Robert Monroe

"I did not see who was assisting me. However, just prior to the assistance, I saw someone sitting yoga-fashion, with robes and headpiece... Of all the helpers from whom I have obtained some repeatable identification, only one have I been able to identify a second time."

"In my visit to Agnew Bahnson in Locale II, someone held me in position to see him. The feeling of gentle but firm hands on each side of me was very strong. The same hands, turning me around to leave, much as one steers a blind person, could not have been more vivid. It was another case of a helper responding to a specific desire on my part."

"When I panicked, screamed, and prayed against the barrier on my way back, no help came. When I was being teased and tormented by the entities, no help came. When I was attacked by the beings so savagely, no help came. More accurately, if it did, I was not aware of it."

"Most of all, who quietly insisted that I return to the physical when I drifted in that seemingly eternal bliss? I don't know whether to be grateful or sad for that particular help."

"I was about to lift out when two hands held a book in front of my closed eyes. The book was riffled, turned around on all sides so that I could see that it was a book. The book was then opened, and I started to read. The gist of what I read was that in order willfully to bring back a condition, it was necessary to recreate the feeling of a similar experience that had occurred in the past (i.e., was a part of your memory). I took this to mean that one should think of the "feeling," rather than the details of the incident. Several illustrations were given, then gradually the book went out of focus as the vibrations faded, and try as I might, I could not continue reading. Finally, I sat up physically and made notes."

"Throughout man's history, the reports have been consistent. There are demons, spirits, goblins, gremlins, and assorted subhuman entities always hanging around humanity to make life miserable. Are these myths? Hallucinations?"

"After some twenty minutes of calming myself down, I returned to bed. I was naturally reluctant immediately to try to sleep again. I did not want a recurrence of the fight. I knew of no way to prevent it. I tried what seemed to be the only answer. (The alternative was to stay awake all night, and I was much too tired.) I lay there and repeated, "My mind and body are open only to constructive forces; in the name of God and good, I am going into normal restful sleep." I did, and awoke at my usual time in the morning. Before sleep came I had repeated the phrase at least twenty times."

"In retrospect, I still cannot find an alternative, nor do I know of any method, place, person, religious practice (that I would be sure of), drug, or anything else in my fund of knowledge, experience, and information that would absolutely guarantee protection against whatever attacked me. However, there must be something other than the pure "fighting back" in self-defense, even if you don't know what you are fighting. It was the same defense mechanism you would use if you were attacked by an animal at night in the jungle. You don't stop to find a way to fight in the middle of the fight. You don't stop to find out what attacked you. You fight to save yourself, with what you have now, the moment the animal attacks. You fight desperately, not thinking at the time how to fight, why you fight, whom you fight. You have been attacked; the unprovoked attack in itself seems to indicate to you that whatever is attacking you is not good, or else it would not attack you in this manner."

"Early in the experimentation, a side effect began to manifest itself. It was not an out-of-body activity as such, but took place in states of deep relaxation prior to any separation. It is evidently called in the trade "precognition." As I was lying down, my mind stilled and body relaxed, without my volition, the "vision" would occur."

"I would see and semiexperience an event or incident like a dream, except that I retained all of my consciousness and sense awareness. The dream would be superimposed directly over outside stimuli. I could perceive both quite readily. I could not and cannot produce the effect at will. It merely happened or was triggered by some non-conscious mechanism. At first, I paid no particular attention to the phenomenon, attributing the dream visions to release of material from the unconscious. A major event brought it strongly to my attention."

"My family and I are in a situation where the whole population of the city we live in is trying to leave. Gasoline is unavailable, electric power has been shut off. There is a great sense of fatality among everyone. It doesn't seem to be the product of atomic war, and there is no concern as to radioactive fallout. There is principally a feeling of doom and the breakup of civilization as we know it due to something momentous having taken place, a factor beyond human ability to control."

"The man who was my host looked at me and smiled, then took me over to the other side of the house overlooking the valley, indicating that he would show me another thing the device could do... A small fire was burning brightly on the hillside some three hundred yards away, with smoke curling up into the sky. He told me to use the narrow beam, and aim at the fire. I did, and immediately the fire went out. The flame shut off as if suddenly extinguished. The smoke held for a moment or so longer, then it too was gone."

"The basic characteristics noted have been confirmed many other times in various ways. Still, there appears to be no method to validate such evidence except by personal experience and observation by others. Perhaps this will come, in time."

"This Second Body has weight as we understand it. It is subject to gravitational attraction, although much less than the physical body. The physicist might explain this, of course, by saying that it is a question of mass, and anything that can interpenetrate a wall must have so little density as to be able to sift through the space between the molecular matter structure. Such little density implies very little mass—but it still may be matter. This is further supported by the half-out experiment, where the legs and hips were separated, then allowed to drift downward and drape over the bed. The low-density mass fell as a feather would fall. Pushing through the wall may be an example also."

"Having described the "physical" aspects of the Second Body, it would seem most important to examine how the mind apparently operates in reaction to the Second Body experience."

"The question posed most often is: How do you know you aren't dreaming, that what you experience is nothing more than a vivid dream or a hallucination of some sort?"

"As reported elsewhere, I was certain that these experiences were dreams or hallucinations for a long period in the early stages. They were seriously considered as something more only when evidential data began to accumulate."

"The experiences differ from the typical dream state principally in the following ways: (1) Continuity of some sort of conscious awareness; (2) Intellectual or emotional (or blends of the two) decisions made during the experiences; (3) Multivalued perception via sensory inputs or their equivalents; (4) Non-recurrence of identical patterns; and (5) Development of events in sequence that seem to indicate a time lapse."

"The duality of existence is completely contradictory to all available scientific training and human experience. Again, the ultimate proof of such affirmation is to experience one's self in this state of being."

"First and most obvious, there is no evidence of the male-female interpenetration. Attempts to express the need in such a functional manner become pathetic in retrospect. One discovers in frustration that it just doesn't happen that way in the Second State. Next, sensuality produced by the physical form of the sex counterpart is entirely absent. There is no distinct pattern of physical shape, either visually or by touch."

"There is an acute awareness of "difference," which is like radiation (as it may well be) from the sun, or a fire as felt by one shivering with cold. It is dynamically attractive and needed. This attraction varies in intensity with the individual... The "act" itself is not an act at all, but an immobile, rigid state of shock where the two truly intermingle, not just at a surface level and at one or two specific body parts, but in full dimension, atom for atom, throughout the entire Second Body. There is a short, sustained electron (?) flow one to another. The moment reaches unbearable ecstasy, and then tranquillity, equalization, and it is over."

"Why this takes place, why it is needed, I do not know, any more than the north pole of a magnet understands its "need" for the south pole of another magnet. Unlike the magnet, however, we can perceive objectively and ask "why." One fact is certain: as in the physical state, the act is equally needed in the Second. In some parts of Locale II, it is as ordinary as shaking hands."

"Throughout this writing, I have made many references to one evident fact; the only possible way for an individual to appreciate the reality of this Second Body and existence within it is to experience it himself."

"The experimenter will want to proceed in a manner that will produce consistent results, perhaps not every time, but often enough to validate the evidence to his own satisfaction. I believe that anyone can experience existence in a Second Body if the desire is great enough. Whether or not anyone should is beyond the scope of my judgment."

"The first step in making some kind of sense out of this mass of raw data was to set up standards for measurement and analysis. After several attempts, it became apparent that only a few of the typical yardsticks could be applied. Therefore, assumptions or premises were made to permit identification in the sorting process, and the conclusions brought forth are only as valid as the premises on which they are based."

"It will be very tempting to dismiss Robert Monroe as a madman. I would suggest that you not do that. Neither would I suggest that you take everything he says as absolute truth. He is a good reporter, a man I have immense respect for, but he is one man, brought up in a particular culture at a particular time, and therefore his powers of observation are limited. If you bear this in mind, but pay serious attention to the experiences he describes, you may be disturbed, but you may learn some very important things."

"In 1958, Robert Monroe floated out of his body for the first time. It began “without any apparent cause,” he wrote. His doctor, finding no physical ailment, prescribed tranquilizers. A psychologist friend, meanwhile, told me him to try leaving his body again. After all, the friend said, “some of the fellows who practice yoga and those Eastern religions claim they can do it whenever they want to.” Monroe did try it again—and again and again. He recalls these experiences in his classic 1971 book Journeys out of the Body, which launched the phrase “out-of-body experiences” into the public conversation. Monroe died in 1995, but the fascination with out-of-body experiences endures."