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
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Gateway Voyage
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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)
Robert Monroe: “Gateway does not guarantee that you will have an out of body experience. Now, of course, I know you, a lot of you perhaps can say, 'Oh, I will have an out of body experience, per se.' Percentage wise, I would say that … 15% of the people who attend a Gateway session have an [out of body] experience during the session.” (Robert A. Monroe - Welcome to Gateway Voyage — Welcome to Gateway Voyage (Transcript).pdf) “Now the room is where we have our check units. Check units are CHEC, which stands for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber. Robert Monroe loved acronyms. And the check units have a black-out curtain that are used for two reasons. One is for privacy and the other is to allow you to be in total darkness while you listen to [Hemi-Sync].” (The Monroe Experience - The Monroe Institute and Gateway Voyage (Martin Taylor)) Joseph Felser: “After the introductions, the trainers ceremoniously collected our wristwatches in a strongbox that resembled a treasure chest. From now on, bells would be rung to indicate times for assembling in the white-carpeted room where we would be debriefing tapes or other activities, such as meals or morning exercise. We were to enter into the right-brain zone of No Time as far as possible. Linear, left-brain anxieties were to be minimized as much as possible.” (Magazine Article 2000 (EHE News) My Gateway Experience - Joseph M. Felser — Magazine Article 2000 (EHE News) My Gateway Experience - Joseph M. Felser.pdf, 2000)