Sound & programs · 13 MIN READ · 8 SOURCE QUOTES
Gateway Voyage
The Gateway Voyage is the Monroe Institute's flagship residential program. A group of participants, 25 in one first-hand account from 2000, spends roughly a week at the Institute's campus in Faber, Virginia, doing guided Hemi-Sync exercises in private booths called CHEC units and then talking through what happened with the trainers and the rest of the group. The Institute describes it as a voyage of self-discovery through the gateway of expanded awareness, built on the original exercises Robert Monroe developed, and it is a prerequisite for many of the Institute's advanced programs.
The week is a graded climb through the Focus levels. Participants start with Focus 10, mind awake and body asleep, then move to Focus 12 (expanded awareness), Focus 15 (the state of no time) and Focus 21, which the Institute calls the bridge. Most exercises follow a similar rhythm: a briefing from the trainers, a Hemi-Sync recording in your own CHEC unit with Monroe's voice guiding the way, and a group debrief afterward.
What people report varies widely. In a study of 160 Voyage volunteers published in 1996, 121 of the 141 who returned the questionnaire described at least one peak or unusually powerful experience, most of them during the tapes. Monroe told his groups that Gateway does not guarantee an out-of-body experience, and by his estimate about 15 percent had one. The Voyage is best understood as intensive training in a set of mental tools, taught in a group and practiced in a controlled environment.
The Monroe Institute's residential Gateway week: Hemi-Sync exercises in a private CHEC unit, trainer-led debriefs and a climb from Focus 10 to Focus 21.
Key points
A residential week, not a set of tapes
The Voyage takes place in person. Participants live at the Institute's Virginia campus, in the Nancy Penn Center and Roberts Mountain Retreat and spend most of each day in exercises and discussion. The Institute's current page gives the length as five days and six nights. Earlier sources count a six-day program in 2000 and about seven days of training in a 1983 Army assessment. Attendance requires an approved application.
A climb through four Focus levels
In philosopher Joseph Felser's account of his 2000 Voyage, Focus 10 came on the first evening and the next day, starting with Resonant Tuning and a Free Flow exercise with no spoken cues. Focus 12 followed on the third day, Focus 15, the state of No Time, on the fourth, and Focus 21 on the fifth. A long final tape called Super Flow then ran through every level. Timing and exercise names have varied between groups and eras.
The CHEC unit: a private booth for listening and sleeping
CHEC stands for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber, one of Monroe's many acronyms. Each participant has a unit in a shared room: a bed behind a blackout curtain, lighting you control, headphones or speakers, and a button or light that tells the control room you are ready. The curtain gives privacy and total darkness for the Hemi-Sync. The unit serves for the exercises and for sleep each night.
A day: briefing, exercise, debrief
The Institute's schedule runs breakfast, morning exercises, lunch, a long afternoon break, afternoon exercises, dinner and evening exercises. Inside each block the pattern repeats: the trainers brief the group, everyone goes to a private unit and listens to a recording, and the group reconvenes to talk it over. One participant's video for the Institute also mentions morning yoga, shared meals, free afternoons on the grounds and certificates on the last night.
Trainers: briefings, questions and no verdicts
Each program has assigned trainers; Felser's group of 25 voyagers had three. Before a tape they explain what is coming and what to watch for. Afterward they take questions, sometimes answering with another question: when Felser mentioned an echoing laugh he had heard in a Free Flow exercise, the trainer asked what he thought it meant. They offer frames, such as No Time meaning that all times are available, and leave interpretation to the participant.
The debrief: sharing without comparing
After the tapes the group gathers in the white-carpeted room, the main meeting area of the Nancy Penn Center, to say what came up. The trainers warn against comparing experiences. Skip Atwater told a 1993 audience that people coming down from their first Focus 21 tape often find it hard to explain and say only that it was great and you had to be there.
Monroe's voice and his talks to groups
Monroe also spoke to groups in person, and the Institute's archive holds his Saturday-night Voyage talks from 1986, 1988 and 1990, among others. His welcome talk, in which he calls Gateway a program of some ten years' standing, asked participants to consider just one piece of dogma, that you are more than your physical body, and offered opportunity and tools but no guaranteed results. A Saturday-night talk in 1988 introduced the numbered states, with Focus 10 as a beacon and signpost from which participants learn to travel and return.
From tapes to your own control
Monroe's aim was independence from the recordings. Skip Atwater described the later days of the residential programs as weaning participants off the tapes, with a well-known non-tape exercise in which you go to your unit, put on the earphones and receive no recording at all. Free Flow exercises already drop the spoken cues and let you direct your own time in a Focus level. The idea is that the tape teaches the route and the state belongs to you.
What participants report
Todd Masluk, then a doctoral candidate, followed 160 volunteers from eleven Voyage groups and published preliminary results in the Institute's Hemi-Sync Journal in 1996. Nineteen did not return his questionnaire; of the other 141, 121 reported peak or other powerful experiences, 291 in all, and 72 percent of the most significant ones happened while listening to the tapes. The largest category was transpersonal: experiences beyond time and space, peak states and inner guidance. Reported aftereffects included greater self-acceptance, living more in the present and less fear of death.
In their own words
Quotes are checked word for word against the recordings and documents they come from. Bracketed words correct transcription errors; “…” marks an omission.
“How do you define something that is so intangible that even the results of it may not show up for weeks and perhaps months? [Gateway] in and of itself is properly defined as, say, a means of freedom, a new [kind] of freedom that perhaps you've never before experienced in your life, a chance at this new kind of freedom. Also, it's an exploration, say, of consciousness, and most particularly, your consciousness.”
“Gateway does not guarantee that you will have an out of body experience. Now, of course, I know you, a lot of you perhaps can say, 'Oh, I will have an out of body experience, per se.' Percentage wise, I would say that … 15% of the people who attend a Gateway session have an [out of body] experience during the session.”
“Now the room is where we have our check units. Check units are CHEC, which stands for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber. Robert Monroe loved acronyms. And the check units have a black-out curtain that are used for two reasons. One is for privacy and the other is to allow you to be in total darkness while you listen to [Hemi-Sync].”
“After the introductions, the trainers ceremoniously collected our wristwatches in a strongbox that resembled a treasure chest. From now on, bells would be rung to indicate times for assembling in the white-carpeted room where we would be debriefing tapes or other activities, such as meals or morning exercise. We were to enter into the right-brain zone of No Time as far as possible. Linear, left-brain anxieties were to be minimized as much as possible.”
“As is customary, the trainers provide some inspirational music in our CHEC unit speakers while we voyagers are attending to emptying our bladders and putting on our ready lights to indicate all systems go. The music, I realize, is the old spiritual, Going Home, which has numerous associations for me. The music itself and the thought of “home” trigger an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, loss, and sadness. Tears flow down my cheeks. I cannot stop sobbing.”
“In our four programs that we do here, the later days [in] the programs are about weaning you off of tapes. And we have this famous thing called the non tape exercise, where you go out to your check unit and you put your earphones on and we don't give you a tape to listen to. So that there's this idea that I am not dependent. My exercise isn't on the tape, it's in me. I've just learned with the tape how to get to this place.”
“So, people who really were coming to please someone else, some of them had dramatic experiences because they had no expectations. So, they were fully open to whatever occurred. And some, only two, I think, who left the end of the week and they said, you know, 'I never got out of my left brain. Nothing happened.' And with them, I checked with them later and found that even though they did not feel they had seen angels or touched God or had these incredible magnificent luminous experiences, they felt that their life was calmer, that they were happier.”
“What we do in Gateway is we put a beacon, signpost, guideposts [there]; we call that Focus 10. We then, in turn, help [your] consciousness consciously, willfully move from here to Focus [10] and back and forth, back and forth, until going in, being in Focus 10 and returning is as well known as your path of getting up and getting out of bed or going to the bathroom in your own home. It's that simple, and that prosaic, and the boredom of that knowledge of getting from there to there, you feel tremendously safe.”
Important things to consider
Expect a group process
Shared rooms, a bell-driven schedule and daily debriefs make the Voyage a group experience. Felser, who called himself not a group person, ended the week with what he described as an esprit de corps. If you picture a silent solo retreat, adjust your expectations.
No result is guaranteed
Monroe said plainly that the tools bring opportunity and possibility but no guarantee. An Institute speaker recalls that some people who came to please someone else, with no expectations, had dramatic experiences, while a couple of people who felt nothing happened later found life calmer. Dramatic imagery is not the measure of a good week.
Strong emotion is common
Felser sobbed uncontrollably before one tape and felt cleansed afterward. In a talk on his study, Masluk said the only two negative experiences involved a woman in grief who cried throughout the week and a man confronting guilt, and that both turned out well. The Voyage is an educational program, not a treatment, and it is wise to plan the week with that in mind.
Health and suitability
The Institute's page advises people with a history of seizures, auditory disorders or adverse mental-health conditions to consult a physician before using its sound technology, and admission requires an approved application. Nothing here is medical advice. If you are in treatment for any condition, talk with your clinician before enrolling.
Allow time to land
A graduate on a podcast recalled getting a few sheets of grounding tips at the end, such as swimming, eating well and spending time outdoors, and being told to hold off on life decisions for three weeks. That is one participant's account.
How to read the research
Masluk's findings are self-reports from volunteers with no comparison group, so they describe what participants say happened, not what caused it. The Institute has also studied the Voyage with random number generators running around the clock during the program; a paper by Dean Radin and Skip Atwater in the Journal of Scientific Exploration reported exploratory correlations between entrained mental coherence and random physical systems. Exploratory means preliminary; neither study shows how the Voyage compares with other retreats.
Common questions
What actually happens during the Gateway Voyage?
For about a week you live at the Institute's Virginia campus and follow a repeating cycle. The trainers brief the group, everyone goes to a private CHEC unit and listens to a Hemi-Sync exercise guided by Monroe's recorded voice, and the group then meets to talk through what happened. The exercises climb from Focus 10, mind awake and body asleep, through Focus 12 (expanded awareness) and Focus 15 (no time) to Focus 21, the bridge, and end with a long tape that links them. In Felser's account the trainers collect wristwatches on the first night.
What is a CHEC unit?
CHEC stands for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber, and it is the private booth where you listen to the Hemi-Sync exercises and sleep. Participants describe a bed behind a blackout curtain, lighting you control, headphones or speakers, and a button or light that tells the control room you are ready. An Institute guide explains that the curtain serves privacy and total darkness. Felser notes that the units have been described as a Pullman berth. The units sit together in a shared room, so the group is close by while your experience stays private.
Will I have an out-of-body experience at the Gateway Voyage?
Not necessarily. Monroe told Voyage groups in his welcome talk that Gateway does not guarantee an out-of-body experience: the opportunity, the possibility and the tools are there, but no guarantee. By his own estimate, about 15 percent of participants had one during the program. The Institute's current page says the exercises lead to expanded states including the state of no time and the out-of-body state, and many reports are broader than leaving the body. Others report nothing of the kind and still value the week.
How is the Gateway Voyage different from doing the Gateway Experience tapes at home?
The Gateway Experience albums are a home-study program; the Voyage is the residential course. At the Institute you work inside a CHEC unit, in a group, with trainers who brief you before each exercise and discuss it afterward, and the days are organized around the exercises. The Institute's FAQ for its 2015 Gateway Experience online course makes a related point about groups: doing the exercises as part of a group is often more beneficial, because you can ask questions of the trainer and other participants and feel more supported than working alone with the Wave I album.
What if nothing happens, or the week brings up strong emotions?
Both happen. A speaker in an Institute video recalls a couple of people who left saying nothing had happened and that they never got out of their left brain, yet who later reported feeling calmer and happier. At the other end, Felser sobbed uncontrollably before one tape and felt cleansed afterward, and Masluk described a participant in grief who cried throughout the week, found it cathartic and said the trainers helped her work through it. The Voyage is a training program, not a treatment, and the Institute advises consulting a physician beforehand if you have a history of seizures, auditory disorders or adverse mental-health conditions.
Do I need the Gateway Voyage before other Monroe Institute programs?
Usually, yes. The Institute's current page describes the Gateway Voyage as a prerequisite for many of its advanced consciousness-training programs, and attendance requires an approved application. A 2015 Institute FAQ listed the core residential programs as Gateway Voyage, Guidelines, Lifeline, Timeline, Heartline, Exploration 27 and Starlines. The Institute also states that its online edition qualifies as a prerequisite for advanced retreats. Requirements change, so check the current program pages for the specific program you want.
Is Gateway Voyage Online the same as the residential program?
The Institute presents it as a self-paced online version of the residential Voyage. According to its page, the course has 23 guided sessions across the same four Focus levels (10, 12, 15 and 21), about 26 hours of training suggested over 8 to 12 weeks, trainer video introductions, journaling prompts, community discussion groups and exercises voiced by Monroe himself. The residential week adds what an online format does not: the private CHEC unit, the schedule built around exercises, the in-person trainers and the group debriefs described above.
Keep exploring
Prepared answers open instantly in the chat; anything else you ask gets a fresh answer.
Connected ideas
People & places
The Monroe Institute
A Virginia nonprofit founded by Bob Monroe in the early 1970s: home of the Gateway Voyage, the Hemi-Sync lab and the Explorer sessions.
Read the summary →12 min · 8 quotes · 7 answersGateway practices
Gateway
Monroe's step-by-step audio training in awareness: home albums, a residential week, a map of numbered Focus levels and one premise to test.
Read the summary →15 min · 8 quotes · 8 answersSound & programs
Guidelines: beyond Gateway
Guidelines, the Institute's second program, teaches Gateway graduates to build a working relationship with their inner guidance in Focus 15 and 21.
Read the summary →10 min · 6 quotes · 6 answersSound & programs
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.
Read the summary →12 min · 8 quotes · 6 answersGateway practices
The Gateway waves
Gateway's home course is a sequence of albums called waves that leads from Focus 10 to Focus 27. Each wave builds on the tools of the one before.
Read the summary →12 min · 6 quotes · 6 answers