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
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Gateway Voyage
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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
Todd Masluk, then a doctoral candidate, followed 160 volunteers from eleven Voyage groups and published preliminary results in the Institute's Hemi-Sync Journal in 1996. Nineteen did not return his questionnaire; of the other 141, 121 reported peak or other powerful experiences, 291 in all, and 72 percent of the most significant ones happened while listening to the tapes. The largest category was transpersonal: experiences beyond time and space, peak states and inner guidance. Reported aftereffects included greater self-acceptance, living more in the present and less fear of death. Robert Monroe: “How do you define something that is so intangible that even the results of it may not show up for weeks and perhaps months? [Gateway] in and of itself is properly defined as, say, a means of freedom, a new [kind] of freedom that perhaps you've never before experienced in your life, a chance at this new kind of freedom. Also, it's an exploration, say, of consciousness, and most particularly, your consciousness.” (Robert A. Monroe - Welcome to Gateway Voyage — Welcome to Gateway Voyage (Transcript).pdf)