There are a lot of mental models on how the mind, reality, dreams, subconscious, out-of-body, lucid dreaming, remote viewing, premonition, etc works. I’m finishing a four-year Licensed Practitioner Program in consciousness studies through the Centers for Spiritual Living that I began right after I took Beyond Meditation and the Gateway Experience at the Monroe Institute (Actually, I took them online during the COVID-19 pandemic). I’ve had lucid dreams and non-ordinary perception states throughout my life. My quest, especially now that I’m semi-retired, is to explore them more deeply. I just finished Mark Certo’s Triad Mind program as well.
Bob Monroe (Monroe Institute), Centers for Spiritual Living, Mark Certo (Triad Mind), Thomas Campbell (My Big TOE), William Buhlman, and on and on all say that how we experience our world is largely a result of our beliefs (thoughts and feelings, i.e. what we hold to be true). Beliefs are a lens through which we interpret. These teachers and approaches use the practice of meditation to quiet the busy mind, get beneath it to where the beliefs can be accessed, and get a different perspective than what we have learned from our culture. All of them believe in personal experience as the path to knowledge. Know thyself.
The Monroe Institute is famous for its Sound Science. Bob Monroe and his team, including Mark Certo and others, discovered that by using biaural beats and a proprietary blend of different waveform frequencies, the brain could be entrained to certain frequencies. They also found that certain frequencies, or combinations of frequencies, aided in the attainment of various states of consciousness. The states varied: deep meditation, lucid dreams, out-of-body, remote viewing, creativity, greater intuition, and getting help by non-physical entities. All are possible with a combination of relaxation, intent, and energy state.
The gateway experience is designed to introduce the practitioner to techniques that when combined with the sound, can aid in that inner exploration. Bob Monroe wanted to approach the process from a scientific point of view. Therefore, he referred to the different states as Focus levels. The Gateway Experience is designed to introduce the participant to different focus levels. Through direct experience, we learn about ourselves and the universe. It cannot be learned from a book. A book can teach the protocol. However, we gain the knowledge through direct experience. Everyone’s experience is different. We are all different. Are we not?