The early stops are the Gateway states. Ordinary waking consciousness, C1, is town. Focus 10 is mind awake, body asleep; Focus 12 is expanded awareness; Focus 15 is the state of no time; Focus 21 sits at the edge of time-space, the bridge to other energy systems. In a 1988 Gateway Voyage talk Monroe sketched these as stages of being progressively out of phase with the body while still attached to it. Focus 21 is where the on-ramp to the rest of the Interstate begins. Focus 22 and 23: the first stops past the edge Institute teaching, drawing on Monroe and Bruce Moen, places at Focus 22 people who are still physically alive but not fully conscious, for example in a coma or a drug-induced state. Focus 23 is where many people who have recently died remain, often unaware of their death or fixed on their old lives. Lifeline participants practice retrievals here: finding such a person and helping them move on along the road. Focus 24 to 26: the exit ramps The Belief System Territories are the most vivid part of the metaphor. In a 1989 interview Monroe described taking a recently dead person along the Interstate; when they spotted the exit for what they believed in, they let go of his hand and moved into it. He said there must be hundreds of thousands of exits, and that he could only see the ones connected to belief systems he had shared, in this life or an earlier one. Focus 27: the last human stop
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The Interstate: Monroe's map of Focus levels
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Focus 27 is described as a way station created by human minds, often called the Park or the Reception Center, where people arriving after death can rest, review and decide what comes next. Later Institute material calls it the limit of the Earth Life System. Exploration 27 is the program that takes participants there deliberately, and the Going Home series was designed to familiarize people facing death with the route before they need it. The run on the Interstate Ultimate Journey ends with what Monroe calls his run on the Interstate. He first travels out beyond the familiar stops. Then, in a final run in the opposite direction, he passes his I-There, the Belief System Territories and the Earth to reach what he calls the Emitter, the source from which the physical universe is projected, and sees that outflow and return form one closed loop. Jordan Crowder's podcast retells this run as a search for humanity's next home; that framing is Crowder's reading of the book. Where the road leads: graduation Monroe used the Interstate to describe what a human who has finished with physical life can become. In a 1992 interview he said belief systems limit what we imagine is possible after death, and that his explorations had opened up the options for a graduate of the human learning system. That is what he meant by going on the Interstate: goals so far beyond ordinary concerns that, for anyone curious, they are the real action. Taught through tapes as well as programs
The image reached listeners beyond the residential programs. The Going Home series, created for people approaching death and their families, includes an exercise called Touring the Interstate, and a 2002 Hemi-Sync Journal article describes a therapist using it with a client to move from Focus 27 back down to 22. Explorers in Monroe's lab also used the word; a 1989 session transcript has an Explorer reporting going to the Interstate and seeing lots of traffic. Robert Monroe: “We don't know how far that spectrum of consciousness goes, that long band. It's, it's, it's endless, and we call that the Interstate. In other words, here in the United States we have, they're not autobahns, they are freeways or interstate, which are these big highways that spread all over the country, and that's where you can go very fast and go great distances.” (Robert Monroe. Interview by Guido Ferrari and Julie Mazo, 1992, 2018-11-08) Robert Monroe: “And all I do is take off down through what I call the Belief System Territories, which is, I have all sorts of allegories, and I say [going] interstate, as we in America call it. And along that interstate are exit ramps to various belief systems. So all I have to do is take this individual, and they just feel themselves moving. And all of a sudden, they disappear.” (Robert A. Monroe Talks - with Neville Drury (1989), 1989)