Nancy Moneagle on How the Monroe Institute Began
Your background makes no difference. An engineer, someone who runs a household, a professor, a psychologist, it doesn't change the pattern. Whoever walks through the door ends up experiencing the thing they most needed to happen. I've seen it play out again and again, and it never stops being remarkable.
Back in the earliest stretch, when I was helping Bob get the institute off the ground, we started as Whistle Field Research Labs. Later the name became the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences. The programs ran ten days then. Over time they got trimmed down, and today they run five days and six nights. People travel to Virginia from everywhere on earth to attend, since that's where Bob eventually put up the facility we're sitting in now. There are also sites in other countries and on other continents running the programs Bob created. That's a roundabout answer, but I'm hoping it gives you a sense of how he got all of this going.
Erik: Wonderful. So the path runs from his RKO radio days, into the technology side, and then developing Hemi-Sync to encourage out-of-body states. That's quite a story. Now, if someone came to the institute today and went into your lab to try this themselves, what would they actually go through?
Nancy: Sure. Although it isn't really a case of visiting the lab. What we have is a residential center. People come and stay, each with a private room. Inside every room is what Bob called a CHEC unit. He had a real fondness for acronyms. CHEC stands for Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber. So everyone gets their own space. If you've ever stood in Thomas Jefferson's bedroom at Monticello and looked at his bed, that's roughly what it resembles. Bob's intention was to block out as much of the outside world as he could. The lab itself is wrapped in copper, since we're also trying to keep electromagnetic radiation from getting in.
Once people are here, they go through the sound exercises. We still call them tapes, which tells you how far back these go. They listen to the recorded exercises, and some of them, for the first time in ages, sleep without any drugs. They learn to let the body drop into sleep while the mind stays awake and sharp. Like I said, whether you paint or run a company or do something else entirely, you might stumble onto fresh ways of making your art, or fresh ways of working through a problem if business is your world.