Through the Gateway

Conspiracy theorists love combing through document dumps from the United States Government, in hopes of finding a particular truth they’ve been seeking – alien cover ups, relations with foreign governments, or secret societies that control the world, to name a few. But what if there was a declassified, unredacted document detailing our place in the universe, what our reality is made of, and how to transcend it to gain knowledge outside of space and time?

The “Gateway Process” document is a 28-page report written in 1983 and declassified in 2003 by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell. Back then, the US Army had a contract with a private organization in Virginia called the Monroe Institute, where its founder, Robert Monroe, had developed an audio program. It was used to induce the listener into a meditative state where out-of-body experiences could occur. USAINSCOM (United States Army Intelligence & Security Command) personnel began taking the course, including McDonnell, and he was tasked with writing up a report for his commander. The report detailed the program’s effects and how and why it worked.

Participants listened through headphones to a series of tapes that combined hypnosis, binaural beats, and a guided meditation narrated by Monroe to achieve a brainwave state called “Hemi-Sync,” where the electrical wave patterns of both hemispheres of the brain become equal in amplitude and frequency. Once this state is achieved, the courses build upon themselves to allow the listener to project their consciousness outside of their bodies. In the document, McDonnell states:

“Fundamentally, the Gateway Experience is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space. The participant then gains access to the various levels of intuitive knowledge which the universe offers.”

That may be the most intense statement I’ve personally read in a government document, or anywhere, for that matter. Big, if true. So why did the US Government emphasize such a fringe topic when they did? In 1972, a classified intelligence report circulating through the CIA claimed that the Soviet Union put a lot of money into psychical research of ESP and remote viewing for espionage. Not to be outdone, the United States began to do the same, which resulted in the Gateway Process and Project Stargate, among others, between 1978 and 1984.

After outlining the physics and science that make it possible, McDonnell states we that live inside a massive hologram of a torus-shaped plane of reality/existence, which mirrors the patterns of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. As the torus flows outward and folds back on itself, it enters a black hole, goes through a densely-packed energy nucleus, and gets spat out the other side of a white hole and begins the process again. The torus represents a continuous flow of the phases of time: past, present, and future, and McDonnell reasons that human consciousness, once brought to a sufficiently altered (or focused) state, could obtain information about the past, present, and future since they all live in the universal hologram simultaneously, to see how the universe works. Thus, our all-reaching consciousness eventually participates in an all-knowing, infinite continuum. Long after we depart the space-time dimension and the hologram, our consciousness continues into what he calls “the Absolute,” which is the energy at rest outside of the space-time confines of the torus.

After reading this report, I came away with a completely altered perception of our universe and how to interact with it. It struck me that people throughout history have founded and maintained religions with less than what was presented in this paper. McDonnell even goes as far as to say that “the resulting conclusions do not do any violence to the fundamental mainstream of either eastern or western beliefs.” On the contrary, he reasons that:

“...the concept of the universe which at least some physicists are now coming to accept is identical in its essential aspects with the one known to the learned elite in selected civilizations and cultures of high attainment in the ancient world. The concept of the cosmic egg, for example, is well known to scholars familiar with the ancient writings of the eastern religions. Nor are the theories presented in this paper at variance with the essential tenets of the Judeo-Christian stream of thought.”

McDonnell was a government employee tasked with writing a report for a superior, a distilled and simplistic breakdown of why a research program was yielding results. Yet, he ended up giving one of the most concise explanations of Unified Field Theory, and indeed, the very nature of our existence. He had nothing to gain or lose from the conclusion. His job wasn’t tied to the outcome, he didn’t have money riding on it, and his ego wasn’t tied to how people took the findings. He presented his findings so that even the most skeptical would be open to the data, and I believe he succeeded.

The paper concludes that the remote viewing studies weren’t yielding consistent and reliable results for espionage. As it turns out, holograms can be viewed forward, backward, or upside down, which can be tricky for gathering intelligence. So, the contract with Monroe was canceled, and the projects were scrapped after varying results that couldn’t justify any more funding. However, the Monroe Institute is still going today, and they still own the copyright on the Gateway Process, which is currently available for purchase.

I would go so far as to say that this paper is required reading for anyone interested in the nature of reality or the metaphysical in general. You can search “Gateway Process CIA” and the document will pop right up. Unfortunately, page 25 (of 28) is missing from the official CIA document, but Reddit users have located and made that available for reading as well.