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Blog My Gateway Tapes experience (so far) Initial thoughts on a foray into doing the Gateway tapes. Chris Amandier 16 May 2023 • 6 min read Share For the last few weeks, I've been trying out the Monroe Institute's Gateway tapes.[^1] The Gateway Experience has earned a lot of buzz online over the last few years (apparently it went viral on TikTok in 2021), but it's basically a meditation program from the 1980s which helps listeners reach expanded states of awareness.There's a lot more to say here about the history of the tapes, the declassified CIA report, and its connection to remote viewing. So, rather than an explainer about the Gateway Experience, this post is just a dump of my initial thoughts as I've dipped a toe into this weirdness. (Like the rest of my blog, this is me learning in public.)As I write this, I'm listening Witch Prophet's GATEWAY EXPERIENCE, a neo-soul/alternative R&B/trip hop album inspired by the artist's experiences with focal aware seizures, which can cause lucid dreams, déjà vu, déjà rêvé, and out-of-body experiences. It's also "an ode to the released CIA report where they studied the use of sound tapes [the Gateway Tapes] to manipulate brainwaves with a goal of creating altered states."A couple weeks ago, when I opened up the Bandcamp app on the most recent Bandcamp Friday and saw that the day's featured album was GATEWAY EXPERIENCE, that seemed like a significant enough synchronicity that I gave it a listen and (because it's great!) then bought it.[^2]In addition to starting to listen to the Gateway tapes, I've also been reading up a bit on the related topic of remote viewing, including Russell Targ's book Limitless Mind and Third Eye Spies. And then that led to a second synchronicity: an episode of the Haunted Objects podcast about remote viewing dropped while I was listening to Targ's book, on the same way that the album GATEWAY EXPERIENCE came out, May 1. Oh, and also Targ's latest book about remote viewing, Third Eye Spies, also came out that day. (A weird number of remote-viewing-related episodes of various podcasts have come out since then, so maybe it's just in the zeitgeist. Though it's strange that I'm stumbling across all of this now versus in 2021, when the Gateway tapes went viral.)Typically, when I start to run into synchronicities, I take it as a sign that I should keep going along whatever path led me to 'em.So, while my first few weeks of digging into the Gateway Tapes has left me a little hesitant, I'm going to keep going for now. I'll plan to share some notes and impressions about my experience as I go along.A bit more about the Gateway tapesRobert Monroe, the voice heard on the earlier waves of the Gateway tapes, popularized the term "out-of-body experience" through his 1971 book Journeys Out of the Body and founded the Monroe Institute (which teaches people about expanded consciousness and which would later have connections to the government's remote viewing program).The Gateway tapes are an adaptation (as far as I can tell) of the Monroe Institute's residential Gateway program, and pioneered a form of binaural beats, which the tapes call "Hemi-Sync."The tapes are available on YouTube, but folks on the subreddit say that the video versions contain compressed audio, so aren't ideal to use. I've been working from .flac versions that are archived online. Most people who attempt the tapes also read the detailed declassified CIA report about them.My relationship with guided meditationsI live in New York City, a place known for being loud. Because of that, for the past decade and a half or so, I've listened to guided meditations or hypnosis audio/videos before bed. It started as something to help me fall asleep while living in noisy college dorms in a lively part of the Bronx, and I've continued just because it turns out that I enjoy a nice guided meditation.I haven't listened to meditations every night, and there were a few years when I lived in louder neighborhoods that sometimes needed to be drowned out by electronic music instead. But it's fair to say that I've consistently gone to sleep listening to guided meditation or hypnosis audio for almost half my life. (In fact, the very first podcast I listened to, back in the 2000s, was a guided meditation podcast.)So I'd consider myself pretty used to guided mediations (including ones with binaural beats).With that being said, let me tell you: these tapes are intense. It caught me off guard, though maybe it shouldn't have.After I downloaded the audio, I started listening to the first tape on a whim while sitting in the living room. I didn't tell my wife I was doing a meditation, because I just wanted to get a sense of the tapes' vibe and didn't feel like I was "seriously" doing the meditation. My wife came in partway through and tried to talk to me, which . . . did not go well. I was in a fairly deep trance and she was (reasonably) weirded out.So I'd say that 1) to me, these tapes feel closer to hypnosis than a guided ...