Lifeline and helping others Lifeline takes Gateway graduates through Focus 23 to 27 to help people stuck after death, visit the Park, and retrieve lost parts of themselves. Lifeline is the Monroe Institute's residential program for exploring the states Robert Monroe linked with life after death, Focus 23 through Focus 27. It is an advanced course for Gateway Voyage graduates, five days and six nights long, and the Institute describes it as the first soul-retrieval retreat, conceived in 1991. Participants learn to enter these states, make contact with people who have died but are confused or stuck, and gently guide them toward what the Institute calls the Light. They can also visit the Park, the afterlife reception center Monroe placed in Focus 27, connect with guides, and reunite with friends and relatives who have died.
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Lifeline and helping others
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Monroe built the program from his own travels and from a family crisis. He told Art Bell that he had been escorted to the Park back in the 1960s, and that with his wife seriously ill he wanted to be sure he could find her if she died. From that experience and further research the Institute set up Lifeline, with the stated aim of making the route from Focus 23, which he placed right after physical death, up to Focus 27 thoroughly familiar. His stepson, A.J. Honeycutt, believes the first Lifeline took place in June 1991. In Monroe's account the Park is a way station where the newly dead rest and decide what to do next, and he said it is not a religious place. Participants describe retrievals of strangers and of lost fragments of themselves, reunions, and a growing familiarity with the Park. In 1994 one graduate wrote of forming a circle of Lifeline alumni to help people near the end of life, and Monroe unveiled plans for what became the Going Home tapes during one Lifeline week. According to its publisher, the Gateway Experience album Voyager is based on the program. All of it is first-person experience; Monroe's own advice, as Nancy McMoneagle recalls, was to go and find out for yourself. A graduate program built on Gateway Voyage
Lifeline is open only to people who have completed Gateway Voyage, in its residential, virtual or online form, and attendance requires an application and approval. A.J. Honeycutt calls it a graduate workshop: you begin with Gateway Voyage and work upward. The Institute links the Focus 23 to 27 range with the afterlife experience and with contact with people who have made the transition. The route runs from Focus 23 to the Park in Focus 27 Monroe said the aim was to help people become thoroughly familiar with moving from Focus 23, which he placed right after physical death, up to Focus 27. At the top of that range sits the Park. Skip Atwater says Monroe drew the picture of a general welcoming area from his own experiences, from conversations with other people and from the reports of near-death experiencers. Atwater adds that Lifeline lets participants visit territories purportedly experienced after death, including the Healing and Regeneration Center. Retrieval: guiding someone who is stuck