Jen Gerson: That time I went through the U.S. psychic spy program and saw an angel

Jen Gerson maybe went a little insane at the Monroe Institute.

What’s in the box?

By: Jen Gerson

Before I decided to attend the week-long consciousness expansion program at an institute famous (or infamous) for training U.S. military and intelligence officers in connection with a series of psychic spy programs, I asked my husband to do one thing.

Once I was on the plane I told him to put some random object in a box. Put the box in the downstairs closet of our guest room.

Don't tell me what's in the box.

Nestled in a rural location outside Charlottesville, Virginia, the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Voyage is a six-day residential program that uses a series of sound recordings to help participants achieve altered states of consciousness. If there was anything at all to the process, then I should — hypothetically — be able to glean some inexplicable information about what was in the box. This should be accomplished either because the program could create an "out of body experience" or OBE, as the institute's founder was famous for popularizing. Or, I should be able to determine what was inside through "Remote Viewing," a protocol that was utilized for decades by military and intelligence agencies to spy on enemy targets and locations — to a greater or lesser degree of success, depending on which version of the story you’re reading.

If I got nothing, well, that would be data too.

The Monroe Institute first appeared on my radar after I read about the U.S. government's attempts with psychic programs in Annie Jacobson's book, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Jacobson, as far as I can tell, is an entirely grounded and credible investigative journalist, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, who has spent much of her career reporting on U.S. military programs and operations.

More skeptically minded reviews regarded her book as a demonstration that the U.S. government had been bamboozled by credulous pseudo-scientists and psychic frauds.

I came away from the book with a very different impression. Credit to Jacobson, she was even-handed in her assessment of these programs. She included plenty of skeptical critique of the individuals and experiments but, also seemed willing to acknowledge that these programs were sometimes eerily successful. They couldn't have lasted very long, and the individuals involved could not have acquired the official commendations they did, unless something was going on, even if we lacked a scientifically grounded mechanism for understanding and describing what that thing was and why it was happening.

But still, Jacobson’s book left me with more questions than I had answers. There was, obviously, only one path forward. I needed to try out the Monroe Institute's Gateway Program for myself.

And, hell, if The Line can't be used to send me to attend a kind of psychic spying school with a long list of military affiliations, what are we even doing, here?

A moment of clarity here: This is going to be a very different piece than the one we typically run here at The Line. I can’t convey this experience in an essay or an op-ed. Reading this is going to feel a little like being there, like following me right through the looking glass and into an altered state in which vivid hallucination merges with a grounded assessment of what the program offers.

It gets weird. Please bear with me.

I came into this program as a diligent and regular meditator. I had achieved altered states of consciousness before, both through meditation and drug experimentation. I was also raised a Catholic and thus have access to a rich subconscious library of myths, sounds, smells, symbols, sensations, and art, all of which serve to give me a framework for understanding and describing the transcendent. I suspect that I have a better than average capacity for visual imagination. This background, combined with the indifferent curiosity cultivated by journalism, all contributed to my relative ease achieving intense visual experiences.

All this to say that I did not go into the Gateway program as a casual and disinterested observer. The only way for me to truly see if there was anything to the phenomena described in Jacobson's book would be to drop the protective pretence of detachment and cynicism and go do the thing myself.

So … I did. When I tell you that on one of the first nights of the program, there was a drumming circle around the seven-foot-tall pink quartz crystal installed from a rock mine in Brazil, you need to understand that I was not standing back, disinterested, scribbling notes on the grass while my fellow voyagers partied. I participated in that drumming circle.

Okay, I led the drumming circle. I goaded other people into it.

So here is the story what happened after I got my husband to put a random object into a box, flew to Charlottesville Virginia, and then got a ride to a retreat 45 minutes away, all to get my consciousness well and thoroughly expanded by the courteous and professional staff at the Monroe Institute.

---

The institute is named after its founder, Bob Monroe. Monroe, who died in 1995, was a former radio executive whose career took an unexpected turn when he began to experiment with sleep learning in the 1950s. After attempting methods of learning while asleep by listening to meditation tapes, he started to have what he characterized as "out of body experiences," in which his consciousness seemed to detach itself from his physical body, allowing him a seemingly limitless capacity to explore both physical and non-physical environments. He wrote about these experiences in several books, and continued experimentation.

He eventually channeled his experience in radio into creating a program of what I can only describe as hypnosis tapes that use both suggestion and binaural beats to create expanded states of consciousness that can facilitate OBEs, and other kinds of psychic phenomena. Binaural beats are auditory illusions created by the brain when different frequencies of sound are played in each ear. The brain perceives the disparate frequencies as a third sound. This trick is believed to help people achieve deeper states of consciousness; you can now hear it in almost any meditation tape or playlist.

Monroe’s system is now trademarked as "Hemi-Sync" and examples of the tapes are now widely available over the Internet, and through the institute's app.

The Monroe Institute was founded in 1971, and has since hosted an estimated 20,000 people, many of whom attend one of their various programs hoping to experience an OBE for themselves. The facility also includes a lab, which is used to study brain waves and examine altered states.

Although Monroe was never explicitly integrated into any aspect of the U.S. military or intelligence apparatus, many individuals from those wings of government entered and studied the Gateway Program. Various Monroe Institute trainers and leaders have drifted between the organization and various covert programs.

Programs such as Stargate.

Established in 1977 by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Stanford Research Institute, Project Stargate operated in various forms for almost 20 years and existed to investigate applications for using psychic phenomena in military applications, and for espionage.

“People believe we have a lot of military history, which we really don’t,” said the institute’s CEO, Allyn Evans, in an interview with me during my own retreat. “What we have are individuals (from the military) who are coming … but it wasn’t this organized thing.”

The U.S. military began to delve into psychic spying during the Cold War in tandem with what they believed the Russians were attempting.

“They decided we need to do something because they’re using this stuff and they’re being successful, and we need to be as least as good or better than what the Russians were doing. So they decided to delve into what they labelled Remote Viewing,” Evans said.

A man named Skip Atwater, who eventually became president at Monroe, led that project. And Monroe is still home to one of the first U.S. government remote viewers, Joe McGroneagle, who teaches a class on the subject. You’ll hear more about Joe later.

Monroe has grown popular again more recently thanks to the declassification of a document about the Gateway Program written by a U.S. Army officer who took the program in 1983. Adding to the mystique of that disclosure, the final page of that document was missing when it was originally released, sending conspiracy theorists into a tizzy about the final conclusions of the memo. (The missing page was actually the result of a clerical error. It has since been recovered and is generally considered an anti-climactic finale.)

Nonetheless, along with growing interest in UFOs and increasing disclosure of previously classified documents on subjects once considered outside the mainstream, interest in consciousness expansion is on the rise. And Monroe is now seeing an influx of younger seekers at its gates.

Big ass crystal.

I arrived at the Nancy Penn Center just after dinner on a glorious Friday. Virginia is still warm in September and I hoped to swim at least once in the manmade Lake Minaron that is on the grounds of the institute, which I later discovered was named after a discarnate entity who was channelled by one of the institute's early psychonautic explorers.

When I arrived, the hills were still lush. The late summer leaves were only beginning to turn. The space offered ample room for wandering outside and included a man-sized pink quartz crystal and a fire pit.

For the next six days, my fellow explorers and I would be staying in a labyrinthine building that gave the impression of a house belonging to a loving but extremely out-there grandmother; think wood-panelled walls, a basement gathering room filled with meditation chairs; worn, overstuffed couches. There is one barely used glassed-in tower turret. A shared living room featured a table filled with books, tarot cards, oracle cards, and a "psi game" intended to test psychic ability. The summer humidity was only beginning to break, and the space smelled slightly musty.

We were fed well and regularly through a communal kitchen churning out homey meals like lamb chops and hamburgers. Snacks including potato chips, peanut butter-filled pretzels, lemonade and iced tea were available 24-7. At night, the staff brought out a giant bowl of popcorn. Drugs and alcohol, beyond caffeine and tobacco, were forbidden. We were warned that indulgence would lead to our expulsion from the program.

Most of the participants of the Gateway Program entered with prosaic goals; to have an OBE, or to master (or even simply experience) remote viewing. I had no real expectations beyond, perhaps, seeing what was in the box in the closet of my guest room, and coming away with something interesting to write.

I had my first chance at an attempt to figure out the box component on our first night. Over popcorn and chatter, one of the participants noted that he had previously been through the Monroe Institute's three-day class on remote viewing. Remote viewing was developed in the '70s and '80s to train psychics to access information about people, places, or events through extra-sensory perception. The technique works like this: a verifiable target — such as an image, person, or place — is selected and then associated with a random number.

"Blinds" are used to ensure the viewer has no way to gather information about the item from anyone during the process. Proponents claim that this is a scientific and blinded approach that those with skill must hone. (Studies on remote viewing are a mixed bag, some acknowledging success beyond statistical likelihood, while others have argued that the actual information received from the remote viewers is not particularly useful.)

In the institute's living room, my fellow participant pulled up a website designed to help remote viewers practice their skills. It worked by attaching random images to random numbers. We could see the numbers, but not the picture.

I got out my notebook and pen. First, we were told to write the random number at the top of our paper. Then we were to think of something we loved, then insert those numbers in our mind's eye over the beloved.

After that link had been established, we were to write down any shapes, images or impressions we received on our notepads.

The challenge, here, is that whatever subconscious process we are engaging with does not communicate in discrete language or specifics. So, if the first mental image we got was of a rainbow, the target wasn't actually likely to be a rainbow. Instead, it meant our facilities were trying to communicate an image or item that had a quality of "rainbow-ness" — think descriptors like a crescent, multicoloured, wetness, naturalness, lightness.

At the bottom of the page, we were instructed to list "analytical overlays" — attempts by our rational mind to take those impressions and prematurely interpret them into something meaningful.

Over time, remote viewers can build an internal subconscious visual dictionary, which allows them to reverse engineer those impressions without falling into the trap of "analytical overlays."

For my first attempt, I think I did okay.

The random number brought to mind a sense of black dots, a beach, something vine-y, a texture of sandiness, colours like yellow and red. A warmth. That’s what my subconscious came up with.

The actual image, once revealed to me? A close up of a sand-coloured lizard on a dune.

I tried the same with the box at home. At first, I saw what looked like my son’s cap gun. Then, a ball of silver trim that I had left near the kitchen table before I left. But the protocol told me to disregard this image as an analytical overlay.

After I did that, what I came away with was that the object hidden in my house had the sense of silver trim; shiny; chaotic; tangled; what I saw was a quality of stringy-ness.

That is how I spent my first night at the Monroe Institute.

The real journey was about to begin.

More fun crystal pictures.

The program began in earnest the next day. We began at roughly 7 a.m., though there were no fixed times for anything. Optional yoga was available in the morning. We began with breakfast, followed by a gathering, in which our two facilitators would give us a general overview of where the tapes would be taking us.

The Institute has created its own classification system for states of consciousness. The Gateway Program trains students to reach what it calls F (for Focus) 10, F12, F15, and F21. Each state is accompanied with a series of abstract binaural soundscapes — that audio brain trick, described earlier — including white noise, crashing surf, or tones.

F10 is a light meditative trance. F12 is a state of expanded awareness. F15 offers the sensation of “no time” and F21 is the place of “no time and no space,” the point at which the individual can purportedly make contact with external entities. The Gateway Program is a kind of brain entrainment program that gradually increases in intensity until at least some participants reach the "highest" or most expanded state, F21. (There are more states after this, but the introductory class tops out here.)

After a briefing about the state we were about to head to, we would all go to the bedrooms we shared with one other roommate. Each bedroom included a "CHEK" unit — a private bed ensconced in a cubby and fitted with a blackout curtain and a chunky black headphone mounted on the wall. Once we were settled in darkness, our headphones on our ears, we would toggle a switch which would let our trainers in the sound control room below know we were ready to begin.

Each session was about 40-minutes long, and we logged four or five of these sessions every day.

Each began with a ritual: we would close our eyes, and imagine putting analytical concerns into an imaginary box; then we would start a course of "resonant tuning," which involved chanting vowel sounds for several minutes. After that, we visualized a spinning energy "reball," a protective forcefield. Then we were to verbally state our affirmations and intentions, all of which started with: "I am more than my physical body."

As the tapes would end, the voice of Bob Monroe would talk us back down into our bodies. We would then "debrief" our experiences in the group, if we wished.

I had little trouble entering F10, the lightest state. And by the second exercise, I was well and fully into the slipstream of my own subconscious. In F12 (Expanded Awareness), I entered a waking dream. These waves of conscious awareness would carry me through the week. I can't remember all of these visions perfectly, because many of them ran through my inner sight too quickly for me to take hold. In these states, my sight would tunnel, and I would experience a sensation of movement or spinning. I distinctly remember flying through an American city.

Some of these visions were distinct and cohesive, as if flying over waterfalls and through lush forests. Others appeared more like vignettes, occurring so quickly that it was impossible to pin down specific details of what I was seeing. Several members of the group (including myself) reported seeing astral images of a brown horse around the facility; one named her Stella, and another rode the horse around during one of his sessions.

Whatever this was, it felt real to me; something between conscious imagination and immersive dream, although it possessed a darkened qualia distinct from waking reality.

It was awesome, but also emotionally intense. I spent much of the week privately sobbing in my CHEK unit before rejoining the group.

The effect of the sessions was cumulative. By Tuesday, the fourth day of our sessions, I was tripping balls whether I was listening to the exercises or not. I noticed that my awareness was altering even when I was supposedly in full waking awareness. Everything took on the same effect as the early stages of a light psilocybin trip, in which patterns appear in grass and solid objects appear slightly wavy.

During one of the breaks, I spent at least an hour outside, alone, staring at the internal geometry of a common yellow weed.

I began to struggle to speak, and often found myself either saying nothing, or entirely too much, going on long, discursive tangents. I got lost while attempting to go on a solitary walk. I kept losing items like shoes and my notes and my toiletries.

Yet we had taken no drugs during this week — at least as far as I was aware —and the experience wasn't quite like a typical psychedelic trip, either. There was no come down and, after a few days, I found I could shift in and out of these states at will.

A moment before we go further: I’m going to share more of what I experienced, but there are going to be limits. When I joined the program, I understood that I would need to respect the privacy of my fellow participants and their experiences. I will also extend that expectation of privacy to myself. Like most of the people who came to this program, I had experiences here that were deeply personal, and I'm not willing — or, frankly, even able — to share all of them with my readers.

But I will share as much as I can, and will always be honest about the limits of the experience. To that end, I should note that not everybody experienced the same ease slipping into the waking dream. Those with little to no background in meditation, and individuals who did not have a spiritual or artistic inner library, tended to swim in the black, or to "click out" during the sessions — the term used for falling asleep.

Eventually, I do think everyone received a purposeful experience or message. But the richer the subconscious content going in, the greater the ease with which the mind could use that content to construct scenes and scenarios to convey meaning across the divide.

From what I can glean, these experiences are co-created; they are formed by the subconscious in line with the symbols, correspondences, emotions and experiences that the conscious mind can bring to bear. Someone with a Christian background will see angels and saints; an Indian participant had vivid encounters with Hindu gods; those who were brought to this retreat through UFOlogy (and there were many) were more likely to encounter their own subconscious in the form of white lights, aliens, and spaceships.

This doesn’t make the experiences not-real, per se. Rather it suggests that they’re all analytical overlays of the ineffable.

---

Many of the Monroe participants were, until recently, atheists. Some combination of personal crisis, the effects of COVID, or research into emerging attempts to scientifically validate paranormal phenomena led them here. Whatever their path, these seekers had come to the conclusion that materialistic atheism simply wasn't helping them to build a meaningful life.

The beliefs humans settle on may or may not be grounded in consensus reality or rational materialist philosophy, but the drives that bring people to seek experiential mystical experience is valid. Is there more to the universe than we understand? What happens after we die? Is there more than our physical body? Are there intelligences beyond our own in the abyss?

It's no mere cope to ask these questions; nor to find our conventional and accepted answers wanting. It's normal — even healthy — to need to believe in something greater than ourselves, and to feel as if we know the answers to those questions.

On one of the warmer nights near the end of the week, about half the group gathered chairs around the firepit to attempt the CE5 protocol. Developed by UFOlogist Dr. Steven M. Greer — who has been at the forefront of the Disclosure Project, an organization seeking to push for declassification of UFO-related information believed to be held by the U.S. government — the protocol is a group ritual intended to contact UFOs.

I mean, I was already here, so if we could get some kind of convincing UFO sighting, my thoughts on the matter were, effectively: "Sure, why not?" I joined the group, settled in an Adirondack chair, wrapped a Mexican blanket around my legs and waited for the soundtrack to begin.

Before long, the UFOologists among us did see lights moving in irregular patterns in the sky.

To be honest, while I did notice movement out of the periphery of my vision, I didn't see what any of them did. We were in a light meditative state prone to causing distortions in our visual perception. In a group of believers, one person claiming to see something is likely to increase the probability of other people perceiving things, too.

My eyesight is poor, especially in the dark and at distance; and on a night in which faint clouds moved across faint stars, I'm inclined to think we were letting our eyes play tricks on us. That we were simply fooling ourselves into seeing things that weren't really there.

For what it's worth, I'm agnostic to the idea of aliens and UFOs. The week I attended Monroe, I got to watch a group of excited believers tune into congressional hearings that released videos showing a Hellfire missile bouncing off the side of a Tic Tac UFO. I think there's something to the UFO phenomena, but in all honesty, I don't know what.

Journalism has taught me to be comfortable living in a state of uncertainty and indifferent curiosity. We seek the truth, while acknowledging the pursuit is paradoxical. We're all trapped in the boxes of our own minds, attempting to understand the world through the narrow slits of light we carve out for ourselves. Our experience is filtered through the fatal flaw of our own individual interpretation. An imperfect language is our only line out. As such, securing the ultimate truth of anything is impossible, even if the quest for it is always worthwhile.

I also don't tend to put too much stock in all-encompassing conspiracy theories, especially when those ideologies are used to replace false certainty for a the mere absence of knowledge and understanding.

Many of the people in our Gateway participant group, however, were inspired to come to Monroe as part of a dive into UFOology. Some were conspiracists of a classical bent, able to recite line and verse from their favourite journalists, authors and government reports.

Others were full-blown believers of a UFO Millenarian new religious movement, convinced that the government was hiding the truth of aliens in order to protect the fossil fuel industries as our celestial brothers intended to gift the world with free energy. They believe this with the same fervent assurance that some Christians await the return of Jesus and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

One woman's son had died only a few months before the retreat. She entered the Gateway Program in the hope of making contact with him. Though she did seem to have some experience through the guided sessions, her attempt at contact failed, and her heartbreak and disappointment at the end of the program was something that we all felt with her.

I can't be cynical about any of these motivations, because I am human and I feel these needs as well.

---

By the halfway point of the program, sobbing periodically as I confronted my unaired subconscious content and rapidly losing grip on consensus reality, I stopped trying to get a peek inside the blue box sitting in my guest room closet. Whatever was happening in my own brain was radically more interesting than whatever random and inconsequential object my husband plucked out of the array of options provided by our home decor. My experiences were now far more interesting than what I thought I had wanted to prove.

More bluntly, suddenly, my experiment seemed wrong. Or, perhaps, it struck me as deeply misguided to go about seeking absolute answers through material means. The presumption of demanding a fathomless God prove himself in human terms.

The distinction between what was objectively real and subjectively experienced began to blur and seem irrelevant. Those who joined the program to check a box, to experience a specific thing, were soon swept away by the current of their own minds.

When we signed up for Gateway, we were explicitly warned that the program did not guarantee everyone an out of body experience. Indeed, after we arrived, we were shown an ancient video clip of Monroe counselling long-past participants that only about 15 per cent of those who passed through Gateway would have that kind of experience.

An OBE typically involves an individual feeling as if they have popped out of their own body and can look down on their slumbering form. But even this phrase "OBE" is a bit of a construction, a term of art that Monroe created to obscure the occult connotations of terms like "astral projection" and "astral bodies."

I did not have the classic OBE, although one other participant in our group claimed to succeed at this, and many of us had visions in which we "ran into" one another in the astral space.

I'm not sure it's possible to distinguish whether or not a classic OBE is distinct from an such a state, and I'm not sure experiencing one would be more valuable than the signal I was already getting.

From my own point of view, whether it be by hypnosis, isolation, ordeal, binaural beats, or something else entirely, the Gateway Program does induce altered states of consciousness. But while the Institute does engage in scientific inquiry of a conventional sort, what's being offered here really isn't that. This program is mysticism dressed up in technical jargon and scientific trappings. It's not scientific knowledge, but rather spiritual knowing.

---

Between sessions, and long breaks, we were subject to videos and discussions. During one of these periods, our group received a surprise visit from Joseph McMoneagle, the last surviving member of the Stargate Project.

McMoneagle still teaches a class on remote viewing at Monroe. He said, to his knowledge, no U.S. military or intelligence unit is doing anything like Stargate now, although he was last called upon to use his unique abilities only two years ago.

Now, he mostly helps find missing children, and often appears on Japanese TV to solve missing persons cases.

He regards remote viewing as a scientific protocol: All remote viewers are psychic, but not all psychics can bear the exacting, blinded and verifiable standards that remote viewing requires. Remote viewing, he said, is much like a martial art. Many people can learn to do it, but gaining real mastery requires years of practice and upkeep.

And, indeed, McMoneagle has recorded some true and unsettling hits over the course of his career as a psychic spy, many of which have been studied and recorded in Phenomena.

However, Stargate was shut down shortly after it was transferred to the CIA. A review of the program found that most of the work generated by viewers to be vague, general, or simply not usable. The reviewers, baffled also by the lack of any known mechanism for which such a skill could work, concluded that the program's hits were the result of reasonable guesses. Further, none of it was proven to be useful to an actual operation.

This is also where my own inner skeptic couldn't help but peek above the waves of my own inner astral adventure. Remote viewing teaches us to dissect our own subconscious images into constituent parts. The problem is that when you take your visions down to abstractions, it’s easy to retrofit those impressions to match the image you're supposed to be viewing. It's easy to concoct a hit post hoc.

It’s easy to fool yourself.

And it wasn't long before McMoneagle's grounded discussions of remote viewing meandered into stranger territory: his next book is expected to focus on his psychic images of Mars.

Graduates of the Gateway Program can continue on to a number of courses on subjects ranging from making a deeper connection to spirit guides; to expanding one's consciousness so far into the universe that the student makes contact with alien life; to making seeds grow with the energy from the palm of the hand.

Needless to say, this is entirely outside the realm of conventional science, or even scientifically informed consciousness expansion. Now we were talking about spirituality, and maybe religion, albeit one that claims only one dogma: "I am more than my physical body" — the affirmation we were told to repeat before every exercise.

It may be true, but one dogma is still one more than none.

Though a teacher's pet in waking life, come Sunday I was a horror in Catechism. And walking around the Monroe Institute I couldn't help but note the numerous photos, paintings, and statues of Bob Monroe, placed, reverently, around the facility. As a former Catholic, I couldn't avoid seeing iconography.

Human institutions are what they do.

There is a problem, however, with leaving my conclusions here. My easy skepticism ran aground on the rocks of my own inner world. Because of all of the members of my group, I suspect I, of all people, had one of the most unbelievable encounters of all.

---

In the final days of Gateway, we were set to reach F21, the point at which this experience with our interior consciousness would begin to blend with something exterior. This is the place where we were told we could meet loved ones who had passed, or connect with entities.

Truthfully, I was not keen. After several days of exhausting meditation, debriefing, and necessary but terrible emotional breakthroughs, my brain was fried. At this point, most of the participants were "clicking out" or falling asleep during the exercises, and could retain little of the content consciously. My own body seemed to clench, as if in rigor mortis, during these visionary states. I was not sleeping properly. I struggled to think straight. Everything hurt. Still, we had more to go. So go, I did.

I hit F21 — or at least, what I thought was F21 — on the first go. This space had all the visual hallmarks of individuals who claim Near Death Experiences. Everything was white light and shimmery and had an indistinct quality, as if it were the idea of a church or an office or a mall.

The first thing I saw was a lumbering figure of a white, furry creature that looked like the flying dragon Falkor from the Neverending Story, except fatter, and with many googly eyes. Also, it didn't fly.

I was confused, but rolled with it.

Further on, I encountered a petite woman with short grey hair and glasses. She reminded me of a pleasant secretary of a small parish. Polite, efficient, happy to see everyone arrive before 10 a.m. I asked if she was supposed to be my guide, and she made note of the fact I wasn't dead.

"You're going to want to meet Gabriel, he's been working hard to get you here," she said. "Um, okay," I replied, also realizing that this meditation session was about to end. "Hold that thought, I'll be back up in a minute."

The tape completed, I woke up, and then remembered something. Before packing my bag to the Institute, I had tucked away a prayer card to Archangel Gabriel in my wallet. I don't know why I did this. It wasn't characteristic. The card was just kicking around. I had forgotten about it. Or, at least, I thought I had forgotten about it.

After the debrief, we went right back for the next session. I pulled the card out of my wallet, memorized the image, put on my headphones, and hit F21 again.

Again, the same woman appeared. She put me in a waiting room until I was fully present, then directed me to the distinct sensation of being in a church. I took the image, placed it on the ground, and was soon sucked up into a vision of an angel right out of Book of Ezekiel, a thing of infinite eyes and spinning rings — though I certainly brought that idea with me, and I have no doubt that this is why it presented itself that way. Did I create it? Or did it create itself for me?

I know only that it had a quality of angel-ness.

I had a sense of an entity that was far too busy constructing this whole imaginarial space to take much of an interest in me, but I was free to check out its many eyes and try to get a handle on it — about as likely as an ant understanding the dark side of the moon. Nonetheless, I tried to enter the centre of it and soon got the visual and physical sensations of being spun around like a ping-pong ball in a laundry machine.

The tape ended, and I came out of this vision, albeit with difficulty.

"Well, that was trippy," I thought to myself.

Never keen to share these experiences, I mentioned it in passing to only one other participant in the group (I'll call him Bob). Then things got a little uncanny.

The next day, the sessions started again. We went back to F21. When we came back, Bob came to me; he had received messages to give to three members of our groups. I was one.

He had several pages of handwritten notes for me, and while some of it was generic and could have been subconsciously conjured with the information that I gave him, quite a lot simply ... wasn't. Much of what he said to me was too personal for me to share, but it was eerily specific to my current predicament.

I don't expect anybody else to be convinced by this. And even if I did share Bob’s notes, there’s nothing in them that would convert the skeptic. But from my perspective, I can't totally rationally account for the messages he was instructed to give to me. It involved a knowledge of my subconscious life and circumstances that Bob had no business having, and that I certainly had not provided.

I'm perfectly aware of how these sentences will read from the other side. Most will suspect I went on a quasi-psychedelic adventure and simply went a little insane. I expect they'll think this is very funny. To be honest, I think it's funny, too. Others will come to the conclusion that I well and properly headfucked by many hours of hypnosis tapes and psychological priming.

Those keen for a metaphysical interpretation will probably opt for a more spiritual view — that I had a vision that, if not outright miraculous, was at least meaningful and moving.

Maybe I was just fooling myself.

I have my own understanding of what I experienced. But as a writer, I believe all of these interpretations are valid. It's not my job to impose an analytical overlay on my readers. I can't tell you what's real. I can only report what I saw.

And by the end of the week, I had ceased any attempt to rationalize these visions. Instead, I took a long stroll to Lake Minaron on a hot day, put my feet in the water and watched, horrified and delighted, as the lake trout nipped the skin on my toes. I am more than my physical body: I am that which observes that body, that which sees the fish at my feet. I am not my feelings of horror and delight, but rather that which perceives those feelings, and lets them pass.

By the time I was seeing angels and fire was spitting out of my eyes, both the seer and the seen, I had gone beyond merely losing interest in what was hidden in the blue box in the closet of my home.

I forgot the thing existed.

When I did return, I remembered that I was trying to see inside a box, that some kind of objective validation was something worth pursuing. Yet, I was in no rush to open it. Instead, I slept. I played with my kids. I exfoliated. I went on long walks. I listened to music.

After a few days, I turned to my husband and told him to get rid of the box. Return the object to its rightful place. I demanded he never tell me what was inside.

If I opened the box and guessed wrong, that knowledge would cast a doubt on what had been an experience for me. And if it were a hit, what would that prove, and to whom?

If the item did have some whimsical quality of stringy-ness, the result would be no different. I would always wonder if I was simply retrofitting that vague quality back onto the item. Nothing would be solved. All I would have is another question: whether or not I was fooling myself.

Sometimes the mysterious retains its power only if it stays that way; in that roiling current of ambiguity and uncertainty; of multiple possible interpretations and meaning. There is a peace that lies in the question that can't be answered. In the knowing of not-knowing.

The Mayan glyph meant to symbolize a mystical vision, or the conjuring of an otherworldly entity, is a hand holding a fish. The thing you are seeking slips away the moment you try to clamp down on it. The beauty is found not in the catching, but rather in seeing the fish, watching it nibble at the flesh, and then letting it go.

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today. Please note: a donation is not a subscription, and will not grant access to paywalled content. It’s just a way of thanking us for what we do. If you’re looking to subscribe and get full access, it’s that other blue button!

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter. Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.