This Arti­cle is Cour­tesy of Fortean Times

Remote View­ing at the Mon­roe Institute

Since its per­haps sur­pris­ing accep­tance as a sur­veil­lance device within the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, Remote View­ing has gone through a trans­for­ma­tion to become part of the New Age toolkit. Mark Black­lock vis­its one of RV’s elder states­men in the USA.

Was Atwa­ter party to exper­i­ments explor­ing poten­tial influ­enc­ing of remote subjects?

“We have used with Remote View­ing a form of remote hyp­no­sis. Dur­ing inter­ro­ga­tion, hav­ing a remote viewer sug­gest to the per­son that’s being inter­ro­gated that if he coop­er­ates he’ll get to see his fam­ily again. Now, could some­one twist that story into a wild tale of mind con­trol? Yes, but those same peo­ple would take a psy­chi­a­trist and say that the word ther­a­pist, when you spell it out, is ‘the rapist’. In my expe­ri­ence this idea of mind-control is mostly fic­tion and sells books and makes good movies.”

I men­tion that Atwate r’s life now, at the Mon­roe Insti­tute, seems a far cry from his mil­i­tary career. For him, it was always going to be thus. “I think that in my younger years I was sort of guided into that unit in the mil­i­tary so that I could learn about that. Now I think that the real value of this ESP or Remote View­ing is not in the infor­ma­tion that you uncover, not in find­ing missed chil­dren or hid­den secrets of the enemy, or miss­ing ter­ror­ists for that mat­ter, I think the real value is in self-discovery: who you really are, that you are more, in fact, than your phys­i­cal body; that you’re inter­con­nected, one with every­one else, in a very unusual way. That you are on a path of evo­lu­tion­ary con­scious­ness and that when you become aware of this you are respon­si­ble then for the evo­lu­tion of your own consciousness.”

It will per­haps come as lit­tle sur­prise that Atwa­ter, like Dr Miller, was raised by “meta­phys­i­cally ori­ented par­ents… What the nor­mal pop­u­la­tion would con­sider quite odd was nor­mal in my fam­ily. So when I stum­bled serendip­i­tously into this pro­gramme in the mil­i­tary, it seemed quite nat­ural to me.”

He speaks in incred­i­bly mea­sured tones and seems like a man at home with every­thing he says and does. He car­ries his large frame lightly and often talks in hom­i­lies, or what seem like pre-prepared spiels.

I become con­scious of the fact that what­ever I ask him, he seems happy with. This could, I am sure, in another mind become evi­dence of his influ­ence over the con­ver­sa­tion. Occa­sion­ally, how­ever, and par­tic­u­larly on ques­tions which refer to proof or evi­dence, his hom­i­lies wan­der a little.

For exam­ple, Atwater’s answer to the admit­tedly obvi­ous ques­tion “is there any­thing to do with altered states of con­scious­ness that can be empir­i­cally ver­i­fied?” while express­ing laud­able sen­ti­ments, does seem to dodge the issue:

“I under­stand where your ques­tion comes from. I think that the answer is that love is a com­mon expe­ri­ence. I think that peo­ple in these var­i­ous states of con­scious­ness, when they approach their sit­u­a­tion with love, they all tend to report the same thing. For exam­ple, heal­ing. Heal­ing and love are con­nected in all instances of report­ing. So there is a feel­ing that that must be a uni­ver­sal truth, that true heal­ing comes from this emo­tion we iden­tify as love.”

He points out, rea­son­ably, the impos­si­bil­ity of mea­sur­ing sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence and draw­ing direct lines between brain activ­ity and what is actu­ally appear­ing in someone’s mind’s eye. He does, how­ever, put great faith in research being under­taken at the Par­al­abs at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity which does seem to pro­duce mea­sur­able results, research into the idea that “when there is some sort of focused aware­ness of an event hap­pen­ing, sub­atomic ran­dom­ness seems to col­lapse just a lit­tle bit.”

“It is as though con­scious­ness itself is affect­ing the sub­atomic world,” he says. “Note that I said, ‘as though’. It may not really be that. It may just be that a prop­erty of focused con­scious­ness is non-randomness, that they may be co-existent events, not one caus­ing the other.

“We’re inter­ested in that in terms of our group classes here. When we run group classes of 25 peo­ple and they’re all intently con­cen­trat­ing on one thing, is that affect­ing our local ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tors? I’m run­ning ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tors for our pro­grammes to see if that’s hap­pen­ing. Can we recre­ate that anom­aly with smaller groups of people?”

But any hope that we might see these results is also slim. “We don’t have the data yet,” he says. “This is ongoing.”

The idea of col­lec­tive con­scious­ness is key to the Mon­roe credo. There is much inter­est in a par­tic­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tion of the Jun­gian idea of arche­types (see FT171:42–47), and specif­i­cally light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel type near-death expe­ri­ences. But a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent arche­types, per­haps bet­ter referred to as clichés, can be found scat­tered around the Mon­roe Insti­tute buildings.

“Dol­phins are big here,” explains Dr Miller when I ask her about these. “Rain­bows. Crys­tals. I don’t think it’s any mis­take that cer­tain com­mon ones keep com­ing back and show up here. If we all share this con­scious­ness and there’s some­thing like a dol­phin, which rep­re­sents non-human intel­li­gence, it becomes a sym­bol for that that’ll pop up wher­ever appropriate.”

I sug­gest that the selec­tion of such sym­bols is at best arbi­trary and at worst based on igno­rance of what lies behind the sym­bol in ques­tion, with ref­er­ence par­tic­u­larly to the behav­iour of male dol­phins, which have been dis­cov­ered to per­pe­trate group rapes upon females. Dr Miller isn’t phased. “We don’t like to talk about those. They dimin­ish the spirituality.”

Atwa­ter is slightly more cagey on the New Age clichés. “Because Bob Mon­roe was a seri­ous busi­ness­man him­self, the imprint that he left here was that this was not so much ‘woo-woo’ – I don’t know how you’re going to spell that – it’s not airy-fairy, it’s ‘this is the facts the way I dis­cov­ered them’. We don’t have a doc­trine. We don’t wear white robes or eat only tofu. But you will find the occa­sional crys­tal out here. Peo­ple like that kind of thing.”

Indeed, you will find “the occa­sional crys­tal” out here. A five-ton mon­stros­ity sits eight feet (2.4m) high in the field below the Nancy Penn Cen­ter. Back at the Acorn Inn that night, Mar­tin tells us it was trans­ported from Brazil, at great per­sonal expense, by a Mon­roe stu­dent.
Per­haps the strongest mes­sage com­ing through from both Atwa­ter and Dar­lene Miller is that ‘the group’ is very impor­tant to Mon­roe Insti­tute programmes.

The idea of group energy and syn­ergy is held aloft like a holy chal­ice, and this nec­es­sar­ily raises cer­tain ques­tions about the psy­chol­ogy of groups, about what might hap­pen when a group of peo­ple intently wants to achieve a pre­scribed result in terms of their con­scious expe­ri­ence.
“Do I think there’s any kind of mass hal­lu­ci­na­tion going on? No, I don’t,” says Dr Miller.
An odd sticker on Atwater’s desk elu­ci­dates the behav­iour of Mon­roe groups quite unex­pect­edly. The sticker reads ‘Ask me about Focus 55’. Mainly because it seems churl­ish not to, I do ask Atwa­ter about Focus 55.

“This is a cute sticker,” he says. “Bob Mon­roe assigned num­ber lev­els for these dif­fer­ent win­dows in con­scious­ness, start­ing out with 10, 12, 15, 21. Well, there is no such thing as 55. But peo­ple get what I call focus envy. They start say­ing, ‘Well I was in 27’ – ‘Well I was in 36’. And so this always reminds me the num­bers don’t always mean any­thing and a big­ger num­ber is not bet­ter than a smaller num­ber. They are just arbi­trary labels.”

A val­ley away, past the hand­ful of bars, restau­rants and shops that makes up Nellysford, Jim Meiss­ner lives in a ram­shackle house sur­rounded by trail­ers. In his trail­ers he keeps his equip­ment: elec­tron­ics gear, machine tools, enough sol­der, nails, screws and wire to fill a hard­ware store. We’d met Meiss­ner in Bistro 151, a sports bar and pizza joint in Nellysford, the night before we went to Mon­roe. We’d been chat­ting to Jane, the bar lady, when Jim had over­heard our conversation.

“You guys are here to go to Monroe?”

“Yeah, we’re writ­ing a story about it.”

“You should write a story about me.”

Meiss­ner was in his early six­ties, wear­ing thick-lensed pre­scrip­tion glasses and a stripy short-sleeved shirt with pens in the top pocket, a look immor­talised by Michael Dou­glas in the film Falling Down. But he exuded none of the aggres­sion of Douglas’s char­ac­ter. He was calm, friendly, per­haps a bit of a nerd. And, as he explained that night, he could heal people.

He had been drawn to Nellysford by the Mon­roe Insti­tute. Fol­low­ing the death of his wife, he’d upped sticks from his home on the West Coast and come to Mon­roe to show them his inven­tion: a box which took Robert Monroe’s Hemi-Sync tech­nol­ogy and amped it up ten-fold. Or so he claimed.

“I used to lis­ten to Bob Monroe’s tapes but they weren’t strong enough for me. So I improved on the Hemi-Sync technology.”

As an elec­tri­cal engi­neer spe­cial­is­ing in audio engi­neer­ing, Jim had the skills to do this. He’d made his Brain State Syn­chro­nizer and taken it to Mon­roe and to Atwa­ter. “Skip Atwa­ter called me a snake-oil sales­man,” Meiss­ner told me with a hang-dog look. He’d been sent pack­ing, con­demned to reside in the next val­ley and to sell his inven­tion online.

I’d asked Atwa­ter about Meiss­ner. He had remem­bered him, refer­ring to him as a “Mr Wiz­ard type of guy, an inven­tor”, and explained that he’d politely passed when offered the inven­tion, hav­ing no need for it. But if Meissner’s ver­sion of events was true, and Atwater’s com­ment to him more than a lit­tle disin­gen­u­ous, it wasn’t hard to see why Meissner’s pres­ence might not have been seen as help­ful to the smooth oper­a­tion of the Mon­roe Institute.

Within min­utes of being invited into Meissner’s house, I felt a lit­tle uneasy and won­dered if Meiss­ner him­self might be hav­ing sec­ond thoughts about see­ing us. Per­haps his bravado of the other evening had been fuelled by alco­hol. Cer­tainly, he was a lit­tle more ner­vous as he showed us around his messy, cob­webby home, the per­fect habi­tat for a mad inventor.

He made it clear that he would rather I didn’t report cer­tain areas of his research. He was con­cerned that in so doing I would draw the atten­tion of the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment to his activ­i­ties, which he didn’t want. He explained why what he was doing rep­re­sented such a threat to gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­larly the Health Admin­is­tra­tion. I promised him that I would not report on this research and intend to keep my word.

Suf­fice it to say, how­ever, that unless I’m very much mis­taken, Meissner’s research is in no way ille­gal, nor indeed of any par­tic­u­lar use to any­one but a hand­ful of peo­ple who share the same inter­ests as Jim. His speak­ers are pretty impres­sive, though.

A lot of jar­gon is employed at the Mon­roe Insti­tute. There is much talk of “men­tal dimen­sions”, “con­ducive states of con­scious­ness”, and “realms of hyp­n­a­gogic imagery”.

It must be hard for those who have under­gone what they feel to be consciousness-altering expe­ri­ences to put such expe­ri­ences into words, and it is per­haps unavoid­able that this sort of jar­gon has to be employed to pin down con­cepts larger than words them­selves. Nev­er­the­less, by the time we leave I’m not sure I’m any the wiser about consciousness.

Before we did leave, I asked to try out some Hemi-Sync tapes. Atwa­ter put me in the iso­la­tion cham­ber. Pro­tected from elec­tri­cal radi­a­tion and wear­ing head­phones which brought his gen­tle coax­ings to me through the Fara­day Cage, I dozed off, lis­ten­ing to the sounds of lap­ping water and Bob Monroe’s voice as they mixed down into phased tones.

I was in for an hour, appar­ently, and Atwa­ter and pho­tog­ra­pher Justin Can­ning were able to hear my snor­ing through the micro­phones. I came out feel­ing incred­i­bly spacey. I couldn’t say whether it had been any more pos­i­tive an expe­ri­ence than your aver­age mid-afternoon snooze, but I know I’d need a lot more Hemi-Sync before I could attempt Remote Viewing.

One thing is cer­tain: Bob Mon­roe has achieved immor­tal­ity, in a fash­ion, and proved his the­o­ries about life after death.

And it’s not just that the Insti­tute is named after him. His voice lives on in the very fab­ric of the build­ings, piped into the check-in units, the iso­la­tion cham­ber, spool­ing and spin­ning on tapes and discs. The Insti­tute is a tem­ple to Mon­roe, sculpted from the sound of his voice. His benign pres­ence is every­where. Whether it actu­ally inter­feres with the video pre­sen­ta­tion equip­ment or forms non-corporeal hazes around the check-in units is open to debate. But it is unde­ni­able that he lives on as long as the Insti­tute remains in this beau­ti­ful cor­ner of Vir­ginia… and else­where, as long as his record­ings are played.

This Arti­cle is Cour­tesy of Fortean Times