The Gateway Process

Start with what is actually documented

Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process is a U.S. Army memorandum dated June 9, 1983. Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell wrote it for the U.S. Army Operational Group under INSCOM after being tasked to assess the mechanics and practicality of the Gateway Experience.

It was not a CIA scientific finding that reality is a simulation. The CIA later held and released a copy through its declassified records. The U.S. Government Publishing Office now preserves the document as an Army publication.

The model, in plain language

McDonnell's argument builds a staircase from ordinary physiology into increasingly speculative territory:

The early steps overlap with real topics in psychology and auditory neuroscience. The later steps are philosophical and speculative. The report often moves from analogy to assertion much faster than modern scientific standards would permit.

The part that sounds like manifestation

One Gateway exercise discussed in the report is patterning. McDonnell describes it as forming a vivid mental model of a desired outcome while in an expanded state of awareness. His explanation goes further: he proposes that an intensely projected thought could become part of the “universal hologram” and influence how a person's reality develops.

There is still a grounded version worth taking seriously: attention changes what we notice, repeated visualization can change behavior, expectations affect perception, and deliberate practice can alter habits. Those mechanisms alone can make an inner image surprisingly powerful without requiring reality itself to obey thought.

What is “the Absolute”?

McDonnell's “Absolute” is the metaphysical center of the paper: infinite consciousness outside ordinary time and space. Individual consciousness is described as a differentiated portion of that larger field, temporarily operating through physical reality and ultimately returning to it.

This is where the report stops sounding like a military memo and starts sounding like comparative mysticism. McDonnell explicitly compares his model with Eastern traditions, Jewish mystical ideas and Christianity.

That is a philosophical interpretation of the report, not a demonstrated scientific conclusion.

The famous missing page 25

That context is almost the opposite of the meme. Page 25 is less “here is how to control the Matrix” and more “modern physics and ancient mystics may be approaching some of the same intuitions through different cognitive styles.”

What the Army officer finally concluded

McDonnell concluded that there was, in his view, a rational basis for considering Gateway's essential objectives plausible. He recommended a phased program using Hemi-Sync, relaxation, hypnosis, out-of-body practice and the higher Focus states, while acknowledging problems such as information distortion.

That conclusion tells us what McDonnell believed after his assessment. It does not establish that remote viewing, out-of-body information gathering, future perception or the report's cosmology have been scientifically validated.

Where I think the interesting question really is

I do not need the Army's physics to be correct for the document to matter.

Human beings have been discovering ways to deliberately alter consciousness for thousands of years: prayer, chanting, breath, music, fasting, ritual, meditation, dance and sleep all change subjective experience. Gateway is a technological version of that old impulse — headphones, signal processing and a training protocol applied to the ancient project of exploring the mind.

That is the part I want to carry forward: curiosity without gullibility, skepticism without closing the door, and enough humility to admit that consciousness remains one of the strangest things we know exists.