Michael Langevin on Ayahuasca, the Monroe Institute, and Lucid Dreaming
My first ayahuasca ceremony happened deep in the Amazon, and something shifted that I'm still trying to put into words. I remember stretching my hand toward the forest and losing track of the line between my body and everything green around me. Where did I end? Where did the jungle begin? I couldn't say. It took me about a week afterward to understand that for my whole life up to that night, I had never actually grasped what connection to nature meant. We belong to the same weave as every living, breathing thing on the planet. I had read that idea plenty of times. Feeling it was different.
Standing in that jungle, you sense a life force pressing in from all sides. I love New York, and cities in general have their energy, but it isn't the same current. The shamans do their work to crack us open. They want us to glimpse how much larger we are than we assume, and to hand us the means to reach toward higher consciousness in whatever shape it arrives.
That contrast is part of why I'm drawn to the Monroe Institute. Nancy McMoneagle runs it now as Executive Director and President, and she carries forward the view her stepfather held, Robert Monroe, who founded the place. The programs are built around the idea of a toolbox. People come to find instruments for reaching their larger self, their wider potential, and a more spacious sense of what reality actually is. Then they get to go explore it and put it to use in ordinary life.
The tools run across a wide range. On one end, you have something plain, like noticing that your attitude shapes how a day turns out, how a whole life unfolds. On the other end you have lucid dreaming, staying conscious while you dream. The catalog is long. Most of it only requires that a person set disbelief aside for a while, experiment a little, and let themselves feel these states directly instead of arguing about them.
Erik asked me to say more about how lucid dreaming is taught there. We're lucky to work with two excellent people, Luigi from London and Thomas from Germany, who run the Monroe programs over in Europe. They travel back to the Institute regularly to lead a five day lucid dreaming course. The thing they want participants to see is that we already do things in our dreams that brush right up against magic. The trouble is that so many of us never remember our dreams, let alone use them.
They bring specific techniques for that, and at the Institute we lean heavily on audio technology. One piece is Hemi-Sync, which Robert Monroe created and patented. Alongside it now we use SAM, short for Spatial Angular Modulation. Through headphones, these two work together to ease a person into an altered state, which makes dreaming and lucid dreaming easier and more comfortable to reach.