I appreciate Monroe’s systematic exploration of altered states. It provides a navigational construct that is sorely missing. Not that we have that many useful constructs for navigation our “ordinary” states of consciousness, but altered states get notoriously slippery.
Since neither ordinary nor altered states are physical locales (and even if they were) individuals will experience the exact place in different manners. However, it is still useful to have some landmarks. Simple distinctions.
For example, in the tick-tock world, we can observe whether we are focused or distracted, whether we are caught up in a thought or aware of a thought. We can notice when our awareness is in the body and when it’s wrapped up in the mind (usually after the fact.) With interoception, we can describe/notice how nuances of emotions feel like . We differentiate between contentment, sadness, nostalgia, etc. We make predictions about our environment and update for discrepancies.
In altered states, these landmarks can shift. The territory itself can change, and our senses report differently. This happens regularly in dreams, and one consequence is that outside our expectations and habitual precepts, we often cannot even retain in memory much of what has happened, much less process it with agency while it occurs.
The trailhead of Monroe’s system starts with a “place” where our body is relaxed, even asleep, while our mind is still awake. On the EEG, this looks like a prevalence of delta (associated with sleep) and alpha, associated with relaxed awareness.
One landmark of reaching this clearing in the woods is that we lose perception of how our physical body is oriented…we don’t have a sense of where and how our arms and legs are arranged, for instance. It’s not usually a binary state. It usually happens in degrees to start. His audio technology assists in reinforcing these frequencies of our brain with subtle resonate frequencies which encourage entrainment. They won’t force the state, but they become a beacon for following the trail.
His system introduces many useful mental constructs to help with bushwhacking during explorations. A preparation ritual of entering the territory, for example, becomes through repetition a powerful tool for accessing the trailhead efficiently with or without the auditory assist.
After we stabilize the body asleep/mind awake clearing in the woods, which he calls Focus 10, the next section of the trail leads to a vast meadow called Focus 12. This place is the topic of this post.
When I was teaching English in Japan, I had the opportunity to make up strange questionnaires under the guise of practicing conversation in order to explore both people and culture more deeply. When I asked people from the USA to point to where they sense the self, they would often point to their chests. In Japan, the popular choice was the nose.
Outside the physical demarcations, we often sense our “self” in the head, the heart, or (often in Japan) the belly (Hara). It makes sense that it’s somewhere interior to these physical avatars we pilot around in spacetime. But this may also artificially limit what we can consciously access. One of the “ritual” steps in Monroe’s system is the affirmation: “I am more than my physical body. Because I am more than physical matter, I can perceive that which is beyond space and time…” Focus 12 is the first step in this direction.
I’ll approach this though, from another system of navigating altered states developed by Anna Wise. She was a brilliant researcher in correlating mental frequencies with altered states and explored the bands of beta, alpha, theta, and delta in meditators, monks, and healers alongside her mentor, Maxwell Cade. Her navigational system is original, but some of her tools have useful cross-applications.
For example, one of her exercises for damping the rampant beta of the chattering mind was to sense the perimeters of the body. Just where your sense of self extends and then expand this, making it larger, pushing it out into a circumference around you a couple of meters (sensing the auric field) then expanding to the room, the building, the city, the country, the planet and beyond. This expansion of consciousness into a larger field is the cornerstone of Focus 12, which is described by Monroe as “expanding far beyond the limitations of the physical world”
And this has some immediate effects. One is that a larger perimeter is a larger area where sensation, percepts, and experience can arise. Instead of feeding through the narrow channels of senses and interior pathways, the nervous system expands to galactic dimensions, encompassing all manner of novelty, most of which will take time to perceive, much less recognize. Like the often-told story of Indigenous people who supposedly could not see the great European sailing ships approaching their shores: the vessels were so far outside their experience that they had no conceptual framework for recognizing them. Only when the smaller rowing boats came toward shore, boats resembling something they already knew, did the approaching strangers register.
The second effect is an implicit intention to expand the range of the senses that attends this expansion. Almost like a stretching of the psychic fascia.
Focus 12, the state of expanded awareness, is easier to access from Focus 10, with beta somewhat tamed and not as intrusive, and it engages more theta frequencies, associated with deep somatic imagery.
And finally, let’s discuss ansuz. Runes are tools I’ve used in altered states that compress non-conceptual vectors of force and form. They resonate in ways similar to the patterns on yantras, mandalas and sacred geometry in a language dealing more with field effects than the linear code of words. Ansuz represents the rune of divine communication and is a catalyst for altered states in Nordic traditions known as seidr. It enhances perception beyond the physical senses and seems a natural complement for intensifying the state of Focus 12.
Integration
Accessing and navigating these states is only one part of the equation. To become more than passive recreation, they should add capabilities for enriching our existence. Both Monroe and Anna Wise explore many ways of utilizing the new territory for self-discovery and leverage in the “material” world.
Focus 10, as a borderline state with the subconscious body, is fertile ground for planting affirmations for health and changing programs installed in the physical body. Focus 12 is a receptive field for acquiring new information, creativity and guidance and for manifesting change through empowered thought-forms. Focus 15 deals with timelines and all their potentiality and a perspective with a larger temporal gating, and 21 is a bridge state to contacts and entities beyond the physical realm for some pretty radical shifts in understanding about the nature of this phase of existence.
Tapping these states counters the tendency toward mental entropy, our tendency to spiral into more predictability and comfortable limitation as a strategy for security rather than striving to be more adaptable to change. Senses expand through effort and shrink through complacency. And while a smaller world may seem more manageable, it’s a vector of decay rather than growth. Eventually, decay cycles back into growth, but only through a painful process of deconstruction. As the mystics say, ‘If you die before you die, you will never die.’ Let the familiar self loosen its grip, the fixed identity, the inherited certainties, the insistence that reality must fit what we already know. Explore or stagnate.