Loosh
Loosh is an alleged energetic substance produced by incarnate biological beings under conditions of emotional intensity — including longing, grief, fear, love, and wonder — that can be extracted, transferred, or consumed by certain non-human intelligent beings. The term was coined by Robert Monroe in his 1985 book Far Journeys from data collected during his out-of-body experience research. Loosh is the substrate presupposed by the loosh harvesting thesis; in that framework Earth is described as a managed production environment structured to generate a continuous loosh supply.
Properties
Loosh is described as "a unique byproduct of organic life" — produced by incarnate beings rather than by inorganic processes — and is released in highest concentrations during states of intense emotional activation. Per Monroe, the substance is not a metaphor but an actual exportable energy that can be collected, stored, and used. The production environment is said to be structured across the human life-course to generate a constant emotional output: love, friendship, family, greed, hate, pain, guilt, disease, pride, ambition, ownership, possession, and sacrifice are listed as the instruments engineered into human existence to maintain steady emission.
Polarity
Accounts differ on whether loosh is intrinsically tied to negative emotional states. The early Monroe framing emphasised suffering — fear, pain, grief, and loss — as the primary production conditions, with Earth engineered for negative-output maximisation. Monroe's later work, Ultimate Journey (1994), revised this framing significantly: the Earth system is presented as a teaching mechanism rather than a simple farm, and love rather than suffering is identified as the principal loosh generated under optimal conditions. The distinction parallels the service-to-others / service-to-self polarity familiar from the Law of One cosmology, in which both polarities produce harvestable spiritual energy but through opposite emotional substrates.
Cross-tradition analogues
Multiple traditions describe what appear to be the same substance under different names and framings:
- Gurdjieff's "food for the moon" — an energy produced by organic life on which the Moon feeds: "Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the moon... The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity."
- Gnostic "soul-food of the Archons" — the Archontic sect described by Epiphanius of Salamis (4th century CE) characterises the soul as "the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live."
- Wetiko — the Cree term, introduced into Western discourse by Jack D. Forbes in Columbus and Other Cannibals (1978), names a cannibal spirit that feeds on the life force of others; extended by Paul Levy (Dispelling Wetiko, 2013) to describe a psychospiritual predatory entity feeding on expanding consciousness.
- Prana, chi, orgone — vital-force concepts across Indian, Chinese, and Reichian traditions that describe a similar substrate, though generally without the predation framing.
Discovery through OBE research
Monroe derived the loosh concept from his systematic out-of-body experience research at what became the Monroe Institute in Virginia. Repeated non-physical observations of what he characterised as harvest-like activity on the human population led him to propose the underlying substance as a distinct category of energy unrecognised by mainstream science. The research context — the discipline of remote viewing and OBE training — positioned loosh as a phenomenologically derived concept rather than a theological postulate, distinguishing Monroe's framing from the Gnostic and esoteric traditions that independently describe analogous substances.
Relationship to loosh harvesting
Main article:
Loosh harvesting
The loosh harvesting framework extends the substance into an extraction economy: named practitioners (Reptilians, Archons, Castaneda's "Flyers"), an infrastructure supporting extraction (Earth as production environment, the lunar harvesting apparatus), and proposed escape strategies.
See also
- Loosh harvesting
- Robert Monroe
- Monroe Institute
- Out-of-body experience
- Wetiko
- Prana
- Archons
- Soul trap
- Service to others
- Service to self