What people report varies widely. In a study of 160 Voyage volunteers published in 1996, 121 of the 141 who returned the questionnaire described at least one peak or unusually powerful experience, most of them during the tapes. Monroe told his groups that Gateway does not guarantee an out-of-body experience, and by his estimate about 15 percent had one. The Voyage is best understood as intensive training in a set of mental tools, taught in a group and practiced in a controlled environment. A residential week, not a set of tapes The Voyage takes place in person. Participants live at the Institute's Virginia campus, in the Nancy Penn Center and Roberts Mountain Retreat and spend most of each day in exercises and discussion. The Institute's current page gives the length as five days and six nights. Earlier sources count a six-day program in 2000 and about seven days of training in a 1983 Army assessment. Attendance requires an approved application. A climb through four Focus levels In philosopher Joseph Felser's account of his 2000 Voyage, Focus 10 came on the first evening and the next day, starting with Resonant Tuning and a Free Flow exercise with no spoken cues. Focus 12 followed on the third day, Focus 15, the state of No Time, on the fourth, and Focus 21 on the fifth. A long final tape called Super Flow then ran through every level. Timing and exercise names have varied between groups and eras. The CHEC unit: a private booth for listening and sleeping
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Gateway Voyage
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CHEC stands for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber, one of Monroe's many acronyms. Each participant has a unit in a shared room: a bed behind a blackout curtain, lighting you control, headphones or speakers, and a button or light that tells the control room you are ready. The curtain gives privacy and total darkness for the Hemi-Sync. The unit serves for the exercises and for sleep each night. A day: briefing, exercise, debrief The Institute's schedule runs breakfast, morning exercises, lunch, a long afternoon break, afternoon exercises, dinner and evening exercises. Inside each block the pattern repeats: the trainers brief the group, everyone goes to a private unit and listens to a recording, and the group reconvenes to talk it over. One participant's video for the Institute also mentions morning yoga, shared meals, free afternoons on the grounds and certificates on the last night. Trainers: briefings, questions and no verdicts Each program has assigned trainers; Felser's group of 25 voyagers had three. Before a tape they explain what is coming and what to watch for. Afterward they take questions, sometimes answering with another question: when Felser mentioned an echoing laugh he had heard in a Free Flow exercise, the trainer asked what he thought it meant. They offer frames, such as No Time meaning that all times are available, and leave interpretation to the participant. The debrief: sharing without comparing
After the tapes the group gathers in the white-carpeted room, the main meeting area of the Nancy Penn Center, to say what came up. The trainers warn against comparing experiences. Skip Atwater told a 1993 audience that people coming down from their first Focus 21 tape often find it hard to explain and say only that it was great and you had to be there. Monroe's voice and his talks to groups Monroe also spoke to groups in person, and the Institute's archive holds his Saturday-night Voyage talks from 1986, 1988 and 1990, among others. His welcome talk, in which he calls Gateway a program of some ten years' standing, asked participants to consider just one piece of dogma, that you are more than your physical body, and offered opportunity and tools but no guaranteed results. A Saturday-night talk in 1988 introduced the numbered states, with Focus 10 as a beacon and signpost from which participants learn to travel and return. From tapes to your own control Monroe's aim was independence from the recordings. Skip Atwater described the later days of the residential programs as weaning participants off the tapes, with a well-known non-tape exercise in which you go to your unit, put on the earphones and receive no recording at all. Free Flow exercises already drop the spoken cues and let you direct your own time in a Focus level. The idea is that the tape teaches the route and the state belongs to you. What participants report