What does "click out" mean in the Gateway Process?
"Click out" has two meanings in the Gateway records. In the 1983 Army report, page 12, it is a physics metaphor: an oscillating wave at its point of rest "clicks out" of time-space and "joins infinity," and the author argues a focused mind could string those instants together. In the Monroe Institute's own brochure, in the same CIA collection, clicking out means losing track of an exercise, as if you fell asleep. Online, people use it the second way.
The report's meaning: page 12
Clicking out and the out-of-body state
The Monroe Institute's meaning: blanking out
Where to read it
What the documents say, and what people claim
The report's meaning: page 12
Paragraph 19 runs from page 11 to page 12. The report says any oscillation, including a brainwave, has two points of complete rest at the ends of each swing. Then: "when, for an infinitesimally brief instant, that energy reaches one of its two points of rest it 'clicks out' of time-space and joins infinity." It ties this to Planck's distance, quoting Bentov that below that scale "we enter, in effect, a new world."
The argument continues: if consciousness reaches a high enough frequency, "the pattern of 'clickouts' comes so close together that there is virtual continuity in it," and part of the mind is "postulated" to keep working in dimensions between time-space and the Absolute. The page ends with the report's most quoted image: consciousness "passes through the looking glass of time-space after the fashion of Alice beginning her journey into wonderland." Exhibit 3 on page 13 draws the clicked-out portions of a wave.
Clicking out and the out-of-body state
Page 12 also applies the idea to subatomic particles, citing a 1983 Science Digest article by John Gliedman on particles that seem to respond to each other faster than light. The report says this communication happens "during the 'click out phase'" and so does not break relativity. That is the author's reading, not Gliedman's.
Page 14, paragraph 22, says a person who can leave the body and then break out of time-space gains "the advantage of 'clicking out' part of his enhanced consciousness while starting from a base located much closer to the dimensions with which he wishes to communicate." For the destination, see What is "the Absolute"?
The Monroe Institute's meaning: blanking out
The CIA collection also holds the Institute's four-page program brochure, record CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210024-6. It describes a different thing. When a participant pushes past what they can adjust to, the brochure says, they blank out the experience and feel either that they fell asleep or that they clicked out for a while; on a later repeat they may remember it. That is Institute material, described here rather than quoted.
This is the sense most people mean today. On forums such as r/gatewaytapes, clicking out usually means dozing off or losing a stretch of the tape and coming back at the end. It is not the physics claim. The two uses share a phrase and little else.
The documents: in the Army report, clicking out is a metaphor from Bentov's physics for the instant a wave is at rest, extended into a hypothesis about consciousness. In the Institute's brochure it is the ordinary experience of losing an exercise and feeling you slept.
The claims: that clicking out during a tape means you left time-space, or that the report proves it. The report's own words are "postulated" and "apparently designed." If you lost twenty minutes of a session, the brochure's explanation is the one the documents support: you blanked out, and you may remember more next time.
Last updated November 4, 2026.
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The Gateway Process, answered: Page 25, Focus 10 to 21, the frequencies, click-out, who wrote the 1983 Army report and whether it works: short answers with page numbers and CIA record IDs.
What is "the Absolute" in the Gateway Process?: The 1983 Army report defines "the Absolute" on page 11 as energy at complete rest in infinity, outside time and space. What it means in the report's model.
What is Focus 15 in the Gateway Process?: The 1983 Army report describes Focus 15 as travel into the past and says fewer than five percent of participants fully reach it. What page 22 says.