In a Declassified CIA Report, Scientists Tried to Move Consciousness Beyond the Physical Realm
- Declassified documents show that throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the CIA had some… interesting… ideas on how to obtain intelligence.
- One of the most dizzying reports comes from a 1983 document detailing the “Gateway Experience”—various means of altering the mind to create a kind of psychic spycraft.
- Although the document details some well-known techniques, such as hypnosis and transcendental meditation, the document veers into some unconventional territory and makes lofty claims about consciousness and the universe.
If you spend any amount of time pursuing declassified Central Intelligence Agency materials, you come across some pretty wacky stuff. There are dragonfly robots, cyborg cats, and an absolutely bonkers Soviet submarine heist. Recently, another chapter of the CIA’s strange investigations surfaced on TikTok.
Through some creative extrapolation by TikTok user Sara Holocomb, the document purported to confirmed existence of reincarnation, which was further touted by sites like the Daily Mail. While this is not in fact true, the document does offer a bizarre look into the agency’s efforts to develop some sort of a psychic spycraft.
The declassified document itself isn’t new—originally drafted in 1983, the CIA declassified the 29-page report back in 2003. The agency is also well-known for its investigations into the inner workings of the human mind and how it could be manipulated for extracting information. The most famous of these investigations was the 20-year-long MKUltra top-secret project, which started back in the 1950s.
The document, written by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell, explores a number of varying means of mind alteration, which McDonnell refers to collectively as “the Gateway experience.”
“The ‘Gateway Experience’ is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus, and coherence to the amplitude 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 space and time,” the report states. “The participant then gains to the various levels of intuitive knowledge which the universe offers.”
So… yeah. I’ll have what he’s having.
Some of these mind-altering techniques are relatively mainstream, such as hypnosis or transcendental meditation—a practice actively advocated for by film director David Lynch. Other ideas are a bit further afield, such as biofeedback (the ability for one hemisphere of the brain to gain control of parts of the other hemisphere) and an idea known as “The Consciousness Matrix,” which claims that “the human is also a hologram which attunes itself to the universal hologram by the medium of energy exchange thereby deducing meaning and achieving the state we call consciousness.”
In her series of TikTok videos, Holocomb zeroes in on page 19, which states how consciousness is timeless—as it exists outside of a space and time, it seemingly has “neither beginning or end.” Which… woah, if true.
This line led Holcomb—and, by extension, the Daily Mail—to assert that the CIA believed in the existence of a reincarnation. However, the document describes this consciousness as a “pool of limitless, timeless perception,” which does not exactly match up with the tenets of reincarnation as described in some religions.
Regardless of these takeaways, the CIA memo is quite the trip, and is written with an impressive amount of unflagging certainty. Which is strange, considering that those working in the scientific field of consciousness still have no concrete idea as to how it’s generated in the animal mind—let alone that it’s a “differentiated aspect of the universal consciousness.”
Needless to say, the CIA never developed a corps of psychic spy agents.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
