by Colin Wilson
Monroe explored his own past incarnations, discovering that in the twelfth century he had been an architect who had been beheaded because he objected to the cost in human life when stones fell from crude scaffolds. When his son visited Louris Castle, near Munro Fields, in Scotland, and sent his father a picture, Monroe was amazed to see that the main octagonal tower of The Monroe Institute (which he had designed) was virtually identical to the castle tower. He enquired about the name of the architect of Louris, and discovered that it was Robert Munro.
When Monroe’s wife died of breast cancer, he was able to visit her on what he calls ‘Level 27’, but found the explosion of emotion too overwhelming. A second attempt brought the same result. Monroe ends the book, published in 1994, wondering whether he can continue to live on two levels at once. In fact, he died in 1995, at the age of eighty.
Monroe was modest about his achievement: he says at one point that he expects his name to be forgotten in a decade or so. Yet, if his books are as factual as they seem to be, there can be little doubt that he will rank as one of the major pioneers of paranormal research in the twentieth century. There are many books about ‘astral travel’ whose authors—like Hereward Carrington and Robert Crookall—are highly regarded in the world of paranormal research; but parapsychologists and scientists who have tested Monroe in the laboratory seem to agree that his results are among the most striking so far. But is Monroe really being objective and accurate about these other dimensions of reality which he describes so circumstantially? Or is it partly subjective fantasy? In fact, are OBEs some form of elaborate dream, as some parapsychologists believe?
The American military certainly does not seem to think so. In a book called Psychic Warrior (1997), a professional soldier named David Morehouse describes how he was trained to use remote viewing for spying. In the spring of 1987, leading a combat platoon on manoeuvres in Jordan, he was knocked unconscious when a stray bullet penetrated his helmet. He found himself in a kind of mist, standing in a circle of white-robed figures, one of whom told him that his choice of a career in the military was wrong. ‘Pursue peace’. Then he came back to consciousness among his own platoon. A few days later, in the sacred place above Petra, he saw the same being, who advised him to seek peace, then to teach it.
Back at home, he found himself undergoing odd experiences, glimpsing visions and images. Then, camping with his family in the woods, he had an odd sense of ‘being closer to everyone, to everything. It was like I was tuned in to a different frequency’. That night, he had an out-of-the-body experience. He found himself rising towards the moon and seeing the Earth spread out below him, before he descended and re-entered his body.
He was now working for army intelligence, and, when he told a doctor about the experience, was surprised that it aroused such interest. He had expected to be treated as if he was mentally ill. The doctor handed him a folder, and when he opened it, back in his room, he found it was labelled ‘Remote Viewing’. Someone was being instructed to identify a ‘target’ and describe it. He spoke of a meeting in which an angry man was talking about American hostages. The ‘remote viewer’ was being asked to find out what had happened to the Americans taken captive in the Teheran Embassy.
Morehouse now found himself assigned to a top-secret operation whose purpose was to use ‘astral projection’ and remote viewing for collecting intelligence.
This is less bizarre than it sounds. As far back as 1972, the American psychic Ingo Swann had taken part in remote-viewing experiments, and later, with the scientists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ (who also studied Uri Geller), had scored some remarkable successes under test conditions at Stanford University. And these experiments, it seems, were closely observed by the military, who saw the potential of remote viewing for Cold War spying, and for such problems as keeping in touch with submarines under the polar icecap. They began a programme for remote viewing in 1974.
Morehouse became part of a group who were being taught ‘astral projection’ aimed at particular targets. He was introduced to a trainer named Mel, and to other remote viewers. And he was trained to find his way to a given ‘target’ through a set of coordinates.
Morehouse devotes only a footnote to the theory behind this, but that is perhaps one of the most extraordinary pages of the book. He explains that the coordinates are randomly assigned by a remote viewer to a target he has already ‘visited’, and that these coordinates can then serve to guide any remote viewer to the same target—the theory, he explains, is based on Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. In other words, once these numbers have been assigned, they become part of the ‘psychic ether’, much as the letters assigned to a website on the Internet will enable anybody to access the site. The parallel is interesting, for it suggests that the ‘psychic universe’—Monroe’s Locale II—should be thought of as a kind of abstract cyberspace rather than as having some ‘real’ location in space and time.
In his first remote-viewing exercise, Morehouse was sent to the Civil War Museum, although not told where he was going. He found he could rise above the building simply by imagining it, and then swoop down through the roof. He described the museum accurately—talking to his trainer Mel—then protested that the whole place tasted of death and blood. He saw a dirty, unwashed soldier staggering along, and realised that he was looking into the past, and that the man was dead. As he returned, he felt his ‘phantom body’ fall through a tunnel of light.
The second target was a Soviet landing craft in the Baltic. Morehouse started by plunging below the sea, and almost choked to death. But he was able to describe the landing craft accurately.
His next set of coordinates sent him to Dachau, the Nazi death camp, which he found full of a sense of hopelessness: ‘I feel forgotten, and I’ve given up’. Although he had no idea of where he was, he felt ‘filthy’. ‘I want to come home and wash’.
But, interestingly, as he passed through the stone wall into the camp, he noted: ‘It was at times like these that I learned that everything indeed has a spirit. The wall had its own history.’
After remote viewing the Ark of the Covenant, he was told by Mel that it was part of a ‘dimensional opening’, the entrance to another dimension.
On a trip to a dead planet—which proved to be Mars—two identical linear depressions running parallel along the ground convinced him that they had once been made by living beings.
In another alien world, he saw crowds of people in a black amphitheatre, paying respect to some kind of lawgiver; Morehouse was certain that the lawgiver was aware of his presence.
Morehouse is discreet about his actual spying missions, although he mentions taking part in the war against drug traffickers in the Caribbean. He also describes targeting the Korean Airlines jet shot down by the Soviets in 1983, his mission being to find out whether the jet had drifted into Soviet airspace by mistake, or whether it was a spying mission, as the Russians believed; he concluded that the copilot had deliberately allowed the 007 to drift off course, looking for holes in the radar coverage of the Russian coastline. And, during the Gulf War, he saw burning oil wells and canisters that had contained Iraqi biological weapons, leading him to conclude that the Pentagon was aware that American troops had been poisoned and intended to keep silent to avoid having to pay compensation.
Morehouse never ceased to feel that it was somehow wrong to use his powers for military and political purposes. Eventually, he decided to ‘go public’—and immediately became the target of a dirty-tricks campaign, which even went so far as slashing the tires of his car so they would burst when he was travelling at high speed. Eventually he resigned from the army, wrote his book, and became a panel member of the Gorbachev Foundation.
It is time to pause, and look carefully at some of the staggering implications of the ground covered so far.
For ten years or so after Arnold’s sighting in 1947, the main question was whether flying saucers came from our solar system or another galaxy. By the 1960s, it was clear that this was
the wrong question, and that the entities behind the UFO phenomenon did not appear to share our limitations in space and time. Vallee pointed out that they seem to behave like creatures out of folklore, Keel that the phenomena resemble those investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century. Abductions and crop circles did nothing to clarify the issue, except to make us aware that we seemed to be dealing with beings whose powers were far greater than our own. Their ability to manipulate human beings, to take over our lives, control our minds and monitor our thoughts, seemed designed to make it clear that our notion that we are the most intelligent life form on Earth needs some serious revision.
Yet the work of Robert Monroe makes it clear that we are seeing only part of the picture. If his experiences are to be taken seriously, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we view ourselves. If we truly understood ourselves, we might have far less reason for feeling inferior to these beings. Monroe’s ability to leave his body strikes us as literally superhuman. The same is true of David Morehouse’s powers of remote viewing. Yet it seems that Morehouse is only one of a team who can all do it.
In fact, shamans all over the world have always taken such powers for granted. In From Atlantis to the Sphinx, I quoted Sir Arthur Grimble’s story of how, when he was commissioner of the Gilbert Islands, he witnessed ‘the calling of the porpoises’. The shaman fell asleep in his hut, then sent his ‘dream body’ to invite the porpoises to a feast; a few hours later, hundreds of porpoises proceeded to swim ashore, where they were slaughtered for meat. Clearly, the hypnotic power exercised by the shaman over the porpoises is not unlike that exercised by the alien abductors described by John Mack and Budd Hopkins.
Monroe gained his powers after experimenting with sounds in his ears, Morehouse after receiving a blow to the head. Jane O’Neill, whose ‘time slip’ at Fotheringhay I mentioned in an earlier chapter, was traumatised after helping rescue the victims of a traffic accident from a bus. She records how she was unable to sleep that night, seeing the terrible injuries of the passengers; on subsequent nights, she found that she could hardly sleep at all. Then she began seeing ‘visions’ that would suddenly obtrude on her normal consciousness; on one occasion, she told her friend Shirley, ‘I have just seen you in the galleys’, and Shirley replied, ‘That’s not surprising. My ancestors were Huguenots, who were punished by being sent to the galleys’. All these experiences culminated in her ‘time slip’, when she saw Fotheringhay church as it had been in the time of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Now it is interesting to ask: why did Jane O’Neill’s trauma not simply send her into depression or a nervous breakdown, instead of to flashes of ‘second sight’ and a time slip into a past century? The shock clearly caused some kind of ‘short circuit’ that enabled her, so to speak, to tune in to stations we normally tune out, because being tuned in to them would upset our normal balance. To know what Fotheringhay looked like in the time of Lady Jane Grey was certainly not essential to Jane O’Neill’s survival. It might have been interesting if she was a historian writing about Fotheringhay; otherwise, it was simply a useless piece of information.
My own observation has convinced me that most animals are telepathic. I have often noted that when I am eating, and I decide to throw a scrap to one of the dogs, she suddenly looks up and pays attention, although, a moment before, she had been lying passively, pretending not to notice. Our parrot knows when my wife is thinking of putting him back in his cage, and takes cover. Ingo Swann noted the same thing about his own parrot. With rare exceptions, human beings have lost this kind of sensitivity to telepathic signals.
I have cited elsewhere the case of a Dutch house painter named Peter van der Hurk, who, during World War Two, fell off a ladder and fractured his skull. When he woke up in hospital, he realised that he could read the minds of his fellow patients. Moreover, he could see into the future; as he shook the hands of a patient who was about to be discharged, he not only ‘knew’ he was a British agent, but also that he would be killed by the Gestapo. As a result of his prediction, he came close to being executed by the Dutch underground, who thought he was working for the Germans; fortunately, he managed to convince them that he was psychic.
The disadvantage of his new powers was that he was unable to return to work; he was simply unable to concentrate. His mind was like a radio set picking up more than one station at a time. He might have starved if he had not had the idea of using his powers on the stage in a mind-reading act. In due course, he changed his name to Peter Hurkos, and achieved fame through using his new abilities to help the police solve crimes.
Man needs his powers of concentration, of focusing on the present and anticipating the future, in order to stay alive. This is why, at some point in his history, he instinctively got rid of his ‘psychic powers’. For the same reason, carthorses used to be blinkered to prevent them being distracted by the traffic. David Morehouse’s accident, like Jane O’Neill’s and Peter van der Hurk’s, removed the blinkers, and made life suddenly far more nerve-racking.
It is probable that man began to get rid of his psychic faculties the moment he began to live in cities and had to pay more attention to bullock carts and jostling pedestrians than to predators. The moment we begin to focus intently upon any important problem, our senses automatically begin to cut out ‘irrelevancies’, and in cities, psychic abilities were less important than commercial acumen.
The problem—as everyone must have noticed—is that, when we become narrow and obsessive, we end by cutting out far more than we intended, and end up with a rather bleak and depressing view of reality. This is what has happened to our own civilisation. Our narrowness no longer serves the function of allowing us to concentrate on survival—which, in any case, is hardly the prime concern of most well-protected city dwellers—but merely traps us in a kind of tunnel vision that deprives us of any wider sense of meaning. It is probably true to say that there has never been a point in human history when humankind had a more depressing view of itself.
We need to change—that is self-evident. But change to what? Let me clarify the issue with another example.
In 1992, a Virginia publisher named Frank DeMarco received a typescript about the lives of Thomas and Martha Jefferson. He was struck by its vividness, and wondered how the author had learnt so much about the couple’s relationship. Finally, she admitted that she remembered being Martha Jefferson, adding, ‘You are free to regard me as a nut if you please’.
But DeMarco did not dismiss her as a nut. He believed in reincarnation, and at college had repeatedly hypnotised two friends and recorded their own impressions of past lives. And he suspected that he had also had glimpses of his own past lives, one of which involved a visit to Emerson at Concord.
DeMarco knew of Robert Monroe’s work, and had visited The Monroe Institute in 1990. In 1992, he went there again, listened to tapes whose purpose was to sychronise the two halves of the brain, and recorded his experiences in his journal.
The instructor was a man called Joseph McMoneagle who, like David Morehouse, had worked for the military as a remote viewer.[1] Given geographical coordinates, he could send his mind to look at whatever they represented.
McMoneagle wrote coordinates representing latitude and longitude on a board, and the group was asked to relax and try to ‘view’ the place. DeMarco did not succeed in remote viewing, but he suddenly felt that the coordinates represented the St. Louis Arch. He was certain he was wrong, for his own geography suggested that the place was in Kansas. But, when a photograph was projected on a screen, it was the St. Louis Arch.
In a later session, he began to have glimpses that he connected with Concord. Having been there, he had no problem in visualising Emerson’s house.
It was not, he says, like imagining Emerson’s house, but like watching a movie. He saw the scene and dialogue in completely realistic playback. He went to the back door, and a maid went off to get Mr. Emerson. He seemed to hear Emerson address him as Dr. Atwood.
In the dining room, he was introduced to Mrs. Emerson, and formed clear impressions of her as a person. He also sensed that she was gratified that her husband’s latest admirer regarded her as an individual, not merely as an adjunct of Emerson.
Thoreau arrived—he lived at the bottom of Emerson’s garden—and Atwood (DeMarco) felt he regarded him with a certain wariness, perhaps seeing him as a rival for the sage’s attention. Atwood disliked Emerson’s rather proprietorial attitude to his wife. Moreover, he felt he has seen her somewhere before. Emerson proposed that they walk down to Walden pond before dinner.
At which point, the voice of their instructor brought DeMarco back to the room in 1992.[2]
Now Jung had developed a therapeutic technique called ‘active imagination’, which involves visualising a scene so vividly that it takes on the ‘movie-like’ quality that DeMarco describes. DeMarco’s experience may have been simply a kind of ‘active imagination’. However, Monroe’s laboratory results, and his tests with three thousand subjects over a ten-year period, seem to indicate that it was probably more than that. And some of DeMarco’s own experiences at The Monroe Institute seem to support that view. He describes how, in a state of ‘Focus 10’ (body asleep—or deeply relaxed—and mind awake) he ‘took a walk’ down the corridor, down the stairs, and out of the door. Looking at the moon, he thought, ‘I can go there’, then decided instead to go to California, where Kelly, the author of the book on Jefferson, lived. Later, he received a letter from Kelly saying that she had seen him in her house.
There is strong evidence that the power of ‘psychic projection’ is more common than we generally suppose. One of the first works sponsored by the newly formed Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s was a vast study called Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, containing hundreds of examples. One of the classic cases concerns a student named Beard who, with an effort of will, succeeded in ‘projecting’ himself to the house of his fiancée Miss Verity, so that he was seen there by Miss Verity and her sister. Beard himself was unaware that he had succeeded; he was sitting in a chair in his own room, in a kind of trance. Again, W. B. Yeats has described how, when he was thinking intently about delivering a message to a fellow student, the student suddenly saw him in his hotel hundreds of miles away, where Yeats delivered the message. Yeats notes that he had no knowledge of ‘appearing’ to his friend.