still it's still it still is that like, yeah, binaural just means like, you know, you're just getting in between. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, exactly. Uh and these are me early

experiments too. We're not conclusive like at all. Uh he didn't all of a sudden stumbled on a magic frequency that shot him out of his body. That never happens. That doesn't happen. But he did begin to notice subtle correlations between certain sound patterns in his ability to enter the vibrational state. The state that precedes the OBE. He found that specific frequencies seemed to enhance the vibrations making them stronger and more that specific frequencies seemed to enhance the vibrations, making them stronger and more consistent, while others seemed to have no effect or even inhibited the experience.

It was just like, gave him too much noise. It really couldn't help him focus at all. So this was just the very beginning of what would eventually become known as HEMISYNC, although he was still years away from developing the sophisticated audio tech and would later that would later become synonymous with this Monroe Institute. And like, at this stage, his sound experiments were integrated into his overall OBE research. He wasn't pursuing a separate line of inquiry. He was exploring sound as a potential tool to enhance and control his out of body experiences to say that like, he's,

he's specifically researching this with the bias and the influence of seeing if it affects these things, not to see what these things do without any like baseline. Right. You know what I mean? Like, and he understands that too. It's not some nonsense. Yeah. He makes a point of that. I mean he understands that he's not doing this out of pure curiosity of what hurts due to the brain.

He wants to see what it just does with this aspect of what he's experiencing. And he was still primarily focusing when he was able to get out of out of body locale to the entities. That was his main go-to place when he finally had the control to get himself there. These experiments and the information that he was learning started to make him wonder if there were other ways to induce his state too, and what would happen if others could experience this as well. As Monroe continued his dual-track exploration, venturing into locale 2 while simultaneously experimenting with sound as a potential OBE catalyst, he began to encounter new and increasingly complex phenomena. These experiences further challenged what he deemed his understanding as a physical realm and made him try to like hone in his techniques to see if he could

find new strategies of like exploration with these tones. One significant development was his increasing awareness of what he calls the energetic nature of locale too. He describes feeling not just the presence of these entities encountering things but he also and this is life stream stuff Jesse where I'm like you're not wrong he considers he calls the flows of energy currents of force that he could learn to navigate and even to some extent manipulate he began to perceive locale to not just as a place but as a dynamic field of interacting energies, a realm where consciousness was the primary force. And I do appreciate him looking at this as like, instead of it being like ghosts and aliens,

he's like, no, these are all just energies in different ways that are moving around. He also described encountering what he interpreted not as these entities, but he called thought forms, which were constructs of energy created by the thoughts and emotions of others. These weren't necessarily living entities, but more think of like tulpas almost. They were manifestations of consciousness imbued with a kind of temporary reality. This truly to me sounds like tulpas when we we, and we've talked about Tulpa's in depth.

And he was able to eventually learn to distinguish between these thought forms and the more autonomous self-aware entities that seem to operate on their own in locale too. He also realized that his own thoughts and emotions could create these forms, adding more complexity and more things to be like cautious and aware about. But the fact that he could create them and he realized that these things aren't like

alive, they're simply impressions of things in his internal state gives an ability to be able to separate and document. Quote, I began to realize the power of thought, not just as an internal process, but as a creative force in this other place, that my own fears, my own desires could manifest as tangible things, as obstacles, or as aids, depending on how I managed them. And he used this principle to avoid the worst of it as best he can. Another significant development was his increasing interaction with what he perceived as these non-human entities.

While he had already encountered the seductive female and the thing, the shadow figures, he now began encountering beings that were even more alien, for lack of a better word, more difficult for him to categorize. He described encounters with entities that seemed to be composed of pure energy with forms that shifted and changed constantly. And he also described encountering beings that seemed to be more advanced than the things he had encountered already saying quote it took much time and many visits before I encountered an intelligence completely foreign and non-human in any terms that I could understand it or they was not a part of my reality system I could not read it no matter how hard I try and he has read in air quotes I could perceive no thought or system. I could not read it, no matter how hard I tried. He has read in air quotes.

I could perceive no thought or emotion that I could remotely understand. Further, it had no interest in me. I was simply there, and to it, I was of no significance. Yeah, so you just start to see these things that just didn't give a fuck about him. They weren't there to watch him. It's almost like he was in their place,

and they were just going about whatever it is they were doing. Right, he was like witnessing them. Yes, there you go, that's a better way. These encounters, he would say, were often very brief, very enigmatic, but they further pushed his curiosity as to what the fuck this place actually is. He considered it at this point in time

almost as a crossroads, a meeting point for multiple intelligences, some of which were utterly alien to human experience, some of which were derived directly from human emotion. And he gives a fairly detailed account of attempting to communicate with a group that he quote meets quote, at best the process was comparable to two deaf mutes trying to carry on a conversation in the dark. One would make a complete statement before the other would respond and the two statements would seem to have no interrelationship, almost like they were talking at each other without hearing the other person at all. Like none of the conversation in his attempt to communicate

made sense. Right. He describes learning about them despite great difficulty and this gave him a further understanding of this existence if not more drive him more his curiosity more. And as his experiences became more complex he continued to refine his techniques to navigate and survive locale too. He learned to create more elaborate and durable mental barriers shielding himself from hostile forces. He developed greater control over his body, learning to move with greater speed and precision. He also became more adept at recognizing and avoiding dangerous areas within locale 2, what he deemed dangerous areas in locale 2, because I do wonder if him thinking it's dangerous then turns it dangerous, developing like a kind of what he considered an intuitive map of this landscape even though It was like doing quantumania. It was like doing quantumania, but in his own brain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

That's a good that's another great way to look at it. Look at we're in the age of literally everybody Okay, all Marvel. Mmm the age the era throughout these complex explorations the underlying strain of his double life continued to exert its pressure because he was still maintaining the facade outwardly of a normal everyday existence, still going to work, fulfilling his responsibilities as a husband, as father, a businessman, while also simultaneously trying to get control of and delve deeper into whatever the fuck was happening

at night that he now was able to have a little control over inducing. In this constant juggling act, this need to keep his two worlds separate just made him so stressed out and he was so fucking anxious about it. He would always say he would in the book he keeps describing this increasingly alienated feeling from the people around him unable to share his experiences with anyone except eventually his wife and then his trusted friend that he simply refers to as R W. R W. Yep. Yep. That's it. Yes. Yes. It's Ronald Wagen. He felt,

he basically describes what imposter syndrome, a strange feeling of like being like not belonging here, going through the motions of everyday life while like, imagine like this is happening to you and trying to just go to work and also realize like, like, it would happen again. Like this whole other world is just like always at your disposal in this. You mean like Sebastian in the wonderful story, the little mermaid. That's what I was going. The never ending story. Yeah, I was just doing a bit.

I'm completely doing a bit. I was just doing a bit. I was like, I was so upset for a minute. I'm completely on the page. It's literally Sebastian and he's reading the book and he like can't stop reading the book because the book's so compelling. And now he's part of the book. Yeah. He goes, quote, it is difficult, if not impossible to express in ordinary terms, the strangeness of what I was experiencing. There are no words. There are no concepts. There are no analogies that can adequately convey the reality of it. And yet, I had to live in both worlds,

the world of my physical body and the world of my out-of-body experiences and somehow maintain a semblance of sanity and normalcy. The word of my out-of-body experience. The out-of-body experience. This contrast is like stressed him out very, very badly. And it really began to take a strain on his day to life. The isolation was becoming a lot and he began to turn this feeling of being isolated and

alienated into a feeling of purpose. Monroe was beginning to feel that his experiences maybe were not simply random meaningless events. Maybe they're part of a larger pattern, a deeper pattern of reality itself that he was only beginning to get glimpses of. That he felt a growing connection that he had a responsibility to explore this reality, try to understand it, and perhaps share his findings with others. He goes, quote, someone starts to search somewhere somehow. So why not me? Yeah, right, yeah. Which I mean, I get it, man.

Nobody else is doing it. Yeah. That's kind of punk. I get it, it kind of is. The idea of sharing his experiences was still tentative, still very afraid of how people would react, but it was taking root in him, growing stronger with each new exploration,

each new encounter, each new discovery of how he can maybe control this. He was beginning root in him, growing stronger with each new exploration, each new encounter, each new discovery of how he can maybe control this. He was beginning to see himself not just as an accidental explorer, but now a sort of astral pioneer, if you will. He wanted to know more about this stuff. He needed to have an understanding. And this is the very beginning of him moving from just exploration into a much, much bigger picture.

He also describes his growing understanding of some of the more esoteric concepts of the non-physical world, with one encounter teaching him a valuable lesson about the very nature of reality, saying, quote, I floated there a moment, awed by the implications. If this was so, then our physical world was not the original. It was the product, a secondary. Somewhere there was a creative force that had made it so, a plan, an idea that had been put into effect. What we call reality was a phantasm, an illusion, in the sense that a house is a thought of

the builder before it becomes a physical object of wood, mortar and stone, which then is the illusion. To give an answer would be sheer foolishness. The impact of such a basic concept could only come slowly in small parts. Basically building a house. He's just doing it piece by piece trying to understand what the fuck he's doing. He's trying to figure out what made the house in the first place. He's trying to find the builder. Quite literally, he is trying to figure out and put together a foundation on what is happening. Literally a building's foundation, but also quite literally a foundation of mutants. Charles?

Charles the Dane? Charles! But yeah, like, and I find this interesting too, because in meditative practice and whatnot, it's your own personal change in perception that allows you to have the confidence and willingness to do something, even if it's a sharing. It's only his, it's in this moment where he changes this

from something that he's scared of, that he's tentatively trying to understand, to something that he's gonna take hold of and control. This perspective change gave him the confidence to say, fuck what other people think. Now I'm gonna start talking to people because there's something here. Even if he's only convinced himself that something is real, that perspective change changed his reality and changed the course of his life to a direction he did not expect it would ever fucking go. And that is a lesson of meditation in and of itself in that weird way.

His experiences, his studies, his catalog of Lo Cal 2 grew, but a subtle distinct shift began to occur. Not in the nature of the encounters themselves, but his relationship to them. The initial terror in this perspective change and confusion were still there. They are base human emotions and he makes that very clear. But they were increasingly tempered by this growing sense of purpose, by these roots that were taking hold. A burgeoning conviction that his experiences, however fucking bizarre, unsettling,

and unbelievable they may be, held some sort of deep significance, if not just for him, but potentially others as well. He was moving from a mindset of survival to a mindset of contribution. This shift was driven in part by the sheer weight of the evidence he had been accumulating over the period of him doing all the study. He had by this point experiences doesn't up to what he would consider hundreds of OBEs.

He had encountered a wide range of entities navigated a this weird landscape. He could no longer really just dismiss these experiences as dreams, hallucinations, or mental illness. For him, they were too consistent, too vivid, too impactful for him to just kind of explain away with conventional means. So he was, again, all for in his perspective, he was forced to accept, however reluctantly, that he was dealing with something real, something that challenged the very foundations of his understanding of reality itself. Quote, without exception, each seemed, talking about every time you go in there and talk about the entities and talking and trying to understand them, he would say,

each seemed cooperative and willing to help in whatever I was trying to do. The problem was to get them to understand that it was I wanted to know or do. If I could have used direct language communication, it would have been simple. I did learn some things that were of value though. And this is where we begin to see the major shift.

With this growing knowledge, this growing sense of responsibility, he began to feel that he was going to bring in more than just his wife and more than just his friends. And he does so. This is the beginnings of what will be known as the Monroe Institute. As very small as it may be in this moment, it's just him working out of his house. This is the true beginnings of how this is going, is of the Institute. We've already discussed his experimenting with sound,

exploring its potential to induce or whatever he was experiencing. But these experiments, though still rudimentary, were driven by more than just the curiosity to facilitate. If they could work for him, could they work for other people? Instead of just sharing, what if we'd also started experimenting with others too? Could this be something that others could use?

Now, I will reiterate, and he also reiterates, he's not talking about the magic key. He's not gonna put headphones on these people's ears who've never had an out-of-body experience, and they're gonna hear tones in their ears, and all of a sudden, they're gonna shoot out of their body like a ghost. But with practice, what will eventually become

guided meditation, does binaural beats and hemisync truly induce a deeper sense of consciousness, if not out of body experiences. And what would happen? The institute that would come a crop out of this would not only garner the attention of scientists across the country and world, but also our very government to draw them in and work with him and then take his studies and their findings and take it back to use on their own with things like Project Stargate. A lot of the things we talked about CropCircles last week, Project Stargate and the CIA's like secret shit. Monroe Institute is a part of that. They are, but that not, that

wasn't their originating foundation. This is the originating foundation. Their studies caught the eyes of scientists and then the government. And then the government came in and there's, we're going to talk about that paper next episode. It's very, very funny. Like sort of like 30 page paper with the, with the diagrams and the show of like, yeah, the missing a page 25 or whatever that they eventually found or whatever. Yes, that came out. Oh, was that just a few months ago? Like, yeah, like pretty recently. Yeah. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I fucking forgot about that. It was because we had page 25, but it was redacted at some point, right? Like it was like just not, it was just not present in any scan and the CIA or overhead at it was like we never had that page. We don't know where it is. Hmm

Yeah, we're um He also describes a detailed encounter by the way I don't want to like pass through this without talking about this point he one point he details an encounter where he tends to make a genuine contact with some being in a group of them and When he walked away He he quote quote. I tried my best to show them love, to express it in every way I could imagine. The result was startling. There was a change in the pattern.

It slowed, then sped up, and with an increase in intensity, and I had the distinct impression of complete surprise. Then I felt, not heard, a wave of what I could best describe as amusement, merriment, a very welcome sensation, then it was gone. And he goes into a few more details about it, but he basically describes the feeling almost like it was like being drunk, like that feeling of just like joy

and just kind of like let go looseness of being drunk. And he found it amusing that he said, quote, his second body could also get drunk. He goes, the next day some friends offered the solution with much merriment and a big question mark. They had a party that evening and offered several toasts in my physical absence. With tongue in cheek, I joined them in my second body

at the proper time. The result was most conclusive. After some six or eight toasts, my second body was as sober as if I had not taken a drink. I tried to maneuver into the fumes rising from the open bottle of bourbon with no result to top it off on the way home An entity made a series of passes at me and I fought him off with no noticeable effects of alcohol intake at the time Huh, he tried to get a second body drunk on physical fumes and it didn't work Right basically is what he's saying like could I get drunk from alcohol in this actual?

Right. Basically is what he's saying. Like, could I get drunk from alcohol in this actual projection? And the answer was no. I basically had friends go out and drink and he induced projection from home to there, tried to see if he could get drunk. And then he went home like in a physical and spiritual form. It's just a very like weird tidbit, but I want to put out there because the weirdness stuff,, he would say we welcome, I bring skepticism from me, even for me, some of the weirder, like the weird, weird shit, like going to sniff alcohol fumes and then following out like that seems weird. It's very, very strange. Um, I vibe it though. I get where he's at. Sure. But it's just one of those

things, um, that, that kind of like puts that crux of like, huh, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it. Sure. So where does all this weirdness leave us? With Albert Munro, the quintessential businessman turned new astral projector jolted out of his body. For every question he's answered, a dozen dozen more sprung up and he's got this idea of locales, but he's still kind of trying to understand them. He's trying to figure out still, are they projections of his own subconscious? Are they spirits of the dead, as weird as that may be? Are they beings from another dimension or are they something even weirder?

What are the rules of this? Can I even get solid rules? He's figured out a bunch of different things, but there are still plenty of things that seem to make no sense to him, like trying to talk to other beings and just having non-understanding communication. And he goes, the only answer seemed to be careful and complete recording of every action

and reaction that I encountered. And from this to try to deduce some basic principles and laws, it was like being a one-man expedition into a totally unknown land without training or knowledge of the dangers ahead, a true stranger without experience. And so here, where it leads us is the Monroe Institute. The Monroe Institute from here would crop up and he would begin to take these binaural beats, these hemisync that we've only briefly touched

and truly with his engineering experience and sound, flesh it out as best he can and bring in more. And eventually this Monroe Institute would be this, it's still out there, you'll look at the building. It is huge, it is out there today studying the mind, studying consciousness. Because Robert Monroe did take that next step. He found a way, a method, some sort of technology

to share his discoveries and to open the doors of perception for other people. He founded the Monroe Institute, a place dedicated to the exploration of consciousness, a place that would become synonymous with altered states, remote viewing, and what we'll be talking about much, much more, the Gateway Experience tapes. And that is what we'll pick up next week.

Yeah. And my whole work to all of you, including you, Jesse, I want you all to try meditating. The Gateway tapes are out there on YouTube, they're on Spotify, you can find them fucking all over the place if you want to use those. But you don't have to. I'm curious, give it a shot,

try to meditate a few times this week. Try to talk to your dog. Or try to talk to your dog, or try to meditate. I'm so curious what your experience is gonna be like. Can you do it? Is it something that just you can't do or like get frustrated with? And for those of you in our community

that are practice meditators, if you have stories or experiences, I'd love to see what your personal experience in meditation has been like. Any notable, just weird things happen or just self profound things, drop it on our subreddit. If you're on our Discord, drop it on our Discord

or we're on Blue Sky as well and all the other socials. Let us know. Because we're about to walk into the world where meditation and the weirdness kind of marry with the binaural beats and the hemisync stuff. And we're going to talk about the science of all of that next week. Thank you all so much for listening. I'm so excited. I've been working on this series for a long fucking time.

I'm finally excited to dive into this because this is also the gateway to like what I would consider chaos magic and more culty stuff. I'm sorry. What? What? I'm sorry. What chaos magic? Yeah.

Yeah. Chaos control, dude. Yeah. That's control. Just get the emeralds. Thank you all so much for listening. We're off to patreon.com slash to chew on it. I do a mini so Alex gave us a teaser.

I'm excited to see what this third eye awakening is going to be for all of us. I got to find the quotes. It's not my butt hole guys. It's a butthole. That's what he's talking about. We'll see you guys next week. We appreciate you. We love you. Anyway, me and my wife were sitting outside, indulging on our porch one night, enjoying ourselves.

I needed to go to the bathroom. So I stepped back inside and after a few moments, I hear my wife go, Holy shit get out of here! So I quickly dash back outside, she's looking up at the sky in awe. I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. So I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it.

I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it. Thanks for watching!