An Interview
With Skip Atwater
Part One

In the midst of the Cold War both the Soviets and the Americans employed psychics to spy on each other’s activities. These were the so-called remote viewers.

Both the CIA and the US Army conducted remote viewing intelligence programs. The US Army’s program, known by the code name Star Gate, was initiated in the late 1970’s by the gifted natural psychic, Skip Atwater. For ten years Skip was the Operations and Training Officer during which time he recruited and trained an elite group of professional remote viewers, through whom he conducted thousands of intelligence-collection missions.

Skip inevitably came into contact with Robert Monroe, the founder of The Monroe Institute. The Monroe Institute dedicates itself to the transformation of human consciousness. A major constituent of this transformation process is in part accomplished through the application of Hemi-Sync technology. The Hemi-Sync is perhaps best known for its capacity to induce an OOBE (Out Of Body Experience), otherwise known as astral projection. More information on the Monroe Institute can be found at www.monroe-inst.com.

Upon retiring from the Army, Skip became Research Director at The Monroe Institute. He has continued with the pioneering work of Robert Monroe. He has authored the inspiring Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul which in many ways continues on from Robert Monroe’s books. More information on this book can be found at http://satwater.www9.50megs.com/skipatwater.htm.

Skip also lectures extensively around the world. It was during Skip’s Sydney lectures in late May 2002 that the following interview took place with Tony Mierzwicki. Due to its length, the interview has been divided into parts, the second part appearing in the next edition of New Dawn
magazine.

Tony: Skip, for the sake of this interview, we might start defining our terms. Would you be able to define the term OOBE, or Astral Projection as it’s known in classical occult literature?

Skip: I think we need to have a reference point to describe the experience that people have called the OOBE. In starting with the reference point of what are we as human beings right now. We might think of ourselves as separate personalities. We seemingly are bodies walking around on this Earth, trying to accomplish things, have families, jobs, make a living, survive. And yet there is more to us than just our physical bodies, so we try to get an idea about this Earth life situation that we’re involved in. We can think about it in a much larger perspective, thinking that we are partly physical, partly emotional mental beings, and partly spiritual beings. All those things coming together when we are in our awake state, like you and I are now, talking to each other, we perceive ourselves to be in the physical body as it were.

As a matter of fact we usually only perceive ourselves to be only our physical body. And yet at night, in unconscious sleep, we separate from our physical bodies and travel to, and around, this world in a different manner in what’s called an Astral Body. Many people don’t recall those trips away from the body because their sense organs are not awake, their astral sense organs are not awake, where there isn’t enough impression left on memory to remember those things. Beyond the astral body is a spiritual realm. So if you think about it in those big three chunks, then you asked me to define what is an OOBE. It could be a spiritual experience which is beyond the astral, or astral travel limiting to that emotional mental body we know as our astral body, and visiting the realm in that way.

Tony: You mentioned before that people tend to not remember their astral experiences because their senses aren’t optimally sensitised. Are there any techniques that you could recommend for sensitising the senses?

Skip: Experience. There’s a psychological theory involving our senses called Sensory Integration, meaning that I know who I am, what I am doing, and I how I feel about myself based on the concept of integrating my senses. And yet when I sleep at night, or am in deep meditation, my physical senses are shut off. And if the theory of Sensory Integration is correct, then we have an unconscious experience. We have nothing to tell us who am I, what am I doing, how do I feel about myself, because our senses are shut down. Ahh, but those are only the physical senses. For in our astral bodies we have equivalent senses, which we don’t necessarily pay attention to, because we only think that we are physical bodies. But through practise, and through exercises, you can learn to pay attention to these realms so that in the natural process of drifting out of your body every night you then become aware of these. We call it turning on our internal perceptual processes but what we’re really saying is turning on our astral senses.

Tony: OK, so what are these astral senses?

Skip: Well let’s define first, in order to understand what the astral senses are, the worlds in which we’re exploring, one being the physical world, one being not the physical world, and think about what constitutes those worlds and how our senses work. First of all in the physical world, as we look around the physical world, we’re not actually getting an accurate view or understanding of what the physical world is. It’s as though we were in a shopping centre in the security office and we’re just watching the monitor. Maybe this monitor is only a black and white monitor, and maybe it’s only pointed in the one direction. And when there’s poor lighting, you don’t see very much, when there’s good lighting there is some. We aren’t actually seeing the shopping centre, we’re seeing our monitor with a pictorial display of the shopping centre. And that’s actually what’s happening to us, we are living behind our eyes and our senses looking at monitors.

What our eyes tell us is a very narrow narrow spectrum of reality. If an animal, a bat, were to come in this room and fly around they would perceive a different world than we’re perceiving. If a dog were to come in here with its hyper sense of smell, this would be an entirely different reality than what we sense. So what’s the real reality? Well, that’s my point – we never really know what the real reality is, because we’re just monitoring our little sense organs out there. In the same way, in the astral realm we have equivalent sense organs, the idea of sight, smell, touch, sound, taste, and we also have additional senses, that of telepathy and of intuition.

In the realm of the physical however, our perceptions are governed by what we know as a common set of realities. We agree that we’re sitting in these things called chairs, and there are plants behind us. We strive then to interpret our physical senses based on an agreement that we’ve grown up learning. Our parents taught us what all these things were called, and we’ve agreed to it so we have a basis of memory, and our sense organs go out and say, “OK, this is a signal coming in, what does it look like?” Well it goes up to our forebrain and our forebrain says, “have we ever seen anything like this before?” If the answer’s yes, then it goes into the Limbic System of the brain, and the Limbic System of the brain says, “how do we feel about this?” And if it says, “this is OK, this isn’t dangerous,” then it comes through the executive consciousness and says, “I see a tree.” But if it goes up to the forebrain and we don’t know what a tree is, and the answer is, “no, we don’t know what this is,” you never get to experience consciously perceiving that tree. The same kind of process is happening in an equivalent way to all our senses. We can only experience and weigh that which we have some experience with and that which is comfortable for us psychologically, emotionally, and makes sense to our egos. If something goes floating through the air, our ego might say, “this makes no sense, let’s not tell him about it.” So you actually don’t have that experience because it’s an uncomfortable thing to become aware of. That’s the rules then of the physical world and how our five physical senses work.

Understand that in the astral world, the rules of the astral world are different. There is not a consensus reality, there’s no striving to have common realities, and there are no personalities as we know them. So it’s simply the mental and emotional realms, our subtle bodies in a mental and emotional world, and our realities there are very compartmented. Your belief systems and emotional feelings create your own unique reality, and I have my own unique reality. So the senses pertain to our own beliefs and are controlled not by Sensory Integration as we know physical senses work, but by our beliefs, our emotional feelings about things and our thinking processes.

To think something is to create something in the astral world. Here although it’s working in God’s eye in the same way, we seemingly did not create this chair; we discovered the chair as we walked in the room and decided to sit in it. In the astral realm, you perceive a chair and it becomes real. So the exercising of these physical senses and the awareness of how the rules work within the astral realm is an important thing to understand.

You’re asking how can I exercise these senses so that I might learn to do this. You need to have a progressive learning process to attempt to experience visualisation in the astral world, attempt to experience intuition in the astral world, and attempt to experience telepathy in the astral world. Much like if someone were to teach you how to swim for the first time. In a swimming pool for our physical bodies it’s a strange and unusual environment, and the first time you’re in the water it’s like, “I don’t know how to move from this place to next, I don’t know how to keep from sinking and drowning.” So you gradually introduce yourself to this and walk in a little bit, and then walk back out, and walk in further and then maybe hold onto the side of the pool and maybe stick your head in the water. And now as adults, we can just go right in and it’s an atmosphere, an entirely strange world, that we now know how to swim. We know how to behave, how to manoeuver, and to define ourselves as swimmers. It’s the same way in learning how to wake up your astral senses, a gradual introduction to this until you become aware of what’s going on and become comfortable in that realm.

Tony: You mentioned before that it’s possible to make things manifest in the astral plane. Once something is manifested in the astral plane, could it then be possible to make it manifest in the physical?

Skip: Yes, and understand that it’s only people who are very savvy who know that they are manifesting in the astral plane. The astral plane emerges out of our subconscious and so it appears to us as though things are real, but they have emerged from our subconscious. As you become more aware, you understand how you might create things. A very interesting illustration of this is in the recent movie, “The Matrix,” where they learn that inside the matrix you could actually change the rules of reality and create things that you wanted to be there. Normally it emerged from the old patterns of the culture that just kept getting reinforced. But the people that understood the matrix were able to then change the reality of their own free will.

Now, you’re asking whether or not we could manifest things in what we think is the physical world. And the answer is yes, because those two worlds that we’re talking about, the physical and the astral, are actually the same world. The Tibetans call it the Bardo. It’s actually the same world, it’s just that we perceive it with our physical senses versus perceiving with our astral senses, and the experience is that it’s two different worlds, but it’s actually the same world.

Tony: How important are environmental considerations to experiencing astral projection? For example, would it be easier to astral project out in a woodland setting rather than a city setting?

Skip: That’s a really good question. In any experience involving expanded states of consciousness and the personal experience one has, there is not an action agent, LSD, Ahayuasca, Ecstasy, DMT. People say, here try this medication and have a wonderful experience. And the initial thought is that drug gives me the experience. But that’s not really what’s happening, and the scientists that have studied that, they saying that the drug is freeing you, chemically freeing you, from locked in perceptions. But what creates the experience are simple terms called , “Set” and “Setting.” And the Set refers to your itinerary that you bring with you to the experience, your background, your own personal exploration experience, and what your intent is. The Setting, is exactly what you’re talking about, the environmental setting. So many people who have explored Ecstasy or LSD, for example, will choose a very calm, peaceful, or country-like setting so that they’re not bombarded with extra input to process.

Tony: You mentioned that those particular drugs can facilitate astral projection. Are we talking about a one-off facilitation in which case the person becomes dependent on those drugs in order to experience astral projection, or do they have long reaching effects?

Skip: Well let’s kind of level the playing field first. For thousands of years, mankind has been trying to figure out how to generate altered state experiences, and they’re often referred to as the 4 D’s: Drugs, Dreaming, Dance and Drumming. Well those 4 D’s are chasing after altered states of consciousness; you don’t become dependent upon on those to experience the astral realm or the Bardo as seen through your astral senses. What they do is open the door to perception.

In our physical waking state, we are occupying so much of our awareness on the seeming physical world that we pay little attention to the other senses. Although occasionally we do have glimpses of telepathy, we have glimpses of intuition. “Gee whizz, I knew they were calling me on the phone, I knew that’s who it was.” Those are little glimpses of our astral selves, our souls speaking to us, as opposed to the physical world senses. The use of the 4 D’s is a use of what we call in America, training wheels on a bicycle, as though it’s teaching you how to balance a little bit, but then it can become very limiting once you know what these areas are like, once you awakened this part of you, once you’ve become aware that you are more than your physical body, then you are free to explore beyond those steps that you take at first.

Tony: You mentioned Ahayuasca a couple of minutes ago. I can’t help noticing that many people claim very similar experiences after having taken Ahayuasca, which seems to indicate an objective kernel to their experiences. How do you feel about that?

Skip: Well, it’s an interesting word objective. Because we tend to run after, “Oh that’s physical world,” it’s real, it’s objective, we could put some instruments on it and measure it, as it were. And the weight of the word objective has all that power. And yet all of our experiences are objective if you accept the fact that what we’re all involved in the Bardo, and different realms of the Bardo. So what you’re looking at with Ahayuasca is people visiting a common neighbourhood in the Bardo. And that same analysis could be applied to near-death experiences. Regardless of any cultural or religious background there are a set of commonalities that people experience with a near-death experience. Does that make it objective? Well maybe it does. In the same way with Ahayuasca people seem to have the same style or type of experience. And yet it’s commonly said even here in the physical world, the problem with eyewitness testimony, you could have seven people who witness a car accident, you’ll have eight versions of what happened. And so what’s the objective answer there? And so I think the Ahayuasca commonality is a very interesting one, much like the near-death experience one is very interesting. It makes us believe more firmly that there probably is a very common experience. UFO abductions the same thing. Regardless of cultural bias or religious upbringing, or ever even thought of UFO’s before, you get abductee experiences that have similar components to them, which makes us tend to believe there might be something to this if they’re all telling us the same story.

Tony: Near-death experiences seem to be accompanied by increased secretion of DMT by the Pineal Gland, and I’ve also read accounts that indicate that alien abduction scenarios have been experienced by people upon administration of DMT. Would you care to comment on that?

Skip: DMT is a very interesting chemical substance, and the fact that it’s associated with the Pineal Gland I think is going to lead to a lot of interesting research. I’d like to see some real time brain scan kind of research watching these things happen, which we haven’t got yet, we had a very small amount of data relating to that. But the idea that this chemical is in some way related to freeing up our locking into the physical realm and allowing us to become aware of these other worlds simultaneously while we’re in our body, it’s much like what we teach in remote viewing, the idea while you’re in your physical body, start describing these other things to me using your astral senses and not your physical senses.

Tony: You were actually involved in Remote Viewing as part of the Stargate Program prior to joining the Monroe Institute.

Skip: That’s correct, and in my book I kind of explain the idea that I seem to have been guided through life and to several different paths. And one of those paths some 25 years ago was to get involved in the military Stargate Program and using the psychic ability of remote viewing for military intelligence and surveillance techniques. And then went from there to the Monroe Institute where I’ve been for the past 15 years or so.

Tony: Skip, you mentioned that remote viewing was used by the US military. Could you briefly explain what remote viewing is, and perhaps give us an example?

Skip: Yeah sure. Remote viewing seems to be the ability of a person (this is a sort of an official description) to psychically or mentally describe locations, activities that are somehow distant from them, or remote from them, like in the next room, or across the world, or even distant in time. Our five physical senses can’t see things in the past or things in the future, or things in the next room, or on the other side of the world. But with the psychic ability, and I don’t mean psychic being spooky or strange, I mean just the mental ability to do that, is the process of remote viewing.

And it usually involves someone getting into a relaxed receptive state and then an interviewer working with that person asking them to describe a location designated in a sealed envelope, describe the location of the sealed envelope, or there is a series of letters or numbers assigned to a target, Target ABC123. And so then your interviewer would say to you ABC123. When you first get a remote viewer relaxed, and then ask him to describe the target in the envelope, they might take a while to describe it, they might not instantly come back and talk in a loud voice like I’m doing now, they might say, “well I don’t know, I seem to be perceiving something very strange, I can’t explain it.” “Well just describe the best you can.” They come back and say, “I see these boxes, underground storage of some kind, some of them are vertical and some of them are horizontal. Doesn’t make any sense to me, this a green area with rolling hills and these boxes that are underground. I don’t know what that could be.” And after this sort of interview in this meditative kind of phase, then you might say, “well OK, sit up now and draw for me what you’re trying to describe.” And so here is a drawing that might be provided here.

You see that he has a symbol here and thinks that’s some sort of a religious target involved here, a flat area with some trees in the area, green rolling hills, and he feels like it’s a kind of place that people might come to visit, and these boxes or crates made of heavy wood, some of them horizontal and some of them vertical, and yet in looking at that we can’t really tell what that is or what that means. And so you might ask him to concentrate again, “try concentrating again, and see if you can’t put the elements (what we call gestalt, major gestalts), put these elements together in a recognisable form.”

And so on a second drawing he might come back and say, “well there is an area over here where these boxes are underground, and then there’s trees, and some sort of religious symbol over here, maybe a church in the distance, mountains in the background”, and he comes and says, “this is actually underground storage of some kind.” Interestingly, in remote viewing they don’t have the same overprint of physical world descriptions that we have, so they don’t try to label the things that we label. They wouldn’t say that this chair is a chair. They would say, “well there’s a flat surface with four legs on it and I see people sitting in it,” rather than saying, “oh, I see a chair.” So we’re seeing the same kind of thing here without the physical world overlay. What is the astral information available here?

It turns out this site is actually a graveyard. And so we have rolling hills in the background, underground storage of boxes, and trees, a place that people come to visit. But notice the remote viewer didn’t have the description. He did not come back and say, “oh, this is a graveyard.” If you and I were to drive by a graveyard in our cars we would turn and look and say, “oh, look it’s a graveyard.” In a remote viewing sense though, he doesn’t have that same kind of physical world labelling that we do. However, this technique proved very useful in military surveillance.

Tony: I can just imagine the frustration of the commanding officer after that exercise!

Skip: Yes, and the question too in many of these things, if you were looking for, in a police instance, where did the bank robber hide the money? And you ask a remote viewer to describe where did the bank robber hide the money. If you gave the descriptions of, “I see lots of boxes stored underground in an open park like area”, they might say, “well that doesn’t mean anything, how are we supposed to find that?” But if you take those sketches to all the policemen, to the firemen, to the building inspectors, the county supervisors, somebody’s going to look at those drawings and say, “you know what that is, that’s the graveyard.” So you need to use this tool of remote viewing in conjunction with normal investigative aids. It doesn’t give you all of the answers instantly, because it’s a different form of perception. It’s a perception of the Bardo reality, the astral reality of it, and not necessarily equipped with our physical labels.

Tony: Could astral projection be used to enhance the abilities of remote viewers?

Skip: Ah, excellent question. As it turns out, the best remote viewers first acquire the target while their souls are in their body, sitting here just like you and I are, monitoring the input from our physical senses. And they close their eyes or they simply turn their attention to those inner senses, those astral senses, and begin to acquire the target. And as they begin to get information and we know that they are locked on to describing the right thing, they are not always right on, some of the best, best, best remote viewers only get locked onto the right target maybe 50, 60, 70% of the time, they aren’t always locked on good. When they begin to get locked on good, then you can say to them, “OK, seems like you’re doing well. I want you to relax now and get really deep, and I want you to visit the target and describe it to me.” And then they rest back and they actually do perceive themselves first stepping aside from their body and then waking up at the site. So the idea of surveillance, non-physical surveillance, in its most ideal application is the expansion first of what we might call classical remote viewing and then extending that into an OOBE. If you don’t do the classical remote viewing first, however, many out of body travellers escape the physical world and are off in other dimensions of the Bardo. It’s much more attractive with a lot of other places to go.

Tony: I just wanted to ask you a controversial question. Apparently the Monroe Institute has accepted a number of military contracts.

Skip: It’s an interesting word you use, “apparently.” Lots of people can write anything, freedom of speech and the Internet. I have intimate knowledge of all of that, I mean I’ve worked there and I’ve been associated with the Institute since 1977. There was one classified government contract with Mr Monroe, not the Monroe Institute, and that was to train their famous remote viewer, Joe McMoneagle. There was also training done by the military when they came down in groups of staff members to go through the Gateway Voyage. But there wasn’t anything classified or military or secret about that, it was just three classes they did where there were members of the military staff who came down as though they were doing some sort of advanced seminar, a communications seminar. Those are the only governmental connections. There’s another rumour that Mr Monroe’s father was a CIA operative, which is totally false. I’m sure somewhere there is some guy named Monroe, who was in the CIA at one time, but it didn’t have anything to do with Mr Monroe at all. It makes an interesting rumour.

Part 2 of this interview covers the mechanics and safety of Hemi-Sync technology and OOBE’s, along with the benefits.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 74 (September-October 2002)

New Dawn – a 88 page bimonthly magazine – is available in newsagencies throughout Australia and New Zealand. Receive New Dawn in your mail box by Subscribing Today!

Subscribe to our announcements list: