by Robert A. Monroe

This journey began in the spring of 1958, when a pragmatic 42-year-old broadcasting executive, Robert A. Monroe, was living a conventional suburban life with his family. Without any prior history of mystical interests or unusual occurrences, his routine existence was unexpectedly disrupted during a quiet afternoon rest. As he lay relaxing, a sudden and intense surge of internal vibrations swept through his physical body. The sensation felt like an overwhelming electrical frequency surging through his frame, leaving him completely paralyzed and deeply disoriented.

Frightened and confused by these recurring episodes, the initial reaction was one of acute panic and concern for his physical health. Suspecting a severe neurological illness, a brain tumor, or an impending stroke, he worried that he might be dying or losing his sanity. To seek answers, he underwent thorough medical and psychiatric evaluations. However, his doctors found him to be in excellent physical and mental health, unable to identify any medical pathology or physiological cause behind the mysterious shocks.

The mystery deepened during a subsequent vibrational episode when, instead of remaining trapped in immobility, a dramatic separation occurred. He felt himself floating upward toward the ceiling of the room, only to look down and see his own physical body lying motionless on the furniture below. Conscious, alert, and fully aware in this altered state, he discovered that he possessed a non-physical “second body” capable of floating through solid structures and observing the physical world from a completely distinct perspective.

Once the initial terror subsided, the realization dawned that these inexplicable events could not be stopped or suppressed, prompting a pivotal shift in perspective. Rather than continuing to fight the phenomenon, he decided to approach it as a scientific inquiry, systematically observing, recording, and navigating these non-physical travels. This accidental discovery permanently redirected his life away from traditional business pursuits, launching a lifelong investigation into out-of-body experiences and the broader nature of human consciousness.

The following is an excerpt from Ultimate Journey of Robert Monroe’s encounters with the dead/dying on the other side:

. . . I began to move out of phase at about three the following morning. Then I used the quick-switch method to the earliest point in my conscious memory. At once I felt a signal vibrating within me. I followed it – and came upon a scene I remembered well. There was someone beside me – it felt like a brother. He seemed nervous. I was pointing at the figure of a man lying face down in the middle of a dusty road. He was a youngster, no more than eighteen.

A battle was going on all around him. Some fifty or sixty men in short brown togas with wide leather belts around their waists were fighting an approximately equal number of dark, bearded men, who seemed to have incredible strength. Both sides were armed with short swords, spears, and round shields. There was shouting, moaning, and screaming, the clanging of metal against metal, clouds of dust, blood spurting, confusion. The wide belts, it seemed, were losing.

The eighteen-year-old, who wore a wide belt, was struggling to pull himself up. The problem was the spear which was holding him down. The spear had penetrated his back, gone all the way through his body and deep into the dirt of the road. His efforts became slower and weaker, until they ceased.

Suddenly, I remembered that years ago I had felt the pain of the spear in my back, but this time it was different. I turned to the man beside me. He was in obvious pain. I asked him if he understood. He nodded, then turned and moved away, and disappeared.

There was nothing for me to do but to try to help. I bent over the youngster and shouted for him to get up. I saw his head – no, not his physical head – lift out of his body, and I reached over, grabbed it, and pulled. He slid out easily.

I told him to stand up. He did so, and looked around at the fighting. Then he noticed a sword lying at his feet. He reached down and tried to pick it up, but his hand went through it. Puzzled, he tried again.

I told him to take it easy. He looked at me angrily.

“I must get back into the fight. My friends are dying.”

I told him that was impossible as he himself was dead.

“What are you saying? I am strong – I can think!”

I pointed behind him where his physical body lay in the dust, blood congealing around it. He turned and stared at it, dumbfounded. He bent over and peered intently at the dead face. Then he looked up at me.

“But . . . I’m alive! I’m not dead!”

I asked him exactly what had happened. He answered vaguely; his interest was still focused on the raging battle.

“We were marching quickly along the road, looking for the enemy, eager to join battle. There was shouting – then something hit me in the back. I was down in the dust, and I couldn’t get up – something was holding me down.”

“What happened next?”

“I gave up trying because I was so weak. I heard you calling – and there was a click. And I stood up.”

I pointed to his body in the dust. He glanced at it, then turned back to me.

“But I’m not dead! How can I stand and talk to you if I’m dead?”

I suggested he try to rejoin the battle, but that was a mistake. He rushed away into the thick of the swords and spears, into the tumult and confusion. When a sword swing he couldn’t dodge went through him with no effect, he watched in fascination.

A moment later a short, bearded man attacked him from behind and the two fell to the ground punching and gouging one another. It took me a second or two to realize that the bearded man also had dropped his physical attachment in the battle. They might still be rolling on the ground centuries later, trying to kill each other! I went over to the struggling duo and shouted that they were wasting their energy. They were both physically dead, I insisted, and there was no way they could hurt each other.

I repeated this until they finally got the message. They rolled apart and looked at me. The bearded man got on his knees, bent forward, and touched his head to the ground, moaning an unintelligible chant. The youngster looked at him bewildered, then at me.

“He thinks you’re a god. Are you?”

“No,” I replied. “Just a friend.”

He felt the place where the spear had penetrated.

“There’s no hole, no blood . . . Are you sure you’re not a god?”

I laughed, shook my head, and told him I had to be leaving. Around us, the battle was less intense. More forms were moving out of destroyed and dismembered bodies. Soon the place would be crowded with ex-physical humans, all with bewildered expressions on their faces. The youngster touched my hand.

“Can I go with you?”

I hesitated, but a deep inner surge immediately gave me the answer. I grasped his hand and started to move upward. He looked uncertain.

“I . . . I’m not a bird – I can’t fly!”

I gently pulled on his hand and slowly we rose above the battlefield. It took but a moment for his anxiety to drop away, and we both shouted in joy as we sped up and out. In my mind I hit the return code on the quick-switch system. There was a flare of light and we hung motionless in the lighter grays of the intermediate rings. I felt the youngster’s hand in mine. The question was, where do I drop him off? Just as I was about to ask him, I became aware that the pressure of his hand had gone. I whirled around. Nothing. No youngster. Nobody. What was going on?

This event was similar to a previous happening in an out-of-body experience many years earlier, but with some basic differences. Then I was the person who was being shown the dying youngster because I myself had experienced an inexplicable physical abdominal pain. Now I was the one who was showing the “old me” the reason. I had, it seemed, answered an earlier call for help – from myself! And the youngster? Where did he go?

I was about to return to the physical to think it over when another signal came in strongly. This time I understood it more clearly. It was much like hearing someone call for help, or a telephone ringing when you know it’s your phone. It was not difficult to home in on it.

Below me appeared a small building, with a hole in the side of it and wide steps leading down inside. I walked carefully down the steps because the signal was coming from inside. There lying on a cot was a man thrashing around wildly. Hanging on to his back were two children, about four or five years old, riding out the bucking and pitching. The man was sobbing in fear and desperately trying to pull the two little ones off his shoulders.

I reached over and gently pulled the children away from him. He lay back in the cot whimpering in relief. I looked down at the children lying quietly, one cradled in each of my arms. They were not children but cats – pets I remembered well. Cats in an out-of-body state! I put my two old friends on the roof, walked back up the stairs, and once at the top, pulled the quick-switch phasing just slightly.

I returned to the physical, feeling that this would have to be thought through logically. It was easy for me to remember the two experiences I had, as it were, revisited, but the perspective in both was different. What was the change common to both?

Logic had an answer, although I did not know how I could accept it.

In the first incident many years ago I was taken by someone and shown the primitive battle to explain a pain in my physical body that I was suffering at the time. I knew then that I was the young warrior impaled in the dust by a spear. Upon realizing this, I had returned to the physical in relief and understanding.

This time, however, I was the one who was doing the showing. I was the one who took the then worried me to the old battle scene hundreds or even thousands of years ago to explain the pain. So I was the one who was helping me. Also I was the young warrior dying in the dust – that was the only way it made sense. That meant, therefore, there were three versions of me at the same place at the same time!

In the second event from years back, I had been the one screaming for help, trying to dislodge the little demons who wanted to ride me like a horse, who seemed to own me. And then a serious-looking man came down the steps and took them off me, held them in his arms, and suddenly disappeared. I remembered that he had looked familiar, like a cousin I had known. But this time I was the one who came down the steps and helped by taking the little cat friends away. I had come to help when I screamed for it! This, I thought, was a little less complicated – there were only two of me present!

Were all of such current nonphysical events simply calls or screams for help from other I’s in different times and places? Who was this I that had the audacity to answer these calls? Have I been helping me through all these years?

The apparent multiplicity and interchangeability of self had yet to fit a pattern I could accept or understand. Nor did it provide an answer to the uncontrolled events that were so disturbing to my physical life. Were they all cries for help? From an earlier me? The prospect was overwhelming.

What my left brain told me was happening was that I from the future had been going back in time to help the I of the past when needed. The signals for help were coming from earlier versions of me, not only in this life but in previous ones. I wondered if this was the same for everybody. I wondered what had happened to the young warrior I who had followed me out of the battlefield. Why did he disappear?

Somewhere in the maze was the answer. If I began with the ‘Knowns’, the whole thing would fit somewhere along the way. What I needed to do was to move into that area in the ‘There’ that was familiar, and look around. For the time being, however, I sought and managed to keep things under control.

Then one night several weeks later, I came to a decision. At the start of a sleep cycle, I rolled out-of-body, moving less out-of-phase than usual, and taking care about what I was doing. I found myself exactly where I expected to be if I really needed to take up the threads again – in the gray area just beyond the entry point from time-space. Immediately I received a signal. I was attracted to a house in the suburbs of a large city. The house seemed vaguely familiar, wide and spacious but empty of furnishings.

I slipped in through the front wall and in the foyer encountered a woman about fifty years old, gray-haired, small and thin. She was wandering through the house from room to room and when I put out my hand to intercept her she seemed surprised that I was there and was paying attention to her.

“Are you here to hang the pictures again?” she asked.

I said I was not and that I was interested in her.

“They took all the pictures down, out of my house. My house! Now no one even speaks to me.”

I asked her why she stayed there. Why didn’t she leave?

“This is my house. This is where I belong. I don’t care if no one notices me anymore.”

Didn’t she feel anything different? I asked.

“Only that nobody will do what I ask them to do. They ignore me as if I wasn’t here.”

I asked her if she remembered dying.

“Dying? Of course not! I was sick, but I got well. One minute I was sick and the next thing I knew I was up and walking around!”

I remarked that nobody saw her and that she was all alone. She tossed her head.

“No one ever sees me. They never paid me much attention when William was around. Now he’s gone, they ignore me completely.”

“I bet you can’t pick up that dining room chair,” I said. “Your hand will go right through it. You’ll see!”

“That’s ridiculous!’’ she exclaimed. “Of course I can pick it up. I’ll show you.”

She tried several times, and each time her hand went through the chair back. She looked at me in confusion.

“I . . . I don’t know what’s the matter. I thought it was some sort of hallucination you get when you’re old. But . . . you can see it too.”

I showed her that my hand went through the chair back just as hers had done. She looked amazed.

“You have the same problem!”

People have this problem, I explained, when their physical body dies.

“But . . . but I’m alive!”

It is the body that dies, I told her. The body. Not you.

She was quiet for a time but she didn’t seem to be in shock. Then she looked at me anxiously.

“I was waiting for William to come back, but he hasn’t. And I love my house so much. He built it just for me. I don’t want to leave it, I love it so.”

I suggested that we go and look for William.

“Oh no, we can’t do that! He passed away five years ago.”

I repeated the suggestion, adding that I thought we ought to try. She looked at me steadily.

“I really am . . . dead?”

I nodded.

“And you are . . . an angel? You don’t look like one. You’re real normal.”

I was, I assured her, just a friend. She shrank back.

“I’ve never met you before in my life! You’re not a friend! You must be one of Satan’s devils.”

I didn’t try to convince her otherwise. I said I was sorry to have bothered her and started to leave.

“Wait! Please wait!”

I turned and stood quietly. She regarded me speculatively.

“If you really were a devil’s helper, I couldn’t possibly chase you away, could I?”

I told her I didn’t know because I had never met one.

“It’s been so lonely . . . Can we really find William?”

We could try, I said. I reached for her hand and started to lift out toward the ceiling.

“I can’t do that! I don’t know how! Your hand is real – I can feel it – but I can’t just float up in the air!”

I pulled her hand gently and she began to rise easily. Excitement glowed in her.

“Oh, what fun! Is this being dead? My, my! Let’s go find William! Won’t he be surprised?”

We cruised slowly more and more out-of-phase. I remembered the previous point where we had met, many years before. It was in a rented house in Westchester County, New York, where I lived temporarily. She was still hanging around the house months after her physical death. At the time, I had gently backed away from the contact. Now I knew better.

I kept us moving slowly outward because I figured that, somewhere along the way, William would be attracted by the bait and would take over from me. But she held on firmly, making excited comments as we passed through the inner rings of the Belief System Territories. I was becoming impressed. William had more to him than I had estimated, based upon her perceived radiation of him. He should be here. But now the only place he could be was in the outer phases. He had kept his progress well hidden from his wife, that was certain.

I was about to ask her more about William when I no longer felt her hand in mine. I turned instantly, but she was gone, completely disappeared. There was no sign at all of her radiation. The only answer I could come up with was that William was very good indeed if he was this far out in the rings. I phased back into the physical to think it over.

A few weeks later I tried again. The process was becoming so smooth that it was hard to define when I actually left the body. It was more the fading out of one state of being and into another, similar to falling asleep and staying conscious while doing so. I was still hesitant to use the quick-switch method for “short hops.” It would be like taking a Concorde to fly from Newark to Kennedy!

In the deeper gray area another signal was waiting. It seemed too easy; perhaps, I wondered, I was reading it wrong. I was about to home in on the signal when somebody called. I turned and saw an odd kind of glow. It resolved into a man, small, sharp-featured, somewhere in middle age, with a squinty frown and curled lips.

“Hey, you – where are you going?”

I approached cautiously.

“Where you going?”

“Hello.”

“Out looking for the secrets of the universe, is that it?”

“I guess that’s what I’m doing.”

“Good luck! I’m having a hard enough time without looking for anything more.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“The matter? I went and died, that’s what’s the matter!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing wrong, except I sure wasn’t ready for it.”

“Maybe we never are ready.”

“Well, I could have been but nobody told me! Nobody told me it was going to be like this! Those bastards yelling and screaming about gates of heaven, hell fire and damnation – they didn’t know what they were talking about! Anyway, I wish you luck, because they could have told me like it is instead of giving me a bunch of hogwash!”

“Well, what’s the problem?”

“The problem? Look around you – that’s the problem!”

“There’s nothing there that I can see. Just the usual deep blackness.”

“That’s what I mean! Nothing, absolutely nothing! Hey, you know you’re the first person I’ve met? Nothing – but nothing – and then you come along!”

“I’m sorry you’re disappointed.”

“You’re like me, eh?”

“Like you? What do you mean?”

“You died – you just died – and you don’t know what the hell to do!”

“It isn’t quite like that . . .”

“Come on, come on! You’re either dead or you’re not!”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

“You’re not dead?”

“No.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?”

“That’s a long story.”

He looked at me in disgust.

“I bet it is! You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t dead!”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Tell me about it! Hey, I know! Somebody sent you!”

‘‘No, no one sent me. I was just passing by. Tell me, how did you happen to die?”

“They made me do it, that’s how! Lying around in a hospital for weeks and weeks . . . I wanted to go home – but no, they kept me there with all the tubes and needles stuck in me. So one night I just yanked them all out. On the night shift – nobody ever came around to see me on the night shift, nobody. You know?”

“Then what happened?”

“I started coughing and then I stopped. I thought, well, I’d better slide the hell out of bed and get going. I must have jumped a bit because I went right out through the ceiling and kept on going until I found myself here. When I went through the ceiling, that’s when I knew I’d gone and died. Pretty smart, huh?”

“That’s right. Maybe you ought to come along with me.”

“You would help me? You? Why?”

“It ought to be better than staying here forever.”

“I’m so damned mixed up! No heaven . . . no hell. Nothing!”

“Here, take my hand.”

“No you don’t! Every time somebody tried to help me, it just meant trouble! You get out of here!”

“I’m not forcing you. I’m only trying to be helpful.”

“You keep your hands off me! You keep away!”

“All right, all right. Whatever you say.”

“Go on, get out of here! And you get somebody to tell you straight! Don’t you get taken in with the fancy talk. Nobody told me . . . and they could have! I would have listened – but no! Now I’ve got to find out all by myself and I sure as hell don’t know how to do that! Don’t even know where to start . . .”

I backed away and the strange glow faded. When I returned later it was gone. I have wondered since how he did get help. Enough was enough sometimes.

Perhaps recounting these events will bring a little better understanding as to the idea of a bridge or bypass over these areas – with caution signs posted along the way. It takes experience and finely honed reason to operate in such conditions, and mine were marginal at best. Any help comes from the top down, I thought – not from the bottom up.

And I had discovered another facet. Not all of the signals I received came from an earlier me. William’s wife was not a part of me, nor was the angry little man, as far as I could determine.

So I came to a conclusion. Helping others goes with the job. While you’re helping yourself, you automatically lend a hand to others, if you can do so.