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.

By Mark Blacklock                                                                           August 2004

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