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Thomas Campbell ñ The Monroe Institute Lecture ñ 0/12
Posted by Kathryn: Mon Jun 07, 2010 12:18 pm
Herewith, section 0/12 proof-read and revised. K
I'm Tom Campbell. It is my pleasure to be here today having been part of the creation
that was to become the Monroe Institute. I take particular pleasure in seeing how far
it has come, how much it has grown, and how many lives it has enriched along the way.
The theme in this 22nd professional seminar is Consciousness: The Endless Frontier. As
one of the original explorers who¥s never stopped exploring, I am particularly pleased
to have been asked to kick off this 22nd professional seminar. We¥re here because of our association
with TMI, and because of our interest in creating a useful applications of Hemi-sync. So, I
will give you a short description of the genesis of both Hemi-sync and TMI. Secondly, in consonance
with the theme, "Consciousness: The Endless Frontier," I will explain very quickly the
core of what I have come to understand about the nature of consciousness and reality. Ok,
um, please hold your questions until the end. There is never enough time for questions,
and I am likely to take the lion's share of the two hours allotted to me. I'm going to
be here all day today, tomorrow, and the next day as long as most of you will be here, and
I'm very open to have meetings, uh, whether it's early in the morning or late at night
is fine with me as long as it is fine with Shirley, and it doesn't interrupt with any
of the things that are already scheduled for the seminar. So, I think we will have to hold
most of the questions until uh later today or the next several days.
This is going to be a very quick skim over the top, actually it's more like a hop, skip
and a jump across the very top of this. Actually, this is a very hard presentation to generate.
Not because I had a hard time figuring out what to say, but because I had a very hard
time figuring out what Not to say, and still stay within the two-hour time limit. That
was the challenge. Now, these slides are going to be busy. They're probably going to have
more words on them than you can read. I'm going to go through them very quickly. I'm
going to be speaking very quickly so that I canÖ, won't have Shirley be-heading me
for going over my time. I understand a big hook comes out from somewhere around here
if you go past your time, so I'm motivated to get done. So it is going to be quick, er,
all of these slides are going to be available on my web site, you see that in http://www.mybigtoe.com,
um, so you don't have to copy a lot of things down, you can find the slidesÖ., I haven't
put them up there but I will just as soon as I get a chance to get on the internet,
also the slides are on the computer here so I'm sure TMI will pass them out to you if
you have a thumb drive, or some way to pick them up. Um, so if the slides become a problem
for you, trying to read them and listen, stop reading and just listen. I will say everything
you need to hear, so you can just let the slides go if they become annoying for you.
But first, a little introduction. Now and always a scientist sums it up pretty well.
In college I majored in both physics and mathematics, went on to grad school, finally did thesis
work in experimental nuclear, and now I work for NASA. I do risk analysis which basically
means physics models, system behavior, complexes, and system behavior. So the team that I work
on, and it's a fairly large team; what we do is try to discover what could possibly
go wrong; what the probability is of it going wrong, and if it does go wrong, how do you
fix it? Okay, how did a physicist like me end up exploring consciousness and being part
of the explorer program earlier on? Well, once I left graduate school my erÖ, I took
a job, my first boss, Billy Oust(?), introduced me to Bob Monroe's first book. Well at that
time, this is 1972, early in '72, at that time it was his only book. The boss comes
out and hands me the book and he says, "Tom, I want you to read this and tell me what you
think." So I did. I read it, and a few weeks later, I er, he asked me, "What about this
book?" I said, "There's (sic) three possibilities. 1. This guy has a good imagination and is
just trying to sell books. 2. This guy is nuts. 3. This guy is sane, honest and accurate,
and there is a whole lot of reality out there that I would love to experience and understand,
but, how do you know? Unless you meet him and can get a measure of the man, how do you
know? You know er, is this guy nuts or what? Well my boss and I both sort of shrugged shoulders
and agreed that it was just really impossible to know from reading the book, but evidently
Bill was listening, and about three months later he came by and said, "Tom, we've located
Bob Monroe, he doesn't live that far away. There's a bunch of us going out there and
visit him, would you like to come?" And I said, absolutely I want to come. I want to
know whether it's 1, 2, or 3, you know, I want to meet this guy. Well that was, um,
like I say, that was more like the spring of ë72, and um, toward the end of that year,
we did meet with Bob, and we spent the whole evening with him. He was very gracious as
usual, and I found out of course, that it wasn't 1, and it wasn't 2, that Bob was very
real, he was very genuine, he didn't have anything to sell, he just wanted to understand
what was going on, and he wanted to put it into scientific terms so that he could share
it with other people. That was his ambition, and we found out why it is he invited all
of us, and put up with us for a whole evening. Towards the end of the night, we were on the
back deck of what was called ëthe lab.' There wasn't a whole lot in it at that point yet,
but, uh, with Bob it was one of those things like, you know, build it and they will come.
He had built it and he wasn't quite sure I don't think, what he was going to do with
it at that point, but he looked at all of us, and he um, kind of scanned us over and
he said, "you know, you guys are all scientists and engineers, right? We all kind of looked
at each other like what's coming next? We nodded our heads and said, "Yeah," and he
said, "Would any of you like to join me here and work in this lab, help instrument it and
put it together, and study consciousness?" Well, it took me about a millisecond for my
hand to go in the air, and I said, "Absolutely I'd love to do that Bob, but I'll do it if
you teach me what you know." And he kind of considered that for about another half a second,
and half a second after that another hand went up in the air, and it was Dennis Mennerich
(?) and, you have to understand Dennis and I were both in our twenties, we were middle
to late twenties at this time, and Dennis said, "I'd like to do it too, but, you know
I want you to teach me what you know." so, uh, Bob kind of looked around the rest of
the room, but I think he was really hoping somebody with a little more stature and experience,
and reputation, you know, would take him up on it instead than two kids not that far out
of Graduate school, but uh, nobody else said anything at all, so it was a deal. And about
three weeks later, Dennis and I are coming out, to Whistlefieldfarm, we are meeting with
Bob, and from then on we meet with Bob like, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We'd get
there after dinner, about 7- 7:30, we'd go to the lab and we'd start building equipment;
there really wasn't a whole lot there. There wasn't (sic) any measurement devices for the
people, there was just audio and the three booths, so, we would build equipment and start
uh figuring out what we were going to do next, you know, experiments and things that we could
do at the lab. After about an hour or so, Bob would come up, and Dennis and I would
get in the booths, there were three booths, and uh Bob would begin to carry out his part
of the bargain which was to teach us what it is we[sic](he) knew. There really wasn't
a programme then, I don't even know if ëFocus 10' existed then, it may have, but certainly
nothing beyond that, so, you know, Bob was just making it up as he went, and we were
just making it up as we went, all trying to come up with something that would make science
out of this. That was our goal. Well we did this for years, and Dennis and I were coming
out here probably for pretty much a straight 5 years or so, we were coming out three days
a week, and we'd come out on weekends. So you can imagine that um, we were averaging
somewhere between 20 and 30 hours a week, uh you know, with the lab and with Bob, so
you know, 20 hours a week with Bob Monroe as your personal trainer, you couldn't help
but learn something and learn something pretty quickly, so it wasn't that long before Dennis
and I had pretty well uh mastered the altered states; we were going out of body, we were
making non-physical friends and people we could get information from. We were doing
experiments. Everything had to be experimental. There wasn't any point in doing anything you
couldn't check to see whether it was real or not. So, that was the kind of the ëground
rule.' It wasn't just fun and games and have a neat experience, it was "Is this real?"
It took a while beforeÖ., it probably took a year and a half or so, before I got to the
point that I could answer that question with a "Yes!" and that is, everyone has to come
to that point somewhere where you decide, you know, "Is this real, or am I making this
up?" But, in any case, Dennis and I were in the ëcut and try' mode and we were doing
anything that we couldÖ, we ourselves had become very sensitive instruments to altered
states of consciousness. Bob drilled us going down to that pulsation state, Out of Body
and back up, back down, and so on. We did that 1,000s of times; we'd be very sensitive
to the ëaltered states' and the pathway in between them. That was the first part of our
training, so Dennis and I were very sensitive to our consciousness and what state it was
in at that time. So we did thingsÖ We crawled in pyramids, you know, aluminum pyramids,
because a book was out that said that pyramid oriented, you could get different, er, ëaltered
states'. Everything that was ever published we tried to go into the subject and we go
in the pyramids and see what it did to us because we were very sensitive. I stuck my
head between two big capacitor plates with a couple of hundred thousand volts.. (laughter
from audience) to see whether or not we could oscillate the pineal gland because we had
read back in the muldoons and Character (?) days that they thought it had to do with
the pineal gland and we thought wellÖ, and we knew it had to do with 4hz, because Bob
and we did too, because when we got to our ëpulsation state' we did this around 4hz
vibration going on, so we knew that was physical because once we out-fitted the lab with GSR,
we could actually, see with the GSR meters that were there and we oscillate at 4hz, so
it wasn't just a perception of consciousness, it was something physiological going on that
was oscillating at 4hz, so those were our only keys. Um, so we were coming and trying
everything. Dennis went to visit some faith healers from the Dominican Republic and, um,
see what they did, and each time we were using our body as the ëinstrument' and our mind
as the ëinstrument' of "How did it affect our consciousness?" looking for tools. Okay,
well, that went on for a year or so and we were unsuccessful in finding appropriate tools,
and then one day well, er, I was at work. (Dennis and I worked at the same place. Dennis
came by and he gave me some papers and said, "Take a look at this, maybe we can use it
out at the lab?" So I looked at it and it was an article by Oster (?) about binaural
beats, and in that article it mentioned that it was thought that binaural beats might change
EEG brain waves. So that sounded pretty interesting. We thought, "Yeah, let's give this a try!"
We were trying everything, um unfortunately, a very few days after that, Dennis had to
leave the country with his job that took him out of the country for about a month, and
when he came back, he went to the Double E lab; he was at the Double E, so he went down
to the lab at the University of Virginia, er, borrowed some equipment and made a binaural
beat tape. It was a very nicely done tape. He started out at Alfa and went down, slowed
it down at Alfa, stepped down, small steps at a time, down to Zeta region at 4 Hz and
he stayed there for an hour or two, stepped back up and we'd go out to the lab at the
first opportunity.