The Key (15 page)

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.

I
n 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.

S
omething 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?”

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.