One day in 1994, while leafing idly through The Wall Street Journal, my eye fell on a small article with a picture of a middle-aged man, Robert Monroe. The article got off to a fast start: (quoting from memory) “Leading corporations send their executives to study intuition and out-of-body experiences at an unusual institute...”

The article went on to say that Robert Monroe, the man in the picture, a successful businessman, a former owner of TV and radio stations, and an amateur musician, had established a center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to study various unusual experiences. These included intuition, accelerated learning through expanded states of consciousness, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), which Monroe had been having spontaneously for the last thirty years, communication between the two brain hemispheres, voyages to the distant past and far-away planets, surgical support, helping newly deceased spirits, and communication with discarnate beings. He had written three books about these matters, and described “pathways” in other worlds, which he called the “Interstate. ” I immediately acquired and read the books, marveling at the experiences he described in a calm and matter-of-fact voice. These experiences were not connected with any form of religion, although there is some mention of “helpers” in other dimensions. But Monroe does suggest that we consider with an open mind that we might be more than our physical bodies. I put his books on the shelf.

I had recently retired from psychiatric practice, had sold my family oil field service business, and was thinking of selling my house in the country, which was large, beautiful, old, and very time and money consuming to care for. I had recently separated from a boyfriend who was more trouble -- and more exciting -- than the old house. This reorganization had left me with free time and open plans for the next chapter of my life. What should I do? What would be the best way to use my next years to be productive and helpful to my fellow man? I felt that the necessary next step should be in the area of exploration of my own mental and psychological capacities. A close friend of my cousin in Houston was to be the the hostess for the Dalai Lama during his upcoming visit there. My cousin and her friend tried to arrange a private meeting for me with the Dalai Lama for me to ask his advice as to what I should do worth my life, but his schedule was too full, even with these advocates trying to help me to squeeze in an appointment. Perhaps that was his answer. “Go and work out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha had said as his final comment before he entered Nirvana.

Two or three years later, I heard a psychiatrist speak at a meeting on the subject of transpersonal psychology. The speaker had attended some courses at the Monroe Institute, and he felt they had been interesting and helpful. I spoke to him after his lecture, and then looked up the Institute on the internet, where there was considerable information. I reread Monroe’s books. Monroe had discovered that playing tones of separate pitches in the two ears, say 440 cycles/sec in one ear and 444 cycles/second in the other ear, would cause the listener to hear a tone with four beats per second. This was not at all like hearing the two frequencies in the open air, where the peaks and valleys of the sound waves physically coincided to produce four beats a second in the air. As the tones were now sent through earphones into each ear separately and then carried by the auditory nerves to the two separate hemispheres of the brain, it must be the brain itself that was producing the four beats per second through the mechanism of communication and cooperation between the two hemispheres.

Monroe called this process “hemisync” (for hemispheric synchronization). As Monroe changed the pitches of the tones, as well as their difference in cycles, and the speed of their movements up and down the scale, he could measure changes in the brain waves as recorded by the electroencephalogram, and these changes corresponded with various psychological states, such as deep meditation, happiness, and other conditions usually only produced by mental mechanisms. It was obvious that any programs listened to in this “hemisync” procedure required good earphones with separate right and left channels.

I decided to enroll for a course at the Institute. They insisted that all newcomers sign up for the introductory course, called “Gateway Voyage.” I was eager to start, and wondered what I might encounter as the airplane descended into the Charlottesville airport. I hoped I might gain further insight into my mental apparatus; although ideas of an OBE were not prominent in my expectations. I was sorry that Monroe himself had died a few years earlier, but his daughter was still present and running the Institute.

A minivan was waiting to take the three students who had just arrived on the same airplane to the Institute, about ten miles out of town in beautiful rolling country in sight of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. The main building was an attractive long low structure built on the side of a hill, one story in the front, two stories in the back where the hill descended, with a four-story glass tower at one end; and there were various outbuildings, including a laboratory building, a giant 5-foot tall crystal standing in a field, and a maze to stroll in.

The rooms had an unusual feature. My room, a single as I had requested, had a private bathroom, a small desk and desk chair, an easy chair, and a window. But the bed was built into an alcove, so that it had a wall at the head and foot of the bed and along one side. On the fourth side, there was a two-foot section of wall extending from the head of the bed along the open side, and the rest of that side of the bed had a sturdy brass rod, with heavy black-out curtains which could be manually operated. It was like a cubicle with a curtain on one side. There were speakers installed in the walls on either side of the pillow, pointing toward the head of the occupant. This made possible stereophonic broadcasts from a central station, so that all the students could hear the same hemisync program at one time. These bed-alcoves were called “check units.” The programs were generally lectures or interesting music.

At lunch I met my fellow students, seven women and four men, average age about 45. Most were from the US, but there were students from Switzerland, South Africa, Japan, and Cyprus. None of them were weirdly dressed or otherwise odd appearing – they looked like a crowd of passengers on an airplane. There were four facilitators (trainers, guides), all cheerful and pleasant.

Many of the students and the staff reported frequent and helpful contact with Mr. Monroe, who they claimed was still present in spirit and remained active in guiding the affairs of the Institute. I did not personally have any contact with him.

We were full of anticipatory questions. "How will we know when we are getting close to an OBE?" I asked. Susan, one of the trainers said, "We don’t want to prejudice or distort your experiences ahead of time. Just watch with an open mind. Now go to your rooms, get comfortable, and relax in your check units with the draperies pulled closed. You should be in total darkness. A one-hour exercise will be played through your speakers. Afterward, we will all gather in the common room to discuss our experiences."

We dispersed quickly, eager to get started with our new experiences. In a few minutes a lecture started coming from the speakers, explaining hemisync, with examples. Then we were told to observe our internal states while hemisync music was played. I was a little tired and was afraid I might just go to sleep. Instead, in about five minutes I found myself sitting on my desk chair outside my check unit. How did that happen? There was no lapse in consciousness. I had not gone to sleep, nor was I asleep in the desk chair. My mental and emotional state seemed about as usual. Remaining seated on the desk chair for about 60 seconds, I looked around the room, which was darkened, and saw nothing unusual, and physically I felt as usual. So I concluded that I was having an out-of-body experience. I wanted to try moving around, and so slowly rose from the desk chair to a standing position. Everything seemed normal. I was interested and not afraid. Perhaps I could go out into the hall. As I approached the door, somehow it opened and I went into the hall. Turning left, I walked along the hall about 50 or 60 feet. I noticed that I was not really walking, but was gliding along the hall, with my feet perhaps 6 or 8 inches off the floor. I stopped moving my legs, but continued moving forward, as I wished to do. I understood that my motion was dictated by my mental state, and I had only to think I was walking to produce a facsimile of walking. I was conscious of how calm I continued to be about this experience.

I decided to finish this experience, and so descended gently to the front lawn, walked (literally) through the front door of the main building and along the corridor to my room. When I reached my room, I moved into the check-unit and lay down in my body.

Soon I opened my eyes, and all seemed quite normal. I got up and went back to the common room, where some of the other students had already gathered. We all described our experiences. Two of the other students had OBEs, and the rest of them had had a variety of experiences. A very attractive woman, about forty years old, was a doctor from a nearby town. She said, “I used to have these OBEs from the time I was four years old, but after about four years something unpleasant and frightening happened, like being raped, and so I tried not to have OBEs, and they gradually shut down. Now that I am older, I feel I can protect myself and so I want to do some more exploration. ” This sounded ominous; perhaps this practice was not without dangers, but I was not afraid.

Two days later, when we were having another exercise with Hemi-sync, I decided to rise up less tentatively, wished to ascend, and suddenly shot up about three hundred feet, then willed the ascent to stop. I was surprised that I could see (through the roof of the main building) my body lying in the check unit 300 feet below. Somehow this great height startled me, and I wished to descend, and so within about one minute I was hovering 2 feet above my body. Over the next 30 seconds I reentered my body, seemed to connect with it, and the experience was over. I got out of the check unit and sat on my desk chair for a few minutes before walking out to the common room. While I described this experience, the other students listened with interest. Nobody had any comments on the mechanism of what had happened to me or on its significance. Later on that week, during hemi-sync exercises, I encountered beings whose natures were not entirely clear to me. I presumed they were discarnate entities or possibly souls of the dead.

After I reported to the group about my encounters with these beings, the attractive doctor spoke to me in private. She said, "My grandfather, whom I loved so much, died two years ago. I haven’t had any communication from him in over a year, and I’m worried about him. When you are encountering after-life beings, could you please keep your eye out for him? Maybe you could find him for me? His name was Ralph Fox (name changed)." “OK, ” I said. “I’ll do my best. ” 

This is the phenomenology of my experience. I did not understand what had happened, but was inclined to accept the experience at face value, as described above. There were of course many alternative explanations, mostly designed to explain away what had happened to me. Perhaps I had fallen asleep and had a dream, perhaps group suggestion, perhaps wishful thinking, perhaps hallucinations, self-hypnosis, something I had eaten, etc. Maybe one or more of these items was the cause of my experiences, but I don’t think so.

There had been no efforts on the part of the Institute to sell books, collect money/donations, or to sign us up for ongoing programs, courses, or political agendas. But tapes and books were offered in the bookstore, as was information about future programs at MI, as it was sometimes called.

Finally, the time was up, we all said goodbye to one another and departed. I wondered what my next step would be. A few weeks later, when on the “other side, ” I recalled the young doctor's request and broadcast her grandfather's name mentally, with a request to speak with him. The same day he approached me, a medium sized, late-middle-aged man, pleasant and intelligent, just as described by my doctor friend. (The way the dead souls appear to us is a separate subject – they communicate telepathically and realize they must be recognizable when necessary.) I gave him her message. He said he was well and would try to contact her. This locating and/or re-orienting of dead souls is refered to as “soul retrieval. ” I passed on his message, which she was pleased to receive. Sometime later, she told me she was happy that her grandfather had contacted her.

Since then, I have pursued this line of experiences, and have kept practicing with hemi-sync tapes, with interesting and wide-ranging results, and have returned for one further course, in time exploration. Our reality is much richer than I had ever suspected (and that’s not the half of it!!).

the end

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