Ghost Columnist

If you've been following this blog you know I like Robert Monroe, pioneering author on Out-of-Body Experience. After I'd had a bunch of spontaneous OOBE's, I attended his formal training programs at the Monroe Institute in Virginia. I like Monroe because he was free of doctrine and dogma and bullshit, he had an experimental try-anything approach, and he wrote very interesting stuff. Particularly his book "Far Journeys". I've read and re-read that, over 10 times now. Always a new insight there.

Last time I was over there training I picked up a CD recording of an old Gateway Radio program featuring an interview with Monroe. To my knowledge this interview has never been transcribed or offered on the net in any fashion. And it has something that doesn't appear in any of his books, his succint summary of why we fling ourselves into this human madness in the first place.

So you lucky dogs, I have culled the most interesting little segment out of the whole CD and there it is right below for your reading pleasure. I call this post "Ghost Columnist" because today's writer is my guest Robert Monroe, and hey, he's dead.

You may not agree with his analysis You should know by now that I couldn't care less about your opinions! Just read it for its inherent interest.

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INTERVIEWER: Why are we here? Why do we incarnate, from your perspective?

MONROE: Why are we here? Well the fundamental pattern you have to understand, first of all, you know as I’ve described it there are a number of ways that brought us here, things that made us come in and be human. One of these is curiosity of course. And then another is the fact that you perceive this writhing mass of disorganized thought and you want to be a missionary and change it all. There’s all these various reasons. But the key reason that brings most of us in is that we feel that if we can go through this experience, this is what we want. Why? Because we have encountered a Graduate of this school, of this experience. In other words a person who had gotten through being human and had accumulated all the human values. We experience it and we’re so deeply involved in it, that we don’t understand these values. We don’t even see them, but they’re there.

 What are we talking about? Well first and foremost, it’s very simple, to acquire and grow an analytical intellect. A “left brain” as it were. That’s one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable, things that we acquire. I can’t tell you how exquisitely important and valuable that is, in these other energy systems, out of Time-Space.

 Take the next thing. We so casually learn to manipulate energy we don’t even think about it. I move my arm, I talk, I’m using what appears to be mechanical energy, but there’s an awful lot of different types of energy related to it. And I do it very easily, very naturally. It’s manipulating energy. But you know, that experience, the simple thing of me waving my hand, has tremendous value in the knowledge and ability to control other energies and other energy systems. Instead of a hand, you have something else, but you’ve learned the process of manipulation of energy.

 And the third thing is, that you get into this accumulation of all types of emotional knowledge. And you follow and accumulate these. The only problem that happens is, and this is so obvious, we get lured in for one reason or another. And we say I would go through that process a thousand or a hundred thousand times in order to be like that Graduate that you met.

 But the problem is that we in rushing in to do this, we say “Oh I’ll take a quick taste of it and then I’m gone". Doesn’t work that way. What happens is that we think we have enough energy to achieve escape velocity and go on as it were – not so. When we get in to a physical earth life, we pick up a load factor. These are emotions and other types of things. And also there’s a lot of friction and that reduces our speed so unknowingly when we leave this first physical life sojurn we don’t have enough energy to achieve escape velocity. So we begin a curve, we begin to fall into an orbit. And there’s no karma, there’s no law that says you must do this, no law. There’s nothing other than you who make this decision. What you do is, it’s done this way, you rationalize this. You say “Oh, I’ve got to go back because I had only two children and I wanted four.” So you go back, and you recycle again, into another life. Because you didn’t get done what you wanted to do in that life. Then you come back up here and you’re still aware, when you exit a physical life, you are still aware, in those early parts, of where you came from and what you are, but each time, as that orbit decays, you get less into that energy field and more into this big, powerful human energy stuff. Each time you come up, you think of a reason to go live again. It’s not a law of karma that I can find, it’s my addiction. So we keep recycling, recycling, recycling.