Journeys out of the body

Journeys Out of the Body is the first book of Robert Monroe (30 October 1915 – 17 March 1995), an American radio broadcasting executive who became famous for his accounts of out-of-body experiences and for founding The Monroe Institute, which researches consciousness and produces the Gateway programme to teach people how to go out of body. Published by Doubleday of Garden City, New York, in 1971, it is credited with popularising the very term "out-of-body experience" (OBE) — Monroe having deliberately avoided pre-existing spiritual terms, including "astral projection", in all his books ^[1:1]. The book comprises an introduction by the parapsychologist Charles T. Tart, twenty-one chapters and an epilogue ^[2]. It quickly became a cult sensation and has been through many printings ^[3], praised for the "clear-and-cogent language of a map-making explorer" and for an author who was "remarkably down-to-earth" ^[4] — "a raw, often frantic account of a man trying to maintain his sanity while his soul keeps slipping out of its skin".

The author

Monroe was a broadcasting professional, not a mystic. Deemed unfit for military service in the Second World War because of ulcers, he spent the war years working for a manufacturing company that designed a flight-simulator prototype ^[1:2]. He wrote an aviation column for Argosy magazine, produced a weekly radio show, "Scramble!", for the National Aeronautic Association, and in 1953 formed RAM Enterprises, a corporation producing as many as 28 network radio programmes monthly ^[1:3]. He was one of the founders of the Jefferson Cable Corporation, the first cable company to cover central Virginia ^[1:4], and over his career created, wrote, directed and produced some four hundred radio and television programmes ^[5].

How it began

The experiences began in the spring of 1958, while Monroe was living a "reasonably normal life" in the Virginia countryside and experimenting with techniques of data learning during sleep, using himself as the chief subject ^[6]. One evening he was gripped by sensations of paralysis and vibration, accompanied by a bright light that seemed to shine on him from a shallow angle; the sensation returned nine more times over the following six weeks — without the light — culminating in his first out-of-body experience ^[1:5]. There was no loss of consciousness: he had not closed his eyes, had seen the room and heard outdoor noises throughout, and the clock showed only a few seconds had passed since he stretched out on the couch ^[5:1]. He feared mental illness; his physician said he might be working too hard, and only a psychologist friend eventually named the phenomenon "astral projection" ^[1:6]. Monroe then found what he called the psychic underground, reading earlier astral writers such as Oliver Fox and Sylvan Muldoon ^[1:7].

Core concepts: the vibrations and the Second Body

Two ideas anchor the book. The first is the "vibration" that precedes separation — "not a shaking, but more of a 'vibration,' steady and unvarying in frequency", like an electric shock running through the entire body without the pain ^[7]. Monroe learned to induce this state at will, and his method — still widely circulated among practitioners — begins by deliberately inducing the vibrational state before attempting to leave the body ^[8]. The second is the "Second Body", the non-physical vehicle in which he travelled, whose natural environment he identified as Locale II ^[9].

The three Locales

Monroe organised his journeys by theme into three realms, labelled "for lack of better nomenclature" ^[2:1]:

Locale I ("Here-Now") — the familiar physical world perceived from an out-of-body vantage ^[10], a tangible reality confirmable through the physical senses ^[11], though unbound by gravity, walls or distance.
Locale II ("Infinity, Eternity") — the natural environment of the Second Body: a non-physical, thought-responsive dimension that "seems to interpenetrate our physical world, yet spans limitless reaches beyond comprehension" ^[9:1], where reality is composed of "deepest desires" and "frantic fears" ^[9:2] and thought translates directly into experience, bearing a semblance to the concepts of heaven and hell ^[12].
Locale III ("Reverse Image") — an apparently parallel physical reality, a mirror Earth with its own history and social organisation, its own technology (including steam-powered cars), and a civilisation "not more advanced, perhaps less so" than our own ^[4:1]. Its inhabitants were unaware of Monroe's presence, and on several occasions he automatically "took over" someone's body there ^[9:3].

His three-realm scheme maps loosely onto the planes of Theosophy and the lokas of Hindu cosmology ^[10:1].

Significant and surprising findings

The author failed his own laboratory test. In Tart's celebrated experiment, a five-digit number was placed on a shelf above the sleeping subject's bed. Monroe was the subject on nine occasions and failed to see the number at all ^[13]; a young woman, "Miss Z", gave the number correctly — 25132 — on her fourth and final night ^[14]^[15]. Monroe's candour about this failure remains one of the book's most scientifically notable features.
Tart slept over to be pulled out. Visiting Monroe in Virginia in autumn 1970, Tart asked that, should Monroe have an OBE that night, he come to Tart's bedroom and try to pull him out of his body too ^[16].
Reality is thought-responsive. The book's most influential claim is that Locale II is shaped by expectation, fear and intention — the traveller's own mind moulds the environment almost instantly ^[17].
Everyone has a doppelgänger. Locale III asserts that we all have "doubles" living out their own lives in an alternate reality — a thesis so unusual that even committed astral-projection researchers note Monroe appears to be the only writer ever to assert it ^[18].
The "hole" experiments. From November 1958 to February 1959, Monroe documented repeated attempts to interact with a mysterious "hole" encountered during his journeys ^[19].
The US Army took it seriously. In 1978 the American military evaluated The Monroe Institute and sent officers for OBE training, sending more in 1983 ^[1:8]; the arrangement was later confirmed in a front-page Wall Street Journal article ^[1:9], which quoted the head of a Zen Buddhist temple in Vancouver: "Gateway students can reach meditation states in a week that took [me] 30 years of sitting" ^[1:10].
Hemi-Sync, tested. The book's research led Monroe to patent an audio technique in 1975 ^[1:11], based on the 1839 observation that when the brain hears two frequencies it produces a third equal to their difference ^[1:12]. Replicated, double-blind randomised trials on anaesthetised patients later found Hemi-Sync effective as a partial replacement for fentanyl during surgery, though ineffective at replacing propofol ^[1:13]. Strikingly, a 2002 University of Virginia presentation found the EEG effects vanished when Monroe's electromagnetic headphones were replaced by air-conduction headphones, suggesting the entrainment is electromagnetic rather than acoustical ^[1:14].
Neurology has a rival explanation. Stimulating or disrupting the brain's temporo-parietal junction can produce OBE-like experiences — a naturalistic account unknown to Monroe ^[17:1].

Legacy

The research grew into The Monroe Institute, a nonprofit education and research organisation on 300 acres (about 1.2 square kilometres) south of Charlottesville, Virginia, claiming no bias toward any belief system or religion ^[1:15]; upwards of 20,000 people are estimated to have attended its Gateway programme in its first thirty years ^[1:16]. Monroe wrote two sequels, Far Journeys (1985) and Ultimate Journey (1994), describing visits to nonphysical realities, nonphysical entities, and connection with his "I-There", his term for what most people would call the soul ^[1:17]. The first book remains "the undisputed classic in the field" ^[5:2] — "jam-packed with parasitic goblins and dead humans, astral sex, scary trips into mind-boggling other dimensions, and practical tips on how to get out of your body, all told with wry humor" ^[3:1].

More than half a century on, whether read as genuine exploration or as a vivid document of one man's altered consciousness, it fixed the vocabulary — OBE, vibrations, locales — through which popular culture still talks about leaving the body.

References