Remembering Robert Monroe and Journeys Out of the Body with Tom Campbell, author of My Big TOE -- IFiEobvvA7A

[00:00:00] Keep watching to learn what the author of My Big Toe has to say about six years spent with Robert Monroe, the author of Journeys Out of the Body. Book three in the New Thinking Aloud dialogue series is UFOs and UAP. Are we really alone? Now available on Amazon. New Thinking Aloud is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully [00:00:30] accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parasychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. You can now download a free PDF copy of issue number eight of the New Thinking Aloud magazine or order a beautiful [00:01:00] printed copy. Go to newthinkingaloud.org. Thinking Aloud. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Michionlo. Hello and welcome. I'm [00:01:30] Jeffrey Michionlo. Today we are going to remember the life and work of Robert Monroe, the author of Journeys Out of the Body. And I'm honored to have with me here in my studio in Albuquerque, Tom Campbell, who was a longtime colleague and student of Robert Monroe and is the author of a three volume series of books describing a theory of everything called [00:02:00] My Big Toe. Tom is also the originator of a internet experience called Tom's Park which is an opportunity for people to enter experientially into the theory that he has developed. Welcome Tom. Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to be with you. People have been asking me to interview you since I [00:02:30] first started this YouTube channel 10 years ago. And I'm delighted that the opportunity has come not only to do it, but to do it here face to face. Yes. How convenient that we find out um you and I that we are neighbors. We're only probably a mile apart or so. At least for a brief period of time. At least for a brief period. Yeah. It seems that you and I were both exposed to the work of Robert Monroe around the same year, 1972. [00:03:00] Yes, I met Bob uh at the very beginning of that year, maybe even late 71. I that was a long time ago, but uh that was about the time that u myself and a bunch of the people I worked with went out to see Bob and Row. And my reason for going out to see Bob was to see whether he was for real or whether he was just trying to sell books. You know, was he uh the real deal or something else? Because I'd [00:03:30] had a an experience of something that was unusual, being able to solve certain problems in consciousness that I couldn't have solved nearly so easily uh in a in an awake state. So that kind of primed me for Robert Monroe. I already knew that there was something else going on that was important and very significant that was outside of the physical world. But at the same time you were working as a physicist and I assume [00:04:00] you were largely holding the mindset of a conventional physicist being materialism. Yeah, absolutely. Well, probably it was a year or two before I met Bob and Row that I had that experience. Actually, it was debugging software in my mind in a meditation state. And it was it was such a a powerful experience that that kind of shocked me out of the usual physicist [00:04:30] viewpoint of reality which is called an operational definition of reality as it's titled. And what that means that if you can't perform an operation on it, if you can't measure it, if you can't weigh it, if you can't physically interact with it, then it either doesn't exist or if it does, it's irrelevant because if you can't interact with it, then what good would it existence be? So that's typically what physicists today also believe. It's his operational definition of reality. But [00:05:00] when I had that experience where I could bring up my my code, you know the how those how that code is laid out in long long pieces of paper all attached to each other and I just scrolled it by and I found the cards, this was back in punch card days, that the cards that had errors on them uh would stand out to me. They would change color. They would be colored red and the rest would be, you know, the normal kind of color. So, I [00:05:30] thought, well, that's kind of silly. Let's see. Let's see how that works. And I went up and checked my cards. And sure enough, that cards that were red were the cards that had problems on it. So, I said, "Wow, what a coincidence. When you're a physicist, it's hard to uh to get out of that mindset." So, I did more of it. And it was clear that I was getting information that was otherwise unknowable. For instance, in those days, one of the [00:06:00] errors that would bomb your your job was a key punch error. Mhm. So, the hole wasn't exactly where it was supposed to be. It was a half of a millimeter, you know, too far this way or that. And there really wasn't any way to see that. Looking at it, it all looked perfectly correct. And it told me about some of those errors as well. That card would be red. I'd go up and check it and say, "Ah, okay, a problem. This didn't work. This card's perfectly fine. But my job [00:06:30] still bombed. So I went back to that card, pulled it out, retyped it, and the card punched. Got a new card and it worked fine. Now, when you say the card was red, you was it actually red or was this a visual experience? This was a visual experience. The cards were all Manila, you know, the same color as a manila folder. And um in those days, that was the only interface to computers. So there's something about your own consciousness that was or your subconscious, one might say, giving you [00:07:00] additional information, right? But it was information I'd asked for. I was sitting there and like most technical people, I work all the time, which means even when I'm not supposed to be working and I'm supposed to be doing something else, the problems are still in my head and I'm still thinking about them. So I was doing meditation and I happened to think, I wonder why my job's bombing. What's What's wrong? I've been over those cards and over those cards and I can't find what's wrong. I wonder what [00:07:30] the problem is. And then there it was. There's my my printouts which I, you know, I I was also the programmer. I programmed the whole thing. So, I was intimately, you know, knowledgeable about every line, every semicolon, every, you know, every letter there. So, I looked at it and then one card just stood out. was red. And I looked a little more. Another car stood out with the color. So these were just colors to to differentiate those cards from the [00:08:00] other cards. And I found out then just from trial and error that those were the ones that had errors on them. And it worked. So I played with it. You know, I'm a scientist. I I want to understand how reality works. And after I don't know after some months of playing with it I realized that the operational definition of reality was lacking that there was another part of reality that was [00:08:30] beyond the physical. It's something that you couldn't measure. It wasn't measurable. It was all mental. It was in mind space. And that there was another whole part of reality that I didn't know anything about. And as a physicist, my job is to model reality. That's what physics does. We try to model reality. So it was a big aha moment to me to say, "Oh, there's a lot more to reality than I thought. I wonder how I could model [00:09:00] that, how I could understand it. How does it work?" Because it obviously wasn't random. There was logic involved. I didn't just get random things. I got very precise things, things that were unknowable, a card hole, you know, punch hole that wasn't precisely lined up. And that isn't something that really could be known even by looking at it. They just got eliminated by, you know, that was [00:09:30] it. You know, you just started retyping cards because you knew there could be a problem. So, you just would make new cards until the deck would work. So, you had a reason to visit Robert Monroe at that point? Well, I did, but I didn't know anything about Robert Monroe at that point. Another year later after that, and I got some pretty good reputation for being able to debug code and a lot of would you help me debug my code? But, uh, I didn't want to talk [00:10:00] about it because you don't talk about those things in a physics community. So, I kept it pretty much to myself. So, I take this job and my boss comes in. I'd only been there for like, I don't know, a few weeks. I was very new in the office. And he tosses Robert Monroe's book to me and says, "Tom, read this book and tell me what you think of it." So, he said, that was Bill Yoast. He was the branch manager of where I worked. [00:10:30] And changed your life. Changed my life. So, I said, "Okay." Okay. And I read the book over the next week and I said, "Well, here's what I think. If this guy's telling the truth, if he really did experience that, then wow, there's a whole bigger set of reality, which I knew from my experience that existed. So that's why I was so open to it. There's another whole bunch of reality that I don't know anything about. If that's the case, we need to connect with this guy and and talk to him more." I said, "On the other hand, maybe he just trying to [00:11:00] sell books and make some money. you know, maybe it's just you write something really fast as a full and and far out and you'll sell books that way. I didn't know which way it would be until about I don't know maybe a month later my boss came in and said, "We found Bob Monroe. He doesn't live that far away. Let we talked to him and we're all invited out to his house. Do you want to come?" I said, "Absolutely." So, a bunch of us, maybe two cars, maybe [00:11:30] four, five, six people in each car. It was jammed, you know, full. We all went out to Bob Monrose. And that was the first time I met Bob. So, my viewpoint there was, is this guy for real or is this guy just a clever, you know, hocus pocus guy wanting to get some money? And I met him and he was very straightforward. He was um he acted actually and had the [00:12:00] demeanor of an engineer. I don't think he actually was an engineer by training. He was in radio and other things, but he acted like an entrepreneur basically. Yeah, he was an entrepreneur and uh at that time he was just starting a cable company, Jefferson Cable in Charlottesville, Virginia. So it was um he got there first. So all of Charlottesville was his for the picking for cable and cable was a brand new thing in that time. So he was well to [00:12:30] do. And as I approached his property in this car with all the others, I noticed the the I don't know quarter mile of whiteboard fence, the pastures, the lake, the big house on the hill, and said, "This guy doesn't need to sell books. This guy is not trying to sell, you know. He was very wellto-do. Yeah, he was a wellto-do gentleman. Lived on about 500 acres, had a tenant farmer who [00:13:00] did farming for him and uh had a beautiful house with a beautiful view out in the Virginia countryside. He was a a wellto-d do Virginia gentleman. In in my case, I knew that he was legitimate because in 1973, I was a graduate student in parasychology working with Charlie Tart was one of my dissertation committee members who had done research with Bob Monroe, showing that in the [00:13:30] out-of- body state, he was able to read numbers that were on a shelf up above that could only be seen by floating up to the ceiling. Yes. Yeah. I heard about Charlie Tart. I think what happened is that when Bob first had these these out of bodies, they frightened him. Mhm. He didn't know whether he was going insane or what was happening with him. Maybe had a brain tumor. He had no idea. And Charlie was one of the people that he