The first of a series of posts describing black-box sessions at the Monroe Institute in 2004. I dedicate the series to the memory of Rita Warren and to Skip Atwater, both of whom facilitated so many explorations, and did it so well
Background
Robert Monroe discovered that he could produce altered states on demand by using the technology he patented as Hemi-Sync, which delivers one set of tones to one ear and a slightly different set of tones to the other; which does two things. It encourages the brain hemispheres to work in synchronization (hence, Hemi-Sync) and alpha, beta, theta and delta waves can be mixed in different proportions to produce certain brain states, which encourage certain mental states. Those mental stated he categorized using emotionally neutral terms like Focus 10, Focus 12, Focus 15, Focus 21, etc.
Monroe designed a series of six-day residential programs around that technology. Program participants listen to the sounds over earphones, lying in compartments called CHEC units that reduce environmental noise such as light and sound. Participants in the “Guidelines” program at The Monroe Institute get a session in a specially shielded chamber I call the black box, which not only feeds the tones to the participant, but also allows electronic feedback from the participant, via three sensors taped to the fingers, as well as one-on-one interaction with a monitor. In the years when I did my sessions, F. Holmes (Skip) Atwater was the usual monitor.
I did a series of ten sessions in the year 2000, and later published the transcripts as A Place to Stand. At the time of the ten sessions, my book Muddy Tracks, which summarized my explorations up to the year 1998, was substantially complete but not yet published. This and subsequent books sketched my interactions with various people not presently in physical form, people that I thought of at the time as “past lives.” In short:
- Joseph the Egyptian, a priest (although priest to the ancient Egyptians wasn’t quite the same as a priest would be today). I don’t know his name in Egyptian but I was told that it translates approximately to the meaning of the word Joseph, roughly “he will add,” or “he will increase.”
- Bertram, a Norman Englishman of the high Middle Ages who became a monk, a priest, and ultimately a Bishop.
- Joseph Smallwood, an American of the 1800s, who went west to Oregon and returned east, lived with Indians in Minnesota, and fought in the Civil War.
- Katrina, a Polish-Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp in World War II at age eight.
All this came while I was in a mildly altered state, via an undefined collection of non-physical intelligences that I call the guys upstairs (TGU).
In August, 2001, a few months after the ten black-box sessions, Rita Warren and I began doing weekly sessions at her house, meeting every Tuesday night for many months. I taped and transcribed the 22 sessions, and eventually published them as The Sphere and the Hologram.
Then, for reasons I no longer remember, our sessions became more sporadic. Maybe we simply ran out of relevant questions. A little more than two years later, I got the idea of doing another series of ten PREP sessions in the black box, as in 2000. Skip was agreeable, and in this first session he asked the guys various questions and they responded. Then I suggested to Skip that he continue to run the apparatus but that we invite Rita to reprise the role of monitor that she had performed so well for the lab’s initial four years. So this is what we did, with both Skip Atwater and Rita Warren in the control room. (In addition, between our second and third sessions in the box, Rita and I did a session at her house.)
And this, I think, should be enough to orient you to what follows. Rather than a transcript, a summary.
First session: May 4, 2004
The final PREP session in 2000 had left me with “a place to stand.” When I asked if we were continuing from there, I got a sense of being a statue, like the statue of George Washington in New York City, standing on one foot and stepping forward. TGU said it was a stylized movement, as in Egyptian statues, in which one foot is always a step forward, although the person is standing firmly. The implication was, you always move into the world from the place in which you stand. They were using George Washington as the symbol of the man of integrity, not a great intellect, but complex but unified. By being unified and putting your right foot forward, you change the world, the guys said. They said this is the time in which people’s inner and outer selves must become coherent, must coincide, or the dissonance will shake them to pieces. “It is for this time that you all came here.”
Surfing chaos
The world we’re used to has always included a significant gap in time between creation-thought and creation-effect. That was our training-wheels period, while we learned how to manifest. But we’re moving into a world in which the difference between inner and outer is significantly lessened. One’s inside and outside are going to have to agree. Ultimately this change in ground rules will be enjoyable, but at the moment it may seem like chaos. Some people will experience this not as the birth of something new, but as disruption and the dissolution of all structure. To them it will look like, everything’s coming apart. “Parenthetically, this is one reason why the increased interest in religion in your day, because on the one hand people are looking for certainty; on the other hand, people are looking, and finding, in scriptures, the keys, the clues, that are helping them to surf this transition.”
As we move towards creation of a new way of being, it is necessary to experience this time of chaos but it is not necessary to experience it as suffering. Someone who is white-water rafting is in a chaotic situation, but it is very enjoyable unless they’re terrified. Your level of being when you hit the rapids determines whether you experience terror, creation, wonder, great joy, or some combination of all those. And your state of being is partially dependent on your own prior conscious and unconscious choices.
A close analogy to this period of turmoil is the teenage years, when from a steady, stable platform of being a child, you go through what we might call braided chaos. Many different streams intertwine, all involving change, all involving turmoil, and it becomes chaotic. But you don’t come out of it still a child; you come out of it as the beginnings of an adult. The experience of living through the turmoil makes adulthood possible. The more that teenagers can be in the now, the richer, deeper, more textured experiences they will have. To the degree that the chaos overwhelms their ability to enjoy it, they will have less. Teenage years are short, and it’s a balance of being in the now and at the same time realizing that the now won’t be like this forever. It’s not a question of wishing anything away, or enduring it with gritted teeth, waiting till it ends. It’s like surfing.
If you were surfing with your attention on the wave than on the surfboard, it would be harder to stay up. If it were too much on the surfboard, it would be hard to stay on the wave. The trick is to be surfing the wave – attentive to it and responding to it – and at the same time remembering that you are on a surfboard. Their giving me a place to stand, at the end of the final session in 2000, amounted to their saying “instead of always seeing the flow, here’s a place where you know where you are, you know who you are, you have a sense of what you are and what you’re here doing.”
They pointed out that these analogies apply not just to world events, or to me, but to everybody, because we’re all one thing. “There is not a meaningful distinction between world events and one’s individual events, oddly enough. We know it looks like it, but if you consider that the whole world is a projected thought, and that you are a subset of that projected thought, there can’t really be a distinction.” As they point out, even during World War II, you might be in a quiet place tending your garden. Everything being a part of everything, you can’t have a thread that is part of the tapestry and is not part of the tapestry.
Cloisters and cathedrals
I got a visual of the cloisters I had seen the previous year in an abbey on the island of Iona, off the coast of Scotland. Cloisters are an open space, open to the sky but enclosed on all four sides by walls that keep the outer world separate. Then I saw the cloister as a metaphor for us as individuals in the world. As individuals we are one inward-facing consciousness, and the life that we create faces inward; it has boundaries between us and the rest of the world. Cloisters are open to infinite inspiration; they’re closed to mundane disturbance. Our lives can be like that, an internal life that continually renews our spirit, an external life that provides us a place among others. The cloister has no connotation of a walled fortress. It is a protected space, tranquil, enclosed, open to the sky, green with new life. Occasionally it has a tree in the center as a central pillar to the sky, and in this you find the metaphor for your central spirit, for the you-ness of you. You don’t live in cloisters, hiding from the world. You go there for renewal and then you return to the world.
A cloister may be shared, in silence, by many, aware of each other as background but not disturbing each other. But, bear in mind, the cloister is physically adjacent to the cathedral, in which great numbers offer joint worship. The cloisters and the cathedral are two polarities for the individuating person.
[Like TGU, I mostly avoid Christian terminology. In our time, our ability to perceive has changed, and the emotional connotations and the meanings of the words themselves have all changed, so that although the underlying reality has not changed, the word “consciousness” is alive to us where “worship,” as an example, is not. But the medieval way of looking at the world is closer to my understanding of the world than is, say, that of the Renaissance, or of contemporary technology-worshippers. Rather than an emphasis on logical thought as final arbiter, their, and my, arbiter was awareness.]
To put it in consciousness terms, the believers were opening their hearts, opening their awareness. Their logical concepts may have been quite alien to ours, but it hardly matters. The awareness was quite close to where we are today, and where we are going as we work our way through the rapids.
Thus, a polarity between the individual experiencing connection to the infinite in the cloisters, on the one hand, and the community experiencing their connection to the infinite and their connection to each other. The danger in a cloister is that one may forget the world. The danger in a cathedral is that one may forget the infinite, if the physical sensory presence of your fellow individuals overwhelms your awareness of the depth within you. TGU say that the Mass was invented to enable a large community to experience connection with a non-sensory reality. According to TGU, the sensory manipulation involved in the Mass helped create a new consciousness which eventually created the individuals of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution, which, in stripping away what they could see had become superstitious, produced several centuries of extreme emphasis on logic and mind and rationality as opposed to feeling or intuition. A necessary detour, perhaps.
Skip asked about the unity experience, a point in consciousness where we have a brief understanding of the interconnectedness.
Their response: “What you are describing, this perhaps momentary sense of unity of all, is not so much your reaching out to others, as the basis for reaching out for others. In other words, it reminds you, `yes we are all one,’ and then you in your external clothing in a body, have to interact with your fellows in such a way that reflects that understanding, and that is what is passed. Having acquired the understanding that all is one, you then are changed. Your changed being then interacts with others, and it may be having lunch with them, it may be giving them a ride in a car, it may be just a casual conversation that you never think of again, but your changed being will change the nature of your interactions with all others, and you cannot help it if you wanted to – not that you would want to.”
In short, a unity experience today has to be brought into the world, not necessarily by preaching, or teaching, but just by being what you have become, and letting it radiate to others. The ideal of a church is to produce people who even in an interim level are changed to the degree that, as a necessary side-effect ,they also change others by what they are. You might say “to produce better people, to help people to be better versions of themselves.”
Borders and an absence of borders
Skip suggested that humanity has what might be called “fractal cloisters,” as for instance nationalism, community, family — groups with shared values. But the guys weren’t quite buying that. They said a nation was a different order of things, basically an abstraction that doesn’t exist to be related to in the way that we relate to loved ones. “You may have quite warm feelings about your city, you may feel fiercely patriotic about your country, but it is not the same order of thing as what you can feel for another person or persons. An abstract idea of a bunch of people is not the same as people. It’s one thing to love a person, but it’s a dangerous thing to love an abstraction.”
This led to a discussion of boundaries and the disappearance of boundaries. Skip began by discussing terrorism, saying that “what seems to be happening now is, through the age of communication, borders are breaking down electronically, and now it would seem that in warfare among mankind, the borders are also disappearing.” TGU began with a dissertation on warfare and terrorism:
“We are unable to see any substantive difference between bombing a population with an airplane and bombing a population with a hand-held device. If one side has all of the technology and the other side does not, the side without technology has to choose between submission or finding a non-technological way to continue the war. If you were to see war as state violence, and terrorism as state violence, the continuity would be clearer to you. Violence is violence, and so long as people are determined to either get their way or defend their rights, or avenge other people, or take what’s rightfully theirs but isn’t theirs – you know, all of the excuses – as long as people use violence to attain any of those ends, they’re using violence to attain those ends. And whether they have anthrax, B-29s, crossbows, pocket-bombs – you understand our point, violence is violence. We see no difference.”
But, they added, the bright side is that all of our highest ideals are also spread in a borderless fashion. “All of your life-saving machinery, your medicine, your increases in nutrition, your ability to do more with less, the ability to overcome poverty. It s is your choice what kind of a world you live in, while you’re in the world.” They see terrorism as a counter-pressure that will force us to decide, Who am I really? What do I really believe in?
However, they returned to the point they are always making: “All is always well. We know that seems wrong, but all is always well. There is no wrong path. You’re going to do all paths at the same time anyway, it depends on where you put your consciousness.” Given that all possible realities exist, you can’t take a wrong path, no matter how bad it gets. “We know that’s counter-intuitive, but it’s an important thing. There isn’t just one reality, and you make a choice and then that chooses the only reality. That isn’t true. It seems true and it is true in terms of your own consciousness, because you can only ride one line at a time. There’ll be a day when you’ll be able to see it wider, but not yet. You’re moving to the next step. We know that’s all counter-intuitive. Tough.”
Do it with joy
Before closing the session, Skip asked if there was a closing comment for the day.
“All of you are here because you meant to be here at this time. You’re here as anchors for others, you’re here as examples, you’re doing work in the external world that is helping people to keep themselves anchored, and that should give you little excuse to berate yourself for being something other than what you should have been, or for having not taken paths you didn’t take. There is another version of yourself that did take those paths. You attend to the one you did take. All is well. All is always well. Let’s put it this way, it would be inaccurate to mourn that fact that things are going to hell. What is happening is the breakup of many old structures and the intense shaking out of what is viable from what is not viable. There is nothing to mourn in this. This is the birth of the next stage, and this is a good thing. You’re all part of the good thing, you’re doing your work, just do it with quiet calm assured joy. And as always we thank you for what you’re doing.”