Book summary “Journeys out of the body”: summary

Introduction

You often suspect that human potential extends far beyond the physical senses, yet you remain trapped by the limits of ordinary reality. You want to explore deeper dimensions of existence without knowing how to access them safely or reliably.

You can consciously separate your consciousness from your physical body and explore parallel non-physical realms of reality.

Robert Monroe charts this exact path through decades of rigorous personal experimentation. The book details your transition from spontaneous physical symptoms to controlled projection, mapping unfamiliar non-physical environments and their laws. You will examine the mechanics of survival beyond death, the nature of non-human entities, and actionable techniques for inducing out-of-the-body travel yourself.

• How do you initiate the vibrational state required for separation?
• What physical and mental laws govern non-physical realms?
• How can you verify that your out-of-body observations are real?
• What happens to your consciousness after physical death?

1. Initial Symptoms and First Projections

Spontaneous physical vibrations and localized disassociations lead to the discovery of the Second Body.

Early Symptoms

In the spring of 1958, unexpected physical events began without warning. Following a relaxation and concentration tape test in isolation, you might suffer from strange muscular reactions. After a Sunday family brunch of scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee, Monroe experienced an unyielding band of pain across his solar plexus. The severe diaphragm cramp lasted from 1:30 PM until midnight without responding to home medication.

Within six weeks following the initial symptoms, a peculiar vibrating condition manifested nine times. The sensation always occurred after you lay down for rest or sleep. A warm beam of light seemed to strike from the north at a 30° angle from the horizon. Your body would shake violently and vibrate like an electric current running through you.

First Projections

When you stopped fighting the shaking, the vibration sensation lasted about 5 minutes. After the vibrations occurred six more times, you gained the courage to attempt movement. During one episode, you could move your fingers through the rug, floorboards, and ceiling of the room below. You reached out from your bed and felt a triangular chip of wood, a bent nail, and sawdust in the room beneath.

Thinking of a pleasurable hobby during vibrations led to your consciousness separating entirely. While lying beside your sleeping wife, you might think of flying a glider. This triggered an out-of-body separation where you found yourself floating near the ceiling, looking down at two figures in the bed. Looking down from the ceiling, Monroe experienced intense shock upon seeing his own physical body lying in bed beside his wife, leading him to fear he was dying and quickly dive back into his body.

Medical Findings

You naturally seek medical answers when such anomalies begin. Medical evaluations, blood tests, fluoroscopes, electrocardiograms, urinalysis, and EEG scans were performed by Dr. Richard Gordon. Consultations with psychologist Dr. Foster Bradshaw and psychiatrist Dr. Lewis Wolberg revealed no evidence of epilepsy, brain tumors, or schizophrenia. Dr. Gordon conducted a thorough physical including an EEG and blood tests, concluding that Monroe was physically healthy and suggesting he work less and rest more.

2. Evidential Experiments and Navigation

Locale I, or the Here-Now, consists of real-world people and places existing in the material world at the moment of the experiment. Visits to Locale I must not contain strange beings or unknown places. If they do, perception is distorted. It is the only Second State environment where evidential results are provable by standard confirmation methods.

Verifiable real-world observations confirm the objective reality of Second State projections despite unique spatial challenges.

On 9/10/58, Monroe visited Dr. Bradshaw and his wife outside their house at 4:27 PM. Phone confirmation later verified they were walking to the post office wearing identical apparel to what Monroe observed. The distance from Monroe's office to Dr. Bradshaw's house was five miles. They arrived at the post office at twenty minutes to five after a fifteen-minute drive.

Evidential Experiments

On 3/5/59, Monroe observed Mr. Bahnson loading a Van DeGraff generator into a car and Mrs. Bahnson passing out large white mail letters at the breakfast table. Both actions were confirmed by the family. On 10/12/60, Monroe visited a small room with four women and noted a mention of cancer. A tall woman in a dark suit sat in his reserved chair and draped across him, which R.G. and the participants later confirmed.

On 8/15/63, Monroe pinched R.W. in her kitchen while she sat with her niece and friend. Upon returning to work on Tuesday, R.W. displayed two brown and blue marks at the exact pinched location.

Navigation Challenges

Human spatial memory is tied to a standard six-foot earthbound viewpoint looking straight ahead or downward. Aerial perspectives completely distort familiar street layouts and homes. Directional navigation in the Second Body relies entirely on thinking of a person rather than a place. Automatic homing is extremely sensitive to stray thoughts.

Letting one microsecond of an unrelated or conflicting stray thought interrupt causes immediate misdirection. On 4/12/63, concentration failures led Monroe to land on strangers' rooftops instead of visiting friends.

Laboratory Validation

Laboratory testing of Second Body separations using EEG equipment shows unique brain tracings and allows verification of unannounced external visitors. On July 19th, 1966, during experiment EEG-5, Monroe observed the technician with a curly-haired man outside the console room. Dr. Tart later confirmed the EEG showed unique tracings and the technician confirmed her husband's presence. Monroe had arrived at the hospital EEG lab at 9:00 P.M. after driving seventy miles from Richmond. Electrodes were attached at nine-thirty, followed by forty-five minutes spent attempting fractional relaxation.

3. Exploration of Locale II and Locale III

Non-physical reality extends into vast thought-responsive realms and historical parallel worlds devoid of electricity.

Locale II Exploration

Locale II is a vast, non-material environment where thought serves as the primary creative and transportational force. Traditional physical laws do not apply here. Mechanical aids like cars or phones are unnecessary because thought is action. Communication is instantaneous. Desires manifest instantly according to the rule that like attracts like.

Uncontrolled raw emotions and repressed fears dominate the fringe areas of Locale II, requiring strict self-mastery. Upon entering this realm, you face unshielded emotions and deep-seated fears like the fear of death, pain, and the unknown. Until these emotional patterns are harnessed and disciplined, rational thought or progress to higher regions remains impossible.

You must handle these psychological demands through specific steps:

• harness and discipline exploding uncontrollable emotional patterns one by one;
• learn calm objective reasoning to pass through the emotionally driven near area.

Monroe visited an area populated by entities reliving physical habits. One notable encounter involved a newly deceased ten-year-old boy awaiting guidance. Another was a monk in Coshocton, Pennsylvania, from a past life.

Locale III Discovery

Locale III can be accessed repeatedly through a specific formula involving vibrations, a 180-degree rotation, and a portal. Monroe discovered this method by setting up physical vibrations, rotating his Second Body 180 degrees out of phase, and encountering a wall with a body-shaped hole opening into deep blackness.

You can replicate this transit using clear physical adjustments:

• set up the vibration condition;
• perform a 180-degree rotation like turning over in bed;
• locate and pass through the hole that appears at the 180-degree position.

Monroe performed this sequence across numerous experiments between November 1958 and February 1959. Elapsed times varied, such as 1 hour 5 minutes on the 11/5/58 experiment, 3 hours 15 minutes away on the 2/15/59 experiment, and 40 minutes of total episode time on the 2/27/59 experiment. Sometimes he reached through the portal to shake hands with unseen entities.

Locale III is a physical-matter world resembling Earth historically and socially, but completely devoid of electricity. The realm features cities, roads, and people with human attributes, but lacks electricity, electronics, internal combustion engines, and oil. Power is instead generated by steam locomotives driven by removable radioactive or thermal vat containers.

Monroe observed wide automobiles steered by a horizontal bar at speeds of 15 to 20 miles per hour. Steam locomotives were serviced by technicians using protective shields.

During visits to Locale III, Monroe inadvertently displaced and temporarily inhabited the physical body of a local resident. He found that he automatically took over the body of an architectural contractor counterpart in Locale III. He experienced his memories, romantic relationships with a woman named Lea, and life struggles while causing him occasional amnesiac episodes.

Monroe took over 'I' There's body while he was getting off a bus, when he announced his marriage to Lea, and during a mountain vacation where he crashed a human-powered vehicle.

4. Post-Mortem Survival and Non-Physical Realms

Personality and consciousness survive physical death. You can visit deceased acquaintances in Locale II where they exist in states reflecting their earth-life personalities.

Consciousness survives physical death, encountering structured heavens, self-created hells, and supreme presences.

Robert Monroe visited Dr. Richard Gordon in Locale II and encountered him not as an old man, but as a short, thin twenty-two-year-old with a shock of blond hair, matching an old photograph owned by the doctor's widow.

Post Mortem Survival

When facing an impenetrable metallic barrier or hostile entities during out-of-body travel, you might recite every prayer you know. These conventional prayers fail to yield results when applied mechanically, similar to reciting a chemical formula without understanding its intent.

When trapped against an overlapping steel plate barrier, conventional prayers did nothing. Monroe escaped only by applying a counterintuitive maneuver learned from recovering from an airplane outside spin: moving away from the barrier back in the direction he came.

Heaven and Hell

Hell-like conditions in Locale II are self-created environments. They are populated by subhuman predatory entities and governed by your deepest unconscious motivations.

Monroe experienced a gray-black ocean where moving violently or fighting back attracts aggressive denizens that bite, pull, and push.

The Supreme Presence

During out-of-body travel in Locale II, inhabitants pause their activities at a heraldic trumpet-like Signal. They form a living road for a passing supreme force. As the presence passes, it generates a roaring musical sound and a feeling of irresistible living force.

The ultimate heaven and mystic nirvana is a state of pure peace, shifting colored light rays, and harmonic music.

Monroe visited this state three times and suffered intense nostalgia and homesickness upon returning, preventing him from trying to go back there again.

5. Entities, Precognition, and Extraphysical Phenomena

Out-of-body travelers encounter non-human entities, precognitive valve mechanisms, and unfamiliar extraphysical technology.

Non-Physical Entities

During out-of-the-body states, travelers may encounter non-humanoid or humanoid entities that behave like animals, clinging to the non-physical body without apparent human intelligence. These small, rubbery, nude humanoid entities attach themselves to your back and resist removal until specific tactics like high-voltage visualization or ignoring them are applied. The first entity encountered appeared to be about 10 years old and approximately 3 feet tall.

On April 28, 1960, Monroe pulled two rubbery entities off his back that turned into facsimiles of his two daughters as a camouflage before a robed man arrived and cradled them.

When dealing with such encounters, you can apply specific methods:

• Remain calm and objective when entities attach.
• Visualize high-voltage charged wire to neutralize or deflate parasitic entities.
• Wait completely immobile so clustering sucker entities detach themselves.

Precognition and Future Visions

Precognitive visions can spontaneously occur in deep relaxation states, initiated by a hissing sound and the mental sensation of a rectangular door valve opening to reveal future events. You experience a formula where a specific hissing sound plus a valve-opening sensation leads to a vision of a future event, which then matches reality with minor interpretive distortions by the conscious mind. By the time Monroe recorded his experiences, this precognitive formula had been proved 22 times.

When a precognitive warning involves a catastrophe the conscious mind cannot accept or fathom, the mind substitutes it with the nearest familiar catastrophic experience from memory. Monroe's vision of an airplane flying low under electrical wires and crashing corresponded symbolically to flying through a thunderstorm and subsequently suffering an unexpected coronary occlusion 4 days after landing in North Carolina. This medical emergency led to 4 weeks spent in the hospital following the coronary occlusion, 12 weeks after the initial precognition entry.

Extraphysical Technology

A sudden soundless explosion during relaxation can violently displace the consciousness out of the physical body, resembling the effect of an experimental energy beam. On August 23, 1963, at 7:17 in the evening, a soundless explosion threw Monroe across the room 2 seconds after he closed his eyes in the den, causing his light fixtures to throw off blue sparks and melting wires.

Out-of-body explorers can encounter unfamiliar non-physical technology, such as a rodlike device that can render people unconscious, revive them, or extinguish fires depending on its focus. On May 5, 1959, in an unfinished non-physical house, a host demonstrated this 18-inch triode device featuring a focusing cylinder, a spiral coil power source, and protective shield plates, after which Monroe recorded a total time lapse of 1 hour 5 minutes upon returning to his physical body.

Misdirected out-of-body returns can place the traveler into alternate historical settings, strange hospitals, or incorrect physical bodies, requiring specific breathing techniques to escape. On March 11, 1961, Monroe returned to a strange bed where women claimed he had been ill for a long time, mentioned a titration treatment level of 1500 c.c., and stated the year was 1924 as calculated by the Greek method.

You can escape these misdirected locations by following a physical recovery routine:

• Recognize when you are in the wrong place or body.
• Breathe in a gasping manner through half-closed lips.
• Accelerate the resulting head hiss into a high-order vibration.
• Lift out smoothly to re-converge with your proper physical body.

6. Characteristics of the Second Body

The Second Body possesses mass and weight, though much less than the physical body, and is subject to gravitational attraction. You can interpenetrate physical walls by sifting through spaces between molecular structures due to its low density.

On 8/8/60, Monroe performed an experiment where only his legs and hips came out, floating down and draping over the edge of the couch like loose cloth before he re-entered after twenty-two minutes of time away during the partial separation experiment on 8/8/60, starting with 30 c.p.s. starting frequency of the rough vibrations surging during the 8/8/60 experiment.

The Second Body possesses low-density mass, extreme plasticity, a connecting cord, and a unique relationship with sexuality.

Second Body Characteristics

The Second Body is extremely plastic and can alter its shape, stretch significantly, or mirror the physical form, potentially explaining mythological creatures. On 9/16/60, Monroe stood in a room and pushed his hand toward a wall eight feet distance to the wall during the arm-stretching experiment on 9/16/60, causing his arm to stretch to twice its length without any conscious awareness of stretching.

A flexible, non-physical cord or cable connects the physical body and the Second Body, serving as a communication and control link. On 1/9/61, Monroe reached behind his head and discovered a two-inch thickness of the connecting cable discovered on 1/9/61 flexible cable composed of hundreds of tendon-like strands, body-warm, and without skin covering.

Mind and Supermind

Experiences in the Second State differ fundamentally from typical dreams through continuous conscious awareness, deliberate decisions, and sequenced events. In the Second State, thought and action are entirely synchronous, meaning that the thought of movement or a destination instantly creates it.

Sexuality in the Second State

The physical sex drive acts as a catalyst to the Second State, but true Second State sexuality is an intense emotional and energetic communion rather than a physical act. You must handle this urge carefully:

• Do not fight, ignore, or deny the existence of the sex urge when it arises.
• Acknowledge that the idea of sex is good and will be addressed later.
• Direct focus immediately to traveling somewhere else or initiating the intended exit.

7. Techniques for Inducing Out-of-Body Travel

The primary obstacle to experiencing the Second Body is an unreasoning fear comprising fear of death, fear of not returning, and fear of the unknown. These fears are deeply ingrained and automatic, triggered by the sensation of separation from the physical body.

You can systematically induce out-of-body travel through deep relaxation, vibrational state generation, and specific separation methods.

The author had to repeat the separation process 18 to 20 times before gathering enough courage and curiosity to stay out longer than a few seconds.

Preliminary Exercises

Achieving deep physical and mental relaxation without any time urgency is the mandatory first step toward inducing the vibrational state. The author outlines progression through distinct conditions:

• Condition A: hold mental attention on anything with closed eyes while drifting off to sleep without falling completely asleep.
• Condition B: eliminate concentration, remaining poised between wakefulness and sleep looking at blackness ahead.
• Condition C: systematically deepen consciousness by letting go of the borderland sleep edge little by little.
• Condition D: achieve relaxation while fully rested and refreshed, best started immediately after waking from a nap or sleep.

When attempting to hold the borderland state after watching a football game for hours, the author experienced visual mind pictures of football players for at least 30 minutes.

State of Vibration

Generating the vibrational state requires specific physical alignment, absolute quiet, deep relaxation, and mental visualization of converging lines to pull wave energy into the head. The experimenter lies along a north-south axis with the head to magnetic north, wearing loose clothing and metal-free skin, breathing through a half-opened mouth.

• Lie along a north-south axis with the head to magnetic north, loosened clothes, no metal objects, and slightly warm covering.
• Ensure absolute quiet without interruptions or time limits.
• Achieve Condition D relaxation and mentally repeat the affirmation 5 times.
• Begin breathing through a half-opened mouth.
• Concentrate on blackness one foot, three feet, and six feet away from the forehead.
• Turn the point of concentration 90 degrees upward on a line parallel to the body axis, reach for the vibrations, and pull them into the head.

The author utilized specially prepared hypnotic induction tapes and borderland sleep state techniques, rejecting drug relaxation due to loss of conscious control and distorted perception.

The Separation Process

Complete disassociation from the physical body can be systematically achieved using either the lift-out float method or the 180-degree rotation method.

• Establish the vibrational state and complete thought control within a familiar room during daylight.
• Lift-out method: think of getting lighter and floating upward with anticipation until disassociated.
• Rotation method: slowly turn over by twisting the head and shoulders without using physical arms or legs until reaching a 180-degree position facing the physical body, then think of floating upward.

An immediate and infallible return to the physical body is guaranteed by consciously initiating any physical motion or sensory action.

• Keep rational thought processes dominant and avoid panic.
• Think of your physical body and mentally begin to move a physical part such as a finger or toe.
• Take a deep, deliberate breath of air, reactivate physical senses, move your jaw, swallow, or move your tongue.

During early experimentation, the author used this automatic direction finder and rocket blast combined whenever difficulty arose, ensuring immediate return without panic.

10 Key Ideas

1. You can consciously separate your consciousness from your physical body and explore parallel non-physical realms of reality.
2. Verifiable real-world observations confirm the objective reality of Second State projections despite unique spatial challenges.
3. Locale II is a vast, non-material environment where thought serves as the primary creative and transportational force.
4. Locale III can be accessed repeatedly through a specific formula involving vibrations, a 180-degree rotation, and a portal.
5. Consciousness survives physical death, encountering structured heavens, self-created hells, and supreme presences.
6. Out-of-body travelers encounter non-human entities, precognitive valve mechanisms, and unfamiliar extraphysical technology.
7. The Second Body possesses low-density mass, extreme plasticity, a connecting cord, and a unique relationship with sexuality.
8. The primary obstacle to experiencing the Second Body is an unreasoning fear comprising fear of death, fear of not returning, and fear of the unknown.
9. You can systematically induce out-of-body travel through deep relaxation, vibrational state generation, and specific separation methods.
10. An immediate and infallible return to the physical body is guaranteed by consciously initiating any physical motion or sensory action.