Review: Far Journeys - Part 1

Far Journeys

by Robert A. Monroe

Today I'm reviewing Far Journeys by Robert A. Monroe. The copyright is 1985. The book is 290 pages, which means you won't feel cheated on the amount of content.

This is part 1 of 2. 

Way back in 1979, when I read Monroe's first (1971) book, Journeys Out of the Body, it started me on my spiritual path. It changed my life, and I was like, "Wow, this is mind-blowing, this is life changing! Five out of five stars!"

Far Journeys was Monroe's long-awaited (fourteen years!) sequel, copyrighted in 1985. When I first read it, I thought, "Monroe took a dive off the deep end of the pool, and never quite resurfaced." It was totally foreign, weird, and un-relatable. It was nothing like Monroe's first book, and I was very disappointed. It just sounded too obscure, almost like the ramblings of a madman. Parts of the book even sounded like a manifesto.

Nine years later, when I read Monroe's third book, 1994's "Ultimate Journey," I was relieved. The old Monroe was back. It was much more relatable and down-to-earth. Well, as much as a book on out-of-body experiences can be. Monroe seemed to have recovered from his lapse of sanity. Still, I think it's best to read Monroe's three books in chronological order.

So I decided to re-read Far Journeys and see if I had the same opinion, or if my forty-some-odd years of OBEs improved it.

What made Far Journeys seem so crazy? Well, for one thing, the vocabulary. Monroe states right upfront that he struggled to convey his (then) more recent experiences into words people can understand, so he made up his own vocabulary to more accurately reflect what he actually experienced. Here are some of Monroe's made-up terms, and a short description of how to translate them in your mind:

•  "TSI - Time-Space Illusion" - Earth and near-Earth environments.
• "M Band" - Psychic "noise" caused by uncontrolled thoughts.
• "Ident" - Mental "address" of a person or item.
• "Rote" - Thought ball. An encapsulated group of ideas and thoughts that can be stored away and "read" like a video screen, and telepathically.
• "Run the rote" - To replay portions of a "rote."
• "Percept" - Insight, intuition, Understand. Think "My perception of this is..." 
• "Open" - Becoming receptive to something.
• "Closed" - Tune out external stimuli.
• "Flickered" - Uncertain.
• "Blank" - Don't understand. 
• "CLICK!" - Instantaneous change in consciousness.
• "Turn in" - Consider, think over.
• "Vibrate" - Show emotion.
• "Smooth" - Get it together, in charge of self.
• "Dulled" - Lost interest.
• "Lighted" - Happy, enthusiasm.
• "Rolled" - Amused, laughed.
• "Curl" - Organized energy, usually intelligent.
• "Plied" - The way things are, goes with the territory.
• "INSPEC" - A helpful "Light being." I'll get into that later. 
• Loosh - We'll cover that in part 2. 

In the past, I've complained about authors using obscure made-up words to better describe non-physical ideas and communications. The IAC, the International Academy of Consciousness tried to do a similar thing, and I didn't like it then either. For example, in books like Demystifying the Out-of-Body Experience by Luis Minero, readers had to learn new words like "velo," "thosenes," "holothosenes," "morphothosenes," "mentalsomas," "energosomas," "cosmoethics," "holomaturity," "penta," and so on. (Minero's book is actually a good book and I gave it 4 stars out of 5). But as much as new vocabulary helps the reader get closer to the actual experience, it can still be very off-putting. Unfortunately, a LOT of Far Journeys is fraught with Monroe's new vocabulary.

On the good side, this book is almost all out-of-body narratives, and you know how much I love those. He describes details of what he experienced, but a lot of those narratives went way beyond what I think is credible. I described a similar problem in my 2018 review of Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiritual World by Luiz Roberto Mattos, where I wrote:

"Another problem is that the dialog was too long and detailed to have taken place in genuine OBEs. There's simply no way anyone (short of eidetic memory) would be able to remember and quote word for word what someone said in an entire half-hour lecture. Not even in real life, let alone from an OBE. I'm lucky if I remember just a few sentences."

In the case of Far Journeys it's more like, "AA tossed me a rote. I opened it, and this is what I saw and heard. (A long discourse, and then) I asked a question about it and AA tossed me another rote..."

Monroe stretches the boundaries of what's credible. And who knows, maybe he crossed that line. In one OBE he is pushed into an (physical) experience of several non-human lifeforms (animals, plants, etc.) For example, he writes:

"...but I can't move...but I can't move, I can't move!...what?...what?...just beeloon it and I can go the porch, how could I forget that! How could I forget to beeloon!...And...yes! Three-way...I could do a three-way and it wouldn't be dark...why, any curl can do a three-way without turning, you need to three-way if you want to keep your spiral going...I could pull a skip and...skip? Skip! And there's more, it's all coming back..." (pg. 108)

This is an extreme example, but see what I mean about sometimes sounding unhinged or crazy? Other times, he sounds almost sane, but his claims seem a bit farfetched or dubious. For example, in physical life, he describes a pair of pants he owned that seemed to mysteriously collect small amounts of money on their own. He writes:

"I've shown it to my wife, Nancy, and she still is skeptical. It seems that if I leave a certain pair of pants hung in the bedroom closet, it generates paper money...I can take the pants to the cleaners and return them to the closet in the plastic bag. It makes no difference. We have theorized that I may walk in my sleep and insert money in the pants pocket. The unopened plastic bag dispelled that idea..." (pgs. 8-9)

I've often said that I tend to be a skeptic and not believe wild claims, unless they happen to me. That one is weird, but hey, I believe it because I've experienced things like that firsthand. After my dad died, my mom got a large life-insurance check, which she put in an envelope on her dresser. Soon after, the check completely disappeared. Everyone in the house searched frantically for it, in every bit of the house. It was a lot of money and it was gone. A day or two later, just when my mom decided to have a duplicate check issued, it mysteriously reappeared. In plain sight. On top my dresser, which we searched a dozen times before! I felt as if my dad was trying to say I should have the money, which, of course, was ridiculous. To this day, I have no explanation. Sometimes it seems like spirits just mysteriously "apport" things. But I digress.

Monroe talks about the early days of The Monroe Institute (TMI) and the research they did. He mentioned their famous Gateway Program, and noted:

"Many, of course, have come [to the Gateway program] on the possibility that they will have an out-of-body experience. Most of the time this expectation is not fulfilled during the session itself." (pg. 29)

He wrote about some of the strange physical effects they observed at TMI. For example: 

"One night, when we got into our cars parked outside some twenty feet from booth 2, we found that the batteries were dead in all three cars...Cars parked on the other side, or sixty feet away were unaffected." (pg. 49)

I was disappointed that the book didn't include any more out-of-body tips or techniques. However, re-reading Monroe's descriptions gave me some new insights. For example, he wrote:

One of the earliest discoveries...was that I had more than one nonphysical body." (pg. 78)

In a few places, I've written that if you seem to get stuck or glued to your physical body, try "to leave your astral [some would say "etheric" or "energy"] body." (i.e. a second time.) For more information, see my blog article Problem 9 - I Can't Go Anywhere. My experience matches Monroe's perfectly. In almost all of his OBE narratives, Monroe describes a two-step process: First, he leaves his physical body, then he leaves his "second" [etheric] body to get to his astral body. (pg. 79)

Unfortunately, virtually all of his OBE narratives make it sound simple: Just reach for the vibrations, roll out of the physical, then roll out of the energy body, and you're free to roam about the cabin. I wish it was that easy.

I was disappointed in Chapter 5, "New Associations," which described how some of his early "Explorers" had experiences in which "with the Explorer's permission, friendly entities take over their physical bodies and speak using the Explorer's vocal cords." (pg. 50) As far as I'm concerned, this is nothing but channeling. Several looooong examples are given. 

Now don't misunderstand me:  I've studied channeling and mediumship half my life and I've amassed a large collection of books on those subjects. In fact, I love reading channeled material, my favorite being the "Seth" books by Jane Roberts. The problem is: I didn't buy a Robert Monroe book to read channeled material. I bought it to learn about out-of-body experiences. Thankfully, there's not a lot of that.

Starting on page 79, Monroe gives us OBE narratives (firsthand accounts of his out-of-body experiences), and aside from some supplementary information (epilogue, Q&A, and two papers written by Stuart Twemlow and Glen Gabbard) they take up the rest of the book. That's a lot of narrative. And like I said before, they're laden with Monroe's new word-concepts, and yes, they're weird.

Much of it consists of Monroe leaving his body, leaving his second-body, then receiving large, complex "rotes" or "telepathic thought-balls" from various non-physical entities. When I read the book in 1985, the concept of a "rote" seemed a bit "out there" but in 2026, with 46 years of experience, it makes perfect sense.  I've received "thought-balls" myself, although not nearly as long and complex as Monroe claims. I still don't like the strange terminology.

Most of these "rotes" come from a non-physical entity/friend he calls "BB," and Monroe unrolls them and reads or experiences them. The "rotes" supposedly explain human (and non-human) existence, its purpose, where we came from, why we keep reincarnating, where we're going to, and so forth. Deep questions. Some people may find it fascinating, but I was a bit bored. Much of it agrees with Helen Wambach's book, "Life Before Life" which I read (and loved) decades ago. Much it agrees with Jurgen Ziewe's observations of the afterlife environments. Much of it agrees with Jane Roberts' channeled observations from "Seth." But Monroe's descriptions are more obfuscated, even if more accurate.

Some of it is positively disturbing, such as:

• His non-physical friend, "BB," describes how addictive physical life is. He describes how their mutual friend, "AA," decided to see what physical life was like, but became hopelessly "addicted" to physical life and kept choosing over and over to reincarnate, to the point where BB could no longer reach or communicate with AA. It reminded me of what I heard about the illegal drug, crystal meth: If you try it once, it will be the most fabulous "peak" experience of your life, but if you try it a second time, you will be its slave forever, and it will destroy you. Just say no to physical incarnation? Oops. Too late.
• On page 89, Monroe describes a "staggering radiation" of sexuality, both male and female which came from a giant squirming mass of  naked "dead" people who focused on nothing but sexuality, but they could never be satisfied because they were no longer physical.
• INSPECS, short for "Intelligent Species." (pg. 93) When I read about them in 1985, I couldn't relate to it at all. It made no sense. Now, in 2026, I know exactly what Monroe was talking about. I believe he was describing the "Light Beings" I think are the basis for Biblical "Angels." I've talked about them in some of my podcast interviews. They're often invisible, but when you do see them, they look like giant Coleman lantern filaments. To me, they always seem helpful, but they have their own secret, yet sacred, agenda, and they sometimes use astral travelers (like me) to accomplish their goals in places they can't reach on their own. These experiences can be alarming and frightening. Monroe doesn't dwell on this much, except to say one of these INSPECS is a "friend" whom he tries to call upon to get answers, but at some point, Monroe lost his friend's Ident.

In part 2, I've cover other weirdness and the concept of "Loosh." That is where Far Journeys gets really weird.

Bob Peterson
28 July 2026

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