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Robert Monroe and Locale III
Founder of The Monroe Institute and OBE pioneer Robert Monroe (1915 - 1995) used the broad term “Locale II” to encompass the infinite expanses of the so-called astral planes—a realm where our belief-influenced heavens and hells are found (more on this in Book 2).
“Locale I”, on the other hand, was his term for what he perceived as “consensus physical reality” from his out-of-body state/second state (this is technically the nearby astral or “real-time zone”). Thus, Locale I, II and III all refer to OBE/ecsomatic states of consciousness, with Locale I generally experienced as a near-exact replica of ordinary physical reality, featuring the same people and places.
Anthony Peake suggests in The Out-of-Body Experience, the discrepancies in Monroe’s reporting were because Monroe’s OBEs were actually occurring not in physical reality, nor in the astral planes of Locale II, but in the parallel/alternate earth reality of Locale III—in inner space. Another way of putting it (in Bohmian terms), is that physical reality is the explicate order, and Locales I, II and III each represent an implicate order—or, a potential/alternate version of our reality.
Monroe found Locale III to be extremely similar to our earth, only its civilisation lacked electronics, electromagnetics, and fuel combustion—it was somewhat anachronistic (one of the locomotives examined there was steam-powered). (See Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, chapter 6.)
If Locale II is, according to Monroe, simply “where” we go every night during sleep (and constitutes part of the earthly afterlife astral experience), Locale III is perhaps less tractable, without a new way of looking at things.
My colleague Nick Sambrook, with his background in computer science, IT, and cybernetics, suggests these different “Locales” were actually
just a way of simplifying a much more complex and interactive information system [in consciousness] much in the same way that Google Earth has different presentations forms and history within it—itself produced and held within an operating system—which represent the physical world1.
This is probably a better explanation, and one which subsumes all three of Monroe’s different “Locales.”
Locale III seemed to Monroe to be a sort of parallel/alternative earth where another version of himself existed. He called this person “I There.” Monroe found himself spontaneously taking over—one might say “possessing”—the body of “I There” for relatively short bursts, and wondered at what distress he may have caused this parallel self as a result of these random intrusions into his body and life.2
As the perceptive Anthony Peake writes, his “I There” must have experienced these events as akin to petit mal “absences,” a “temporal lobe epilepsy parallel within a parallel universe.3”*
(Graham Dack is another OBEr who has spotted a double of himself in what seemed like a parallel reality, though he stayed away, acting only as observer, as his other self met with his wife there. Frederick Aardema is another who has experienced alternate versions of his life and house, though also with the same wife. Interestingly, afterlife reports never feature a double of oneself—at least none I’ve seen.)4
Peake suggests that Monroe’s OBEs actually took place in Locale III, the parallel (or potential) earth Monroe found. This could be why his attempts to produce veridical information from an OBE state pertaining to the physical earth sometimes produced disappointing results—at least it’s one possibility.
Sambrook’s explanation that all the Locales exist as different constructs within an interactive consciousness-information system seems the most parsimonious—and still accounts for the discrepancies.
Regarding the petit mal “absences” Monroe inflicted on his alternate self in Locale III, Peake observes that epilepsy can be instigated by scars or lesions on the brain resulting from accidents or illness. When epilepsy focuses itself on the temporal lobes, people usually experience the epileptic “aura” (totally unrelated to the auric field/biofield), which acts akin to an early warning system that a seizure is coming.
In that vein, Peake finds it compelling that Monroe describes the sensation that immediately preceded his first OBE as being like a vibration coursing through his body like a painless electric shock—similar to the aura of both a migraine as well as TLE.5 Monroe exhibited other symptoms of the aura state, including hearing voices (such as from his “Helpers”) and an encounter with a talking light (all in the OBE state).
This type of experience dates back to Old Testament times and beyond. (There’s a teensy clue there.)
I Visited My Own “Locale III”
An experience I had circa 2020 while having a blood sample taken speaks directly to the parallel reality idea. In short, I passed out while sitting in the chair—apparently very common for healthy young men, for reasons unknown to me.
What unnerved me afterwards was not that I lost consciousness, but that, on the contrary, I instantly found myself living another life in a completely different world, almost like a “walk-in.” It was completely tangible, coherent, and real—and felt utterly normal and familiar; the most natural thing in the world. I knew I had a life there and just “continued going about my business.” I remember walking outside, on my way somewhere.
However, to my beloved and perturbed Aimee back in the doctor’s surgery, Brendan was still seated in the chair, head back with my eyes rolling and fluttering as if having a seizure of some sort. But I was utterly oblivious to Brendan D. Murphy and his body—my “I” was somewhere else and feeling a-okay in the other life.
Had I shifted my locus of awareness to an alternate/probable self elsewhere in the quantum hologram/multiverse somehow? Was it “Locale III”—another rendering of self and earth life out of the probability field while the more familiar version of Brendan D. Murphy was momentarily offline? Whatever the answer is I’m just glad it didn’t last long.
Physicist Tom Campbell—who worked with Monroe in the early years—argues these “parallel worlds” featuring our alternate selves are theoretical versions of the earth life video game that exist only as potentialities until they are triggered by different free-will choices. The other self and their reality frame is not a fully independent version with the same ontological status, though they seem utterly real during our visits.6
In Ian Lawton’s view, Monroe’s excursions to Locale III suggest there are more divergent versions of the human “video game” running “alongside” ours (at least in potentiality).7
In a vein similar to Campbell’s, our observation of such realms—when our consciousness shifts state—may spontaneously render them into being. Observation creates, though I don’t recall having any conscious choice in the matter, personally—the “choice” must be made at a deeper/unconscious level.
To support his argument in favour of “Locale III” accounting for Monroe’s parallel reality and OBE perception shortcomings, Anthony Peake also points to inconsistencies in other research, such as that involving the late psychic Ingo Swann (see TGI Book 1 for a more detailed accounting of these interesting CIA-funded remote viewing (RV) experiments).
One of Swann’s RV tasks was to remote view Jupiter at a time when little was known about the planet. He correctly perceived a ring around Jupiter against all scientific expectation of the time. Respected psychic Harold Sherman simultaneously performed his own RV of Jupiter some 2,000 miles away independently and recorded near-identical observations.
The catch: Sherman noted huge volcanic peaks while Swann saw massive mountain ranges, only there is no evidence to date that suggests it is even possible that mountains could form in Jupiter’s gaseous hydrogen and helium atmosphere. So some of what they saw applied to Jupiter (the rings) and some did not (though Jupiter’s moon Io, does have volcanoes).
Peake suggests—and I tend to agree—that Sherman and Swann remotely participated in a shared hallucination,8 which in itself may be seen by some people as remarkable, as “hallucinations” are supposed to simply be internally generated illusions restricted to one’s skull.
I differ only slightly in that I tend to think that the two remote-viewers’ perceptions were a blend of fact (the rings) and fiction probably based on expectation and preconception (the mountains and volcanoes). I don’t believe they were viewing Io by mistake, because Io does not have any rings, thus I believe the virtual reality blend of fact and fiction—resulting from shifting awareness into—or syncing with—the quantum information/probability/possibility field and its human-generated content—is the more likely explanation.
It is well established that expectations can influence your experience in these virtual reality/mind-world experiences, and we will see this undeniably in the following chapters (of Book 2). Thus the two seers both viewed a partially accurate shared “hallucination” of part of our solar system via the probability/possibility/information field.
Sambrook summarises this joint remote-viewing process by describing it as,
our collective mind desperately trying to create a distant perception of reality based on dreams, fact, visions, and imagination—and this dreamscape virtual consensus worldview being shared, refined, and projected to individuals until it is consolidated in time to reflect physical reality through science and exploration9.
If you need to re-read that a few times, go ahead. This way of looking at perception stemming from altered states of consciousness is not yet well established.
Many “astral projectors” exploring the collective information field appear to find themselves, in the initial stages of a projection, in the physical world, the “real-time zone” of the near-astral sub-planes. The presence of anomalies, however, can indicate the crossing into astral frequencies/sub-planes; prosaic details like the colour of a wall or location of a chair might be off. These kinds of things constitute a form of “reality fluctuation.”
Veteran astral projector and author, William Buhlman, has shared how it slowly dawned on him that the out-of-body environ was not actually the physical world proper, but a non-physical simulacrum, which is why there were slight variations between the nonphysical and physical furniture and other objects.10
Buhlman also adds that to be able to see what looked like his normal physical surroundings, his internal vibrational rate had to be relatively dense, or slow. (Contrariwise, he found the act of “requesting consciousness and clarity seemed to automatically increase the internal frequency of my nonphysical body.11”)
Hence, in order for “ghosts” to affect physical matter or create “poltergeist” disturbances, they must lower their awareness/frequency enough to fall into phase with physical matter. Only then can they act out their impulses, desires and whims, for example; throwing things or rearranging furniture.
Buhlman’s “candle experiment”, wherein he tried—in his OBE state—to blow out a candle he lit prior to his projection, was unsuccessful. He merely managed to extinguish the astral counterpart. Theosophist Arthur Powell wrote in 1927, “One could no more move a physical object by moving its astral counterpart than one could move the rose by moving its perfume.12”
To affect the “physical” realm, you have to first fall into phase with it or generate enough “kindling” (Tom Bearden’s term) of charge and force to influence physical matter. Otherwise it appears you are merely toying with a virtual reality astral simulation of the physical.
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Brendan D. Murphy is the “consciousness guy”, afterlife expert, and author of the critically acclaimed epic, “The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality — Book 1”
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1 Personal communication, September 2024.
2 Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, chapter 6.
3 Peake, The Out-of-Body Experience, 66.
4 Lawton, Afterlife, 60-61.
5 Peake, The Out-of-Body Experience, 70.
6 Campbell, My Big TOE, Book 3, 693, cited in Lawton, Afterlife.
7 Lawton, Afterlife, 62.
8 Peake, The Out-of-Body…, 86.
9 Personal communication, September 2024.
10 See Buhlman, Adventures Beyond the Body.
11 Ibid.
12 See Arthur Powell, The Astral Body, chapter 16.