Bob Monroe

Bob, signing for someone

I met Bob Monroe because Bob Friedman and I wanted to get him to agree to let Hampton Roads try to get Hemi-Sync tapes into the Waldenbooks chain, back when that was the largest bookstore chain in the country. We drove for four-hours up from Norfolk, and I had a wonderful time. We had lunch in the staff dining room — Bob Monroe, his stepdaughter Scooter and her husband Joe McMoneagle, his book agent Eleanor Friede, and Bob and me – and Bob Monroe spent the entire lunch (as I remember it, anyway) telling me what he had been doing with his life and what he was trying to accomplish. (I realized later, the others all knew the story.)

I was ecstatic. This was exactly what I had been looking for, ever since my mescaline experience of 19 years before, a way to pursue higher consciousness that did not involved drugs. How I wished I could do a Gateway Voyage, his introductory course. But Bob and I weren’t paying ourselves very much in those days, and the price seemed prohibitive. I bought a couple of tapes, and hoped that practicing with them would lead me somewhere.

Of course, in terms of our specific hopes, the trip was not only inconclusive (Bob wouldn’t say yes, he wouldn’t say no), but was prophetic of all our future commercial relations. Bob wouldn’t say yes, wouldn’t say no. In time, we learned that his staff called his office “the black hole,” because things entered but never came out again. And this continued, off and on, for years.

But – in a larger sense – so what? Look what he accomplished! More to the point, much more to the point, look what he made possible for the rest of us to accomplish!

I always tell people, Bob Monroe gave us three gifts. In increasing order of importance,

• The Hemi-Sync technology and the residential programs he built around it, to provide first-hand experience rather than mere words and longing;
• A value-neutral language for us to use to describe those experiences, so that we could learn to discuss and analyze our experiences in productive ways;
• Most important, he gave us a community. What would we have given, when younger, for a community of like-minded individuals, speaking a common language, discussing similar experiences!

Perhaps as important as anything else, Bob consistently rejected the guru role, saying “I don’t want the responsibility.” He functioned, instead, as a finger pointing to the moon.  And this was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. If TMI had said that before you could do a course you had to believe certain things (no matter what those things might be) I never would have crossed the threshold. Instead they say, “Consider that you might be mor than your physical body” (not a stretch for me in any case) and they let us go exploring. As I say, perfect for me.

It seems to me that each of us has tasks we want to accomplish, some internal and some external. The greatest tasks take the longest to show their full effects, and are therefore the most easily underrated or overlooked. It takes a while for people to see what they had in their midst.

Bob Monroe set himself a great task, which ultimately amounts to the transformation of the world. He did the best he could, and his best was pretty good. The day will come when it will be more obvious, how good his best was, how much he facilitated.

We didn’t have him for long. I met him in 1989, and he was gone half a dozen years later. But the Institute remained. The tape exercises and program remained. The community remained. I can imagine Bob saying to himself that he had earned his leave. His body was beat up and he was tired: Why not move on?

On Friday morning, March 17, 1995, half a year after his 79th birthday, he died a quiet death in a Charlottesville hospital, with his children at his side. As it happened, I was in New York City that day to meet Colin Wilson, hoping to persuade him to come see the Monroe Institute and meet Bob. But, too late. Bob was gone.

The next morning, I bought the Saturday New York Times, thinking to read Bob’s obituary — which wasn’t there. I thought, like Emerson speaking of Thoreau, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.” I thought then, and think now, that 100 years from now, nearly every educated person on Earth will know his name.

A week later, when I returned from the memorial service TMI held, I wrote up some impressions and posted them to the Voyagers Mailing List, an Internet group we had started in late 1994. A few excerpts:

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… The unusual began immediately: people directing parking on the lawn. Folding chairs, set up outside the sliding doors of David Francis Hall, faced westward toward that lovely view of the far mountains. Facing the chairs was a microphone and a little platform, and two enormous sound speakers. At a table off to the side were Mark Certo and two others, to control the special effects. The day was bright, sunny, with a wind that gusted stiff enough to make us warm on the south side, cold on the north side.

We milled around for a little bit, hugging old friends. Bob McCulloch was the first person I met, Bob who had been one of my trainers in both Gateway and Guidelines. And there was Karen Malik, a trainer with Bob McCulloch from Guidelines. She and I had last seen each other just three weeks before, which was also the last time either of us saw Bob. And so many others were there: Dave Wallis and Skip Atwater, Helen Warring and well, you know, the staff, and what I call the extended family, like Eleanor Friede and other nearby residents and associates. Then we all sat down, listening to the Metamusic from the speakers, and waited for the family to file in.

In my experience, religious ceremonies often have at least patches of emotional deadness; places that don’t resonate, words that are only empty words. This ceremony, conducted by the Rev. Shay St. John, had none of this deadness. But then, how could it? The first thing to come over the speakers was Bob’s voice, repeating the affirmation he wrote long ago. You may have heard the words once or twice: “I am more than my physical body….”

Rev. St. John spoke of Bob and then invited each of the family to speak. Bob’s brother Emmet; his stepdaughters Penny and Scooter; Scooter’s husband, Joe McMoneagle; his stepson A.J.; his daughter Laurie. I am sorry I cannot give even a précis of what was said. I used to be a journalist, but this day I was not in reporter mode; the words came washing in, affecting me to the core, then washed out, leaving little or nothing in short-term memory. I am left not with the specifics but with visual memories, and with the memory of the emotional impact.

… Then the family gathered in a circle, holding hands, holding the two white helium-filled balloons [representing Bob and his deceased wife Nancy] hat had been whipping around in the wind the entire time. Rev. St. John told us what would happen and invited us to stand up at the proper moment. Over the speakers came Bob’s voice, reading the climactic point of the “Going Home” tapes, advising the dying person that he or she was going to find that he or she was everything he or she had ever learned, ever been. And at a certain point the family released the balloons, and that terrific wind whipped them off to the south. As we had been invited to do, we all stood and watched the balloons fly off, two white points against that deep blue sky, climbing and also covering the ground at an incredible rate, and then they were out of our visual range, and Bob’s voice was giving his final advice, telling the departing soul, “Remember. Remember.”

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“Remember,” he said. As though we who are his heirs could ever forget.