The Master of the Key was real. The visitors I have seen were real. They were all possessed of advanced knowledge that would transform human life and save our species, and yet they assiduously keep themselves hidden. If anything, they encourage the catastrophic official denial of their existence that has led our scientific establishment to waste even the knowledge that is there for the taking all around us.
As matters stand, the vast majority of our scientists, including those I just named, absolutely would not entertain for a moment that visitors are here and interacting with us, and that is a grave tragedy. The waste of knowledge is heartbreaking. But it also isn’t our fault. We haven’t been given the proper tools to communicate with our visitors. On the contrary, they do everything possible to make certain that science continues in ignorance.
I can only think that they believe—or perhaps know for certain—that freedom is literally more important than survival, and if one looks at the words of the Master of the Key carefully, it’s possible to see that this may be true.
He painted a picture of the world that is radically different both from the one that emerges out of our superstitious past, and the more materialistic one that has come with the rise of modern science. Interestingly, though, his vision contains elements of both so, despite his rather dismissive attitude toward human philosophical thought, we’ve managed to do a good deal that appears to be correct.
He even admits that we are not to be blamed for our situation, and says himself that it’s a result of overpopulation.
If the danger we face isn’t even our fault, all the more reason to help us.
Perhaps it doesn’t happen because it can’t. Maybe the visitors are constrained in some way by the physics of the situation. If they are time travelers, their ability to alter the past is probably very limited, as I discussed earlier. If there are other, physical universes occupying the same space as this one, and that’s where they’re from, they might be experiencing other arcane restraints.
It is chilling to contemplate that they might be doing all that they can, but this could be true. In any case, my own ethical position is very clear. It is to continue to proclaim their reality and tell my own story as accurately as I can, and no matter the dreary martyrdom of marginalization that is the consequence of doing this. It’s not universal, and I have the joy and the continuously surprising experience of meeting other people who have had close encounters of the third kind, and they turn out to be a fascinating group.
Given that so many of them, like me, have had physical objects that are easily identifiable on X-ray placed in their bodies, there is an objective way to determine the origin of their memories. Deep physical and psychological studies of such people might be quite revealing of the motives of our visitors.
In any case, it may be that we are a lot closer to escaping from the slavery of ignorance that so curses our advancement and exposes us to such danger. The Master makes it clear that we are capable of becoming smarter when he says, “The reason that your intelligence is insufficient is that you have lagged in the process of artificial amplification.”
He says that we are as intelligent as nature has made us, but not as intelligent as we could be.
When I was having contact experiences, I was struck by my visitors’ combination of extraordinary precision and emotional intensity. Once, when I turned away from one of them out of fear, she uttered three desolated and despairing cries, which were the most emotionally rich and complex sounds I have ever heard. But they were also measured to a precision that I have never heard before or since. They were at once utterly precise and utterly passionate.
Was she, in part, a machine, with a machine’s precision, and in part a biological and spiritual being, with living emotions?
Not only have we recently made advances in creating super-dense machine memory using gases and other means, it has also been announced that the memristor has been perfected and will be available for some very surprising applications in the relatively near future. A Hewlett-Packard representative said in the New York Times on April 8, 2010, that: “We have the right stuff now to build real brains,” and very small memory devices such as the memristor bring up the possibility of implantable brain augmentation.
It might become possible to inject things like calculational skills or language knowledge into brains, or do other things that are even more transformative, and perhaps our salvation lies in that direction. Right now, though, it seems to me that our species is afflicted by vast numbers of people who will believe practically anything. The German nation allowed itself to indulge the ludicrous fantasy that they were the victims of a Jewish conspiracy that had, in fact, been invented by the czarist secret police before World War I and promulgated as “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Reading it, one wonders how anybody could believe such drivel. Anyone with even a slight understanding of the economics of the era would know that the mechanisms proposed in it are a structural impossibility.
Presently, a trip across the Internet will reveal the same sort of weakness of mind and lack of discrimination that led to things like the murder of the six million Jews.
Lord Rees recently commented that “it is astonishing that the evidence for evolution is not taken seriously by seemingly 40 percent of people.”
And yet the evidence is completely indisputable by any sane person. But it would seem that a substantial minority must prefer Voltaire’s theory.
Perhaps the gap between us and remarkable and brilliant people like the Master of the Key is too great to bridge on any significant scale. Maybe that’s why they don’t try.
I see this on a very personal basis, because I come across people with disturbing frequency who want to integrate my descriptions of my experiences into what amounts to a kind of new religion, a dreary modern fantasy of alien contact that includes imaginary details about many different races, elaborate fictions of huge government conspiracies—indeed, anything except the equivocal, confusing and extremely strange experience that people actually report, and the sadly unfocused reality that those experiences reflect.
Despite my disappointment that the Master of the Key has not reappeared, I still respect his ideas enormously, and I have tried to rebuild my own ethics in light of his thought, and I have found this to be an enormously freeing and satisfying endeavor.
I have been taken by the statement that “sin is denial of the right to thrive.” I do not know of a more concentrated or convincing definition of sin, or one that offers more clarity. Using it, one can find clear ethical ground, both in one’s own life and in the lives of others. I find myself constantly considering my own actions in its light, and coming away with a much clearer understanding of their worth and validity, or what might be inappropriate about them. The Ten Commandments are a wonderful document, and the cultivation of compassion in conscience can be accomplished without anything more than a natural sense of right and wrong, but these eight words sharpen and dimensionalize the whole process quite wonderfully.
It has taken me a long time, but in the light of my own life experiences and the things that the Master said, I have come to see that there could be such a thing as conscious energy, and that, if it is real, then it must be the actual center of mind in this universe.
Having meditated consistently since 1970, I have attempted to find ways to come into contact with such energy, and discovered that it is immediately and vividly possible to do this, and that such contact leads over time to fundamental change of being. What has happened to me, specifically, is that I have found a new form of sensation as well as a new way of experiencing being.
If one is open to the possibility, one soon discovers that one’s perspective can change. Normally, we feel a sense of being rooted in the physical. There seems to be nothing else. This, I think, is what the Master refers to as being “soul blind.”
Over time, though, one begins to find another perspective. Again and again, it becomes possible to sense the body not as oneself, but as a tool that is b
eing used to penetrate into the physical world and draw experience from it.
As the sense of being separate from the body matures, one’s existence as a soul also becomes more complex. In recent years, I have ceased to see any real difference between body and soul. It’s all one form, which grows more and more dense as it approaches and then penetrates into the physical universe. But it is possible for sensation to be stretched across the whole spectrum of one’s being, and when you do this, you also gain access to the world in a much larger and more compelling way.
The Master spoke of the existence of an energetic organ in the body, which is generated by the nervous system and extends above the surface of the skin. He says that this organ, being composed of electrons, can be in superposition, and when it is, it is “effectively everywhere in the universe and nowhere specific.”
I knew of this theory before I transcribed his words, so it was one of the things that I puzzled about. A paper I had read authored by famed psi researcher Charles Honorton caused me to think that something like this might exist, and I had discussed the idea in speeches prior to meeting the Master of the Key.
However, he took it so much further, and I discovered that his description of it was incredibly useful to me in developing techniques of meditation that have enabled me to access this organ and make it work for me.
He said that “this field is an organ just like the heart or the brain,” and that “with it, you may see other worlds, you may see the past and the future, you may see into the lives of those around you.” Most importantly though, he explained that “the process of imprinting itself causes the organ to cease to be in superposition and thus to cease to be accessible to further imprinting.”
In other words, when you see the larger reality, as soon as you try to look closely at it, the electrons are immediately positioned and you lose contact with what you are seeing.
We live in a world with a very deeply ingrained addiction to gain, and it took me a long time to stop looking and simply see. When something appeared in my mind’s eye, my attention would immediately seek more detail, whereupon it would disappear.
He spoke of surrender in the same way that Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century master, did, when he said that we must “become as a clear glass through which God can shine.”
To some extent, I learned to let go of my desire to explore, and simply let the journey happen. I learned to start the process of sensation not in my physical body, but in the subtle body that is my true core, and to see the physical body not as myself, but as an instrument of being.
In so doing, I found, I think, a true edge of heaven, because coming to this experience is extraordinarily joyous. I think that the reason the Master seemed, as I have said, to “twinkle,” is that his body was a container filled with the paradoxical joy of objective being.
Among the grandest of his ideas was one that was completely unexpected to me. It was that Christianity, Buddhism and Islam are actually a single religion that was brought to us by three different masters, each of whom laid down a different aspect of the greater whole.
If one understands the ancient law of triads clearly, his explanation of the way the three approaches work in concert makes a great deal of sense. Basically the Law of Three, which Buckminster Fuller called “the building block of the universe,” conceives that everything is divided into interlocking triads. A triad has an active side, a passive side and a third side that keeps the other two in balance.
When he explained that Christianity is the seeking, or active, side of a triad, Islam the surrendered side and Buddhism the balancing side, I was startled to see, suddenly, a very much larger perspective on the three teachings that went beyond doctrine and belief, and far beyond the primitive ideologies that have in recent centuries been attached to Christianity and Islam.
I’ve read the New Testament and the great theologians, much of Buddhist material and the Koran in English translation, and I at once saw the sense of what he was saying.
As a result of this, my doctrinal concerns gradually slipped away. I ceased to take an interest in theological details, and my perspective expanded immeasurably. I came to understand the presence of the sacred in human life in a completely new way, as a profoundly true process that leads toward a state of balanced surrender.
One can put aside all the beliefs, and seek as Christ sought toward the delicious innocence of the father when he suggested that we “be as the lilies of the field” and surrender to the will of God as the muezzin calls us to our soul’s journey over the course of the day, and then, vibrant with the energy of this material, we commit ourselves to the tremendous silence that Buddhist practice discloses.
He spoke of the journey toward God, and the happy surrender that it implies and gave us, in the few words he left regarding the true way of the three religions, a most wonderful and very effective means of exploring the garden of forked paths that is at once a new way of the soul, and, by implication, the key to the lost science of the soul that he mourned with such gentle eloquence over the course of our conversation.
Before I met him, I considered myself a very wealthy man. Fate had left me without much material comfort, but it had granted me an incredibly precious gift, which was the relationship that I had forged with the joyous, glorious and dangerous visitors I wrote about in Communion . Now, this latest gift left me, I think, a wealth beyond riches, because it gave me the chance not only to take the marvelous journey that the Master reveals is on offer but also to take on the challenge of communicating it to others.
From the first hour, in fact, from the moment I called my wife to tell her to never let me deny it, I have felt that the material he left behind had great value. Now, having lived with it and worked with it for these years, I can say with at least some small authority that it has genuine value, at least it does for me.
I have ceased to care where he came from or where he went, or why he has not returned to me as a physical creature. Of course I was angry about it. I felt tantalized and abandoned. But he gave me more than enough. In fact, he was so lavish in his gifts that every time I read his words again, I find something new.
There is very little material in this world that can bring about actual change in our state. This man left some words that I feel are an effective tool for real change, and there lies great joy.
APPENDIX
In 2000, I finally transcribed the words of the Master of the Key and published them privately, for sale only on my website, Unknowncountry.com. A few years ago, I let the small edition sell out, only to see used copies of the book appearing for sale for hundreds of dollars. So I republished it.
I have now retired it in favor of this new edition. Having worked with the Key for ten years, I think that I have some useful things to say about it that were not apparent to me when I published the private edition.
However, since that edition will not now be reprinted, I do think that it is important that the original front and back matter be included with this edition, so I provide it here, exactly as it was originally printed.
THE ORIGINAL FOREWORD
The MASTER of the KEY
Something was disturbing me, causing me to swim up out of a deep sleep. As I became conscious, I realized that somebody was knocking on the door of my hotel room. I was confused. Then I decided that it must be the room service waiter come to get my tray, and that he’d probably been there a long time. I rushed for the door saying, “I’m terribly sorry,” and threw it open.
A small man in dark clothing came in. His face was rather angular, but other than that, he appeared normal enough.
I had been deeply asleep when the knocking started. All day, I’d been signing books and doing media appearances, and I was pleasantly tired. It was the last day of the author tour for my book Confirmation, which was an effort to identify the hard physical evidence of a possible alien presence on earth, and also why it would be secret.
By the time I’d come to my senses, he was all the way into the room
. Obviously, this was no waiter. In my travels on author tour, I’d had a few incidents like this, such as the woman who’d bribed her way into my room in Chicago, then launched herself at me out of the closet while I was watching TV. I’d ended up going down to the front desk of a sixty-story hotel in my pajama bottoms to get help.
He was now standing with his back to the curtains that hid the window. There was a slight smile on his face.
I thought about running out. The door was behind me. I could escape quite easily.
Then he started talking. His voice was breathless and quick. He said my name. I was gruff, angry, in reply. How had he gotten my room number? From whom? No response, just that embarrassed little smile.
I demanded that he leave. He pleaded with his eyes. The expression was so pure and so frank—and yet so deeply humorous—that it made me hesitate and really look at this intruder.
He was wearing charcoal trousers and a dark gray turtleneck. He had a rim of white hair around his head and an aquiline nose. His skin was dusty-pale, his features sharp. He looked old. He was sort of—twinkling. There is no other way to describe the combination of serenity, happiness and deep, deep humor in his expression. In fact, I don’t think that I have ever seen a face so much at ease within itself, so deeply at peace—not before, not since. There was an eerie stillness about it, too. It could have been the face of a corpse. But there was nothing awful about it. On the contrary, had he been dead, I would have thought that his face said that he had died a happy death, and the last of life had left behind it a hint of secret joy.
He again said my name, “Whitley.” There was a disorienting familiarity, as if I was meeting a dear friend after many years apart. But I could not remember seeing him before, not ever in my life. Or could I? My first question was “Who are you?”