The Monroe Institute A Virginia nonprofit founded by Bob Monroe in the early 1970s: home of the Gateway Voyage, the Hemi-Sync lab and the Explorer sessions. The Monroe Institute is a nonprofit education and research organization in the Blue Ridge foothills of Nelson County, Virginia, about 45 minutes from Charlottesville. Robert Monroe created it to put into practice what his laboratory had learned about guiding people into expanded states of awareness with sound. The Institute dates its creation to 1971, while a 1985 radio biography says Monroe founded the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences in 1973. Its flagship is the Gateway Voyage, a residential week built around Hemi-Sync audio, and its advanced programs include Guidelines, Lifeline, Exploration 27 and Starlines. The Institute grew in stages. Monroe's company began a sleep-learning research program in 1956. By the early 1970s he had a laboratory at his Whistlefield farm, where Tom Campbell and Dennis Mennerich built the first binaural-beat tapes and volunteer Explorers began their sessions. Traveling weekend workshops followed, then the purchase of the property insiders call the New Land, where construction was under way by 1978. After Bob's death on March 17, 1995, his daughter Laurie led the Institute, followed by directors including Skip Atwater, Paul Rademacher and Nancy McMoneagle.
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The Monroe Institute
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Today the Institute says it offers more than 250 programs a year worldwide, 55 of them on its Virginia campus, led by over 100 certified trainers, along with online courses and a meditation app. It also lists research projects with partners such as the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies. Its stance on belief is simple: no dogma, except the premise that you are more than your physical body. From a company R&D division to an institute The Institute’s history page says it began in the research and development division of Monroe Industries, Inc., and was created in 1971, while the site footer says “since 1973.” A 1985 radio biography says Monroe founded the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences in 1973. Nancy McMoneagle, Monroe’s stepdaughter, recalls the Whistlefield Research Labs being renamed the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences while still at the farm. Whistlefield: the farm laboratory Before there was a campus there was Whistlefield, Monroe’s farm about 10 miles away. Campbell says the lab was an empty building with sheetrock walls and a roof when Monroe asked for scientists; there he and Mennerich worked in isolated booths, built the first binaural-beat tapes and later trained others. When Skip Atwater met Monroe there in 1977, the new buildings did not exist and the operation was one man with a laboratory, a few cassette programs and occasional weekend workshops. The New Land and the 1978 building plan