Ahhh... okay. No worries, Wants2.
One reason I commented was last night I had one of those terribly true and basic realisations that made a lot of what I'd previously believed completely wrong. You know - I both hate and love those...
What I'd realised is that many of the times I felt I was OOB or in touch with God in the past, I was simply being me, being happy, being centered. Not OOB, not having a spiritual experience with the Big Man Upstairs - none of that. For someone raised Catholic, that was a big deal to realise.
HUH! I thought. And OUCH! I've been stupid.
I still believe in God, but now I also have greater faith in the energy I personally generate than I did before. Faith in me.
So... OOBs? To me, they were part of that whole misunderstanding.
God doesn't make a lot of house calls, if he/she/it ever does at all. I am convinced that level of spirituality is not obtainable in life and I'm satisfied to seek simpler things like living a better life and becoming a better person.
So about this place - new cult, ya think? Scn offshoot?
Unequivicaly - the Monroe Institute is not a cult and not religious.
If you do some research on Robert Monroe, the now-deceased founder, what you will find is that he was a radio and TV executive and expert amateur pilot who spontaneously began to have out-of-body experiences starting in 1958 while he was experimenting with sleep-learning technology.
He needed a new direction for his company and as the initial step for studying sleep learning needed to induce sleep.
He started having strange symptoms that made him think he was having a heart attack. He was checked by doctors who said that he wasn't. The symptoms settled down into vibrations that recurred so often before he went to sleep that he got used to them and found them merely annoying.
It turns out that the so-called "vibrational state" is a very common precursor to out-of-body experiences. It varies in intensity from a gentle buzzing to an intense sensation that feels like the roaring of a train. You can detect this if you pay attention while you are on the cusp between sleep and waking. It doesn't always precede OBEs but is very common.
One night, while experiencing the vibrations, he was also thinking about the excellent weather conditions for going soaring in a light aircraft the next day. He found himself bumping into something and thought perhaps he'd fallen out of bed. Then he spotted something like a waterfall in the middle of the room.
At some point, he looked down (obviously he was now out of his body but unaware of it) and saw what he thought was a stranger in bed with his wife. He also realized that the waterfall was the chandelier. He realized that the stranger in bed with his wife was him! He got scared and ended up back in his body.
The OBE was very frightening so he again got himself checked by doctors, including a friend who was either a psychiatrist or a psychologist. This doctor was aware that OBEs are described in eastern religions and advised Monroe to study them.
Being both curious and having a scientific background in sound engineering as well as training as a pilot, Monroe devised his own informal experiments to see if the OBE state had an objective aspect, i.e. could he, for example, chose to travel somewhere in the OB state and observe information that he could later confirm?
He was able to do this and eventually created a lab in his home in which people could have OBEs while hooked up to galvanic skin response meters and other devices that measure aspects of body functions.
There was (and may still be) a missile defense research site located close to Monroe's home and he invited some of the scientists there to visit him to discuss building his lab for exploring OBEs. Several scientists went and two volunteered to help Monroe: Tom Campbell, an applied physicist and an engineer.
They helped Monroe set up his lab and in return he taught them to have OBEs at will. They spent years doing research together on the OB state, along with other subjects who were very good at achieving the state at will.
Tom Campbell writes about this in his book My Big TOE (theory of everything - the physicists' holy grail of theories).
Monroe eventually retired from radio and TV to build the Monroe Institute to instruct people in how to have OBEs. It still operates. It is not in any way a cult. It's a business or school for learning to alter your consciousness.
Being honest, they do not guarantee that you will have an OBE if you take a class, since it is beyond anyone's ability to guarantee such a thing. People arrive at the courses with varying states of health, varying levels of aptitude, varying attitudes, fears, blockages, previous experience, openness, etc.
Therefore, since they don't make inflated or false promises, they don't offer a guarantee that you'll have an OBE. But that doesn't mean that many people don't. Like many things in life, the result you get tends to be based on how disciplined you are in your work to achieve your goal.
It's like training a muscle - even if you pay a personal trainer, you still have to do the exercises consistently, along with other behavior that helps achieve your goal (like refraining from damaging yourself through excess or neglect).
And no one can say precisely when or exactly how you will see results, since each person is different.
If it were a cult, they would make false promises. Reputable organizations don't.
You can take classes there, one or many, but there is no charismatic leader who is followed as either a dictator or as a demi-god. If you take a course, you are not relentlessly hustled to take more.
Monroe was a very rare person who after constant study and practice learned to leave his body at will and to manipulate his consciousness through states that he referred to as simply different focuses.
His books are interesting and his classic Journeys Out of the Body is a classic. The next two require more patience to understand because as he became more adept at altering his focus in the OB state, the experience becomes harder to translate into words.
There's an elderly retired doctor in Brazil named Waldo Vieira who also learned to have OBEs at will. He has written a lot of books that have been translated into English. His studied states of consciousness extensively, of which OBEs are but one of many categories. Being a doctor and therefore comfortable with Latin, he coined his own vocabulary to avoid occult terminology to describe various phenomena. This vocabulary demands learning a lot of new terms and that can be cumbersome and off-putting.
Vieira has created both a national (in Brazil) and international organization (the IAC or International Academy of Consciousness) to teach people to have OBEs and spiritual evolution. He also has not created a cult or a religion but instead a way to help people grasp the concept of spiritual evolution and develop the tools to proceed safely for themselves. The IAC openly runs substantially with volunteer teachers who themselves are adept at having OBEs.
I've taken one of their classes. They do not pressure you to do more. In fact, they can be a bit hard to reach when you want to contact them!
Another very articulate and adept OBEr, who sometimes teaches at the Monroe Institute, is William Buhlman. He taught himself to have OBEs in about three weeks of practice while he was in college studying computer science and gives very good exercises to learn how to do this. His books Adventures Beyond the Body and The Secret of the Soul are also excellent.
Another scientist who has had and written about his OBEs is Albert Taylor, a NASA engineer.
These men all have hard science backgrounds and none of them approach this through religion.
The point of learning to have OBEs is that there are very real benefits to experiencing your consciousness outside of your body in a lucid state: reduction of the fear of death and many other forms of direct spiritual learning that are the result of personal experience, not book learning, not taking information on faith, not listening to others' lectures, etc. Just direct experience of our non-physical reality. Which ultimately is our fundamental nature.
I think they regard what they are doing as reminding us of what we already know rather than teaching something new.
Interesting.. glad you wrote that letter. Dilpickle
male body, "just because". Also if you did that "scientific" 1m prize stuff you'd never get paid. You'd do whatever tricks they want and first thing THEY'D WANT YOU TO DO IT AGAIN. And again and again and again etc etc etc. You'd end up in some secret military lab with electrodes up your ass and hard-wired to your brain in their attempt to control you and weaponize you. The reason no one is interested in the 1m prize is they KNOW at some level what would happen to them. It probably happened to them before on Buttwipe 3 in the hemmoroid galaxy. 
I thought, "OK, here's is somebody who knows about all this stuff, how refreshing." Too bad Hubbard and his enablers had to inject all his bullshit 'take over the world' ambitions into it.
