Big ideas · 12 MIN READ · 8 SOURCE QUOTES
Loosh
Loosh is a word from Robert Monroe's second book, Far Journeys (1985). In it Monroe describes receiving, during an exploration in an altered state, a packet of knowledge he calls a rote that tells the story of Earth from a non-human point of view. In the story, a scarce and valuable kind of energy is wanted in another realm. That energy is loosh. Living things release it, most strongly in conflict and strong emotion, and a creator figure called someone solves the shortage by building a garden, Earth, where life produces it on a steady schedule. Collectors tend the garden and harvest what it yields.
The fourth crop in the story, which includes humans, turns out to be the best producer because it is mobile, competitive and emotional. The rote names love, friendship and family alongside greed, hatred, guilt and pain as devices that draw the energy out. Monroe wrote that the account explained the food chain, human history and the apparent purpose of it all in plain terms, and that he needed months to accept it. Many readers find it disturbing because it treats love and suffering alike as output.
The picture is more mixed than its reputation. Later in the book the same energy is described as a form of love flowing toward a place that resembles heaven, and a non-physical woman says her group gathers it knowingly and gladly. In a talk the Institute's archive dates to 1992, Monroe described Earth life as a place to learn and spoke of escape velocity, not harvests. Readers today split: Jordan Crowder takes loosh as real, Tom Campbell, author of My Big TOE, says Monroe misread a message about consciousness growing, and one Institute survey respondent used the word for the force of love felt in programs.
Loosh is the energy Far Journeys says life gives off and collectors harvest: a story of Earth as a garden that shook Monroe and still divides readers.
Key points
Where the word comes from
Far Journeys (1985) is the middle of Monroe's three books, between Journeys Out of the Body (1971) and Ultimate Journey (1994). In it he extends his reports beyond out-of-body travel to meetings with non-human intelligences he calls inspecs, short for intelligent species. His vocabulary is his own: a click is an abrupt change of state, and a rote is a packet of thought and experience handed over whole. The loosh rote is one such packet, and Monroe says it took him months to absorb.
The story: a garden built to produce a scarce energy
In the rote, loosh is prized in another realm the way oil or gold is prized here, and it once came only from the wild, from the vibrations of living processes. Someone decides to produce it deliberately by building a garden. Early crops, from tiny cells to plants to huge slow creatures, disappoint. The breakthrough is conflict: struggle releases loosh steadily. The fourth crop, mobile and competitive, includes humans, who become the dominant producers, and collectors manage the harvest.
Emotions and institutions as harvesting tools
The rote describes a harvesting technology built from human life itself. It names love, friendship and family beside greed, hatred, guilt and pain, and on a larger scale nations, religion, war, famine and trade. It ties yield to the intensity of the pattern, and its list mixes feelings we call good with ones we call bad.
The harvest: engineered upheavals
The most unsettling detail is the harvest itself. According to the rote, the collectors thin the crop on instruction from someone by stirring up storms and upheavals in the air, sea and land, which kill multitudes of the fourth crop. The stated reasons are practical: the dead supply chemicals and other nourishment for younger generations, and the deaths release extra loosh. The text presents it as routine management of a productive garden, in the manner of a farm report.
Why it disturbs readers
Three things combine. It reverses the meaning of what people value most, so love, family and faith become instruments in someone else's supply chain. It makes suffering functional, so pain is output, neither accident nor lesson. And it casts people as livestock; the book reaches for dairy-cow imagery. Monroe's own account shows the weight: he cycled through shock, rejection, anger, depression, resignation and acceptance, a sequence he compared to the reaction of people told they are dying, and wrote that something in him was dying.
How Monroe handled it
He did not present loosh as comfortable or settled. Once past the shock he found it hard to locate holes in the account, which explained the food chain, the planet's balance and human history in prosaic terms and supplied the why he had long sought. He then asked whether the inspecs he knew were the gardeners, the collectors or the overseers, a question that tormented him for weeks until he went looking for an answer in a deliberate out-of-body search.
The softer second half
As Far Journeys continues, Monroe is told that the energy is better understood as a kind of love, a radiation traveling toward a destination he pictures as heaven-like. A voice reassures him that he need not be a final transmitter of it, only one oscillator in a larger pattern. In a later scene a non-physical woman says her group gathers loosh knowingly, like honeybees or dairy cows who understand what they are doing and are glad to do it.
What Monroe said in his talks
In a 1992 talk, Monroe described the point of Earth life as learning. People come to master a measurement system of polarities such as pain and pleasure, to manipulate energy and to acquire an analytical intellect, then use successive lives to build escape velocity and go home. He warned that human life can become addictive and said the decision to return rather than go home is our own. He also spoke of an inspec friend and the inspec home in terms of love, joy and unity.
How people read it today
Jordan Crowder, who devoted a book-report-style video to Far Journeys, takes loosh as real: in another video he describes Earth as an energy factory in which the food chain moves energy around, a design he says he is not calling good or bad. He says he is pretty sure the collectors are the gray beings of UFO lore, a reading that is his own. Tom Campbell holds that Monroe received a message about consciousness growing and turned it into a farm.
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.
“What did you come to learn? You came to learn a measurement system. This is a system of, of opposites, of polarities. And we quickly give them labels like positive and negative, good, bad, these kinds of things. We, we learn this measurement system, very important. We learn it, the system of measurement. And, and the great system of measurement that we learn is pain, pleasure.”
“And you begin to have a higher and higher orbit as you learn more. And in these successive lives, till finally you got escape velocity, and then you do go home. And that's what it's all about.”
“Well, that's, that's an interesting question. I would say probably. I can't give, I'm prone to make percentiles, and I don't know if I can give you an appropriate percentile. It is a combination.”
“But sometimes he got information and he didn't get it right, because his own background, his own kind of history and the way he put things together in his mind put it together in a way that wasn't what was intended. That's what happened with this big [loosh] thing. I don't know if you know about that, but Bob, when he had that out of body the next day he came down and says, 'I want to share something with you. I just had this out of body yesterday and it's very disturbing.' He was very disturbed by it.”
“And he didn't get that abstraction. Instead, he turned it into a farm metaphor rather than that abstraction. And that's what's been feeding the 'prison planet' and 'never go to the light' and all the rest of that stuff ever since has been feeding off of Bob's story about the [loosh].”
“And he discovers all these things along the way of what produces [loosh]. Okay? Whenever an animal dies, it produces [loosh]. Whenever an animal's born, it produces [loosh]. Whenever an animal is scared, it produces [loosh].”
“So, living things have to eat living things to survive. And in the process of doing that, you produce this energetic byproduct which Robert Monroe called Loosh. And it serves as a fuel source. You know, Earth is kind of like this power plant. Now, I'm not saying this is good or bad. I don't think that the creator of this world made it for good or bad purposes.”
“Heart opening – both in a sort of general sense of feeling of love for the other participants, but also in a physical sense – that feeling you get in the chest like you might explode. This force of “loosh” that is almost too much for the physical body to handle. Becoming aware of guides or non-physical friends who are looking out for you, and being overwhelmed by their loosh, knowing you are never alone.”
Important things to consider
Treat it as a reported experience, not a finding
Loosh rests on one author's account of information received in an altered state. No one has independently verified it; in a 1992 talk Monroe said the ideas he was presenting came from a combination of his own analytical mind and outside sources. Read it as a significant, carefully reported experience whose meaning is open.
Separate the book from the online version
Far Journeys speaks of a garden, collectors, a creator figure and inspecs. Shorthand such as loosh farm and prison planet, warnings not to go to the light, and the link between collectors and gray beings come from later commentators, and Campbell argues those spin-offs feed on a misreading.
The word has two meanings
In the harvest story loosh is an energy drawn from emotion and death. In the same book it is also called a form of love, and one Institute survey respondent used it for the surge of love felt in programs. Ask which meaning someone intends before arguing.
Why the story persuades, and why that is not proof
Monroe noted that the rote explained the food chain, human history and the purpose of it all with unusual neatness. Neat explanations attract, but a story that fits everything is hard to test. The appeal is visible in Crowder's remarks: if every living thing must eat another, an energy-exchange design seems to follow.
Mind the effect on you
Monroe needed months to adjust, and the story can unsettle readers too. Campbell's remark that fearful people see fearful things is his opinion, not a measurement, but it carries a practical point: read the passages when you can talk them over, and set them aside if they unsettle you. It is a philosophical story, not a diagnosis of your life.
You can use Gateway without it
In his welcome talk to Gateway Voyage groups, Monroe said the program asks you to consider only one piece of dogma: that you are more than your physical body. He did not mention loosh in that talk, and whatever you decide about Far Journeys, that statement of what Gateway asks of you leaves it out.
Read the whole sequence
The harvest passages are only part of what Monroe wrote on the subject. The later passages that recast loosh as love, and that describe beings who gather it willingly, belong in any fair summary. If you read the book, read on through the chapter called Shock Treatment and beyond, not just the rote itself.
Common questions
What is loosh?
Loosh is a term from Robert Monroe's book Far Journeys (1985) for an energy that, in a story he received during an altered-state exploration, living things give off and collectors harvest. In the story a creator figure called someone built Earth as a garden to produce loosh, which is scarce and valuable in another realm. Strong emotion, conflict and death release it, and the fourth crop, humans included, is the best producer. The book also uses the phrase loosh love, and one survey respondent at the Monroe Institute used the word for a powerful flow of love felt in programs.
Did Monroe believe the loosh story was literally true?
He took it seriously enough to spend months absorbing it, and there is no independent verification of it. In Far Journeys he describes shock, anger and eventual acceptance, and admits he could find few holes in the account. In a 1992 talk that never mentions loosh, asked whether the ideas he had just described came from his own analytical mind or from outside it, he called it a combination. Tom Campbell, who knew him, says Monroe's background shaped the form the information took and that the real message was about consciousness evolving. Others treat it as literal. The evidence does not settle what it describes.
Why does loosh disturb so many people?
Because it recasts love, family, faith and suffering as inputs to someone else's supply chain and recasts people as livestock. The story also says collectors sometimes cause disasters to harvest, an especially unsettling detail. Monroe's own reaction shows the weight: he went through shock, rejection, anger, depression, resignation and acceptance over several months and wrote that something in him was dying. Campbell says Monroe was clearly disturbed when he described it the next day.
What did Monroe say about loosh later?
Within Far Journeys the tone changes: the energy is described as a kind of love flowing toward a place resembling heaven, and a non-physical woman says her group gathers it knowingly and gladly. In the 1992 talk quoted here, Monroe describes life on Earth as a place where people learn a measurement system of pleasure and pain, learn to manipulate energy and acquire an intellect, and eventually build escape velocity to go home.
How do people interpret loosh today?
Readings differ widely. Jordan Crowder takes loosh as real. In a video on leaving the reincarnation cycle he describes Earth as an energy factory in which the food chain moves energy around, a design he says he is not calling good or bad. In his book-report video on Far Journeys he also says he is pretty sure the collectors are what we would call gray aliens, an identification of his own that goes beyond how the book describes them. Tom Campbell argues that Monroe received a message about consciousness growing and turned it into a farm metaphor, and that later talk of a prison planet feeds on that misreading. In an Institute survey, one participant used loosh for a warm, overwhelming flow of love.
Do the Gateway tapes teach loosh?
Monroe's own description of Gateway to Voyage groups centers on tools for exploring consciousness and one piece of dogma: that you are more than your physical body. He did not mention loosh in that welcome talk. Loosh is an idea from Far Journeys; one respondent in a 2008 Institute survey applied the word to a surge of love felt in programs. You do not need to accept any version of loosh to use the exercises.
In Monroe’s books
Summarized in our own words; the books are not reproduced on this site.
Far Journeys. Monroe presents loosh through a rote, a packet of experience handed over whole, in which Earth is a garden built by a creator figure to produce a scarce energy needed elsewhere. Life gives it off, most strongly through conflict and emotion, and collectors manage the harvest, sometimes through disasters that kill many.
Far Journeys. The chapter called Shock Treatment records Monroe's months of shock, anger and depression, then acceptance. He admits he could find little wrong with the account and wonders whether the inspecs he knew were gardeners, collectors or overseers.
Far Journeys. Later passages recast the energy as a form of love moving toward a heaven-like place. A non-physical woman says her group gathers it knowingly and gladly, and Monroe is told he is one oscillator in a pattern, not a final recipient.
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