The Key Page 3

  He had gotten through to me via my literary agents, desperate to know if this had ever happened to anybody else.

  I was able to tell him that it was a commonplace of the close encounter experience, although undocumented by UFO investigators, because it obviously suggests that something quite unexpected and very little understood is actually going on.

  The reason that he was so eager to know this was that the older brother, their seventeen-year-old son, had been killed the previous week in an auto accident.

  Another incident took place, also involving Glennys MacKay, that convinced me once and for all that the Master’s detailed explanations of the soul must in some sense be correct. It does persist after the death of the body, perhaps not as a disincarnate version of the person who lived, but in some coherent manner.

  Anne and I were driving Glennys and her husband to dinner. I asked her if she always saw the dead. She said that she did. So I asked her if there were any dead with us at that moment. She said yes, that a dead person was with me. He was wearing a tuxedo and he had played the piano. Then she added, also the violin.

  As a lover of classical music, that could cover a pretty broad range of performers I’ve enjoyed. But then she added, “He says his name is Milton.”

  I was so surprised that I almost drove off the highway. She had asked no leading questions—in fact, none at all. She’d simply said what she saw.

  When I was a child, an older boy who lived across the street had played both the piano and the violin. He had become a violinist with the local symphony orchestra, and wore a tuxedo during performances.

  His name had been Milton. I was aware that he’d died in the early seventies, but I had not thought of him, not at all, in at least thirty years.

  Something is out there, something alive, and it is exquisitely aware of our lives and associations, and I am going to let myself believe that the situation is as the Master of the Key has claimed.

  When I asked him what the soul was, he replied that it was a “radiant body,” potentially. “Formed out of conscious energy.”

  He said that it is not passive to manipulation, but that a relationship must be formed with it if one is to really engage with it. He added that “it is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, easily detectable by your science as it exists now.”

  Researchers like William Roll have presented evidence that plasmas are associated with ghostly presences, and done this using relatively straightforward instruments. The Master offered a marvelous inducement to further study in this area: “The undiscovered country can become your backyard.”

  Our world would change in very fundamental ways if this happened. It seems to me that our species is actually severed into two parts, one physical and the other in some sort of plasmic state. It’s as if two halves of a single brain had been severed, as in a cerebral commissurotomy.

  In the end, I have come to accept that the soul is, indeed, part of the physical world, in exactly the same sense that an electromagnetic field is part of the physical world. However, I don’t think that it’s clear what, exactly, this means. It has advanced the question in my own mind from “Does the soul exist?” to “How are we to understand the existence of the soul?”

  Perhaps the dead can assist us from their side in repairing the fissure between us, and if so, maybe then the gap between us and whoever else is here can be closed enough for them to have meaningful interaction with us.

  In any case, if the dead exist and can be made accessible to reliable and repeatable communication, that would be in itself a revolution of world-historic proportions.

  He described ours as a “fallen” world and said that “because you have no plan for yourselves, there is no plan for you.” Although he didn’t say it outright, there was the strong implication that the reason we cannot see the world as it is, and continually deny the existence of an afterlife, is that it forces us to face the raw and unbearable truth of our own sins and insufficiencies.

  Throughout the conversation I had with him, this remarkable man promoted a powerful and consistent morality, as if to say that leading a moral life frees us to see ourselves as we really are.

  He offered a strikingly original definition of sin: “denial of the right to thrive.”

  I have found that taking this definition to heart has increased my moral precision. One can see much about oneself by applying those words to one’s own actions. They are really quite powerful and useful to anybody striving to lead a moral life.

  His attitude toward social responsibility was uncompromising. “All are responsible for all.” Like the visitors I engaged with in the mid-eighties, he regarded humility as absolutely essential to a moral life, and as well, essential even to an ability to see the world clearly.

  Ego does battle with our mortality and, above all, with our smallness. An astronaut I knew years ago stated the position of the scientific and intellectual communities with memorable eloquence when I pointed out to him that he knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t lying about my contact experiences, and that they were not an outcome of some sort of disease process or delusion. He said, “I know that’s probably true, but I have to tell you, I want us to be at the top of the food chain even if we have to lie to ourselves to stay there.”

  He also said, “I don’t want the path to Mars to be wellworn,” and I find that very understandable. I also think that it illustrates a subtle but important danger that is inherent in opening one’s eyes too wide. It is the same thing that has disempowered so many indigenous cultures when they have been exposed to western technological civilization, which is a sense of futility and irrelevance.

  If the veil between the world should fall, the implication is strong that we are going to discover that we are a footnote in a super-conscious vastness that we can hardly even begin to comprehend, but which is chiefly characterized by a kind of absolute knowledge that makes such things as discovery and innovation superfluous.

  Read with care; the words of the Master of the Key have a darkness concealed within them. There is a suggestion that souls can be subjected to exploitation, and even that, while everybody is to some extent participant in conscious energy, not all possess the “radiant body” that requires attention to maintain.

  Could this be why the great majority of the dead just seem to disappear? Usually, after somebody I know dies, I will see them for a few days, and then they are gone. Rarely they may return, seemingly perfectly intact, years later, but not often. When they do, it often seems more as if I am dealing with something that has been gathered into a certain form in order to engage in communication, and that what lies behind it is, in a sense, focusing itself into this particular form only so that it can be understood.

  However, in my mind, there are certainly dead people who have a continuous and discreet presence of some sort. Between 1989 and 1993, I meditated almost nightly with such people.

  One summer night in 1989, I was in the guest bedroom where I meditated around eleven each night when I suddenly felt a presence so palpable that I could not ignore it. Finally, I said aloud that if I couldn’t see whoever was there, I had to leave the room. A few moments later, I did so.

  After a period of what could charitably be called disquiet, I fell asleep, only to be awakened at about three by a familiar blow to my shoulder. Many times over the past few years, I’d been woken up like this, usually to face some bizarre experience or other. But this time what happened was completely incredible.

  I saw, sitting on the foot of the bed, a small man wearing a tunic. He slumped against the bedstead like a rag doll. I threw off the covers and went down to him. Up close, he was compact. His eyes were deep set but his appearance was human. I took his hand in mine. It was as light as air. From experience with such apparitions, I attempted to anchor myself by smelling his skin. He was startlingly ripe, as if bathing was not a custom he was familiar with.

  An instant later, he disappeared. I went down the hall and began meditating. Soon, I could hear breathing
behind me, as regular as if it was being generated by a machine.

  For the next three years, we meditated together regularly. He would appear with a great clatter of noise on the roof above the meditation room, and we would begin. Often, he would come into the bedroom around three, and we would meditate together.

  Once, my wife came in to meditate with us, but when the clatter began on the roof, she said, “I’m not ready for this,” and left the room.

  Because I had been made such a public laughingstock, people were becoming embarrassed to buy my books and my financial situation was deteriorating. On the night before we left the cabin forever, I asked to see him as he really was. Obviously, someone who seemed to use his physicality in the same way that we use clothes could not be, in the end, like us and subject to the same rigors that constrain us.

  I waited, but nothing happened, and finally I went back to bed. Suddenly there appeared in the front yard a terrific light. It was so bright that I thought for a moment that the house had caught fire.

  I rushed to the window and there glided out from the meditation room and across the yard what was probably the most magnificent thing I have ever seen. It was a bright light, like a huge star floating twenty feet off the ground. Out of it there came piercing rays that I could actually feel as if they were pinpricks. It was as if they were penetrating my skin, and where they entered me, I felt a sweet sense of another human presence, as if I was being embraced by a dear old friend—which, of course, is exactly what was happening.

  In 1998, when the Master of the Key described the radiant body, I knew exactly what he meant, because I had seen a person in this state and had lived and worked with him for years. It is endlessly interesting to me that he could control the degree to which he was physical.

  When I asked him, once, what he was, he indicated a book in my library called Life Between Lives, and I suppose that is where he was from. Often, I have wondered if he eventually reentered the state of the living, and what that experience was like for him.

  I began by discussing some thoughts about who and what the Master of the Key might have been, and now will conclude it by reposing that same question but in a new context.

  I know what he was. He was one of us. No matter the mystery of his identity, his humanity was immediately familiar. Had I asked him, though, I suspect he would have revealed himself, also, in radiant form. I do not think that he walks the streets of Toronto, that he eats his dinner and reads his book. I think that he is either a man who has, in life, attained the ability to live and see beyond the limits of the physical, or somebody from beyond the physical who has perfected the skill of walking among us when he wishes.

  How often my mind is drawn to memories of the extraordinary beings I have been privileged to know. But of all of them, the most articulate and forthcoming by far was this gracious master you are about to meet, knowledgeable, wise, deeply humorous and morally impeccable in ways I have not seen in any other person. Certainly, I met a great man on that night, who slipped in and out of my life so skillfully and so swiftly that I let him go without the slightest protest, only to be left as I am now, in gratitude and wonder, but also with a sense of frustration. Not a day passes that I don’t think of another question I would like to ask him.

  Since I first became an advocate for rejected knowledge by publishing Communion, I have always tried to bear witness to these extraordinarily important experiences with the greatest accuracy and integrity that I can bring to bear. They are things that people have great difficulty accepting, because they mean that the vision of reality that we have built up over a painful history of superstition, confusion and struggle is profoundly inadequate.

  The Master of the Key offers clarity where there is now confusion, and if one is open to his message and the new ideas it contains, unexpected vistas of discovery present themselves, as one is led toward the promise of new knowledge, where questions beckon that are as yet scarcely imagined among us. But they come at an opportune time, because the human world and human civilization face a profound bankruptcy of vision that is sorely in need of renewal. We have done all we can with our ideas of reality as they exist now. If there is to be another step taken in the human journey, a step upward, new visions are essential.

  The CONVERSATION

  Why are you here?

  You’re chained to the ground.

  Excuse me?

  I am here on behalf of the good. Please give me some time.

  Who are “the good”?

  Those whose lives are directed toward ascension.

  You mean, like, religious types?

  Belief impedes release. The ascension I refer to is a pro-

  cess of finding God within and the universe without.

  Meaning?

  Mankind is trapped. I want to help you spring the trap.

  What makes you able to do this?

  The key I offer you consists of a new way of seeing your-

  selves that will free you.

  There’s nothing new under the sun.

  There are thoughts unthought and words unspoken. For

  example, I have a message for you about the next age, and

  the one just passed.

  Dare I ask?

  The most important thing about the last age was the

  Holocaust.

  An “age” means what?

  An age is a bit over two thousand years.

  The length of a Zodiacal sign?

  Yes.

  And the Holocaust was the most important event in the past two thousand years?

  You were meant to have acquired the ability to leave the planet by now. But you are still trapped here. You may be irretrievably lost. This is of absolutely fundamental importance, because the earth will soon be unable to support you, and yet you will not be able to leave. This is because of the Holocaust. The destruction of six million may well lead to the destruction of six billion. So it is the most important event, by far, of the age.

  Why has the Holocaust prevented us from leaving the planet? The Holocaust reduced the intelligence of the human species by killing too many of its most intellectually competent members. It is why you are still using jets seventy-five years after their invention. The understanding of gravity is denied you because of the absence of the child of a murdered Jewish couple. This child would have unlocked the secret of gravity. But he was not born. Because his parents went, the whole species must stay.

  You’re saying that the catastrophe we’re facing now—too many people and no ability to leave the planet—is punishment for the Holocaust?

  What is happening is consequence, not punishment. The Holocaust was triggered when economic disorder combined among the Germans with a feeling of being trapped due to overpopulation. The resultant explosion drove the German tribe to lash out against other tribes, especially the one that lived in its midst. Unfortunately, they murdered the bearers of the intellectually strongest genes possessed by your species.

  Why are we so blind?

  At deeper levels, you are a very different species than you appear to yourselves. Just as the biblical story of the fall of man and the banishment from the garden is really an allegory of the destruction of the previous civilization, so also the story of the fallen angel is an allegory of your fallen heart. The demon is the part of you that hungers for destruction.

  Why do we do these things?

  This is a fallen world.

  What is a fallen world?

  Be as the lilies of the field. When you hear that, you think: how can we possibly do that? We need to make shelter.

  We need to gather food. You are at war with your fate.

  A species at war with God’s plan?

  Because you have no plan for yourselves, there is no plan for you. God wants companions, not supplicants. Become the friends of God, and you will find your plan.

  What is God?

  An elemental body is a mechanism filled with millions of nerve endings that directs the attention of God into the p
hysical.

  That didn’t answer my question.

  It did. Very precisely. If you were a friend of God, you would have understood. There is a much larger world behind your backs. It is this world to which man is blind. Man is soul-blind and God-blind.

  How can we change?

  Surrender to God.

  What about free will?

  Free will is only possible in God. The will of the fallen is slavery.

  How do we surrender to God?

  Return to the forest. Otherwise, you will destroy the earth and yourselves.

  Six billion people can’t return to the forest. The forest can’t possibly support us.

  I agree. It’s impossible.

  But if we destroy the earth, we end up dead. So what happens to us then?

  You go forth even though you aren’t ready.

  Go forth? To where?

  To another state of being. Your access to elemental bodies ends.

  What is an elemental body, anyway?

  A body formed out of chemical elements, something drawn from the dust and made alive.

  What sort of body would we have without elements?

  A radiant body, potentially. Formed out of conscious energy.

  What is this? How can we put it to use?