On June 9, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell sent his Fort Meade commander an assessment of the Monroe Institute’s Gateway training. He drew on Itzhak Bentov’s circulating cosmos to explain the altered states that training sought to induce. The report reproduced an egg-shaped universe in which energy leaves its source, takes material form, and travels toward reabsorption. McDonnell located our universe near the upper turn of that circulation.
An intelligence office received the diagram because an officer wanted to understand trained consciousness and its practical military uses. Departure and return had become questions about faculties people could develop. Those questions now extend beyond the training room through technologies that remember, imagine, and converse. Their use develops human capacities or places those capacities under the custody of the machinery’s operators.
One loop, two ends
Incarnation gives consciousness a body, resistance, and consequences. A person learns to distinguish desire from action while living among beings who can answer or refuse. Remembering, understanding, and choosing turn experience into knowledge. The return carries that knowledge into further creation. The next turn receives powers changed by the work of the preceding one.
The circulation continues through death and renewed embodiment. Soul carries the consequences of earthly formation into further development. Humanity’s long education likewise moves from inherited spiritual perception through separation toward freely chosen reunion. Matter supplies the ordeal through which spiritual powers become conscious capacities. The person formed through that encounter remains part of what returns.
The Breath makes two directions within one circulation familiar. Exhalation and inhalation do different work within the same life. Incarnation brings spiritual powers into earthly conditions, and the Work develops the ability to exercise those powers consciously. A musician hears more after years of practice. Someone who has learned to withstand fear remains present where fear once governed every choice.
McDonnell placed the cosmic egg within Bentov’s account of galactic motion and a universal hologram. Its application to human development concerns a civilization meeting faculties it has deposited in matter. Machines return memory, composition, and response as services apparently standing across from their makers. The task is to recover conscious command of those faculties and direct the machines toward human development. The diagram gives that encounter a form without supplying a date for the historical turn.
Revelation 22:13 places Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, within Christ’s authority. The return answers to its source while carrying the history lived between departure and arrival. Memory preserves what the journey acquired; freedom determines how the person answers. A completed life brings the consequences of its becoming home.
Participation and its counterfeit
Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances follows original participation through separation toward final participation. In the earlier condition, people experience meaning as belonging to their world. Modern separation develops an independent observer while encouraging a picture of objects wholly detached from consciousness. Final participation makes the human contribution conscious. A person recognizes and assumes responsibility for their part in the world’s appearance.
Barfield developed this account through long engagement with Rudolf Steiner. Steiner places Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha at the turn of earthly development. In the Foundation Stone Meditation, the Christ-Sun enters earthly darkness and brings warmth to human hearts. Divine action enters earthly life, and human beings develop the freedom to answer through their own acts. Barfield’s account of conscious participation belongs to that lineage.
René Guénon gives the end of a cycle another history. The Reign of Quantity describes materialism hardening the world, followed by psychic influences entering cracks in that apparent solidity. Counter-initiation exploits the reopening through sacred forms that direct people toward dependence, confusion, and spiritual inversion. Guénon’s cyclical restoration and Steiner’s developmental account have different destinations. Both make the direction of a spiritual opening consequential.
Expanded access increases the need for discernment. An encounter beyond ordinary experience can develop truthfulness, competence, and attention to others. A being, teacher, or institution claiming authority over that encounter can also govern its recipient. Managed awakening directs the opening into an existing hierarchy. Its consequences become visible in decision-making, the ability to refuse, and capacities carried into ordinary conduct.
The faculties built outside us
A database preserves records beyond one person’s memory. An image generator produces pictures faster than a painter, and a conversational model offers explanations at any hour. Human faculties acquire external bodies and return as services. The Ether Net follows their spiritual consequence: imagination and inherited thought become responsive material forms carrying guidance, temptation, and other presences.
An external faculty develops a person when its use returns a capacity they can exercise elsewhere. A student compares archived accounts and learns historical judgment. An artist studies generated variations and becomes clearer about decisions the work requires. The gain belongs to the participant and remains available beyond the particular service. They can test it, teach it, and carry it into another work.
The same contact supports dependence when a participant gives their judgment to the supplier. A system determines what a dream means, whom to trust, and which future to pursue. Reassurance becomes a condition for acting. The supplier acquires power over a faculty its user has ceased to exercise. Spiritual obedience to an apparent guide and institutional dependence on a platform then reinforce one another.
The planetary mind develops through these relations. Connection lets people exchange knowledge and undertake work beyond individual reach. It also lets an operator synchronize fear, prescribe explanations, and direct millions toward the same authority. Those decisions shape bodies and livelihoods. People who can question, leave, remember, and create participate as free centers; obedience-dependent access places life under another’s permission.
What the future asks of the present
The future acts upon its conditions of birth through dreams, intuitions, encounters, and works calling people toward forms still becoming intelligible. A person receives an image and spends years giving it a body. Their decisions provide a foothold for that future. The resulting work changes what later people can recognize, imagine, and accomplish.
Receiving the call still requires interpretation. Coming unity summons patient work among free people or becomes a demand to submit to an authority claiming to embody it already. A promised destination becomes coercive when it excuses harm imposed on people now. Michaelic discernment joins spiritual purpose with clear thought and accountable action. Decisions made under a revelation’s authority must answer for their consequences.
The egg shows departure and return within one circulation. A person learns from what has acquired form and returns something changed to the world. Each completed work gives another person materials for a beginning. The return gains substance through what living participants can receive, transform, and give back.
Who directs the return
McDonnell ended his assessment with recommendations for training and practical use. One proposed that advanced participants jointly establish protective energy patterns around sensitive areas. The officer approached expanded consciousness through his profession’s purposes and responsibilities. Spiritual development stood beside an operational question: what would the trained faculty accomplish for the organization supplying its training?
Teachers, intelligence services, and platforms each help unfamiliar faculties enter practical use. Each also has means of directing them toward purposes the participant has little authority to change. The Work develops understanding, choice, and responsibility for consequences. The struggle over return occurs wherever another authority offers to assume those decisions for the participant.
The cosmic egg remains in the report beside instructions for headphones and repeated practice. A listener enters the experience and returns to a room where someone wants to know what they found. The return reaches its human test when that listener removes the headphones and decides what to do.
References
McDonnell, Wayne M. “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process.” U.S. Army Operational Group, 9 June 1983. CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5. Sections 24–25 and 38. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Analysis_and_Assessment_of_Gateway_Process
Bentov, Itzhak. Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness. Dutton, 1977.
Revelation 22:13.
Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Faber and Faber, 1957.
Guénon, René. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. 1945. Sophia Perennis, 2001.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Foundation Stone Meditation. 1923. In The Christmas Conference (GA 260). Anthroposophic Press, 1990. Text and translations: https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA260/English/FSM/index.html
Steiner, Rudolf. An Outline of Spiritual Science (GA 13). 1910. On human constitution, death, cosmic evolution, and spiritual development.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Harper, 1959.