Is Outer Space Only An Illusion?

By James Donahue

The late Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute at Faber, Virginia, and author of books describing his out-of-body explorations, described traveling to the planets when out of his body. But Monroe said he only could go so far before running into an invisible wall that stopped him cold.

Monroe, whose institute brought scientists and professionals from all over to study the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences, astral travel, the use of sound frequencies to create altered states of consciousness and the exploration of the death experience, was haunted by a problem he could not understand. He had difficulty staying in his body. He said he could not lie down for a nap without finding himself on the ceiling, looking down on his reclining body below.

The son of a college professor father and a medical doctor mother, Monroe had a successful career as the creator of numerous radio shows and became well known in the 1950s as a composer of music for radio, television and motion pictures. He served as vice president of the board for Mutual Broadcasting System.

He established his own firm that financed a research and development division to study the effects of sound patterns on human consciousness and experimented with ways of using sound to learn during sleep. It was through this work that it was discovered that slightly altered sound frequencies heard through a headset could be used to alter the consciousness of the human brain, even going to far as to changing behavior, healing the body and traveling out of the body. He called his discovery hemispheric-synchronization, or “Hemi-Synch.”

In his books, Journeys Out of the Body, 1971, Far Journeys, 1985, and Ultimate Journey, 1994, Monroe wrote about his experiments and research while out of his body and his quest for discovering just what happens to us at death. He discovered that the human spirit, or the essence of who we are, is something separate from the body and that we all have the ability to leave our bodies at will.

Once out of the body there is almost no resistance to where we can go, and we can travel anywhere just be mentally sending ourselves there. There is no sound in the astral. There also appears to be no such thing as space or time. Thus one can travel to the Moon or to Mars in an instant, or we can fly anywhere in the world we choose to go.

Monroe was perplexed about something unexpected while making his out-of-body travels, however. He wrote about coming to invisible “walls” to the space in which he could travel. He never understood what it was that he was running into or why he was prohibited from flying beyond these points.

Since Monroe’s experiences, numerous other students of the Monroe Institute, or followers that have learned to leave their bodies by listening to the Monroe Hemi-Synch recordings and reading the instruction books at home, have experienced many of the same discoveries. For out-of-body travelers, at least from this three dimensional plane of existence, there appears to be a wall that prohibits our travels beyond certain points of our universe.

While Monroe was experimenting with astral space travel, NASA was busy sending rocket powered research spacecraft throughout our solar system to photograph and study all of the planets, moons and even the comets flying around within our solar system. We sent men to the moon. We also sent two exploratory craft, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 that flew by various planets before getting hurled out of our solar system and into the blackness of the beyond.

Pioneer 10 was designed to stay in radio contact with Earth for 21 months. This was time for it to pass through the asteroid belt and enter the outer solar system. But the probe did even better than expected. Powered by plutonium, the probe continued to transmit date for 31 years until the signals stopped coming in 2003.

Even after transmissions ceased, researchers have been tracking the Pioneers using NASA’s Deep Space Network. And what has been found are anomalies in the expected trajectories. Every time scientists look for the craft they are in the wrong place. And nobody knows why.

After passing Pluto and officially leaving our solar system, the Pioneer probes have been slowing down and drifting off course. The strange anomalies were first noticed by John Anderson, a specialist in radio-wave physics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since then, the two probes, both traveling in opposite directions, have both drifted millions of miles off course.

Recently there has been a story floating around via the Internet that the two Pioneers came to a complete stop and are now beginning to reverse their course, as if being pulled back into our solar system by some unknown force of gravity. These reports, which give no source or documentation, are not confirmed by NASA and appear to be fictional

Scientific teams have been baffled by the strange behavior of the two probes. Because both Pioneers are behaving exactly the same way, in extreme different places in deep space, they have to write off the possibility of mechanical failure. The possible explanations range from unexpected gravitational pull from so-called “dark matter” in space or simply proposing that Newton’s belief that the force of gravity weakens as distance from planets increases may not be correct.

NASA is so baffled by the behavior of the Pioneer probes that a new follow-up probe is being suggested. This time, according to Slava Turyshev of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and Michael Neito of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a third deep-space mission filled with instruments is proposed that would test for gravitational pulls and other possible effects of that cold dark region of space. Turyshev and Nieto make their proposal in an article published in Physics World.

They suggest that the new probe, fitted with more up-to-date and sensitive measuring gear, navigational and communications equipment, could try to discover just what alternative force of nature really exists outside of our solar system.

The question at this point is whether NASA is discovering the same thing that Robert Monroe found in deep space. Everything that we believe we see beyond our solar system may not exist at all. Is it possible that we exist in a complex vortex of images created within our minds and that, like the Hollywood film The Vortex described, it is possible to fly off the edge of what we perceive to be reality?

 Unlike the vortex limits depicted in the film, however, our limits may be confined to only what exists in our own solar system. All of the images of stars and galaxies depicted on our high-powered telescopes are all a spectacular light show created for our amusement.

But if this is true, who or what has manufactured the limited space in which we struggle daily to exist and expand our knowledge? What is the power that makes it all spin, and gives us awareness? Are we not the creators of everything we see? And if we destroy our world and go extinct, will everything we perceive disappear like an exploding soap bubble?