(In)Credible Journeys

Robert Monroe’s three books on his out-of-body adventures made such an impression on me that I’ve read each of them three times over the course of the last two decades. His pathfinding in the metasphere and his efforts to bring it all down to earth transformed an obscure psychic phenomenon into a whole numenal tourist industry, in which umpteen thousands of people now do their best to pop out of their physical bodies every night and roam freely where angels often fear to tread.

My own interest in Monroe’s opus lies mainly in the thorough job he did of mapping the many spheres beyond the physical, or the “rings” as he called them. And his engaging descriptions of the bizarre and awe-inspiring entities he met there rivals top-notch science fiction ~ something I strive for in my own writing. However, the many threads of several epics are so tangled in Monroe’s presentation ~ especially in the second book, *Far Journeys* ~ that I feel many readers must miss a lot of the significance. So at last I’ve set out to write a comprehensive review and condensed description of all three books in a way that makes everything lucid.  It’s a work in progress on my MetaBlog, and at the end of each post/chapter there’s a handy link to the next, so that you can read the whole story in chronological order starting with the first post; and/or you can click on the links for each chapter in the handy index below.

Part I:

1. One Small Step for a Man…
2. Journeys Out of the Body
3. Far Journeys
4. An Encounter with the Creator

Part II: A Loop in Time and Space

1. Time Will Tell
2. Life and Death All Over Again
3. A Guided Tour of the Human Condition
4. Exploring the Rings
5. Rings, Spheres, Dimensions
6. How to Score Big in the Game of Life
7. The Loop Closes