A year before his death in 1995, Robert Monroe published Ultimate Journey, the last of his three books.

Ultimate Journey builds on the foundation Monroe established with his previous books (Journeys Out of the Body and Far Journeys); in fact, if you’re new to Monroe it’s advisable to read the books in order, as the earlier texts provide invaluable context for Ultimate Journey.

However, Ultimate Journey also digresses significantly from Monroe’s earlier writing. Whereas previously Monroe focused on understanding his Out of Body Experiences (OBEs), in Ultimate Journey he attempts to describe the metaphysical system from within which humans operate.

A common feature of all of his books is that Monroe attempts to use language that is relatively free of theological overtones. In Ultimate Journey, for example, he uses the name “I-There” to designate a super-entity that aggregates all of his experiences across multiple lifetimes — an entity which other mystics might describe as a god or soul.

Students of metaphysics, however, will notice many parallels between the material presented in this book to that of other metaphysical writers (Jane Roberts’ Seth material, for example):

• The portion of reality we’re aware of when we are awake and focused on the hear-and-now is only a tiny fraction of the reality of which we are a part;
• Each of us has reincarnated countless times;
• Each of us is a single aspect of a larger conglomerate of selves, which include “past” selves as well as selves which have not (or not  yet) incarnated on Earth;
• Earthly existence is a spiritual crucible intended to help us to grow;
• Eventually, the cumulative experience of all of our selves reaches a point where a greater transformation takes place, after which we pass to a level of non-physical reality that is beyond our ability to express in physical language.

The challenge with the metaphysical architecture described in Ultimate Journey — as with all such architectures — is that Monroe’s experience was entirely subjective. It can be assumed, therefore, that at least some portion of what he reports was filtered through and colored by his personal biases and perhaps even limitations. But implicit in all of Monroe’s work — including this book — is the suggestion that each of us has the ability, if we wish, to verify the truth of this for ourselves . . .

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If Robert Monroe’s contribution to metaphysical literature had ended with his first book, Journeys Out of the Body, it would have been a considerable accomplishment. As described in a previous review here, in Journeys Out of the Body, Monroe recounts how his consciousness began to spontaneously separate from his physical body, and what he subsequently learned about Out-of-Body-Experiences (OBEs). Monroe’s stated aim, with the book, was to bring comfort and reassurance to other people who had similar experiences and who might otherwise think they were ill or crazy.

Monroe’s first book, however, was actually the first of three he would write in his lifetime.

Far Journeys is the second.

Far Journeys picks up where Journeys out of the Body leaves off. Monroe first describes how he founded The Monroe Institute, a not-for-profit research organization dedicated to studying human consciousness. In the first 50 pages or so of Far Journeys, Monroe describes some of the Institute’s early research and the experiences of the individuals who served as research subjects.

Monroe next returns to the subject of his own OBEs.  By then, he’d been experiencing the phenomenon regularly for 25 years, and, he writes, he’d begun to feel frustrated.

It is hard for some people to believe, I suppose, but such travels actually became boring. The early excitement had long passed . . . there didn’t seem to be anything exciting to do.

It was clear that Monroe needed to do something different, and that “something” was to turn his OBEs over to his “total self.” The results of that decision, he writes,

have been of a nature so far removed from anything my conscious mind could conceive of  . . .

That’s something of an understatement. Where Monroe was once primarily interested in OBEs as a scientifically significant  phenomenon, Far Journeys is a book about spiritual discovery and transformation, set in a world where the boundaries of space and time do not exist. Monroe meets advanced beings who share information about the spiritual origins and future of Earth and humanity. He meets a non-physical entity who he knew before he himself began incarnating.

Monroe continues to refrain, as much as he can, from language that suggests any sort of theology. For this reason, Far Journeys, in addition to serving as an account of his own OBEs, offers a roadmap for readers who wish to explore the phenomenon for themselves.

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When surveying the metaphysical literature produced in the last century, it is impossible to overstate the importance of Robert Monroe.

Monroe (1915 – 1995) was a radio broadcasting executive who, in the late 1950s, began to spontaneously experience a phenomenon now commonly referred to as an Out of Body Experience (OBE).

OBEs were not new at the time. Numerous accounts of OBEs (often described via the more archaic term “astral projection”) can be found in both ancient and pre-20th century esoteric literature. But Monroe brought something new to the experience: he made a genuine effort to observe and record his OBEs as objectively as possible.

Journeys Out of the Body is the first of three books Monroe wrote in his lifetime about his OBEs and the effect they had on his life.

The book, which is still in print over 40 years since its original 1971 publication, begins with a chronological account of Monroe’s first OBE experiences. They were not pleasant. Monroe had never heard of the phenomenon and had no spiritual or religious frame of reference by which to understand it. He thought at first he might be having psychotic episodes of some kind, or that the OBEs were symptoms of a physical ailment such as a brain tumor.

But when medical and psychiatric evaluations found him to be both sane and healthy, Monroe’s curiosity took over. He began exploring the OBE phenomenon with as much of a scientist’s eye as was possible (given the fact that by definition, an OBE is a highly subjective experience).

One of the first things he set out to do — understandably! — was to try to obtain evidence that he was, in fact, separating from his physical body.  Chapter 3, On The Evidence, describes several of these experiments: Monroe showed that he could “visit” living people during his OBE episodes, observe them, and then report what they were doing. In many cases, he was able to report information he could not known without being on the site at the time he made his observations.

The next several chapters of Journeys Out of the Body focus on the nature of the OBE itself: what the Second Body is like, and the things that happened to Monroe when he was out-of-body.

While some of Monroe’s journeys took place in what he identifies as our everyday, physical world, he came to believe that the Second Body’s “natural home” was elsewhere.

The Second Body is basically not of this physical world. To apply it to visits to George’s house or other physical destinations is like asking a diver to swim down to the ocean bed without scuba gear or pressure suit. He can do it, but not for long, and not too many times.

Instead, the Second Body’s natural home actually spans two environments, in the lexicon Monroe uses in this book: Locale II and Locale III. He defines Locale II as “a non-material environment with laws of motion and matter only remotely related to the physical world,” and describes it as vast beyond comprehension. Locale III is a “physical-matter world almost identical to our own.”

Much of the value of Journeys Out of the Body comes from reading Monroe’s accounts of  what — and who — he encountered during his visits to these Locales. These accounts are all the more valuable because Monroe strives always to be as objective as possible. Readers, in other words, get the unvarnished truth about OBEs. We learn that OBEs can be frightening and chaotic. We learn that OBEs call into question many conventional notions about life, death, and the afterlife.

But OBEs also suggest that consciousness is not “merely” a byproduct of the physical brain. In that respect, OBEs may point to a new spiritual path — a path that may even be compatible with modern man’s post-Enlightenment embrace of empiricism.

Monroe suggests as much in the book. Beginning in Chapter 16, he also describes techniques readers can use to try to induce their own OBEs.

Journeys Out of the Body is a must-have book if you’re at all curious about OBEs, or if you want your metaphysical library to include seminal works.

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