Brief explanation of how Bob Monroe became involved with consciousness exploration.
Because of his radio background, he knew that people are highly suggestible to sound, and this became the stimulus he studied.He discovered that certain sound patterns seemed to alter brain waves to produce predictable responses. Certain sounds produced relaxation, others sleep, or alertness. But what interested Bob the most, were those sounds that led people to experience states of expanded awareness.Nevertheless, the basic element was his personal OBE experiences in which he dared to go further and found out what it was next.With characteristic entrepreneurial zeal, and a willingness to spend his own time and money, Bob began his search for answers.
What specific character traits motivated Bob Monroe to explore consciousness?
The report of Dr. Stuart W. Twemlow, MD (Psychiatrist, Chief of Reasearch Service of the Topeka Veterans Administration Hospital Research Department) which was juxtaposed in the ‘Far Journeys” book includes many of the specific personality’s traits which may have motivated Monroe to explore the immense field of consciousness.However his life’s direction and motivation, they may are a matter of a pre-arranged plan before his coming on Earth as his “I There” claims to be in the “Ultimate Journeys”.His curiosity can stand in the first rank followed by:
“…One of the most consistent themes in Monroe’s history is his interest in the air. The air is his medium. From an early age he built model planes, learned to fly airplanes in high school, and later became an accomplished glider pilot.Another significant theme in Monroe’s life is his preoccupation with movement. In reviewing his family background he became very excited at his childhood recollections, especially of riding on trains.…Monroe appeared to be able to actualize his individual talents in a manner somewhat unusual in traditional families. His parents allowed him a considerable degree of latitude, somehow recognizing his unusual talents, particularly his mechanical ability…Some of his unevenly developed talents included his ability to read and write at the age of four years… He was a leader of his peers as a child, and highly creative, constantly searching for answers. He was self-generating, as so many people in this field are. He also demonstrated a common characteristic of people exploring altered states of consciousness, and that was that he listened to and acted on his own subjective experience. In other words, he appeared to believe his own experience, and would quite independently and with a great deal of faith pursue what he felt…He was an unusual person from a very early age with unevenly developed intellectual and emotional abilities, and an unusually mature sense of person and independence…That certain personality attributes are present, and Monroe does demonstrate these. These include a tendency to feel socially isolated and different from others at quite an early age, often seeing the world itself as alien. This relative isolation is combined with a tendency to be autonomous, and yet also to be a leader, quite aggressive and danger- seeking.”Final it can be said of Monroe that his energetic life with a high sense of purpose, and his need for and relentless desire for understanding, were the clue for his inner motivation to explore consciousness.
Summary of Bob Monroe’s personal evolution and changing goals.
He evolved from a successful businessman to a researcher in sleep learning. Having OBE experiences he switch to explore meta-physical areas and began to accumulate data from other realms of consciousness far beyond the perceptual confines of space and time.
For a long period in these other realms, he was learning and exploring how to move, where to go and for what reason and finally he got in contact with his “I There”. This meeting with his previous understanding turn him again to go deeper or higher searching for The Source of all.During his exploration he invited many to share with him his discoveries with the goal to find which sound generates which state of consciousness. This collaboration led to the Hemi-Sync patent and to the production of a huge range of specified recordings to help people to solve different issues of health and personal growth.
Brief explanation of how research with the “Explorers” was conducted.
The “research team,” which later became known as the Explorers.The combination of Hemi-Sync, the sensory deprivation booth, bio-monitoring equipment and trained monitors guiding the exploratory process, all converge to produce a personal growth tool par excellence. Monitored by Robert Monroe and Research Division staff, the “Explorers” report from these non-physical environments, and communicate their perceptions.The Explorers had to learn to report verbally, no matter how deep the state or how “far out” they happened to be, so that Bob could determine which sounds correlated with which experiences. At times he would have two or three of them “travel together” to these other, nonphysical realities. Sometimes they reported separately (often with amazingly similar details), and sometimes he would open their mikes, allowing them to hear each other’s perceptions.Another way Bob observed what was going on with each Explorer was via the galvanic skin response (GSR) readouts transmitted to the control room from electrodes they put on each time they climbed into the booth. The GSR gave him a feel for any major changes in explorers’ s physical state of relaxation or tension. Not only was this a valuable guide to how they were doing, it also gave him more data about how they were responding to the particular sounds he was combining and sending to them via the headsets.When it came to labeling which state they were in, or where they were being focused, Bob felt that using numbers was a clean and simple way to identify the states of consciousness. C-1 stood for “Consciousness Number One,” the state of being fully wide awake and alert. Focus 10 became the state of mind awake- body asleep, Focus 12 the state of expanded awareness and Focus 15 was the state of no time.Thanks to information that certain Explorers “brought back” from their experiences, Bob then guided people to even “higher,” or perhaps more accurately stated, deeper and more profound states of awareness. In many instances, foreign “third parties” would enter the experiments to aid in the understanding of their non-physical worlds. In the case of Miranon and many of the experiments with ROMC, a total emergence from one being into the Explorer’s physical body took place, causing definitions and concepts relating to our physical beings to be drastically reexamined. There are currently 32 taped excerpts in this on-going research project taken from literally hundreds of hours of lab sessions.
Creation and early days of the Monroe Institute trainings – a brief summary.
It was during the ’70s that Bob, with the help of a number of individuals, started putting his work together in a form that would, indeed, be the foundation for bringing something of value to a large number of people worldwide. To facilitate his research, Bob built a specially designed lab at Whistlefield, the country home in Virginia where the family then lived. Although he initially called the lab “Whistlefield Research Laboratories,” he soon changed it to the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences, or M.I.A.S. It wasn’t until 1985 that M.I.A.S. was called The Monroe Institute, now known as TMI.The lab included a control room and three shielded rooms or “booths,” (Bob named these little spaces CHEC Units, for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber) which were outfitted with audio and with galvanic skin response measuring units, he had the perfect set-up for testing his audio guidance system. In the booths the Explorers would lie down on comfortable beds, listen to and report on the effects of the audio combinations he fed to each person via stereo headsets. All along, he was recording the correlations between the sound combinations and the Explorers’s experiences. In addition to family members who participated as Explorers, there was a core group who consistently came to the lab weekly for sessions in the booths.After much trial and error and a host of Explorer sessions, the distinct sound combinations to reach specific states were determined and implemented and Bob began making what became known as the Hemi-Sync taped exercises.With word got out about his studies of the effects of sound on consciousness, and because of the burgeoning success of his book, Journeys Out of the Body, Bob was invited to conduct a workshop at Esalen Institute in California. And so it was that his very first program was born. Bob and his engineering friend, Bill Yost, conducted the first of the Monroe consciousness training programs in 1973 at Esalen using Bob’s special tapes of verbal and audio guidance.This first weekend program, called the M-5000 (later changed into the Gateway Voyage), offered round-the-clock taped exercises, which guided the participants into various states of consciousness. Each tape was an hour long, and other than bathroom breaks, time out for meals, and brief rest periods, the participants were “on tape” the entire time.The M-5000 participants reported a wide range of extraordinary experiences and there was great success in rapidly achieving the kind of deeply meditative and altered states of consciousness that yogis or skilled meditators typically took years of practice to achieve. Seeing the powerful effects of his Hemi-Sync tapes when used in a group setting, Bob knew it was time to take this process to the next step. By the mid-’70s, The Institute was offering the M-5000 weekend and a ten-day program at local motels and retreat centers in Virginia.And with every passing year the program became more and more popular as people heard about the massive personal breakthroughs program participants were having. A number of other programs have since been added to the curriculum.