The Gateway Tapes

Last year I started an audio drama called Close Your Eyes, an audio drama about a guy who, in an attempt to try and find his missing brother, gets involved with a cult whose members claim they can revisit or even alter their past using psychological and meditative techniques.

This year I came across the Gateway Tapes.

During the Cold War, several U.S. intelligence programs were deep in some paranormal shit. The Cold War produced a surprising number of intelligence and military projects that ranged from unconventional science to outright fringe ideas. Many people know about MKUltra (which I only came to know about after playing Outlast), the program which focused on mind control and behavior modification using drugs such as LSD. The program was highly unethical as the people they experimented on (psychiatric patients, prisoners, military personnel), weren’t aware they were part of the experiments.

The Gateway Process, or Project Stargate (as was called by different agencies), was of a similar fashion. The goal of the project was to investigate whether people could obtain useful intelligence through “remote viewing”. Remote viewing is the ability to mentally perceive distant locations, objects, or events without being physically there.

The process itself comes from a system developed by the Monroe Institute to expand your consciousness and achieve out of body experiences, without the need for extensive meditations or hallucinogenics. But the CIA started investing heavily in the project for their own dirty purposes.

The institute’s website looks like a cult recruitment platform (and maybe it is, who knows). After all, the institute makes claims about “expanded consciousness” and “altered states of mind” that are (a) hard to believe, and (b) sound very culty.

Now me being naturally curious, I started down the rabbit hold of these tapes to try and figure out what is real and what is woo woo. Plus, there’s also the fact that aside from all the paranormal possibilites the program claims, it is also generally used by a lot people for just relaxation, meditation, and lucid dreaming, which are all reasonably achievable goals. The program itself uses binaural beats for this, which are one of the “evidence-based meditatve practices” that Dr. Huberman preaches. So what could be the harm in trying it?

But then I found this line in the CIA report…

…and this comment exchange under a YouTube video on the project.

At this point I felt like I had somehow entered an episode of Close Your Eyes. Are these experiences real or are they creations of the mind by delusional internet hippies? I couldn’t find any reliable evidence for these aside from obscure forums on the occult and astral projections.

Not one to be scared off easily by paranormal claims (for one, because I don’t beleive in them), I decided to give the tapes a shot. After all, the key claim that got me interested in was that the tapes can quickly help you meditate, relax, and achieve mental states that would otherwise require years of discipline and training. And since my Google Health app has been reminding me regularly about my lack of mindfulness, I think the tapes might be able to help me with that. Or at least, that’s the belief I’m taking with me on this “gateway experience”.

I’ll be loggiing my entire experience of the Gateway experience in the journal below. You can check out and read all the entries.

Journal

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