Robert Monroe Quotes

The best introduction to Locale II is to suggest a room with a sign over the door saying, "Please Check All Physical Concepts Here." If getting accustomed to the idea of a Second Body was an uneasy experience, Locale II may be hard to take.

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 moment I left the physical, I became aware of three beings in the room. I stayed cautiously close to my physical body as they came nearer. They started to pull at me, not hard, but deliberately as if to see what I would do. They were having a good time at it. I tried to stay calm, but there were three of them. I wasn't sure I could get back into the physical quickly enough before they pulled me away. So I prayed. Again, I used every prayer I knew. I asked God to help me. I prayed in the name of Jesus Christ for help. I tried a few saints I had heard of through my Catholic wife. The result? My tormentors laughed loudly and worked me over more enthusiastically. "Listen to him pray to his gods," one chuckled, most contemptuously. "Listen to him!" I think I got a little angry after that. I began to push back, got close to my physical body, and dove in. I wasn't exactly fighting back, but I certainly didn't remain passive.

The presentation of such material is not designed for any particular scientific group. Rather, the principal attempt is to be as specific as possible in language understandable to scientists and laymen alike, with avoidance of ambiguous generalities. The physicist, chemist, life scientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher may each use more technical or specialized terminology to state the same premise. Such interpretation is expected. It will indicate that the plan of communication is workable, that the "plain" talk does convey the proper meaning to a wide base rather than to a narrow pinnacle of specialists. It is expected, too, that many interpretations will be contradictory.

My first visits to Locale II brought out all the repressed emotional patterns I even remotely considered I had—plus many I didn't know existed. They so dominated my actions that I returned completely abashed and embarrassed at their enormity and my inability to control them. Fear was the dominant theme—fear of the unknown, of strange beings (non-physical), of "death," of God, of rule-breaking, of discovery, and of pain, to name only a few. Such fears were stronger than the sexual drive for union, which, as noted which, as noted elsewhere, was in itself a tremendous obstacle.

The best advice seemed to be to pray, meditate, fast, go to church, absolve my sins, accept the Trinity, believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, resist Evil, or resist not Evil, and give myself to God. All of this did nothing but add to the conflict.

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.

Most important, you are not alone. With you, beside you, interlocked in you are others. They do not have names, nor are you aware of them as shapes, but you know them and you are bonded to them with a great single knowledge. They are exactly like you, they are you, and like you, they are Home. You feel with them, like gentle waves of electricity passing between you, a completeness of love, of which all the facets you have experienced are but segments and incomplete portions. Only here, the emotion is without need of intense display or demonstration. You give and receive as an automatic action, with no deliberate effort. It is not something you need or that needs you. The "reaching out" is gone. The interchange flows naturally. You are unaware of differences in sex, you yourself as a part of the whole are both male and female, positive and negative, electron and proton. Man-woman love moves to you and from you, parent-child-sibling-idol and idyll and ideal—all interplay in soft waves about you, in you, and through you. You are in perfect balance because you are where you belong. You are Home.

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.

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.

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.

Paradoxically, the scientist today can conceive far more easily of the possibility of the area here labeled Locale III than that of Locale II. Why? Because it fits his latest discoveries in physics, small bits of evidence he has uncovered in his experiments with matter bombardment, accelerators, cyclotrons, etc. The best way to get acquainted with Locale III is to take the significant experiments leading up to it directly from the notes.

This is all I can report. The Old, Established Way is not enough. Or as I say, perhaps I am not qualified. Worse still, it may be that my prayer training was insufficient or improper. At any rate, it didn't work for me.

It is an immensity whose bounds are unknown (to this experimenter), and has depth and dimension incomprehensible to the finite, conscious mind. In this vastness lie all of the aspects we attribute to heaven and hell (See Chapter VIII), which are but part of Locale II, It is inhabited, if that is the word, by entities with various degrees of intelligence with whom communication is possible.

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.