Part 2 It is now a good two-decades later, and Robert Monroe has become, by any definition, a Master Shaman – able to leave his body at will, virtually whenever he pleases. He is comfortable travelling in “Locale-II” (though he no longer calls it that, feeling it’s too vague a label for what he’s now perceiving), and has become accustomed to meeting discarnate entities there. He even “makes friends” with a few and has ongoing interactions with them. Two of these beings, arbitrarily labelled “AA” and “BB,” occupy a good deal of his attention. Their communication in hyperspace does not involve words as we understand them, and is to all intents and purposes “telepathic.” Obviously, spoken language (which consists of vibrations produced in a physical larynx and enunciated via tongue and mouth through the earth’s atmosphere), is irrelevant in the non-physical realms. In hyperspace, information is conveyed, not serially, in words, sentences and paragraphs, but instantly in one comprehensive gestalt. Monroe has coined the word “rote” to describe these packets of information, and it is precisely because of the difficulty he has in translating them into word sequences, that he often uses fiction techniques in his writing. At any rate, in Chapter 12 of Far Journeys, Robert Monroe receives a rote from the discarnate entity, BB. The translation takes up ten pages: 162 to 172, and is a devastatingly accurate synopsis of the Gnostic world view. (This section is, of course, much too long too quote here in full, so the following is a brief summation – “Ident” is Monroe’s term for “Mental name or “address,” i.e., energy pattern of item,” and “Loosh” might be described in Gnostic terms as “the dew from above [that] gives them strength.”) Here’s the “Loosh Rote” as translated by Robert Monroe into English:
“Someone” (who else but the Gnostic demiurge?), turns out to be one entity among many: a god among gods. As the rote unfolds we learn how Someone seeded His Garden (obviously planet earth), and evolved life forms upon it to eventually produce human beings. He then appointed Collectors to gather the Loosh/Emotional Energy from the earth’s entities, among whom humans are by far the best producers.
The Loosh harvest initially involved the creation of natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), to kill off large numbers of creatures, since Loosh was easier to gather upon the deaths of the organisms generating it. Then it was discovered that different forms of “stress” generated in the human population would release Loosh without having to kill the organism. This was because Someone, as an experiment, injected a “Piece of Himself” into the human species. This was done to maintain more or less constant stress in each individual since the human would always “seek to satisfy the attraction this tiny mote of Himself engendered as it sought reunion with the infinite Whole.”
From a Gnostic perspective, the “Loosh Collectors” are the “Archons” – the dreaded rulers of hyperspace who had to be avoided at all costs when leaving the body at death.
But because all humans contain a “Piece of Someone” within them, they cannot really die, so are reincarnated over and over again as Loosh producers in spacetime. The true Gnostic, then, is the person who has objectively observed this vicious cycle (presumably by “getting outside of himself” via OOBE) and, with his newfound knowledge (gnosis), is enabled to escape into the truly spiritual realms beyond the earth environment. This is only possible because the Divine spark within him renders him immortal.
It’s important to note that Gnostic cosmology perceives the physical earth as surrounded by concentric hyperspatial “spheres” or “rings” which were regarded by them as palpable barriers. Each one of these circle-realms is presided over by an Archon whose only purpose in life is to capture any passing souls who may have escaped the lower rings.
When I read this seemingly exotic idea for the first time, I assumed (like most gnostic scholars probably do), that it was a theological allegory. “Surely,” one without gnosis might say, “the idea of literal rings around the earth is the product of some ancient philosopher’s metaphorical imagination.” Then I came across this passage in Far Journeys – Monroe is here describing what he routinely encounters in his (by now vastly expanded) out-of-body explorations:
In other words, the “rings” constitute the heaven and hell worlds which have always been a part of human mythology. They are made up of the belief systems of both the discarnate entities who dwell within them, and similar true believers still incarnate in physical bodies. Indeed, in Ultimate Journey, his third book, Monroe no longer refers to them as rings at all, but as “Belief System Territories.” William Buhlman, another contemporary gnostic-shaman, in describing out-of-body perception in his book Adventures Beyond the Body (1996), portrays these discarnate realms as “consensus environments.”
Obviously, if these rings are the objective correlatives of the subtle energies that we label “belief,” they must be to some degree “illusory,” very much like dreams, which for all of their insubstantiality, are certainly real enough while we’re experiencing them. One way to conceptualize this space in toto might be to imagine it as analogous to the Jungian “Collective Unconscious” – except that here it is perceived objectively, outside of the body, rather than as usually experienced: subjectively, within our heads. In the Gnostic conception, each soul leaving the physical body at death, is challenged to pass through these rings. If the soul is locked into a strong belief system it will be attracted to the ring corresponding to it: Christians go to Christian heavens or hells, Muslims go to Muslim heavens or hells, etc. Those who spent their earth lives locked into other beliefs wind up exactly where their heads are at the moment of death. This of course, is exactly what the Bardo Thodol describes as the first reality perceived by the soul as it leaves the body at death:
Buhlman states it more succinctly:
Thus: “Belief System Territories,” or, if you prefer: “Consensus Environments.” The shaman’s special talent is the ability to visit these spaces while still incarnate – he or she doesn’t have to wait until the moment of death to perceive them. And, like visiting a foreign country here on earth, it isn’t necessary for the visitor to share the beliefs of its inhabitants to be able to perceive their consensus reality “objectively” – i.e. outside of that particular belief system. Here, accompanied by his discarnate companion BB, Monroe describes what it’s like to actually enter the Belief System Territories, corroborating that they are mirror images of many physical life environments:
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688—1772), the great Swedish mystic, spent the last three decades of his life exploring the same realms that Robert Monroe did in our era. He was definitely a shaman (though he is seldom described as such), and he probably wouldn’t have liked that label himself, being very much a Protestant Christian – a belief system which unfortunately colours all of his discarnate perceptions. Here he describes what “the rings” (though he doesn’t use that nomenclature) looked like about 200 years before Monroe visited them:
The main goal of the Gnostic was to eliminate belief entirely from his life, replacing it with gnosis. In which case, his soul was enabled to transcend the rings entirely – to escape into the “True Reality,” to find the “True God” beyond the Belief System Territories, exempt now from reincarnation in the earth life system, which (as Buddhism has always asserted), is pre-eminently an “illusion” anyway.
This was no easy task, even for the Gnostics, because one always had to run the gauntlet of the Archons. Who, or what, the Archons are has been argued about for millennia, and it is still not easy to differentiate exactly what they represent. The authors of the Bardo Thodol mention Peaceful and Wrathful Deities, who are conceived of as the personification of our own beliefs and could easily be thought of as Archons – this fits the scheme outlined here. But there the Archons’ primary function as “guardians of the threshold” seems to end. Although Swedenborg describes angels and demons presiding over the various heavens and hells, entry into those realms is not seen to involve any encounter with either Loosh Collectors or Archons. For example:
Despite the rather twisted prose, we recognise that “interiors” translates as “beliefs,” and the “state of his interiors” (unless they are totally unique to that individual), would correspond to our definition of consensus realities. So what happened to the Gnostic Archons? Buhlman doesn’t mention meeting them, nor do Fox and Muldoon. Monroe’s concept of “Loosh Collectors” fits their description, but it is highly significant that although he learned about them from the “Loosh Rote,” he never describes encountering other discarnate entities resembling either Archons or Collectors – and he definitely doesn’t perceive the rings as being subject to their specific control. Initially disturbed by the Loosh Rote, Monroe had a great deal of trouble integrating it into his “Reality Percept;” he goes so far as to imagine a Guernsey cow being milked by its owner as an allegory of the human/Archon-Collector relationship:
This may be too benign a view when compared with the Gnostics’ conception of the Archons as demonic prison guards. Monroe eventually came to terms with the Loosh Rote after consulting a high-level discarnate entity, he calls an “Inspec” (for “intelligent species”), who advised him while out-of-body. Eventually, he accepts this reality as an unavoidable truth of existence: since we cannot do anything about it anyway (like paying taxes), we are best advised to accept it and get on with our own personal growth. Perhaps that is the solution the Gnostics chose as well, though many legitimate questions remain. Perhaps significantly, Monroe never mentions it again. Obviously, there is more to this subject than meets the eye. By the time we reach Ultimate Journey, the final book in Monroe’s trilogy, the structure of hyperspace has become infinitely more complex, though our Archon questions (plus a few others raised in his previous volumes), are never completely answered. Before we can examine Monroe’s magnum opus, we must first attempt to fill those gaps with data obtained from other sources. This will be subject of the next article in this series.
© Copyright 2002 by New Dawn Magazine. This article first appeared in New Dawn No. 72 (May-June 2002). For further information visit www.newdawnmagazine.com
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