I could understand their desire to leave. My reputation in the area was already so notorious because of odd events being witnessed around my place, that I was afraid that I’d reach a point that nobody would work for me.
After that, the children often saw the man, even when my son was in his teens. He brought some kids down from Andover for a weekend. We had strict instructions from him not to discuss aliens, UFOs or anything like that. My teenager’s opinion, at that point, was that I actually was the most embarrassing father in the world.
The kids slept out in the woods. I told my son that this was foolish, because the visitors would be bound to be interested. He said that they wouldn’t be bothered. By that time, the ultra-high-level strangeness of his childhood encounters had made them seem so dreamlike to him that he was eager and willing to dismiss them as fantasies.
I had no problem with that. I had done it many times myself. However, his friends had an active night. They saw seven balls of light floating through the woods. Just at dawn, one of them saw a swarm of gnats turn into the face of a woman—a phenomenon I had observed myself once or twice, but which I had never reported because it was just too strange. And they had also seen, standing off in the woods, a man in tight-fitting black clothing, a man that Andrew recalled from his childhood.
They had quite a bit of fun, actually, and Andrew actually told them some of his childhood stories, which are among the most marvelous encounter experiences I have ever heard . . . . when he remembers them . . . . when he will speak about them.
That was the last time we saw the man of the woods. As I have never laid eyes on him, I cannot be certain that he was the same person whom I met in Toronto. Whether he had glaring eyes or an animal-like face or not, he never hurt anybody. The foreman said that he looked “ratlike,” and the man in Toronto did have rather sharp features. But not that sharp. Of course, somebody who’s frightened tends to exaggerate.
I explored one other possibility. In his marvelous book The Labyrinth of the Grail, Masonic author William Mann discusses the legend that some Knights Templar refugees from Europe made it to Canada after the order was destroyed by the French king and the church, arriving in 1398.
The Templars were probably the single most important secret order ever founded. They apparently found ancient secrets in Jerusalem that eventually came to form the core of Masonic teaching about the value of man and the meaning of human freedom. The United States is founded upon these principles. It is a Masonic project, and thus the Templar heritage is of fundamental importance to the institutional structure of the world’s most successful republic.
There is a text now known as The Zeno Narrative that historian Frederick Pohl has claimed indicates that Prince Henry Sinclair, a Templar leader, arrived in Nova Scotia in June of 1398. Among the Micmac Indians who are native to the area, there are still legends of Glooscap, who tirelessly explored the countryside. There is a possibility that there was a survival from Henry Sinclair’s expedition—people who preserved their cultural tradition and secret knowledge even into modern times? My visitor described himself in many ways, and interestingly one of them was that he was “a Canadian” who didn’t pay taxes and didn’t have a driver’s license.
Canadian friends have pointed out that it’s exceptionally hard to escape taxes there. One way it could be done, though, would be if you had been in Canada before the arrival of the French and the English, and had made a point of never joining the state.
So maybe he was a representative of a Templar survival that still persists in Canada.
It is here that my trail ends. I was never able to find out anything more definite about him. He could have been an alien, or one of the human beings he mentioned who live off planet, or an angel, or even an image of God. He could also have been a very brilliant and thus also very clever fan of my books, who succeeded at three in the morning at throwing me enough off-balance that I was susceptible to the subtle messages and suggestions that he sent.
It would have been fabulously interesting to be able to come to a final conclusion about who this man was. I think it is obvious to anybody who reads the words of the Master of the Key that he is in possession of remarkable knowledge. I also suspect, however, that this master of subtlety and ambiguity wanted to be seen as holographically as he sees God. At times, I felt like I was talking to an ordinary person. At other moments, he seemed to have the powerful and joyous presence of an angel. When he uttered the words “cruel to God,” there came into my heart the feeling that this was God. There was a note of sorrow in the tone so gentle and yet so great, that it was easy for me to feel, in that moment, that the great God of the universe was sitting right there expressing a deeply personal and yet unimaginably vast pain.
He inspired me very powerfully. Like my friend the composer, the rest of my life is going to revolve around my time with him. The deepest part of me resonates with a kind of assurance that this man possessed the truth and told the truth. Beneath the questions that he left unanswered there is a kind of bedrock of certainty that they are good and true questions. Beneath the information, there is the same sense of truth.
If the Master of the Key did tell the truth, then he pointed the way to our becoming an entirely different species. In this sense, his words are an engine of evolution. They are a light in the blind darkness of our world, out of which we can conceivably forge a whole new mankind.
The PROPHECY of the KEY
The Key seems to me to be all but unique in the way it breaks down the barrier between science and religion, man and machine, human and God. It suggests a new vision of each of us as a full and complete repository of God. It suggests, quite incredibly, how science can become a form of prayer: an instrument through which we can clearly and objectively address the higher world.
The process of evolution is not automatic. Far from it. We are expected to take an active role in personal transformation, in social transformation and even in the transformation of intelligence itself, through the creation of machines more intelligent than ourselves, machines that will ultimately become conscious. One of the most haunting moments in the conversation comes when I ask the Master if he is a conscious machine. He replies, “If I was, I would deceive you.”
If such a machine comes into being in the future and gains access to movement through time, then perhaps he can best be understood as an artifact of its own process of self-creation.
Whether the Master is a man or a machine, the conversation also points to a fundamentally new way to find union with God. For thousands of years, we have been searching for God on paths that are essentially exterior to us. We have been disciplining ourselves as monks, enduring privations, wandering the world in search of enlightenment.
The Master suggests a different road. He does not offer an outer path, but subtly suggests that we allow the flux of life to carry us where it will, as we seek light within ourselves. And not just a small bit of it. He asserts that we are not mere fragments, like “crumbs in a cake,” but that each of us really does contain the entire Kingdom of God, even to the extent that we can come to know the whole of creation as God knows it. There is the implication that something has changed about mankind over the past two thousand years, and that we are now more able to experience this than we were then.
When you say God, you think of somebody outside of yourself. You think as the age of worship thinks. Over the last age, that of Pisces, the elemental body was changed by this process of worship. It is not the same as it was two thousand years ago. Now the receptacle is larger. Now each of you can contain all of the universe. That was not true then. Now this is a species of sacred beings. But you are babies, and so still ignorant of your powers. The last age was the age of the external God. This is the age of God within.
This quite surprising statement seems to infer that history has been a process of evolution, that we have been in some way changed by the passage of time. Other statements imply that a large-scale plan for mankind is in effect.
We
measured the rate at which you would expand and grow very precisely, and fitted your development to a calendar which we devised called the Zodiac. In your writings, Whitley, you have wondered why mankind would have such a long-count calendar. Why were simple farmers in need of it? They were not. We needed it.
Who is this “we”? And why did they need a measure of the ages? When one examines history in the light of the Zodiac, some very curious hints emerge, especially in the Middle East, where the Zodiac seems to have been consciously used as a marker of the epochs.
I have discussed this both in Confirmation and in The Coming Global Superstorm, but it is worth repeating here that the Sphinx, which is a gigantic image of a lion, was sited so that the constellation of Leo rose directly over it in 10,500 B.C. It has also been found by geologists to be very much older than was previously thought—in fact, that it might date from that period. If so, then it must be a monument to the Age of Leo, which began at that time.
The Old Testament, which was written during the Age of Aries the Ram, contains more references to that animal than any other. Similarly, Christ was born just as the Age of Pisces began. He is called the Fisher of Men, and his apostles are fishermen. Indeed, Piscean imagery is so prevalent in the gospels that early Christians identified themselves with the symbol of the fish, which has been resuscitated by modern fundamentalists.
The parallels between the symbolic content of these ancient writings and monuments and the Zodiacal ages in which they took place cannot be an entire coincidence. It suggests a level of planning higher than any of which we are consciously aware, and it is my belief that the Master of the Key is a part of this level of planning. It is possible that he has deposited these words as an artifact for the age we are presently entering, which is Aquarius.
In this age, the water in which the fish has been so comfortably swimming will get poured out. Although this implies an increase in freedom, it also means that the medium in which we have been living will no longer be there to support us. This medium, of course, is the earth itself, and the Master of the Key warns about changes in the earth’s environment that are going to place us in the position of either finding a way to expand off the planet or face possible extinction.
It was a statement of his about the nature of ice ages that inspired The Coming Global Superstorm:
Because air at the surface is getting warmer, the north polar ice is melting, reducing the salinity of the Laurentian sea. At some point, winds crossing this sea due to the increasing difference between lower and higher atmospheric pressures will warm the northern ocean so much that the temperature differential needed to pump the North Atlantic Current will not be sufficient, and the current will slow down, stop, or stop flowing so far north. This same mechanism always triggers ice ages, and would happen within a few thousand years no matter what. However, human activity has sped up the process of atmospheric warming, so the change will be sooner and stronger. The greater part of human industry and culture, along with the species’ most educated populations, will be destroyed in a single season. This will happen suddenly and without warning, or rather, the warning will not be recognized for what it is.
This statement turned out to be a very exact description of a process that has been discussed for some years within the paleoclimatological community as an explanation for climatic upheavals in the past, and we were able to actually use their findings in Superstorm to support our theory.
The one thing that their studies did not confirm was the storm itself. In “The Great Climate Flip-flop” by William H. Calvin in the Atlantic Monthly in January of 1998, it was postulated that the change had come very quickly in the past. Interestingly, the last abrupt change took place, according to James White, a University of Colorado climatologist, approximately 12,500 years ago, in 10,500 B.C., at the same time that the Sphinx was apparently built. (Although some Egyptologists continue to claim that the Sphinx is of more recent origin, the evidence of water erosion on the object is overwhelmingly convincing to geologists.)
The Sphinx reflects a fundamental principle that is echoed in the words of the Master of the Key in numerous places. The Sphinx has a lion’s claws, a bull’s body and the head of a man. In esoteric tradition, the riddle of the Sphinx has been this: What has the strength of the bull, the courage of the lion and the intelligence of the man? The answer is never quite clear, except to those who have achieved this balance. More plainly spoken, the idea of the triad as expressed in modern esoteric philosophy is this: that positive and negative forces, pressing against each other, come into balance. Buckminster Fuller called this the fundamental principle of the universe. The Master of the Key relates it most notably to his rather astonishing assertion that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam are actually a single religion.
Christianity is the active side of the triad, Islam the passive, Buddhism the reconciling. Christianity seeks God, Islam surrenders to God, Buddhism finds God. When you see these as three separate systems, you miss the great teaching of which each contains but a part. Seek the kingdom as a Christian, give yourself to God as a Muslim, find your new companion in the dynamic silence of Buddhist meditation.
There seems to be a great truth in these words, which, like so much of this material, refer to a larger scale of things than we are used to thinking about. We think in terms of tens or perhaps hundreds of years, not thousands. And we certainly do not think on a scale so large that it would find a means of reconciling three great religions and practicing them as one.
Indeed, it is essential that the whole issue of scale be addressed in any commentary on the Key. For example, the Master’s conception of God is at once much larger and infinitely more personal than our own. His model for deity is the hologram. God is not equally present in all things, but totally present in all things.
This idea does two things. It redefines not only man but every creature as something immense and incredibly important. But it also makes one feel rather frozen and helpless. How can I possibly become aware of a greatness like this, that is so far from my everyday life, even if it resides in every particle of my being?
He did not describe this change as a sort of flash of inner light that would instantly transform everything. Rather, he pointed in a totally new direction.
Conscious energy is not like unconscious energy, the servant of those who understand its laws. To gain access to the powers of conscious energy, you must evolve a relationship with it. Learn its needs, learn to fulfill them. But also remember, it is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, easily detectable by your science as it exists now. You can learn to signal and be heard, and to record response. The veil between the worlds can fall. The undiscovered country can become your backyard.
This is a truly gigantic promise that suggests the existence of a new and entirely unexpected human frontier. When he says “the veil between the worlds can fall,” he means the barrier between the living and the dead. This is made clear by the reference to the “undiscovered country,” which is an allusion to a famous speech of Hamlet’s, from Act II, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s play: “the dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns . . . .”
The Master of the Key had clear and intimate knowledge of the world of the dead. He spoke of the effects of death on our history, for example, when he described how the destruction of the European Jews had critically hampered our scientific progress.
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.
This was one of the most shocking statements I have ever heard in my life. It implies that a completely new moral order will emerge when we can see the real consequences of our actions. I thought to myself at the time: “We were not res
ponsible for this. It was a result of historical forces beyond our control.” He quickly agreed with that, saying that our present situation was not a punishment but simply an inevitable outcome of events.
But he also made stunning pleas for personal responsibility on a scale from which we usually distance ourselves. His pleas for the poor and the innocent stirred me to my depths. I will never forget for an instant:
Remember this: every one of you is entirely and completely responsible for the welfare of all others. So if a child is starving in Liberia, Whitley, you are personally and entirely responsible for him.
It is beyond my power to communicate the resonance of his voice, or the richness of its emotional content. However, there was something about the assurance in these words—as if he innocently trusted me never to doubt them and to act on them always—that has filled my heart.
It has also left me with a huge question: What is to be done on behalf of the children? Should I become a pilgrim on their behalf?
Go to Calcutta or Lagos or Bogotá and give yourself to the first street urchin you meet as his helper and lifelong servant. Do it without question or hesitation. You say that you want to worship God? Kneel to this little one and you kneel to God.
How those words haunt me. They have the ring of “come and follow me,” but am I not like the rich man whose possessions prevented him from taking the greatest of all journeys?
Remember the Eye of the Needle? A rich man may pass through the Eye of the Needle if he uses his wealth to enrich the world. Those who cling to their wealth are dying souls.
I have asked myself, “What is wealth?” I think that my wealth lies in two areas: my ability to write, and my incredible luck at having met, in the flesh, some very great and extraordinary beings, the most forthcoming of whom was certainly the Master of the Key. So my use of my wealth to enrich the world lies in creating books like this one. However, when I retire, I can easily imagine myself going somewhere deep in the third world and starting an orphanage. Once, when passing through the streets of a huge third-world city, I saw all the street children and I thought to myself: “Each of them is as precious and potentially as valuable as our children at home.” But we pretend, don’t we, not only that they don’t have as much value, but that they aren’t even there.