Lehal Library

4. Explorer Team I Amid the diversion of Gateway sessions, visitors ranging from psychologists and electronics engineers to ex-flower children with backpacks, mail response to the original Journeys, we continued our research program with our volunteer group in the laboratory. The group became consistently more proficient in achieving other forms of consciousness, including the out-of-body state. However, personal events in their lives (such as moving to another city) brought the regular weekly group down to six. These were the physicist, electronics engineer, social services executive, transpersonal psychologist, office manager, and psychiatric counselor. I would have liked to use actual names, but several felt their employers would take a dim view of it all. Therefore, no names at all. One of the most peculiar aspects was that their experiences paralleled my own only in the preliminary stages. They could and did replicate my own near out-of-body experiences but from that point on there seemed little similarity. Possibly because of the confidence factor of a monitor with whom to communicate, in some respects they had freedoms that I had never experienced. So that the picture is clear: The subject lies on a water bed in a darkened, acoustically and electrically shielded 8-by-10 room (usually booth 2, everyone’s favorite for some unknown reason). The booth has its own air-conditioning and heating controls. Electrodes for monitoring physiological states are glued to head, fingers, and body. A sound microphone hangs about four inches above the face. Audio headphones completely cover each ear. Most important, the subject has just gone to the bathroom to be sure the bladder is empty. Too many sessions had been aborted because the subject reported a “problem” in the physical body, only to find upon a hurried return