Reflections on Monroe

For people in my advanced age group (but you don’t have to be all that old) any kind of reminiscence with your mate, looking back, will bring to the fore rather sharply just how incredibly diverse and vast ordinary life is on this our tiny planet, right here and now. And if you add to that historical reflections on the deep past we know from records and narratives, that feeling merely expands until one shakes one’s head. Perhaps the most lasting impression of reading Journeys Out of the Body, by Robert Monroe (1915-1995), published first in 1971, is that the realms out there, beyond the physical—that people who have out-of-body experiences (OBEs) encounter—are vastly more complex yet, which, assuming that they exist, is not surprising.

I’d read that book many years ago. It came to mind when Brigitte and I fell into one of those wide-ranging reviews of the life we’d shared thus far. The subject had nothing to do with arcane matters, to be sure, but the sheer diversity that of what we’d seen surfaced as a mirage—and it reminded me of Monroe and some thoughts I’d had back in the Long Ago. The thought then was that the traveler sees what the traveler can understand—that the person reaching China and spending some days there will see far more than he or she can easily absorb—never mind can, just by means of that visit, deeply penetrate the higher layers of Chinese culture reaching back into the dims of time. Why shouldn’t that be so for the traveler who reaches regions that lie beyond the borderzone? I found Monroe’s book and checked my impressions of that time.

We lived in Virginia in the 1970s; Monroe lived there as well; he ran a broadcasting company. Washington’s Virginia suburbs were a hotbed of the New Age then, and once we attended a lecture by Monroe and therefore knew him inside the body as well. He had a bad cold at the time; the lecture was so so. For all I know I bought my copy of his book off one of those tables in the back so common at New Age and other kinds of conferences.

Monroe had many hundreds of OBEs. They began after he listened to some self-help tapes at night, intending to sharpen memory, a product his company was selling. His listening to the tape and his first OBE may not have had a cause-effect relationship, nor does he claim one; but in the history of psychic phenomena, concentration is a likely suspect when odd experiences eventually result. Monroe had four kinds of experiences. He labels these local, Location II, Location III, and precognitive. The first were OBEs in our ordinary reality; staying “local” turned out to be very difficult, and such trips therefore rare; the disembodied self appeared irresistibly drawn into Location II, an enormously vast and diverse spiritual realm filled with all kinds of strange societies. At entry to Location II lay what I call “slums”; other travelers have experienced and reported this as well, see for instance this link on Borderzone. Once passed them—and getting through them took some learning—Monroe was in a realm where he supposed heaven and hell are also located, but most of what he saw was neither. The laws of Location II were quite different from those in our realm regarding space and time; Monroe attempts but fails in explaining the difference—but one hears strong echoes of Swedenborg reading his explanations. Location III was a world he took to be another planet, quite like our own, obeying the same laws, but with different technology; the technology is neither high nor low, just different. His precognitive experiences were visions, experienced as beginning with a look through a hole in a wall. Many of these were confirmed; many were not, or not yet.

For someone somewhat versed in the mystical literature of humanity across a number of cultures, the strong impression is that Monroe really was there, that Location II is well-enough described; Monroe’s virtue lies in his emphasis on its mind-boggling diversity, something one also gets reading Andrew Paquette’s Dreamer. Another strong impression, for me, was that Monroe did not penetrate very deeply into that realm—not, mind you, spatially but in a grasp of what that life-beyond-life actually means. Despite his many, many trips, he seems to have been a tourist, not an explorer. His interest remained strongly focused on promoting this-worldly recognition of that realm, ideally attracting the favorable attention of science. And I find that rather interesting. He himself, in a way, also gives the explanation for this. One of the chief laws of Location II that he does note is that Like Attracts Like over there—something we also encounter in Swedenborg and in all manner of other reports. To best equip ourselves for the beyond, it seems, it behooves us to “eat” the right kind “food” in this realm.