X-Meditators vs CIA, part 3
Dream Wars
In his non-fiction book, Men Who Stare at Goats, (2004), Jon Ronson suggested interrogation techniques used in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) are an extension of a process that began in the 1950s, under Project MK Ultra.
The link between LSD experiments, remote viewing, and Abu Ghraib is brain functionality — controlling it, enhancing it, or breaking down its defenses.
From a scientific research perspective, drugs and waterboarding are easier to study than remote viewing. Paranormal phenomenon may not be amenable to the research techniques stipulated by the American Institutes for Research.
The approach of concentrating on people with unusual abilities, like bending spoons at a distance, is also inherently dangerous for any scientist hoping for a certain result. That hope is incredibly easy to manipulate by magicians more practiced in deception that a couple of smart young scientists who were pretty sure they knew what was going on already.
Another approach would be to find a systematic process anybody could do, have your people go through it, observe what happens, and explain it.
Someone did that too, with Robert Monroe’s Out-of-Body-Experience (OBE) work, which by 1983 had become the Monroe Institute’s, Gateway Experience.
Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process
CIA sent people through Monroe’s, Gateway Experience in 1977 and opened a full inquiry in 1983. The inquiry did not have millions of dollars and a staff of colorful characters. Its final report was submitted as the work of one individual, an Army Intelligence Officer named Wayne M. McDonnell, who had been assigned the task of assessing potential military applications for a specific consciousness altering technique.
The entire purpose was to explain Monroe’s approach. It was called the Gateway Project and even though it “proved to be extremely involved and difficult” to describe how the brain could be upgraded and put to practical use in extending world domination, the report does it — by using Ben Bentov’s ideas about consciousness to explain Robert Monroe’s application.
No problem, right? Except for the fact that plenty of intelligent people then and now believe that Bentov and Monroe’s ideas are absolute bullshit.
The author of “Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process’ did not take the careful route. That’s unusual, except, apparently, when the Military investigates the paranormal.
The Gateway Experience is still the foundation on which the Monroe Institute rests. The product has been through many iterations and is now available online for $1,065. Well, not quite. That doesn’t include the actual course materials.
The public promises on the Web are appropriately vague, but in McDonnell’s report, the beneficial outcomes of the Gateway Experience do include handy skills like remote viewing and time travel.
McDonnell believed in it and he tells us exactly why in captivating detail, if only because Ben Bentov’s ideas are inherently captivating and detailed in their explanatory power — if you allow yourself to accept a holographic view of the universe that is not Settled Science.
The Report’s carefully worded conclusion would be considered a major stretch by many.
Bentov’s assumptions about consciousness and the human brain are not widely accepted. Linking anything that smacks of quantum effects to the brain is still mostly derided even you are Sir Roger Penrose.
McDonnell, or whoever he is, must have been aware of this bias as it was even more true in 1983 than it was ten years later when the scientific community told Penrose and Hameroff to keep their ideas about quantum effects inside the neuron to themselves.
The Report’s conclusion is astonishing in its stark understatement. But it is not the end. Things get even less normal.
“McDonnell” goes on to lay out a careful process for bringing significant numbers of soldiers, presumably, through the Gateway in a useful way. “Useful” meaning they can translate their out-of-body experience across space or time or both into actionable intel — not a slam dunk, as the mystics have been saying for quite a while now.
OK, we get that. It’s hard to translate into words. What else?
Encourage pursuit of full self-knowledge In all individuals involved in the foregoing experiments to enhance objectivity in out-of-body observation and thinking, and to remove personal energy blockages likely to retard rapid progress
Wow, nice touch in a military report. Personal energy blockage and all. OK.
Get ready for the Big Ones:
Non-Corporal Energy Forms!
Be Ready to Repulse Unwanted Presences!
Develop Accelerators for Advanced Progress!
And with that the author slips back into obscurity despite having proposed a coherent solution to problems scientists and philosophers have been working on for centuries!!!
McDonnell’s, “Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process” was declassified in September, 2003, twenty years after it was submitted.
US-British forces had a shaky hold on Baghdad and there were plenty of other newsworthy events to draw attention away from the report.
Why it was ever declassified at all is a great question.
Now anyone could see that CIA knew how to train people to transcend time and space.
Who would want that knowledge to be public?
And if people really can transcend time and space and bring back reports, why don’t we hear more about it? Why doesn’t everybody go through the Gateway Experience, no matter how much it costs?
It can’t be that simple, can’t be that cut-and-dry — just do this and access all knowledge, right? Then why is the Monroe Institute still going strong after almost fifty years?
The Monroe Institute is not Uri Geller.
Geller claims to have psychic abilities bestowed on him by extraterrestrials. He made a living from whatever his abilities are, sued the heck out of anyone who was nasty to him or used bent spoons in any way, and is living now with a comfortable $20 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
In 2019, Uri Geller stated to then-UK Prime Minister Teresa May that he would block Brexit with his mental powers. Maybe he really tried but was overmatched.
Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute claim to teach anyone how to develop psychic abilities using a technique they call Hemi-Sync (tm), which uses the phenomenon of binaural beat to achieve enhanced mental states. Hemi-Sync (tm)is a registered trademark for a process Monroe patented, seeing a way to package what traditional drummers have known forever.
The idea of creating altered states through participatory rhythmic experience is both ancient and as modern as Jam Bands.
Monroe transformed something marginal and only vaguely understood into a product based on the principle of rhythmic entrainment and the auditory phenomenon of Frequency Following Response (FFR). While almost every word in that last sentence deserves more careful attention, entrainment and FFR are merely a means to an end.
The goal of the brain wave manipulation is synced hemispheres; as the Monroe Institute puts it:
a state of consciousness defined when the EEG patterns of both hemispheres are simultaneously equal in amplitude and frequency.
That’s when the good times roll, because the left hemisphere’s powers are reduced. It is unable to filter out much of the natural activity of the right hemisphere, the groovy one, where coupling with Astral Plane frequencies happens all the time. We just don’t get to know about it.
Parental block removed, new layers of the Universe open up.
YMMV.
That has to be it, right? There can be an explicit patented process, but there is something deeply subjective and fundamentally un-’Scientific’ that is crucial to the experience.
Why did Lieutenant Colonel McDonnell add the recommendation about personal development and energy blockages? Did he witness a range of responses to the Gateway Experience among the military personnel who went through it? Why else would add that statement?
Reading his Report, it feels like the author(s?) had a set of experiences that none of his(their?) past education or beliefs could account for.
Lieutenant Colonel McDonnell was strongly driven to understand and describe whatever was happening using some kind of conceptual model. There are plenty of very smart and famous people he could have interviewed and quoted and then turned in something acceptable.
Instead he chose Ben Bentov’s model to explain how the Gateway Experience works.
