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Appendix 116: The Gateway Experience: Brain Hemisphere Synchronization & “Operation Crestone/Baca” (2 videos, 2 articles, declassified CIA document & webmaster’s comments)

New World Religion
Articles & Interviews

Part VIII: Cult Connections

February 9, 2024

I. C.I.A DECLASSIFIED – The Gateway Experience: Brain Hemisphere Synchronization (Hemi-sync) (7/2/21)

Epigraph Quote from Video:

“June, 1983, Wayne MacDonald was tasked by the CIA to provide an assessment of the Gateway Experience in terms of its mechanics and ultimate practicality. This top-secret document was declassified after 20 years in 2003 revealing some powerful techniques to synchronize both hemispheres of the brain (Top-Secret US Army Document de-classified document dated Sept. 10, 2003 is shown). What was revealed in Wayne’s assessment could be one of the most powerful techniques ever discovered in regards to vibration. The human energy field and synchronization of the heart and brain. The particular technique we will be looking at today is called Hemi-sync, the synchronization of the right and left hemispheres of the brain and how this technique can be used as a powerful tool for manifestation.

‘”The Gateway Experience is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus, and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space. The participant then gains access to the various levels of intuitive knowlede which the universe offers.”

II. Webmaster Comment on possible connections with Crestone/Baca interfaith spiritual community:

Is THIS what Crestone/Baca is all about?!!!! In this post, I am simply drawing some connections, not making judgements.

That said, the amount of sabotage and interference I have personally experienced during my volunteer efforts to improve and/or protect human life in Crestone/Baca led me to the conclusion, long ago, that Crestone/Baca is a military-intelligence operation of some sort. Certainly, in the wake of what I’ve learned about MKULTRA and other US Government mind-behavioral control projects over the past 70 years (detailed on this website), it makes sense that these same military-intelligence agencies and their private, academic, and non-profit partners would wish to study the effects of the various religious traditions and their spiritual practices, including meditations, etc. on mental and behavioral functioning.

The Gateway Experience and related studies of various mind and performance-enhancement techniques could be the common background and context for the Crestone/Baca retreat community. However, a consistent thread that re-occurs in various books I’ve read is that the so-called “kundalini experience” (or “serpent energy”) referred to in the video is a satanic practice. These connections may explain a LOT about ‘Operation Crestone/Baca.’

This thesis is reinforced by these facts:

1) The Spiritual Life Institute of America (SLIA) was the first of the spiritual groups that Hanne Strong’s Manitou Foundation invited to set up retreat centers in Crestone/Baca (1983).

2) I was a friend of SLIA going back to 1968, when as a student at Prescott College, I visited the SLIA frequently with other student friends on weekends. At that time, SLIA consisted only of its founder, Fr. William McNamara (OCD- Carmelite Priest) and his assistant, Tessa Bielecki, and resided at their Catholic retreat center in Sedona, Arizona (Nada). The facility was originally called “Big Park Ranch” and was located south of Sedona.

3) In about 1982 or so, Manitou Foundation, run by Hanne Strong, offered SLIA their choice of Manitou building sites in the Baca Grande on which to build their monastery/retreat center. They built a new Catholic Carmelite retreat center in the Baca and sold their retreat center in Arizona.

4) In 1983 (note the date coincides with the date of Gateway Experience monograph above), the SLIA had a “Silver Anniversary” event to celebrate their new location and they invited their many friends and donors, etc. I was invited and attended the event. If I recall correctly, the “Silver Anniversary” was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Fr. William’s special dispensation by the Pope to found a mixed male and female community monastery. At the event, Fr. William spoke, eloquently as usual, about many topics. Among the topics I recall was his reference to progressive Jesuit priest and anthropologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, author of some 78 books, including “The Phenomenon of Man.” Chardin’s ideas seem to resonate with “globalists” such as Evelyn de Rothschild, who quoted de Chardin at the 1987 meeting of the Fourth World Wilderness Congress in Colorado. Among Chardin’s ideas that Fr. William promoted, were the ideas that the age of the nation state is past and the concept of a coming “noosphere,” or “Omega Point” in human evolution is immanent, in which a sort of divine collective consciousness (“hive mind?”) is achieved (as I understand it).

This de Chardin quote is one with which the “one-worlders” would obviously resonate:

“The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity.”

The key guest speaker at the event was Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute, who was apparently a friend of Fr. William’s. Murphy gave a thought-provoking talk which focused to a large degree on humans attaining “peak performance” in their artistic, athletic and presumably spiritual pursuits. He told a story of an olympic swimmer who reached new heights of performance while “in the zone.” Murphy seemed especially interested in understanding what this “zone” really was.

Esalen Archive states: “Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, a key figure in the Human Potential Movement, and author of “The Future of the Body” and other books on topics related to extraordinary human potential.”

Hmmmm… The Human Potential Movement. Where have I heard that before? CIA, Tavistock Institute, Stanford Research Institute, CIA spychiatrists….. Is there a consistent trajectory in Crestone evidenced in the fact that the Spiritual Life Institute of America, with links to Esalen Institute and Teilhard de Chardin, has now been replaced by the Center for Contemplative Research? Was scientific measurement of “peak performance” via EEG (electroencephalographs) what Crestone/Baca has always been about?

From LSD Timeline:

Brotherhood of Eternal Love, History

“Further, these “headshrinkers” (referring to “Freud, Jung, Laing, Bateson and more”) then teamed up with the master manipulators of the intelligence services to compare notes and create bleeding edge projects in mind control and global orchestration. Among other phenomena, this eventually gave rise to wholesale brainwashing, mind control, the human potential movement, New Age thought, and global power plays.

Tavistock shenanigans are at the root of both World Wars and the Cold War, and New World Order. No stranger to imperialistic machinations, the British fostered foment. Marx’s Communist Manifesto was born in England to create an economic and ideological enemy to capitalism for the war machine.”

I’m a great fan of Fr. William McNamara, incidentally and considered myself a nominal Catholic for about 15 years because of his influence. I heard many of his inspiring and enlivening sermons (homilies) at the SLIA in both Sedona and Crestone. He commonly referred to his good friend, Jewish rabbi, Abraham Heschel, with whom he presumably had some contact during Vatican II proceedings in Rome in the early 1960’s. Another reason he was acceptable for the Crestone/Baca interfaith project?

Looking back now, I realize that Fr. William was not at all a traditional Catholic priest. Rather, he was what might be considered a “New Age Catholic priest.” And this, of course, is probably why he was invited: to bring his progressive spiritual center to the Manitou Foundation’s United Nations of Religions, here termed “Operation Crestone/Baca.”

5) During the 1980’s, at Fr. William McNamara’s prompting, Tessa Bielecki and the SLIA Carmelites were involved in a series of dialogues with Tibetan Buddhist leaders in Boulder, CO. I attended one of these events. The goal was to establish commonalities and differences between the different traditions through the dialogue process. Boulder is home to the Naropa Institute, an accredited college founded by Tibetan Buddhist, Chogyum Trungpa as well as his sangha (group of followers). Many scandals have plagued that group based on the “crazy wisdom” behavior of its founder.

6) SLIA was sabotaged and split apart in 2003 in what may have been an intelligence sting operation. I visited Fr. William about 6 years later when he was presiding over his fourth spiritual retreat center in California. He maintained that he was effectively deposed in a mutiny by others in the community. The particulars of the “scandal” were hushed up and kept quite vague for those of us on the outside of the monastery. But the gist of the story is that Fr. William was accused of sexual harassment and removed as SLIA director by his fellow priests at SLIA’s Nova Nada hermitage in Ireland by the presiding Bishop in Ireland, but that he retained his status as a Carmelite priest.

Over half of the other priests and nuns left SLIA at that time and many “defrocked,” returning to “non-religious” status. Between 2003 and present, the radically-paired down personnel at SLIA included Fr. Eric Harrer, Connie Bielecki, and Susan Ryan.

7) After being “on the market” for several years, the SLIA building facilities were purchased by the Center for Contemplative Research (CCR; Center for Contemplative Research). Ostensibly Buddhist in orientation, CCR has three centers (in Crestone, Italy and New Zealand) and is officially or unofficially affiliated with philosophy professor, B. Alan Wallace, of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Wallace has authored several books including “Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind” (2003). CCR is linked with many psychology, neurology and cognitive research departments at universities around the world that focus on the study of EEG (electroencephalograph) patterns of meditators and others.

8) I purchased my land in the Baca Grande (“Big Cow”) in 1994, completed building my house in 2001, and moved there permanently in 2011. In 2017, after being extremely heavily stalked and harassed (see this website), I purchased another house in the Baja California, Mexico.

While in Crestone, I have encountered all manner of people with exotic, New Age interests, beliefs, and philosophies. I met a man who was evidently good at “bi-locating.” I met a woman who claimed to be an expert on bio-feedback. I met a military man at a Buddhist retreat who was one of the top supporters of the Mind and Life Institute, of which the Dalai Lama is a notable participant and supporter. I attended a guided meditation by New Age guru, Barbara Marx Hubbard, who stressed that humanity would soon bifurcate into two species; the spiritually-advanced “new man” (Homo Novis) was about to replace the coarse, crude Homo sapiens (the rest of us). These encounters are just the tip of an immense iceberg of experiences I’ve had with New Agers in Crestone/Baca.

Do these remembrances, collectively, support the hypothesis that Crestone/Baca has served the role of providing guinea pigs in a sort of military-academic-UN mind control laboratory? Seems so to me.

III. More From the Video:

“What differentiates the Gateway Experience from forms of meditation is its use of the Hemi-Sync technique which is defined in a monograph by Monroe Institute Trainer, Melissa Jaegger, as “a state of consciousness defined when the EEG patterns of both hemispheres are simultaneously the same in amplitude and frequency.”

IV. Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process

Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process

Declassified consciousness matrix telepathy

V. In 1983, The CIA Wrote A Bizarre Report About Transcending Spacetime With Your Mind

In 1983, The CIA Wrote A Bizarre Report About Transcending Spacetime With Your Mind

Tom Hale

11 Mar 2021, 16:45

Back in 1983, the CIA wrote an obscure report looking to the “Gateway Experience,” claiming that an altered state of human consciousness may be able to transcend space and time. Decades on, the document has since been declassified and is now experiencing a resurgence on social media. However, despite what you saw on TikTok and YouTube, the document doesn’t provide proof of the “Law of Attraction,” nor does it reveal the benefits of sending “good vibes” out to the universe.

The 29-page document – titled “Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process” – was declassified in 2003. It’s thought the report was part of the CIA’s wider investigation into whether concepts of mind control and hypnosis could be used in the espionage efforts of the Cold War. It’s an intensely wordy and dense report that touches on everything from neuroscience to quantum mechanics, wavering between hard science and pseudoscience as if wobbling between the two on a tightrope. It essentially boils down to the CIA investigating the idea of inducing a profound out-of-body experience that could possibly tune into some kind of higher realm beyond reality.
Should You Really Never Wake A Sleepwalker? – IFLScience

“Fundamentally, the Gateway experience is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space,” the report reads.

The technique, called the Gateway Process, is based on ideas developed by the Monroe Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the exploration of human consciousness. The theory is that certain exercises can allow the brain to “hemi-sync”, whereby brain waves in the right and left hemispheres synchronize at the same frequency and amplitude. Hemi-sync, the report argues, can be achieved through a series of meditation-like exercises while listening to a set bunch of soundwaves, known as the Gateway Tapes.

As per the report, the universe is a complex system of “interacting energy fields” in which states are simply variations in energy. Human consciousness is no different, it’s just a vibrational pattern of energy. Once hemi-sync is achieved, the report says, it can trigger an altered state of consciousness in which the vibration of a person’s consciousness is free from physical reality and tunes into this pure energy field.

Drawing on ideas of quantum entanglement, the report claims it may be possible for human consciousness to profoundly alter the universe since reality is holographic projection; the part encodes the whole. In this understanding of reality, everything is deeply connected in a matrix of interconnected energy vibrations, from your consciousness to the depths of the universe.

“This consciousness participates in the all-knowing infinite continuum of consciousness which is a characteristic of energy in the ever present,” continues the report. “Consequently, it is accurate to observe that when a person experiences the out-of-body state he is, in fact, projecting that eternal spark of consciousness and memory which constitutes the ultimate source of his identity to let it play in and learn from dimensions both inside and outside the time-space world in which his physical component currently enjoys a short period of reality.”

Some readers of the report have dug into this idea deeper and taken it as proof of the law of attraction – the philosophy that positive thoughts bring positive results into a person’s life, while negative thoughts bring negative outcomes.

So, what to make of all this? No doubt, the document makes for an interesting read, but it shouldn’t be treated as scientific, despite the scientific language and concept it draws influence on. Many of the ideas in the report are drawn from real scientific research, but when pieced all together, they aren’t testable. There’s also a lot of questionable theories and leaps of logic chucked into the mix.

But hey, don’t let us stop you on your journey to the realm beyond this reality.

VI. (EXAMPLE OF GATEWAY EXPERIENCE?) Top Secret CIA Mind Control Study- CHAPTER 2

WEBMASTER’S COMMENT: The singing/chanting in the background is a very close approximation of that of Tibetan Buddhist prayers. The colorful imagery, of course, is very reminiscent of that associated with psychedelic drugs. In other words, the CIA has apparently fused the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism with hypnosis and the acid experience promoted by CIA-spychiatrist, Timothy Leary.

Since I practiced Tibetan Buddhism myself for 15 years or so in Crestone and elsewhere with some of the greatest Tibetan Buddhist masters, I am in a position to offer my opinion based on what I learned from them:

And that is this: The appropriation of aspects of Tibetan Buddhist teachings for purposes other what they are intended to accomplish (the dharma, enlightenment) is likely to be regarded by Tibetan masters as a major no-no, a misappropriation of sacred knowledge for self-serving, evil purposes!

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