The Key (16 page)

Over our history, we have rejected what is actually 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.

W
hen 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 just 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.

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.