The Monroe Institute: Part 1

Gateway Voyage

During my sabbatical several years ago, in addition to doing Reiki stuff, and contemplating the importance of a balance between work and one’s personal life…I also regularly visited The Monroe Institute’s (TMI) website and calendar of seminars (see web link on your left) to try to figure out if I could afford to attend a TMI Gateway Voyage seminar…or if the cost of flying from Alaska to Virginia would break my piggy bank. In addition, I also contemplated the logistics of scheduling a solo seminar trip in between “quality time” vacations with my husband.

I figured out that I could fly from Anchorage to Minneapolis and from Minneapolis to Washington, DC on Northwest Airlines. Then I could take a commuter plane and fly or rent a car and drive into Charlottesville. (This was before Alaska Airlines had scheduled flights from Anchorage directly to Washington, DC.) I hollered to my husband in the next room and asked him what dates would work for him…for me to be away next year. He said, “Why wait until next year? Do they have any seminars you could attend this year?”

My husband, an engineer by training, was not one to embrace attending seminars that promoted expanding consciousness. It just wasn’t his thing. However, if he (of all people) was encouraging me to go…I guess I could at least give TMI a call to see if they had any openings in their upcoming Gateway seminars. (Maybe he just wanted to get me out of the house for a while) :-)

This is when things started to fall into place. Northwest Airlines had just mailed out a promotional voucher that would enable me to fly to Washington DC for an extremely inexpensive price. In addition, TMI had an opening in a Gateway Voyage seminar just 2 months away.

The Gateway Voyage seminar is the first seminar everyone has to complete prior to attending any of the other seminars offered at TMI. The Gateway Voyage “…is an on campus six-day intensive program designed to provide the participant with tools that can enable: development and exploration of human consciousness; deeper levels of self-discovery; expansion of one's awareness; willful control of that awareness; communication with and visits to other energy systems and realities.” Like all seminars at TMI, the use of hemi-sync technology is used to help facilitate the participant’s ability to attain deep meditative states and explore human consciousness. The Focus Levels visited and explored during the Gateway Voyage are: 3, 10, 12, 15 and 21.

Many excellent books have been written by folks who have attended TMI seminars, like Rosalind McKnight, Patricia Leva, Bruce Moen’s Exploring the Afterlife Series, Courtney Brown, PhD and Joseph Felser, PhD (see complete references at the end of this post).

I won’t go into the above authors’ level of detail, but I will do my best to give you the gestalt of what I experienced at the seminar and how the experiences impacted the quality of my life.

My primary motivation to attend the Gateway Voyage seminar was to figure out if the hemi-sync technology and the TMI approach would give me the necessary tools to harness and focus my natural abilities.

The routine of every TMI seminar is the same. You arrive at either the Nancy Penn Center or the Roberts Mountain Retreat (what used to be Robert Monroe’s home).

- Go to your assigned room & CHEC-unit (your bed that is equipped with a set of head-phones and a dark curtain to help keep out the sunlight) and unpack your stuff
- Meet and greet with other seminar attendees
- Have your intake interview with one of the facilitators
- Join the facilitators and other attendees in the casual conference room for orientation, introductions, and the set-up for your first Focus Level session.
- Go to your CHEC Units
- Debrief the session in the conference room afterwards
- Have fascinating conversations with fellow attendees over meals

The Gateway Voyage attracts a very diverse group of people. We had a mix of left brained and right brained folks: physicians, engineers and retired military, mixed with energy healers, intuitives and assorted new age folks. Our debriefing sessions were lively and covered a wide range of approaches and interpretations. We were all in different places along our spiritual journeys and were getting different things out of our experiences at this seminar.

There were also a lot of interesting things that occurred during the week. Many of these similar experiences are also documented in the books referred to at the end of this post. For example, when traveling and exploring through the various Focus Levels many attendees run into each other and even assist each other with their unique challenges and breaking through belief system barriers. There were many anecdotes shared in debriefing sessions where one attendee was having a hard time getting from Focus 15 to 21…and another attendee would run into them at Focus 15 and metaphorically drag them up to Focus 21.

It has taken me several years to be able to articulate what I experienced at the Gateway Voyage seminar (or any seminar I attended at TMI). The primary reason for my reluctance to discuss my experiences was because….what you experience cannot easily be put into words. The reason these experiences cannot easily be put into words is because you are not really seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting anything. Instead your brain is trying to process these non-specific gestalts in a manner you can understand and in a language that is unique to you.

Many folks that attend the Gateway Voyage seminar have preconceived ideas about having an out-of-body experience or having experiences similar to what they have seen on TV or in movies. The reality is much more benign. Instead of the expected “lightning bolts”…the experiences are more like “whispers”. But these whispers can be extremely profound.

Attendees must quiet their internal chatter enough to perceive the whispers. A lot of what happens during Gateway is the process of quieting internal chatter – in the form of deeply personal archetypes and metaphors.

For example, one of the attendees was a policeman from Hong Kong. (Yes, people come from all over the globe to visit TMI) This young man was in the process of re-prioritizing his life. He recently lost his father – who was also a Hong Kong policeman – and was considering making some major changes to his life. During one of the mid-week debriefing sessions he shared one of his experiences out in the Focus Levels: He was chasing a perpetrator down some darkened streets and alleys. When he finally caught up with the perpetrator they got into a violent physical fight. He pulled out a knife and started to stab the perpetrator. When he saw the perpetrator’s face – it was his own.

This is some deep stuff. The Hong Kong policeman did not understand what this vision meant. To me it was quite clear…and I tried to explain it to him as gently as I could…but he wasn’t quite ready to hear it....or my metaphorical archetypes mean different things than his unique metaphorical archetypes.

For example, if a whisper was about unconditional love, a person might see his or her dog from childhood. However, if the attendee was mauled by a dog...the attendee might instead see his or her kindly grandmother.

There were also many experiences full of loving and positive archetypes and metaphors that were shared during debriefing sessions. For example, one person had unfinished business with a deceased parent, and perceived having a cup of coffee at the Focus 21 Bridge Café with him and having a deeply meaningful conversation.

The process of Gateway seems to be a healing process for a lot of internal (read: deeply personal) issues. This includes healing the stuff that makes up our internal chatter…colors our perspectives and distracts us from moving forward.

As the seminar winded down, I realized that the TMI approach would be able to help me learn how to harness & focus my natural abilities. On the last day of my Gateway Voyage Seminar, I took a long hike down to the hill to the registrar’s office and signed up for a Lifeline Seminar ~9-10 months away.


References

Brown, C. (1996). Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth. New York: Dutton Books.

Felser, J.M. (2005). The Way Back to Paradise: Restoring the Balance between Magic and Reason. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company.

Leva, P. (1998). Traveling the Interstate of Consciousness: A Driver's Instruction Manual: Using Hemi-Sync to Access States of Non-Ordinary Reality. Longmont, CO: Q Central Publishing.

McKnight, R.A. (1999). Cosmic Journeys: My Out-Of-Body Explorations With Robert A. Monroe. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company

Moen, B. (1997). Voyages into the Unknown (Exploring the Afterlife Series, Vol. 1). Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company.

Moen, B. (1998). Voyage Beyond Doubt (Exploring the Afterlife Series , Vol 2). Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing.

Moen, B. (1999). Voyages into the Afterlife: Charting Unknown Territory (Exploring the Afterlife Series, Vol. 3). Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company.

Monroe, R. (1971). Journeys Out of the Body. New York: Doubleday.

Monroe, R. (1985). Far Journeys. New York: Doubleday.

Monroe, R. (1994) The Ultimate Journey. New York: Doubleday