The monitor's role in an Explorer session The monitor sat in the control room, guided Explorers through states, relayed their questions to contacts and watched the gauges; on the original tapes it was Monroe. In an Explorer session the monitor was the second voice on every tape. Seated in the control room, usually Monroe on the original series and later staff such as Rita Warren and Martin Warren, the monitor heard the Explorer through a microphone, spoke back through the Explorer's headphones, fed in different Hemi-Sync signals and watched the instruments that tracked the body. The Explorer lay in total darkness in the booth, so between the two rooms almost everything happened by voice. The work had four parts. Guiding meant taking the Explorer into Focus 10 and Focus 12, asking for a description of the state and sending the Explorer on toward a higher source of information. Questioning meant asking for detail, relaying the lab's questions to whatever the Explorer met and rewording a question when the answer showed it was flawed. Supporting meant noticing discomfort, doubt or struggle, then bringing the Explorer back with a count, a signal and a debrief. Watching meant reading the gauges so that a silence could be told from a problem.
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The monitor's role in an Explorer session
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For anyone reading the transcripts, the monitor is half of the evidence. A question can ask for a description or suggest a subject, and the Explorer's answer is often a reply to it. Reading the monitor's lines first shows which ideas the Explorer brought and which the conversation supplied. Control room, headphones, instruments The monitor worked from a control room near the booth. It held the sensitive equipment that received data from the Explorer and sent signals back as needed. Monroe's description is simple: modified headphones let the Explorer hear the monitor and the monitor hear the Explorer, while he or another monitor feeds different Hemi-Sync signals directly to the subject. In the last tape he adds that body voltage, read through only two or three electrodes, told him most of what he wanted to know about the Explorer's state. Guiding the Explorer through the states A session began with the monitor taking the Explorer into Focus 10, on to Focus 12 and beyond, and asking for a description of the state. A common prompt in 1977 transcripts is to reach back, use the physical vocal cords and report what is perceived. A 1984 monitor asks an Explorer to go farther and farther out to the highest source of information and say when there. Monroe also improvised: when an Explorer could not stabilize in Focus 12, he asked for descriptions of levels 15 to 22 and back as he counted. Relaying questions to the contact
When an Explorer met a nonphysical being, the monitor became the questioner. Monroe's own example is a monitor saying, ask him about gravity, then passing the answer back. On the first tape the prompts include asking what the beings' relationship to the Explorer is, what they can do to help the Explorer improve, whether they have a message and what name could be used to reach them again. Monroe likened Explorer and monitor to two brains working together. Questions get reworded In a 1984 session a monitor asked how life entered the physical universe. The communicator replied that the question contradicted the reality of creation, because life is creation rather than something that enters it. The monitor agreed the wording was an error and restated the question. The communicator later explained that on such basic ideas questions have to be redirected for the answer to make sense. Both sides were adjusting, which is why exact wording matters when reading a transcript. Safety and comfort