A Place to Stand — Introductory Remarks

In view of the interest my Coast to Coast AM appearance seems to have generated, I thought I’d post the Introductory Remarks from the book, to give people a taste:

Introductory Remarks

My friend Gordon Phinn sent me a YouTube recording of himself channeling John F. Kennedy. Watching Gordon balance between worlds, I could sense by my reactions how my own work must strike many others. I did not doubt Gordon’s sincerity, not his experience, nor his acquired skill, but at the same time, I couldn’t help wonder how much of the message was from Gordon’s own mind, “filling in the blanks,” as it were.

And this is always the substratum of such experiences, is it not? Even granting the sincerity of the person bringing forth the message, still we have to use our discernment in weighing the message. To swallow anything whole is to invite indigestion, just as – to continue the analogy –refusing  even to consider messages from the other side risks spiritual malnutrition. As in the rest of life, it is “buyer beware,” but, as in the rest of life, “buyer beware” does not mean “buy nothing.” It means, keep your eyes open. Think, don’t just accept, don’t just reject.

This balancing act – not automatically accepting, not automatically rejecting, but considering – requires more conscious attention than either alternative, and many people find it easier to position themselves at one extreme or the other; unless a given field is important to us, we may not think it worth the attention and energy needed for discernment. Well and good. But if the field does attract your interest, and does seem important to you, then it deserves careful, mindful, thought and consideration.

And yet—

Thought and consideration are necessary, but not sufficient. For many of us, they are not even primary. More important than logic or reasoning is the something within us that connects us to the non-physical world that underlies and sustains this physical world. Experience precedes knowledge (anything is only a belief to you until you have experienced it for yourself), but before experience comes our conscious autopilot, leading us in the way it wants us to go. We would be fools indeed to pretend that our lives do not have such a gyroscope. We don’t have to go in the direction it points, but the guidance is there, whether we listen to it or not.

Part of listening is learning how to listen. Another part is developing the habit of doing so. And a third part is moving from passive listening to active dialoguing. That’s part of what this book is about.

.2.

When I was young, I hoped to write books, but I had no idea that they explore our human ability to contact non-physical beings on a day-to-day basis. Even if I had had so outlandish an idea, I would not have expected that they would stem from personal experience, rather than theory. But that’s what happened.

Why from personal experience? Because, as far as I can see, firsthand knowledge is the only kind there is. Everything else is hearsay. As Thoreau put it in Walden:

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”

In Muddy Tracks, my first interim report, I cited Joan Grant’s Winged Pharaoh, a channeled work which says that in ancient Egypt, the priests in the temples taught the people using this formula: “I of my own knowledge tell you that this is the truth.” Regardless whether that is historically true, the idea resonated deeply, and I have tried hard to confine myself to what I have experienced. Muddy Tracks described my initial explorations, centering on four residential programs I took at The Monroe Institute between 1992 and 1997. (In the years since, a great variety of programs have been added. See www.monroeinstitute.org for descriptions.) Regarding The Monroe Institute’s technology and programs, these few words of explanation:

Decades ago, Robert Monroe discovered that he could produce altered states on demand by delivering one set of tones in one ear and a slightly different set of tones in the other. This encourages the brain hemispheres to work in synchronization. When the differing tones include certain specific overlays of alpha, beta, theta, and delta waves, the mixture tends to produce unusual brain states, which encourage unusual mental states. Those mental states Monroe categorized using emotionally neutral terms like Focus 10, Focus 12, Focus 15, Focus 21. Monroe patented the technology as Hemi-Sync (for hemispheric synchronization, of course), then he designed a series of six-day residential programs around that technology.

The Gateway Voyage introduces participants to the everyday practical uses of these states. I did that program in December, 1992, and have since referred to that week as the beginning of my conscious life. A scant three months later, I did Guidelines, which centers on the process of access to non-physical sources of guidance. As part of that program, participants get a session in the specially shielded chamber that TMI calls the booth, and I call the black box.

Inside the black box, you lie comfortably on a waterbed. If, like me, you experience a drop in body temperature when you enter altered states, you can be covered by a light sheet or blanket if you wish. The little room – little more than eight by eight, I suppose –is shielded from light, sound, electromagnetic frequencies, even vibration. Stereo headphones conduct the Hemi-Sync tones and a microphone allows you to interact with the session monitor in the control room. Three wires taped to your fingers record fluctuations in your skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and skin potential voltage. These wires connect to a computer which displays the data on a monitor, stores it, and uses it at the end of the session to produce a chart, which give an outside view of a highly subjective process.

In retrospect several elements of that 1993 session seem to have been a preview of coming events. For one thing, for the first time, I was able to let “the gentlemen upstairs” speak. Words formed within me, and I spoke them as they came, not attempting to shape the sentences or make them grammatical, as for instance this:

“You have reached the point of departure and now you are going to see what the rest of your life looks like, and what it looks like will be a lot like the previous except that the point of view will have totally changed and therefore the whole thing will totally change. Living the entirely same life, but out of a conscious intention to give love and demonstrate love totally colors what you see and what you get, which of course is the point that’s being proven anyway. It is true that you have everything you need and that all you need to do is concentrate on how to use it, why to use it, when to use it, rather than `will I have it, will I get it, does it exist’ and so forth.”

Their chief messages were that I needed to remember to use both halves of the brain, logic as well as intuition. As they put it, “there is such a thing as over-reliance even on higher powers. We can guide, but you can act. Part of acting is thinking and analyzing and dissecting. It isn’t all perception of patterns. Which is the initial message: You can’t see the trees for the forest. You like trees, take your time with individual trees. Your message from the beginning here was that your important work was not in the CHEC units [doing tapes] but talking to your fellow participants, and that’s why, they are the trees.”

When I asked what would come after the program, they said:

“Again it is what you are more than what you do that will be the message, and changing what you are is easier and harder than changing what you do. Easier, in that when you change then everything flows automatically. Harder, in that changing requires the overcoming of a certain amount of inertia and comfortable patterns. It will require deliberate conscious intent, deliberate conscious continuous intent until the new habits and energies are established in their own habits. So that you will want to watch carefully as you relate to those you have related to before. In other words, not fall back into accustomed habits without examining the habits, without examining the implications of the habits, without questioning whether or not this is what you want to be. To a degree you can remake what you are. To a degree it’s been done, to a degree you can do it.”

So it proved. Although the changes seemed slow and small as they happened, the cumulative effect was tremendous, and continued to accumulate.

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After Guidelines, I did the Lifeline program twice, in July 1995 and again in August 1997. (Lifeline shows how to communicate with the dead – that is to say, with non-physical life in another form.) At that point, I paused to write Muddy Tracks, which summed up the first 50 years of my exploration process. Muddy Tracks, although not published until January, 2001, was substantially completed in 1998, the year I moved to the New Land that surrounded the Institute.

But by late summer, 2000, I was getting restless. I didn’t feel like doing another program, but I did want to do some more exploring. I sent TMI lab director Skip Atwater an email asking if he had any suggestions. He suggested a series of ten PREP sessions in the black box, once a week. The idea resonated, and we scheduled the first session for Friday, September 8, 2000.

By the time that date came around, the idea of doing a session on that day seemed ridiculous. I had spent most of the day before in bed, on the verge of having the flu. My ears were blocked, and so I was having a lot of trouble hearing things. If I couldn’t hear, how could I listen to the tapes?  But something inside said to do it anyway.

I had no idea what it was going to lead to. How could I? To know, I would have had to be a different person, and it was the journey I was about to begin that would make me that different person.

So there I was, lying down in the dark, hoping I would be able at least to hear the tones in the earphones!