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
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The monitor's role in an Explorer session
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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
The monitor watched the gauges as well as the conversation. Monroe describes sitting in the control room when an Explorer tried a new technique: within seconds every life-support reading dropped to nothing, and after about two and a half minutes he was on his way into the booth to try to resuscitate the body when the readings returned. Other sessions show smaller interventions: monitors add a grounding signal to help an Explorer return, and in one session the monitor told an Explorer who asked for someone to come in that staff would be right there. Bringing the Explorer back The return was as scripted as the descent. One monitor's closing instructions ask the Explorer to come back to the region of Focus 10 and take as much time as needed, then to return to ordinary waking consciousness feeling alert and full of energy, count down from 10 to one and accept a short beta signal to help. Later monitors ask whether the Explorer feels centered, offer a grounding signal and ask where the Explorer prefers the debrief. Restraint and presence