Robert A. Monroe (1915–1995)

Of the few books I have reviewed I feel this is probably the most difficult, and yet maybe the most required in terms of explanation and relevance to what you might be looking for. Its premise is a phenomenal story of one mans journeys during his experiences of travelling out of his body, and through his own curiosity and endeavour he is taken on a series of incredible journeys through time and space. He meets with various entities from other realities, and through the action of simulation show more and experience they attempt to show him the purpose of life and the world upon which it depends, from its initial creation to its ultimate completion.

It is both an incredible and immensely thought provoking book and will leave you with many sleepless nights trying to correlate and make sense of his story, and whatever your conclusion it is almost certain that life will not be quite the same as it was before you opened its pages.

Depending on where you are in your quest and the part you are still looking for it will leave you either exhilarated or despondent, and there are certainly elements in this book that will do both. Like `Journeys out of the Body' when it was originally published, I suspect `Far Journeys' is still quite a few years ahead of its time. However, if you think you are at the point where you have read all there is in your quest to fully understand the nature of existence but feel there is still something missing then this might well be the book you are looking for. I hope it resonates and you will go on to read his follow up `Ultimate Journey', if not then I suggest you put it aside and wait. I'm sure there is something here for you, but maybe it's just not the piece of the puzzle you are looking for at this moment. show less

This is a follow-up on Monroe’s classic work ”Journeys out of the body”. Here I would like to say that Monroe’s three books as a whole constitute a unique contribution to scientific knowledge: our understanding of the Universe/universes takes a great leap forward after reading them.

As the author states in chapter 1 of this book regarding OBEs, “You can visit a friend three thousand miles away, you can explore the moon, the solar system, and the galaxy … you can enter other show more reality systems only dimly perceived and theorized by our time/space consciousness”.

He has found that his innumerable OBEs have led to his body rejecting all chemicals, including alcohol, prescription drugs and caffeine. During surgery he rejects the anesthesia and wakes up (not very nice). When gambling (playing cards) he knows what the cards are without seeing them, so always wins.

He tells us about his work at the Monroe Institute and the development of hemi-sync. This creates simultaneously an identical wave form in both brain hemispheres. (You can down-load a hemi-sync mp3 from the Monroe Institute’s web-site.) Using the process can apparently remove psychotic symptoms, improve sleep and memory, inter alia. It has “a great ability to focus and hold attention”.

Monroe informs us about the Gateway Programme, in which various states of consciousness were investigated. Focus 10, for example, was “mind awake, body asleep”. “Participants learn to move into what is called Focus 12, where all physical-data input is shut off and the consciousness can reach out and begin to perceive in ways other than through the five senses.” The Gateway Programme first surmounts the Fear Barrier (fear of the unknown, of change).

The borders between this and other reality-energy systems are crossed. Reunions with “dead” friends and family are reported, as well as encounters with other forms of intelligent energy not generally recognized.

The basic effect of the Hemi-Sync process is to provide an access to many levels of consciousness simultaneously. (I don’t really understand this, I admit,)

We are given reports by people in the Programme who have had various amazing experiences.

The so-called Explorer team makes innumerable visits to inner space, or whatever it is. Reports from these visits, as they occur, are not only given in this book but also available as free downloads from the Institute’s web-site.

Explorers communicate with and are helped by beings they encounter and given much interesting information. For example, plants exist on levels 1-7, animals on levels 8-14. Levels 15-21 “are what you call human life on this Earth”. A person that progresses to level 21 cannot go higher unless he is willing to give up human form. Levels 22-28 are the levels you enter upon death.

One Explorer is told that part of one’s energy may be used to develop a personality and one may have several personalities going on at the same time, being developed at the same time in the physical reality. She is informed that she has one that is old, one crippled, one male, but she is not ready to know where they are.

Our energy can inhabit other places than Earth, and is aware of all these other places. We do not inhabit bodies like human Earth bodies but “other forms of things or beings”. One is “like a gelatin kind of thing … slimy kinds of things”. These forms we inhabit are thousands of light years away.

Monroe writes that all of the Explorer material poses more questions than it answers, and I can confirm this.

Beings encountered have the ability to remove the energy essence of a human from his physical body without “disrupting his biologic systems”. They utilize the vocal cords to communicate with us and have total access to the “memory storage lodged in the individual”. They can and did move that extracted human essence to various other sites/realities and returned it in safety. The entire history of humankind and Earth is available to them in the most minute detail.

All other intelligent species than man, either in the physical universe or in other energy systems, use non-verbal communication (NVC).

Monroe encounters a high glowing being reminiscent of God (but, apparently, not God) who calls him “Mister Monroe” and provides him with information in NVC. He meets with this being several times and is greatly reassured by their contact, until he is told that they can no longer meet. (As far as I remember, it is because Monroe has now reached the stage where he can find out things for himself.)

Monroe (who is often referred as RAM) also has continued unexpected meetings with a character called BB who is looking for someone called AA. Sometimes Monroe saves people in these realms, but generally they suddenly disappear again. BB or Monroe perhaps too originally come from a planet/system/place called KT-95.

The book contains detailed, scientific information relating to Monroe’s and the Explorers’ voyages. These voyages are fascinating and provide new information. Drawbacks are that Monroe presents the material in such a way that it is often difficult to comprehend, and his use of abbreviations and special terms, not immediately defined, complicates matters greatly.

However, nonetheless, I highly recommend that you read this unique, illuminating book. show less

All three of Monroe’s books are unique and amazing. To my knowledge, he was the first to explore OBEs at length and to report about them.

This is Monroe’s third book. The only problem I have with it is his prevalent use of acronyms without always letting us know what they stand for, or not at first.

He tells us about his INSPEC (Intelligent Species) friend, whom he generally met with past the H Band noise. This is “the peak of uncontrolled thought that emanates from all living forms on show more Earth, particularly humans”. It is M’s opinion that this Noise contains not only “current time thought patterns, but all that ever existed”. Passing through it quickly is advisable.

M wonders who his INSPEC friend really is. He has a strong light around him. Is he an ET? He reads M’s thoughts, and replies that he is not an ET as M means it. M describes him as a “brightly glowing figure that some … would interpret as a god, an angel”. He is told that he doesn’t have the experience to understand who he is. M just needs to ask and help will come. He is not from another planet and is not God.

M then receives from the being a “surge of enormous energy, an immensely powerful vibration of very high frequency”. He terms this a ROTE, short for Related Organized Thought Energy, a sort of “ball of condensed thought and ideas”.

The INSPEC tells Monroe that though his (M’s) goal now is service to humanity, when he is no longer human, his desire will focus in another direction. M finds a new goal – to go and be in what he construes as Home.

After meeting with the INSPEC again, he is allowed to return Home; there he experiences “many-hued cloud towers” – music – a thousand instruments, thousands of voices. He finds patterns in a repeating loop, everything exactly the same – nothing new, nothing different. He sees curls of energy playing games, joins in, but tires of it. He doesn’t want to be “around in the same clouds forever, with the same music over and over”. He realizes there’s nothing there for him now. That’s why he left and now he doesn’t want to come back. He returns depressed.

INSPEC then takes him to an era on Earth where human organization is different. There are about 2 million people there. He is told that it is a place of the past, about a million years ago. The people do not wear clothes, but it is not a primitive society. They communicate by telepathy and control the weather. There is no conflict, and the people don’t die.

He asks the INSPEC if he could be shown one non-physical non-human intelligence which he can easily talk to. INSPEC then guides him to one – he flies out past the moon and sees an extremely large flying saucer. Out of this steps a short, chubby man who absolutely resembles W.C. Fields! This “hologram” invites M aboard the vessel. He apparently is not Fields nor a human. He explains that he is an “exporter”, who gathers jokes, which his civilization apparently needs. (This all seems very strange to me, but that is what the being explained.)

Then M asks to visit “the most mature and evolved human in physical earth, living in his time reference”. Suddenly he is in a room with a being whose sex he cannot determine and whom he thus refers to as a “Heshe”. The being’s radiation of light is astounding – it is like “standing in bright spring sunlight that was filled with every human emotion that ever existed”. Heshe has only lived the one lifetime – one continuous lifetime for 1800 years. M feels he has met the being previously. He gave up eating and sleeping years ago. Heshe calls M “Ashaneen”.

This will give you an impression of the sort of information contained in this amazing book.

The book gets more and more interesting, better and better.

I highly recommend that you read this exciting, instructive, well-written book. It states on the cover that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross found it to be the best of M’s books. This may well be so, but I found them all thrilling. show less

This is the first of three related books Robert Monroe wrote about his out of body experiences. He approached his work from an engineer's mind set trying to find evidence that his OBEs were based in fact vs. simply a dream or concoction of his brain. If you are so inclined, you should read his books in their published order (Journeys, Far Journeys and Ultimate Journey). You should also visit the Monroe Institute web site to learn more about what grew out of Monroe's investigations into the show more OBE state.

I found his three books to be an essential part of my personal library. You can glean knowledge about what awaits us after death. However, the non-physical realms that can be visited in an out-of-body state seem to infinitely varied. I say this having read other authors' books on the OBE subject. One can chose to have a limited view of non-physical worlds by not reading books on OBEs and NDEs. However, recognize that in staying uninformed, you might be limiting your experiential options after transitioning. Instead of accepting whatever is presented to you, you might be able to make informed choices.

Jim Fisher show less