The Interstate: Monroe's map of Focus levels Monroe pictured consciousness as a highway out of physical life, with the Focus levels as stops and the belief systems as exit ramps along the way. The Interstate is Robert Monroe's image for the whole spectrum of consciousness, borrowed from the American highway system. Everyday physical life, with its worries, customs and certainties, is "local traffic." The Interstate is the big road out of town, where you can travel fast and far. Monroe used the image from at least 1978, explained it to foreign interviewers by comparing it with the autobahn, and built a whole map of the afterlife around it. He even named his business Interstate Industries; Nancy McMoneagle later recalled that the name came straight from his advice to skip the local traffic and take the Interstate. On the Institute's map the stops along the road are Focus levels. Gateway takes you from waking consciousness through Focus 10, 12 and 15 to Focus 21, the edge of time-space. Past it, the levels taught in Lifeline, Exploration 27 and the Going Home series lie along the Interstate proper: Focus 22, where people who are still physically alive but only partly conscious are found; Focus 23, where many of the newly dead stay stuck; Focus 24 to 26, the Belief System Territories, which Monroe described as exit ramps to every belief system humans hold; and Focus 27, a human-made way station often called the Park.
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The Interstate: Monroe's map of Focus levels
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For Monroe the road continued beyond 27. In Ultimate Journey (1994) he describes a final run along the Interstate, out past the human areas to the source of the physical universe and back. In interviews he used the image to describe what a human who graduates from physical life could become. The Interstate is a teaching map, not a survey. It gives explorers a shared vocabulary and a sense of direction, and Monroe was quick to say it was only a symbol. Local traffic versus the Interstate The core of the metaphor is a contrast. Monroe called everything humans can think, conceive or pattern "local traffic": our beliefs, ambitions and ideas of importance. Getting out on the Interstate means seeing beyond them. In a 1978 talk he described a new kind of consciousness that treats human physical life as a local custom and goes interstate, growing able to communicate with other realities. When asked late in life for his most important lesson, he returned to the same contrast. Why a highway In a 1992 interview with the Swiss filmmaker Guido Ferrari and Julie Mazo, Monroe explained the choice to listeners who might not know the word. American interstates, he said, are the freeways that cross the whole country, where you can go fast and cover great distances. He paired the image with his idea of a spectrum of consciousness whose length no one knows. The highway carries you along that spectrum, and the Focus numbers mark where you are on it. The Gateway stretch: C1 to Focus 21