Focus 27 is described as a way station created by human minds, often called the Park or the Reception Center, where people arriving after death can rest, review and decide what comes next. Later Institute material calls it the limit of the Earth Life System. Exploration 27 is the program that takes participants there deliberately, and the Going Home series was designed to familiarize people facing death with the route before they need it. The run on the Interstate Ultimate Journey ends with what Monroe calls his run on the Interstate. He first travels out beyond the familiar stops. Then, in a final run in the opposite direction, he passes his I-There, the Belief System Territories and the Earth to reach what he calls the Emitter, the source from which the physical universe is projected, and sees that outflow and return form one closed loop. Jordan Crowder's podcast retells this run as a search for humanity's next home; that framing is Crowder's reading of the book. Where the road leads: graduation Monroe used the Interstate to describe what a human who has finished with physical life can become. In a 1992 interview he said belief systems limit what we imagine is possible after death, and that his explorations had opened up the options for a graduate of the human learning system. That is what he meant by going on the Interstate: goals so far beyond ordinary concerns that, for anyone curious, they are the real action. Taught through tapes as well as programs
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The Interstate: Monroe's map of Focus levels
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The image reached listeners beyond the residential programs. The Going Home series, created for people approaching death and their families, includes an exercise called Touring the Interstate, and a 2002 Hemi-Sync Journal article describes a therapist using it with a client to move from Focus 27 back down to 22. Explorers in Monroe's lab also used the word; a 1989 session transcript has an Explorer reporting going to the Interstate and seeing lots of traffic. Robert Monroe: “We don't know how far that spectrum of consciousness goes, that long band. It's, it's, it's endless, and we call that the Interstate. In other words, here in the United States we have, they're not autobahns, they are freeways or interstate, which are these big highways that spread all over the country, and that's where you can go very fast and go great distances.” (Robert Monroe. Interview by Guido Ferrari and Julie Mazo, 1992, 2018-11-08) Robert Monroe: “And all I do is take off down through what I call the Belief System Territories, which is, I have all sorts of allegories, and I say [going] interstate, as we in America call it. And along that interstate are exit ramps to various belief systems. So all I have to do is take this individual, and they just feel themselves moving. And all of a sudden, they disappear.” (Robert A. Monroe Talks - with Neville Drury (1989), 1989)
Robert Monroe: “The interesting part is, is when you're moving along what I call this, and it's not this, but it's only a symbol, moving along this interstate, the exit ramps, there must be hundreds of thousands of them, but if I have no connection with them, I can't even see the exit ramps. And yet, if I have participated in this, their life cycle, but in a previous life cycle, in some belief system, that exit ramp would be pretty clear to me.” (Robert A. Monroe Talks - with Neville Drury (1989), 1989) Robert Monroe: “It looks upon human life as a, and the patterns thereof, as sort of local traffic, because this new consciousness is, goes interstate, as it were. It has the ability, growing more and more, to communicate with these other realities, because they're a natural part of this new consciousness.” (Robert A. Monroe Talks - New Frontiers of Consciousness (1978), 1978) Robert Monroe: “One of the things that we must begin to consider is that anything we humans can think about or conceive or pattern is what might be construed as local traffic. … I like to put the other pattern: once you get out on the Interstate, as it were, you can see the difference. What we believe as to be important is basically local traffic thought.” (A Rare Conversation with Bob Monroe | Exploring Expanded States of Consciousness | EOC (Ep. 3), 2023-08-02)