WHO ARE WE? In 1958, Robert Monroe, a New York broadcasting executive, began having experiences that drastically altered his life. Unpredictably, and without willing it, Monroe found himself leaving his physical body to travel, via a second body, to locales far removed from the physical and spiritual realities of his life. He was inhabiting a place unbounded by time or space. With some trepidation, he wrote a book about his experiences. Doubleday published Out of the Body in 1971. Anchor brought out a second edition in 1977. Throughout the book Monroe maintains the stance of a careful, objective reporter who reports his own confusion in this unusual area. He relies upon personal experiences for interpretation rather than any occult, religious or spiritual framework. In the 1960s, Monroe became interested in the possible connection between non-verbal audio patterns and brain wave rhythms. From his long experience with sound, he advances from rotating disc circuit breakers to sophisticated, custom built signal generators and the production of tape recordings in which he has as many as sixteen patterns of sound mixed together on stereo channels. Drawing upon his discoveries and the work of others, he employs a system of binaural beats to create a frequency following response by the brain wave rhythms. The FFR not only gives some control over the brainwave emission of each hemisphere, it aIso promotes brainwave synchronization between the two hemispheres. In May, 1975, Monroe received a generic patent for this method. In 1971, the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences was founded and located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in Virginia. After he shared his findings with others pursuing the same interests, an Advisory Board representing several major scientific disciplines formed around the Institute. The Institute then developed a highly experimental program for the training of consciousness itself. What are we doing? We are instructing and training individuals in the art of switching perceptual modes, the art of becoming more conscious of one's particular inner resources, inner abilities, and, most of all, of ones inner intelligence. From Samadhi and Satori to the Vision Quest and the Cloud of Unknowing, cultures in all times and all places have harbored a few individuals who reached and practiced profound levels of self-exploration. Most of these individuals practiced within a mythology, an epistemological groundwork by which they could interpret and give meaning to their experiences. Present day Western epistemology, just recovering from an entrancing flirtation with materialism, provides little in the way of a ladder toward other perceptual modes. What investigation has been done within our current theory of knowledge has centered on the physiology of the brain and on the possible correlation between the brain's physical state and the subjective state of the mind. First, brain--wave profiles and then lateral brain specialization and hemispheric synchronization have offered potential tools for the description of the subjective state and the mind's operational function. Yet, in our work, we suspect that while the tremendous variety of subjective states may each have physiological correlates, the ability to determine these correlates lies beyond our present techniques. It may well be, as Elmer Green suggests in Beyond Biofeedback that the brain, as a physical mechanism, cannot register non-physical events. If this is the case, the Western idea of knowledge will have to be enlarged. But how? It is precisely this that we are investigating. First, we are training interested individuals to switch their perception to areas or fields outside the realm of our physical matter reality. We call these, non-physical realities. Then we examine the data they bring back. Such examination presents problems peculiar to this investigation. Often the experiences in these non-physical realities appear to be in and come from a qualitatively greater consciousness than our usual consciousness in physical matter reality. Therefore, in order not to miss or misinterpret important patterns and information, we need to take the qualitatively greater perspective into account while at the same time, in order for the patterns and information to be useful to us here in physical reality, we try to interpret them from the perspective of physical matter reality. It would be easier, of course, if we all would switch perceptual modes and rise into a greater consciousness. That may be the only way we can enlarge our ideas about knowledge itself; the only way we can create a mythology sufficient for the coming years. Our Gateway Program provides the instruction, the training and the environment for making this transition. On a wide scale we have no idea how successful the program would be. On a small scale we do know that it is successful for those who have the volition and courage and desire to rise into the truly unknown.