He looked at me out of the side of his eyes, his face sparkling with amusement. The message could not have been more clear: “You know that. You know perfectly well who I am.” A jolt went through me, of confusion and embarrassment. Now I felt as if an old friend had come back and I’d failed to recognize him.
Then I asked, “Why are you here?”
He leaned back, looked toward the ceiling as if considering the appropriate answer. Then his eyes met mine, and I became aware that this man was something very strange. There was an alienness to him, when he regarded me in this way. It wasn’t that he seemed in any way like somebody from another world. Hardly. He could not have been more ordinary.
No, it was more subtle than that. There was about him a sense of command. The precision of his movements and the cadence of his speech were—well, they seemed very exact. Perfect, even. Later, when we would discuss intelligent machines, I would feel this sense of strangeness again.
He answered my question. He said, “You’re chained to the ground.”
His words carried an unexpectedly powerful resonance. Perhaps it had to do with the way he spoke them—the ultraprecise diction, the completely self-assured tone—but the instant I heard them, they seemed not just true, but true in a much larger than normal way. I felt an awful urgency: the earth was a prison; we were the inmates.
I went on trying to be my ordinary self, to act as if this was an ordinary encounter. He was a slightly crazy fan who had the nerve to bust in on me in the middle of the night. Okay, I would humor him. “Excuse me?” I asked. What did this crazy “chained to the ground” comment mean, anyway? What kind of nonsense was this?
He said, “I am here on behalf of the good. Please give me some time.”
The word “good,” the way he said it, exploded in my heart like an emotion-packed hydrogen bomb. It wasn’t just the tone, it was the look that melted across his face as he uttered it, an expression of love so strong and so absolutely impeccable that I just gasped.
I was hooked. This would be no ordinary conversation. I got out a yellow pad and started taking notes—and now I thank God that I did, because many of the ideas he talked about were breathtakingly new, and unfolded on a scale that was larger than my own mind. As such, they would prove to be extremely difficult to remember accurately. The notes are not extensive, and mostly don’t even seem related, but their mnemonic power has helped me recapture many of his great and elusive thoughts.
Afterward, I would say that he and I spent about half an hour together. But once our conversation was transcribed, it became obvious that more time was involved. He must have been with me for at least two hours.
What this man had to say was so deeply, profoundly new and so richly textured that I do not think that I need to assert an unprovable claim regarding whether or not he was real.
During the course of our dialogue, a new image of God emerged. It was almost as if the words I was hearing had the power to cause God to emerge into the room with us. Reading the dialogue feels the same—it’s as if there is somebody living in these words.
I am not saying that I don’t think my visitor was a human being. He certainly looked human. For all I know, he may even have been what at one point he said he was, a Canadian who didn’t pay taxes and had no driver’s license. I do know that he had, by far, the best mind I have ever encountered. He was also the most emotionally alive person I have ever known—again, by far. Richly alive though he was, he seemed as intimately and easily familiar with what we think of as death as he was with life.
There were periods of incredible emotion—especially one in the last few moments of our time together—that are among the very most powerful experiences I have ever had in my life.
As he was leaving, he asked me to drink a white liquid. I know that it will sound fantastic when I say that I agreed to do this. But at the time, I remembered very well doing it previously. I recalled meeting him twice in my life before. In fact, what little bits I remember from those conversations suggest to me that they are part of the subtext of my very being. So much of my thought, of my belief, of what has meaning and importance for me in life comes from them. And yet, I can only remember them at times, and then only in the briefest snatches—a word said, a facial expression, some small flavor of the moment.
After I drank this substance, I remember nothing until the next morning. When I woke up, I immediately did three things. First, I looked for my notes. They were there, lying on the table beside the bed where I had put them. Then I went into the bathroom, thinking that maybe some of the white liquid would be left in the bottom of one of the glasses. But they were clean. I then telephoned my wife.
I had something to tell her, and it felt urgent. As soon as she answered, I recounted the story of my visitor. Then words popped out of my mouth that I did not expect to say. “There will come a day when I’ll tell you that I don’t think he was real. Never let me forget that he was.”
I lay back looking over the notes. There wasn’t much there—less, in fact, than I’d hoped there would be. And yet, they had a strange quality to them, as if each word was capable of causing a whole spring to flow in my mind.
Much of the conversation I remembered quite clearly. And when you read it, you’ll see why. Nobody would ever forget what he said about the Holocaust, about religion, about the true nature of the soul.
I was so happy that morning. I remembered what the woman I met during my 1985 close encounter had said to me, “You are the luckiest of the lucky.”
As I packed my bag for the trip home from Toronto to San Antonio, I certainly felt that way. There kept coming into my heart little explosions of joy. I put my precious page of notes into an inner pocket of my briefcase. My plan was to get home, type everything up and have a new book ready to go in a few months. I had been handed a real gift.
In my dreams. It is now December of 2000, and I have just completed the most difficult writing struggle of my life. At first, the memories came fast and easy. Soon, there were twenty pages, then thirty. But then I began to worry.
What if he hadn’t been there? What if it was just my imagination? This material was full of God. It contained a new image of God, subtle and powerful and totally incredible. It redefined history and religion. It lifted the veil between life and death and announced that we could begin communicating with the dead, and it told just exactly how to do this. It redefined sin and prayer and man’s whole relationship with God.
If it was just me, then how dare I presume to publish this, I could not die with the mark of such a lie upon my soul. And then I thought: it’s because of what he said about sin that you are so concerned about this.
I was raised a Catholic. Go to confession and forget it—trust God’s forgiveness. But when he spoke of sin, he did not just mourn over it or warn against it, he showed what it was and why it’s bad and what it does to you. It was his explanation of sin that made me so very concerned that I not assert that he was real when I knew, or sensed somewhere in my deepest heart, that he might not be.
A hundred times, I quit. He wasn’t real and therefore I couldn’t claim his authority for these ideas. Each time I gave up, Anne would say, “Remember when you called me and told me never to let you convince yourself that he wasn’t real.” And I would go on.
I don’t believe that any of the extraordinary experiences I have ever written about have been dreams, this one included. I have had the incredible privilege of living between the worlds, in the sense that I have actually spent a substantial amount of time in my life with people who were not physical in the way that we know the physical. I have learned from them, and loved them and feared them and tasted of them. I know that there is a soul because I experienced complete release from the boundaries of my body. It has been my great privilege to personally experience these things, and so it is my duty to tell you this: I believe not only from faith, but from actual experience, that what I have written of is true.
Over our history, we have rejected what is actu
ally the greater part of reality by labeling it as “supernatural.” Most of us believe—or fear in our hearts—that the soul is not real, and that there is no world beyond this one. We die into a question, or into that flickering and inadequate medium that we call “faith.”
My visitor would agree with the skeptics in one key way: there is no supernatural. But his explanation of the way parts of reality that we have labeled supernatural actually work offers a promise for the future that is truly breathtaking. He has opened the door to the proverbial undiscovered country, and invited us in. For it becomes very clear, from what he says, that there exists a powerful science of the soul that we can master just as certainly as we have mastered the science of the atom.
We have hidden from this science, and pretended to ourselves that it doesn’t exist. We have done this in order to isolate ourselves from the overwhelming power of the world that lies beyond.
He has left us with a challenge and a promise: it is time for us to face the reality of this other world, and to come to terms with the fact that we can detect it, communicate with it, and see beyond the curtain of denial and lies that now obscures our vision of it.
In the end, I thought perhaps he was a dead man, come in fulfillment of prophecy in this perilous age. If so, then he is a herald, for what he said will lead to a revolution in our understanding of ourselves and the universe around us. We are about to make a discovery of fundamental importance: not only is the world of the soul real, it is accessible to verifiable scientific exploration. In fact, scientific method would be essential to success in the effort to identify the soul. Science—our science as we understand it now—can part the curtain between the living and the dead. We can thus come into real relationship with an ancient world that is much larger than this one, that is so much our true home that we have never left it, but only retreated into this small corner of it that we call the universe. He has challenged us to drop the pretense and face what we truly are, creatures who have always had the capacity to walk in the electric paths of heaven—but only if we dare. Only if we dare.
THE ORIGINAL AFTERWORD
WHO WAS HE?
When I woke up the next morning and went out into the crowded lobby of the hotel, I was struck a blow by each face that I saw. At the breakfast tables and at the hotel desk, they were all crying out, “I’m alone and I’m dying,” and I knew in every cell of my being what he had meant—what he had really meant—when he said that this is a fallen world. I knew also, with a certainty that will never, ever leave me, that he was not fallen. I had been with somebody who had never tasted the mystery of our isolation, but who understood the loneliness of mankind better than we do.
As I walked through that hotel lobby, there was a fire burning in me. I saw that what feels like a hopeless, immutable reality—that we are fallen—is itself just another illusion. All that lies between us and the ascension of which he spoke is exactly nothing. We can ascend right now, immediately, all of us.
I was off to the airport after a couple of last stops at bookstores. I felt very strange, as if the world around me was not quite real. People talked, I talked, I signed books. But it was all happening somewhere far away, each present moment seeming as if it was a memory.
I remembered the night’s events with perfect clarity. There was no question in my mind but that it had all been real. I knew, though, that it had been a very strange experience, and I suspected that on some deeper level I was reacting to it much as I had to my close encounters. This was why I called my wife and told her never to let me forget that the encounter had been real. If something happens to you that is sufficiently strange, it soon comes to seem curiously illusive. Before too long, the brain files it in the realm of dreams, even though it was real.
It was a Saturday morning, and the publicist from the publishing house only stayed with me for a short time. I did not know quite how to approach her about what had happened, so I said nothing. A few weeks later, I would call her and describe my visitor to her. She would tell me that she had never seen such a man, as would a number of other people I knew in Toronto. But that would not be the end of it, not entirely. I would go down some strange paths in search of this man.
When I got settled in the plane, I had a chance to reflect. I watched the world of the north slip away beneath me. Gone were the days that I would be returning to New York. We were now living more-or-less in exile, due to harassment and subtle threats from shadowy parties. There had been many financial reverses, much hardship. I had lost my beloved cabin in the woods in upstate New York. With it had gone most of my close encounter experiences. But now I had this. At least I had this.
I felt a familiar sense of self-assurance. How could I ever forget a word of that incredible conversation? And anyway, I had my notes. But I knew that this was all an illusion. Had I not also had a number of ultra-strange experiences, I might have soon lost a great deal of what had been said. But I knew remembering it correctly would be hard. I estimated that it would take me six months or so to transcribe the conversation and get it into order. I never dreamed how hard it would actually be. It took me years to get this put together in a manner that even begins to do justice to the original conversation.
As I flew home, I wondered who he had been. I wondered about the might-have-beens. What might have happened if I’d attacked him and tied him up and called the police? Or if I hadn’t drunk the white liquid and had instead followed him? Or if I’d had a camera with me and taken a picture?
Who was he?
When I got back to San Antonio, I set about writing down the conversation. Immediately, I ran into trouble. These huge ideas, and new ideas, were even more elusive than I’d thought they would be. I had them in my mind, most certainly, but when I tried to transfer them to paper they became . . . well, me. Where was the soaring sense of newness and assurance that had been there when we were face-to-face? Where was the excitement?
I struggled for days. But it all came out sounding like a mix of warmed over Catholicism and new-age mysticism. Me, very definitely . . . and not even me at my best.
I began to think that I needed another session with this man. I needed to know him, actually, to get his direct participation in the writing process. Until you lose track of somebody, it seems so easy to find them. But, in this world, if you don’t have a name or an address or at least a neighborhood, you’re in trouble.
I hadn’t tried harder to get him to identify himself because he had seemed so familiar to me at the time. Why would I want my grandfather to tell me his name, or my uncle to give me his address? When I was with him, I might even have been able to say his name. It had seemed as if I’d known him all my life.
Which got me to thinking. Maybe I had known him. Maybe, in fact, he’d been in Texas when I was a child. So perhaps it would be interesting to ask around in San Antonio. What I did was to tell people the story of the meeting. I didn’t pick and choose. I simply told anybody who seemed interested. And then I would ask them if they’d ever seen this person. I described him as a relatively slight man somewhere between sixty-five and eighty, with a dusting of white hair and a sharply-featured but kind face. I did not think that anybody who had met him would ever forget him.
For the most part, I drew a blank. Then one friend had a rather interesting reaction. He thought perhaps he had met this man, or somebody quite like him, back in the sixties.
He had been a student of percussion at the time, and his teacher was a percussionist with the Houston Symphony. The percussionist was a shy man, preferring his own company to the point that nobody had ever entered his apartment. He often wore gloves, and would clean his hands frequently. He took a liking to my friend, who was amazed one day to be invited to his apartment.
There were books everywhere, in bookcases lining every wall. While his teacher was out of the room, he looked at some of these books. They seemed concentrated on two subjects: UFOs and radar. My friend was confused. He had expected books on musical subjects, because his teacher was not j
ust any percussionist. He was thought to be one of the great percussionists in the world. But here he was, obviously obsessed with what, in the sixties, was a very odd subject indeed—UFOs. And radar? A percussionist?
They completed their time together, and my friend did not see his teacher for some days. Then shocking news came. The apartment had burned. The fire had been so hot that it had actually burned all the books to ash. Houston fire department officials were doubly mystified. Not only had this fire been hot enough to burn closed books, which require high heat to be completely incinerated if the pages aren’t exposed to air, there had been almost no damage to other apartments in the building. Even stranger, the percussionist had disappeared and there were no human remains of any kind found in the apartment.
He has never been seen since. But he did leave my friend, who has become a prominent composer, a wonderful legacy: his love of percussion, which is central to his work.
The facial descriptions of the two men were not close enough to be an exact match, but I really did wonder, as I still do, whether or not they were the same person.
In the days when we had our cabin in upstate New York, the children used to see a man in black clothing moving through the woods, or standing at a distance and watching them. His presence made me and my wife extremely nervous, and I used to try to see him myself, but I never did. I really wondered—hoped, perhaps—that he was just an imaginary playmate.
Then, one day, the foreman of a group of men who were clearing some poison ivy from the trees along our driveway appeared at the house. They were not finished but they were quitting. They didn’t want any money, they just wanted to get out of there. The reason was that they had seen an alien cross the driveway not twenty feet from where they were working. They described him as humanlooking, wearing black clothes, but with a face “like an animal” and “glaring” eyes.